Walt Odets, a psychologist "whose work with gay men in the Bay Area at the height of the AIDS epidemic led him to write a book on a nearly taboo topic, the survivor's guilt and depression experienced by men who were not infected with H.I.V.," died on July 5, the New York Times reported. He was 79.
His 1995 book, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being H.I.V.-Negative in the Age of AIDS, "appeared more than a decade into the crisis--before effective treatments arrived and as thousands of men dying in their prime continued to grip gay communities in grief, fear and anger," the Times noted.
Odets, who was gay, wrote that there was also a "psychological epidemic" among those who were H.I.V.-negative, who were "anxious and lonely in their 'wellness'.... For many, survival is so difficult they sometimes wish they had not survived and sometimes hope they will not."
He also observed: "It has often seemed selfish, inappropriate or simply ridiculous for the uninfected to have any important feelings about themselves. Feelings about oneself seemed the exclusive right of those who were infected, sick or dying." But such feelings mattered, he contended, because a sense of fatalism among H.I.V.-negative men encouraged unsafe sex.
Born in Los Angeles, he was the son of the playwright Clifford Odets, author of Awake and Sing!, Waiting for Lefty, and other works. His mother was actress Bette Grayson. Both parents died by the time he was 16, and Walt spent part of his late adolescence in New York with his legal guardians, Method acting pioneer Lee Strasberg and his wife, Paula.
After training in clinical psychology at the California Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco, he received his Ph.D. in 1989 and offered therapy in Berkeley to gay men as individuals or couples. "In the years before his first book appeared, Mr. Odets was best known in the Bay Area as a fierce critic of AIDS prevention campaigns that had failed to slow infections among younger men," the Times wrote.
About 25 years after In the Shadow of the Epidemic, Odets published Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives (2019), contending that despite evidence of progress like treatments that drove AIDS mortality sharply downward and same-sex marriage becoming the law, he dismissed the notion that America had outgrown its deep homophobia. Shame, he wrote, remained an ever-present emotion for many gay men and "still often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives."
"There's sadness in Odets's life story," Benoit Denizet-Lewis wrote in a Times review of the book, "but there's mostly resilience, tenderness, and a willingness to fashion an unapologetic gay life, sometimes against all odds."