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In November of 1996, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "When Plagues End" in which he claimed that then-new treatments for the HIV retrovirus had signaled the end of AIDS. The article drew much criticism from activists and health professionals; in Love Undetectable, Sullivan--who is himself living with HIV--elaborates upon his argument, embellishing and embroidering it with nuance and context to make it at once more personal and universal. His thinking about AIDS leads him to a philosophical contemplation on the "causes" of homosexuality in which he discards all of the negative psychological theories, then rejects genetics as well. In the following essay on the nature of friendship and love, Sullivan finds his voice and true topic--using "friendship" as a lens through which he can wed his autobiographical musings and speculative theories on how we, as mortal humans struggling against time and the body, can make sense of the world.

Always provocative--the chapters on the plague will still rankle those who see AIDS as an ever-present and growing danger--Love Undetectable proves that Sullivan has a voice and a heart that can reach across the borders of experience and politics. --Michael Bronski --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The AIDS plague is over, Sullivan declares in the first of three astute, searching essay-memoirs, arguing we should now view it as a manageable disease. An optimistic view, this, and one that holds only for patients of means. But it's also a diagnosis not without merit, given Sullivan's emphasis on AIDS as a cultural watershed in the gay community. The first essay, some of which was first published in the New York Times Magazine, neatly traces the confusion and ambivalence that have begun to set in as the crisis, one that galvanized a movement, seems to abate. In the second essay, "Virtually Abnormal" (whose title plays off Sullivan's previous book, Virtually Normal), the New Republic senior editor engages the question of etiology, for "where homosexuality comes from" remains for Sullivan a "fascinating" question. This essay reflects Sullivan's tortured efforts to reconcile his Catholic faith with his homosexuality, an issue that also troubled the late Yale historian John Boswell. Like Boswell, Sullivan sees human sexuality almost exclusively in terms of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, and draws the familiar conclusion that gayness is a result of both genetic predisposition and environmental factors, predictably taking heterosexuality as a sort of base line from which one deviates. The best essay by far?though all are engagingly written?is the last, "If Love Were All," which discusses a topic not, according to Sullivan, taken seriously enough since the Middle Ages?friendship. Drawing upon Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Emerson and others, Sullivan finds it, fittingly, to be "the deepest legacy of the plague years." (Oct.) FYI: Sullivan served as editor of the New Republic from 1991 to 1996.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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