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Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival

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In his book "Love Undetectable" gay political columnist Andrew Sullivan shares the pain he felt upon the death from AIDS of a close friend. The friendship was cemented when the two told each other that they were HIV positive. Sullivan weaves this story and confessions of his traumas, loves, sex life, faith and philosophies through the three essays in the book. He adds his observations of the gay world and illumines the experiences with the ideas of great thinkers from ancient and modern times.

The first essay, entitled "When Plagues End", contains a slightly less optimistic version of an article Sullivan published in 1996 in the New York Times magazine. After depicting the horror of illness and death from AIDS, Sullivan describes the release from impending doom provided by the new anti-viral drugs. He draws on Camus for inspiration. In the second essay, Sullivan turns to the psychologists' views of homosexuality. He does this in response to the recent vocal claims by reparative therapists and "ex-gays". By exploring this issue, Sullivan ventures into the no-man's land between those who want to abolish homosexuality by curing it and those who won't tolerate any mention of pathology in connection with being gay. Although Sullivan seeks a "teleology of homosexuality, to answer the question, `What are homosexuals for?' ", he devotes the essay to presentation of theories of its origin and causes. He concisely summarizes Freud's ideas and those of recent psychotherapists. Sullivan follows Freud's example by not proposing an explanation for the causes of homosexuality. He challenges the gay reader to use the presentation of various theories to spur self-examination.

The third essay deals with the definition of friendship, a relationship whose significance, Sullivan argues, has been lost in modern times. Sullivan brings to us the categories of philia from Aristotle and the pensees of Montaigne, Augustine and Cicero. He describes the tenderness in the friendships between Jesus and his followers. To Sullivan, the modern preoccupation with eros is the greatest threat to friendship. Friends, he opines, give each other breathing room, which lovers do not. Through forging friendships in the face of societal opprobrium and suffering from AIDS, gays present a lesson to society. It is in these friendships, Sullivan proposes, that the gays today can acquire a worthy purpose.

Andrew Sullivan is impelled by his emotional pain and his desire for healthier public and institutional policies towards gays and lesbians. He disciplines his motivation and stays within the boundaries of his arguments. His Waughian prose is poetic; powerful yet restrained. In "Love Undetectable" he has created a precious account of his recent life and thoughts.

Andrew Sullivan made a reputation for himself by being elevated at a very young age as a senior editor of 'The New Republic', a position he filled from 1991-1996. He continues his journalistic career by writing for 'The Times' (London) and 'New York Times Magazine', as well as contributing articles to a large number of other periodicals.

At the height of his career, Sullivan made the announcement made the announcement that he was HIV-positive. In saying this, he made the assertion: `I intend to be among the first generation that survives this disease.'

Sullivan has occupied a difficult position politically - tending toward conservatism that doesn't sit well with much of the homosexual community, he also tends toward political positions (such as pro-same sex marriage) that go against much of the conservative sentiment. In this first book, 'Virtually Normal', Sullivan argued for an acceptance of same-sex marriage; he followed that up by editing a collection of essays and contributions by others on the same topic.

However, his latest book, 'Love Undetectable', is a very different book. Insofar as Sullivan's life is inextricably bound up with political, historical, and sociological writing through his profession, that is reflected here, but this is a very non-political book. Consisting of three essays, it is primarily reflexions on the life of a survivor, who has yet to become a successful survivor - Sullivan himself.

Sullivan is bound to alienate all sides in some ways once again with this volume. He takes on both the church and religious side and the gay liberation side in his first essay: When Plagues End. 'The gay liberationists have plenty to answer for in this. For far too long, they promoted the tragic lie that no avenue of sexuality was any better or nobler than any other; that all demands for responsibility or fidelity or commitment or even healthier psychological integration were mere covers for "neoconservatism" or, worse, "self-hatred"; that even in the teeth of a viral catastrophe, saving lives was less important than saving a culture of `promiscuity as a collective way of life', when, of course, it was little more than a collective way of death.'

Of course, this quotation is bound to please the fundamentalists, who would love to paint the gay community as a `collective way of death'. But Sullivan doesn't go lightly on the other side, either. Sullivan recalls a time when the AIDS quilt was in Washington, and during a service at that time, in the heart of Washington's gay community, the priest at the church began a sermon with the words, `Today, few of us know the meaning of a plague like leprosy....' Sullivan of course had words with the priest afterwards, and asked him quite bluntly if he had ever heard of AIDS.

This is a very personal journal of Sullivan's, presenting his arguments in full concert with his emotions and experiences, of friends who have been public and friends who have stayed silent about their orientation and their disease, those who are reckless with their health and those who are determined against their illness, as is Sullivan himself. A remarkable journal of an interesting person.

