Waiting for Death, Learning to Live

Andrew Sullivan was no stranger to the AIDS epidemic. After nursing dying friends and seeing familiar names crowd the obituary section, he had intimate knowledge of the disease. It was knowledge, however, that would be foreshadowing. In 1993, Sullivan was diagnosed with HIV. Suddenly, all the friends he had comforted and bereaved families he had consoled were a haunting premonition of his own death.

Sullivan, then a senior editor for The New Republic, girded himself for the battle of--and for--his life. But for three years, in a metamorphosis that transformed his healthy, young body into a skeleton too sick to get out of bed, Sullivan was slowly losing the battle. In 1996, just when it seemed that he was running out of defenses in the fight against AIDS, Sullivan acquired a powerful new arsenal: a cocktail of drugs called protease inhibitors. All of a sudden, Sullivan--and thousands of other AIDS sufferers--had a reprieve on what seemed like an inflexible death sentence.

Sullivan's latest novel, Love Undetectable, is born from this revolution in AIDS treatment. Sullivan tells us of his renaissance--his tacit preparation for death, then his difficult readjustment to life. Sullivan makes it clear that along with the euphoria that followed the realization that he was going to live came a surprising anticlimax. It seemed that life was most precious when it was about to end. As his viral load of AIDS plummeted, Sullivan's relief was countered by an unexpected banality. And so, Love Undetectable is divided into three essays that explore the spectrum of thoughts that germinated from Sullivan's AIDS diagnosis, former anticipation of death and recent renewal of life.

In prose that moves as seamlessly as poetry and as quickly as a stream of consciousness, Sullivan uses the first part of the book to speak of his life pre-AIDS. With candor and sensitivity, Sullivan is remarkably honest as he recounts how he never found true love in a relationship, quenched his loneliness with promiscuous affairs and used friendship as the one predictable source of support and spirituality. Friendship, in fact, forms a main artery of the book. After the onset of AIDS symptoms and the cavernous despair that ensued, Sullivan cites the strength of his friendships as providing his only scaffold of hope. But not even friendship was immune to the epidemic. As AIDS infiltrated the gay community with the stealth and fury of a plague, Sullivan buried some of his closest friends and saw others deteriorate to the point where even protease inhibitors could not save them from incipient death. Friendship and other personal sagas, however, are only one part of his tale. As a contributing editor to The New York Times Magazine and vociferous critic of conservatism, Sullivan has never avoided polemics. And so, throughout all of the essays in the book, he intermingles personal throughts with political ones on the subjects of AIDS and homosexuality.

Some of his insights are surprising. Contrary to what one might expect, Sullivan views the AIDS epidemic as providing a source of solidarity to the gay community, by empowering the same segment of the population it decimated. After seeing friends and lovers die a protracted death, Sullivan claims that homosexual men refuse to let such suffering be for naught. He claims, in short, that AIDS has provided an impetus to the movement for gay rights. Much of the book, in fact, discusses the struggle to obtain equal rights for gays. Sullivan personally makes an impassioned argument for the recognition of gay marriage. He also presents a comprehensive survey of different theories on the genesis of homosexuality that, in spanning Freud to modern psychologists, address the nature versus nurture debate head on.

But even though Sullivan often discusses what it is like to take 40 pills a day and debate mortality with a friend on his deathbed, Love Undetectable is only partly about Sullivan's attempt to live with AIDS. What the book primarily explores is what he is learning through the experience. If there is one overarching theme in Love Undetectable, it is the pan-human need for love and companionship, independent of sexual orientation. As Sullivan creeps back from the brink of death, he implores society to recognize people for their capacity to love and to give and not for being gay or straight. His thesis is heartfelt and forthright. It provides the arguments that render Love Undetectable a rich and engrossing read for many audiences--and, sadly, a controversial one to others for the same reasons.