Love Undetectable

August 31, 1998
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." (Oct.) FYI: Sullivan served as editor of the New Republic from 1991 to 1996.