The most striking aspect of Andrew Sullivan's latest book, "Love Undetectable," is its personal subtext. It's markedly different from his landmark book, "Virtually Normal," in that Sullivan shares with us his own life.

In the first essay, "When Plagues End," he discusses his own sexual journey and how becoming HIV-positive reshaped his life. But not only that--Sullivan captures the feelings, moments and memories associated with his romances, spirituality and struggle for identity. It's a keyhole to a side of Sullivan we have never really seen, and it makes his writing more real and persuasive than ever.

"Virtually Abnormal," his second essay, is not as personal, but thoughtfully and persuasively articulated. Here he delves into the most current media debate about gays--the origins of homosexuality and whether it can be changed through psychotherapy. Sullivan presents several theories and arguments, from both sides of the fence (here his writing style does resemble "Virtually Normal"). No matter where he turns, from the "genetic" to the "environmental" theory, we see that each position holds a piece of the truth, and there are no hard answers. Sullivan concludes that even though homosexuality is neither strictly "normal" or "abnormal," we should pay attention to society's reaction toward it, since "its treatment is a critical indicator of the endurance of...liberty in a free society."

Friendship is the topic of "If Love Were All," in which Sullivan challenges us to reconsider and even resurrect the value of friendship. Gay friendships can be a model for straights, he says, since gay men are particularly good at forming lifelong bonds with each other. Sullivan argues that popular culture's notion of love has turned out to be "the great modern enemy of friendship," and we ought not discount the gift of true friendship--where candor and camaraderie are perhaps even more prevalent than in romantic relationships.

Finally, we glimpse into his personal world again, as Sullivan remembers his best friend's death. Sullivan admits that Love Undetectable is "a very Christian book," but not in the sense of fanatical fundamentalism or evangelistic Christianity. He fuses his discussions of spirituality with humanity, reminding us in a powerful way that we participate in our own destinies.

By the end of the book, we craved a fourth essay, perhaps tying the piece together (as he did in Virtually Normal's "What are Homosexuals For?") But he left us with the haunting images of death, life, and friendship, and we're left to wrestle with the meaning of all three.

The best reveiw I have read of Sullivan's book appeared this week in the Washington Post. I have heard Sullivan read from Love twice, and he makes the point that straight female reviewers concentrate more on the substance of the book and are more appreciative than many other readers. If you can locate that review, you may wish to read it. And there is much in his new book to appreciate. The three essays are pieces that recall the best of 19th century essay writing. And Love is also a religious confession, a love story, a prose elegy, and more. Sullivan is best as an essayist, though his personal recollections are as powerfully drawn as many novelists'. One of the highest compliments that can be paid Love was also true of Virtually Normal; even Sullivan's detractors are going to buy the book and devour it. Regardless of which side of the polical spectrum one is on, the strength of Sullivan's writing makes him required reading.

Some of the reviews express such anger. Because not all of us have as yet found a way to "be" whole and content is not a reason to bash Sullivan because he has. Yes, he seems to blatantly extend his perspective as universal, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from his perspective. No one tale describes the full story. No one journey depicts universal experience. He's honest and real, even if you disagree with his viewpoint. Stop slamming him for how he found his way and spend a bit more time finding your own, perhaps with his help.

I recently purchased my third hard copy of "Love Undetectable", not for myself, but rather for an acquaintance of several months, who I had met at an online "hookup" site. It was my recollection of the incredible combination of logic, candor, and a quality I can only describe as a kind of philosophical grace that caused me to obtain a copy for someone who, by a recent confession, revealed that his affections for a straight and married man, twice stricken with cancer, had been unrequited. Worse, in his eyes, was the revelation that, after years of solicitous attention from my troubled friend, the object of his longstanding interest had, for the last year, been secretly conducting an affair (his first) with another man.

For this reason, my new friend was in considerable distress. So much so that, in a rejection of all loving feelings, he had determined to discontinue the intimate habits which had brought us together in the first place. I thought such a stunning piece of transference and role reversal was worthy of Shakespear. To state the obvious, his objections to his friend's discovery of a compatible partner in what may be his last year showed how oblivious he was to the strained affections he himself had unwittingly placed upon me, his married friend's wife and children, and the lover in question.

