Love Undetectable
Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival
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- 129,00 Kč
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- 129,00 Kč
Publisher Description
"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.
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." FYI: Sullivan served as editor of the New Republic from 1991 to 1996.
