Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival

Front Cover
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998 - Current Events - 255 pages
"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 ultimatelynot about homosexuality or plague, but about humanity and mortality.

From inside the book

Contents

Virtually Abnormal
89
If Love Were
175
Select Bibliography
254
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1998)

Andrew Sullivan was born in southern England on August 10, 1963. He attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a first in modern history and modern languages. In 1984, he won a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He interned at the Centre for Policy Studies, where he wrote a policy paper on the environment entitled Greening the Tories. He received a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis, Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott, won the government department prize. He was a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and a columnist for The Sunday Times (London). He is the author of several books including Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con, and Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival. He is one of the world's most widely read bloggers.