Had I been inclined to dole out brutal truth I might have pointed this out. Instead, I attempted to help him see that, if in fact this was a transcendent moment for his friend in discovering a new breadth in his capacity for love, that he should be happy for him and take pleasure in the fact that he had very likely helped him come to terms with a latent and unfulfilled condition of his own character. At that moment, this counsel represented considerable heavy lifting on my part. I knew that, if he was to take this to heart and examine these convoluted facts in a compassionate light, it would take just such considerable reinforcement, in the form of objective thought upon the standards and double standards which constitute the norm in our society. I could think of no single reading more capable of guiding this meditation than Andrew Sullivan's "Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival".

It may be that modern philosophical reasoning is free of the constraint of being qualified through practical application. So much has been said about the uniqueness of each individual's perception, yet Sullivan's work represents a kind of archeological literary dig into the consensual reality of our civilization's treatment of socio-sexual response. It traces the evolution of moral values represented by same sex relationships right through to the chaos of the sexual revolution and on past the plague years of the AIDS virus. It is a kind of summation of a battle that has been fought and won. After so much misunderstanding and suffering, it stands as the terms of a peace treaty that everyone who still finds themselves in conflict should read.

Sullivan is the product of his background - an upper-middle-class Anglo-Catholic Oxford graduate. His book reads like a 250-page tutorial essay, except that no self-respecting Oxford tutor would let pass the mutliple inconsistencies and non-sequiturs in this tepid dribble of mental masturbation. He wants us all to be virtuous and abstinent, to replace our lovers with friends - yet in the year before his seroconversion he is so promiscuous that he has no idea who has infected him. A sermon in a Catholic church infuriates him, yet he goes on at inordinate length about the virtues of his faith and what we can learn from Jesus (pity he didn't learn modesty). His selective and misleading account of psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality would be risible if he didn't take his tedious self so seriously. He rightly attacks the notoriously homophobic analyst Charles Socarides, yet directs almost as much venom towards Richard Isay, an openly gay psychiatrist who has devoted enormous time and effort not only to working with gays but also to making such work respectable within the psychiatric profession in the USA.

Sullivan wants to replace love by friendship because he has never found love and is looking for intellectual explanations of this empty place in his life. It doesn't seem to occur to him that he is a smug, sanctimonious, pseudo-intellectual, right-wing prig whom any self-respecting gay man would run away from. Maybe one of his friends should tell him.

I have read all of Andrew's books and this is by far the least compelling. While he does generate some interest in the first two chapter, by the third he is off into some very abusive logic. He has written an important article recently about his injection of testosterone as a treatment for HIV infection and I believe this is changing his writing style. If you compare this book with his earlier ones, it would almost appear that he has become ex-gay or at least supports the philosophy of Reparative Therapy and it's earlier genesis with Frank Worthington and Love-In-Action (San Rafael, CA). I look forward to anything he writes in the future, but cannot recommend this book to any of my friends.

Sullivan writes like a five-year-old child who believes the center of the universe is him. He clearly has no compassion for anyone outside his demographic niche, despite the vehemence with which he proclaims his belief in Catholic doctrine. A mediocre journalist whose fame has arisen purely from his sexuality, he has no understanding (or desire to understand) the lives of those whom the world has treated in other ways.

Probably Sullivan's best book, especially the passages on his own personal struggles with homosexuality. Here at least he is willing to describe the differences between gays and straights more honestly than in his other pieces, and certainly more honestly than most people. In my experience (and I wish it were not so!), gays tend to share some unpleasant character traits, such as effeminacy or lack of masculinity, cliquishness, and lewdness. Sullivan gives some societal causes for these things, such as a harsh childhood environment, and the hostility of parents and public [...]. This can indeed be expected to produce unhappy results, one of which might, perhaps, be promiscuity in certain individuals; but I doubt that the promiscuity would be so widespread and would continue well after adolescence, in much more lax and tolerant times, and even in the face of a deadly venereal disease, were it not for some strong natural and innate predisposition, taste, and desire. I myself have not noticed any correlation between gay promiscuity and childhood unhappiness-except perhaps a slight inverse correlation. When one considers further the lewdness, even pornography, of even the most well-regarded pieces of gay "romance" stories, of gay newspapers and magazines, of gay bars and personal ads, of gay parades and rallies-wherever and whenever gays feel, not oppressed, but most *free* to be themselves with themselves-one is forced to suspect that some unfortunate natural difference between gay men and heterosexual men must be at work.

Sullivan attempts to try to interpret these characteristics in a more favorable light, for example, that gays are more tolerant in their relationships and more realistic. I agree that these qualities can, in limited respects, be good. But from the point of view that is most interesting to me, as someone trying to assess the romantic possibilities, I disagree that something very good can be built on such things. I also disagree that these qualities can be conducive to the best friendships. There is much more kinship between love and friendship than he realizes (for example, true friendship is an exclusive bond between two, not a carefree open network among many).