Synopses & Reviews
"I intend to be among the first generation that survives this disease." That was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan's first public statement about his HIV diagnosis. Speaking to heterosexual and homosexual audiences alike, this book is about the first steps in that journey of survival.
If Sullivan's acclaimed first book, Virtually Normal, was about politics, this long-awaited sequel is about life. In a memoir in the form of three essays, Sullivan asks hard questions about his own life and others'. Can the practice of friendship ever compensate for a life without love? Is sex at war or at peace with spirituality? Can faith endure the randomness of death? Is homosexuality genetic or environmental?
Love Undetectable, then, refers to many things: to a virus that, for many, has become "undetectable" in the bloodstream thanks to new drugs, and to the failed search for love and intimacy that helped spread it; to the love of God, which in times of plague seems particularly hard to find and understand; to a sexual orientation long pathologized and denied any status as an equal form of human love; and to the love between friends, a love ignored when it isn't demeaned, and obscured by the more useful imperatives of family and society.
In a work destined to be as controversial as his first book, Sullivan takes on religious authorities and gay activists; talks candidly about his own promiscuity and search for love; revisits Freud in the origins of homosexuality; and makes one of the more memorable modern cases for elevating the virtue of friendship over the satisfactions of love. Scholarly, impassioned, wide-ranging, and embattled, Love Undetectable is a book that is ultimately not about homosexuality or plague, but about humanity and mortality.
Synopsis
In the penultimate days of a "plague", Andrew Sullivan reflects on the meaning of the past 15 years. In a work that is personal and analytic, philosophical and spiritual, he asks the questions posed by the 20th-century plague called AIDS: about life after near-death, faith in the face of evil, the nature of normality, and the meaning of friendship.
Sullivan tells stories of those who survived and those who did not. He talks candidly about sex, promiscuity, and risk-taking. He delivers strong words to the religious establishment for its silence, and to the gay establishment for its denial. He dissects the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality as a disorder and yet rejects the case for genetic determinism. The book's climax is an investigation into the meaning of friendship, in contrast to family love and romantic love. Drawing on literary and philosophical sources from Aristotle to Montaigne, from the Gospel of John to Emerson, Sullivan memorializes a dead friend and makes an argument for the superiority of friendship to every other form of human relationship.
About the Author
Andrew Sullivan is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and a senior editor of The New Republic, where he was editor from 1991 to 1996. He is the author of Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality and the editor of Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con. He writes a weekly column about the United States for The Sunday Times (London), and lives in Washington, D.C.