In The Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS

Duke University Press, Durham, 1995

Comments and Praise:

“In the second decade of AIDS, the short-term emergency solutions of the 80s are no longer enough; we need a way of living and staying uninfected for an indefinite future, about which many gay men are at best ambivalent.  No one has risen to this new challenge more articulately than Walt Odets.  In the Shadow of the Epidemic, already controversial, is essential reading for anyone who cares about AIDS prevention or about gay men.  It is a moving, courageous, and profoundly humane book.  And I believe it no exaggeration to say that it will savemany lives.” – Michael Warner, editor of Fear of a Queer Planet

“Dr. Odets’ work is extraordinarily insightful, provocative, and courageous.” – Benjamin Schatz, Executive Director, Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

“Reading this book, from outside the epidemic, is a revelatory experience.  One tends to feel it as more than a psychologist’s account.  These tales of love and loss, hope, grief, denial, despair, deal of course with the materials of all human experience; Odets brings to them so sharp an eye and eloquent a tongue that his book takes on some of the dimensions of literature.” – William Gibson, playwright.

“This will be the literature on the subject.  In the Shadow of the Epidemic is a remarkable work.  Odets’ practice, his clarity of thought and introspection have provided us with a true gift.” – Alvin Novick, Yale University and editor-in-chief of AIDS & Public Policy Journal

“Odets presents an often harrowing picture of frailty and vulnerability on a massive scale, and his book is a much-needed corrective to the complacent view that everything is basically O.K. in the domain of gay men’s safer sex education.  In the Shadow of the Epidemic will doubtless become an instant locus classicus for subsequent debate about the short- and long-term psychological impact of the epidemic and the types of interventions necessary to reduce wide-scale suffering.” – Simon Watney, author of Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AID