SEPTEMBER 1, 1995 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

BOOKS

Flawed argument gives insight into some gay men's thinking

In the Shadow of the

live in communities or settings that have

Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative been heavily impacted by AIDS.

in the Age of AIDS

by Walt Odets

Duke University Press $45.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper

Reviewed by Richard Berrong

The argument of In the Shadow of the Epidemic will appear extreme to many readers outside of the author's San Francisco home. Walt Odets maintains that HIV-negative gay men are "routinely... depressed, anxious and lonely in their 'wellness'; they are having a hard time surviving, and for many survival is so difficult they sometimes wish they had not survived and sometimes hope they will not." Indeed, so widespread does Odets claim this problem to be among negatives that he repeatedly refers to it as a "psychological epidemic," and terms it "a crisis that places in peril the health, mental health-and lives of millions of men, and that threatens the future of gay communities as a whole."

This argument could lead many readers simply to dismiss the book out of hand, since they are likely to know enough mentally healthy negatives to find it unacceptably exaggerated. In addition, they may be struck by the book's lack of methodological rigor in the presentation and analysis of data.

For example, Odets' argument is based largely on the remarks of his own clients. (He is a clinical psychologist practicing in San Francisco.) Despite a cursory attempt to forestall the objection, his assumption that an entire community resembles those of its members who are so troubled that they seek psychiatric help is a highly questionable premise.

Furthermore, Odets' clients all live in one community. As he himself repeatedly remarks, at least 50 per cent of San Francisco's gay community HIV-positive, such that AIDS there has a particularly vivid presence, and such that negatives there, unlike elsewhere, actually occupy a potentially minority position. One would have to question the use of any one community to make generalizations about gay men, but Odets' own data make it clear that San Francisco, of all places, cannot be used as the representative gay community the author by implication posits it to be.

In addition, Odets only identifies his clients by a first name and age. His efforts to protect their privacy are laudable, of course, but as a result there is no indication of anyone's race, economic status, religious upbringing, education, family background, etc. These are all factors that can impact an individual's way of dealing with crises; they therefore all have to be taken into consideration in any analysis.

Similarly, Odets never discusses the time frame of the cases he reports on. Over what period did he see these clients? Did attitudes change over time? How recent are his most recent studies? Can assertions be made about the state of negatives today based on information gathered in the past?

In short, it would be very easy to dismiss this book. That would be a mistake, however, for several reasons.

On a negative note, the book is being actively promoted to a large, general audience. It has already been the focus of Neil Chethik's nationally-syndicated "Men's Column" (carried in the July 30 Cleveland Plain Dealer) for example, in which Chethik, himself not gay, presented Odets' description of negatives as true for all HIV-negative gay men. "Their lives are infused with misery," he assured his largely non-gay readers. "They are left angry and depressed...guilty about their survival." One can only shudder at the thought of Odets, with all the apparent authority of his title and Duke's imprimatur, appearing on talk shows to inform the nation of what it is like to be gay and negative.

On a positive note, the book itself, despite its very real flaws, is not without value. The early chapters, those that develop the clearly overstated thesis, nonetheless give moving insight into the lives of some negatives who

There are also certain sections later in the book that stray from the thesis and that, thereby not distorted by it, provide important information. Most notable of these, and perhaps the most generally interesting and useful section of the book, is Chapter 8, "Being Sexual," which describes some gay men's problems with various forms of gay sex, as well as what Odets sees as the hidden agenda behind the emphasis on safer sex by both the gay community and society at large.

Finally, and more subtly, the very radicalness of Odets' thesis offers some possible insight into the mentality of certain gay men.

In asserting that it is routine to find negatives living in this terrible state of despair, Odets is doing one of two things. He might be so overcome by what he encounters in his own world that he can no longer see beyond it, so that he has come to assume that gay negative men in general must be like himself and his clients.

Or, like some radical gay thinkers, including one he mentions in his own introduction, he may have chosen to redefine gay, no longer allowing it to signify all men attracted to other men, but only those who experience the trauma he and his clients confront. In other words, homosexual men not demolished by AIDS, at least emotionally, are for him not worthy of the term gay. "Being gay," he declares, “means being profoundly affected by the epidemic."

This second possibility may say something about the horrible effects of rejection and isolation. Odets repeatedly points out that the San Francisco gay community is comprised not simply of natives who happen to be gay, but of many born elsewhere who, because they felt excluded as a result of their sexuality, fled to San Francisco in the hope of finding a community that would accept them. Now some of these men, because they are

negative in a community that devotes so much attention to positives, feel that they are being left out again.

One can understand how, given their extreme reaction to their initial isolation, these negatives might, in order to prevent what they perceive as a second exclusion, redefine the term at the base of their present community-gay-so as to situate themselves at its center and thereby forestall any second rejection. It is sad, of course, that in an attempt to prevent their own exclusion these men should be willing to exclude others.

More importantly than providing an explanation of Odets' and his fellows' extremism, however, this perspective offers further understanding of what is perhaps the most astounding feature of the negatives that the author describes: the repeated instances of their having unprotected sex with partners whose serostatus they do not know, or whom, even more astonishingly, they know to be positive.

Odets asserts that, contrary to popular belief, such unprotected sex happens not just because of substance abuse or during impersonal, bath-house type encounters, but also between regular, loving partners. As several of his case studies show, these partners dispense with condoms because they find them, and the fears they represent, to interfere with intimacy as they understand and want it.

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Once it is recalled, as Odets never does, that many of the men he describes were so traumatized by feelings of rejection and isolation, and so desperate to find others with whom to experience the close bonds that they had lost at home, that they actually uprooted and relocated, one begins to understand how some of these men might be willing to risk death itself rather than have anything separate them in any way from the loving other whom they had lost, sought, found, and now will not be separated from again. (Odets' impassioned assertion that this sort of unprotected sex is a valid option, rather than the

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result of a conception of intimacy in need of alteration, is perhaps the most difficult part of his book.)

Odets' thesis is severely flawed. For gay men to ignore his book, or to concentrate exclusively on its very real faults, would be a mistake. However, it is one which can only delay the breakdown of the isolation that, to a greater or lesser extent, seems to be so very much a part of so many gay men's lives.

The reviewer can be reached via e-mail at em424@cleveland.freenet.edu

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