Word: sullivans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...