Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Sullivan lives in Washington, D.C.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Sullivan offers [a] profound, often beautiful appreciation of friendship. . . . [He can] fascinate us with the range and depth of his mind."--"San Francisco Chronicle
A "New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"One of the great pleasures of this book lies in watching Sullivan's mind at work . . . [his essays] are filled with a passion and heat that most cultural criticism lacks." --Katie Roiphe, "The Washington Post
When former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan publicly revealed his HIV positive status in 1996, he intended "to be among the first generation that survives this disease." In this new book, a powerful meditation on the spiritual effect AIDS has on friendship, love, sexuality, and American culture, we follow Sullivan on his path to survival.
A practicing Catholic, Sullivan reflects on his faith in God, and expresses his bittersweet joy upon learning about new AIDS treatments that he believes led to the virus's recent transformation from a plague into a chronic illness. He revisits Freud to seek the origins of homosexuality and reviews the works of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and W. H. Auden to define friendship for a contemporary, post-plague world. Sullivan's last essay extols the virtues of friendship, elevating platonic love over the romantic, as he memorializes his best friend, who died of AIDS. Intensely personal and passionately political, Sullivan's essays are not just about his own experiences but also a powerful testament to human resilience, faith, hope, and love.
"Sullivan has found meaning in chaos. . . . With its paradoxical sense of beauty amid pain, Love Undetectable has something of the quality of a war memoir." --"The New York Times BookReview
"On display here are all of the author's many strengths--compelling, poetic prose style, some keen observations on faith. . . . Sullivan offers a moving defense of the open gay male urban sexual culture and his participation in it." --"The Boston Globe

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Love Undetectable

Vintage Books USA

Chapter One

1. WHEN PLAGUES END

The sense of what is real ... the thought if after all it should prove unreal...
--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

FIRST, THE RESISTANCE to memory.

    I arrived late at the hospital, fresh off the plane. It wasaround 8:30 and there was no light on in my friend Patrick'sapartment, so I went straight to the intensive careunit. When I arrived, my friend Chris's eyes were a reddenedblear of fright, the hospital mask slipped downunder his chin. I went into the room. When I first caughtsight of Pat, he was lying on his back, his body contortedso his neck twisted away and his arms splayed out, hishands palm upward, showing the intravenous tubes intohis wrists. Blood mingled with sweat in the creases of hisneck, his chest heaving up and down grotesquely withthe pumping of the respirator, a huge plastic tube forceddown his throat. His cold feet poked out from under thebedspread, as if separate from the rest of his body.

    The week before, celebrating his thirty-first birthday inhis hometown on the Gulf Coast of Florida, we had swumtogether in the dark, warm space he had already decidedwould one day contain his ashes. It was clear that he hadknown something was about to happen. One afternoon onthe beach, he had gotten up to take a walk with his newlyacquired beagle, and had glanced back at me a secondbefore he left. All I can say is that, somehow, the glanceconveyed a complete sense of finality, the subtlest butclearest sign that it was, as far as he was concerned, over.Within three days, a massive fungal infection overtook hislungs, and at midnight, the vital signs began to plummet.

    I remember walking slowly back to the intensive careroom when a sudden rush of people moved backwards outof the room. His brother motioned to the rest of us to run,and we sped toward him. Pat's heart had stopped beatingand after one attempt to restart it, we surrounded him andprayed: his mother and father and three brothers, hisboyfriend, ex-boyfriend and a handful of close friends.When the priest arrived, each of us received communion. Iremember I slumped back against the wall at the momentof his dying, reaching out for all the consolation I had beenused to reaching for--the knowledge that the worst wasyet to come, the memory of pain survived in the past--butsince it was happening now, and now had never felt sounavoidable, no relief was possible.

    Perhaps this is why so many of us have found it hardto accept that this ordeal may be over. Because it meanswe may now be required to relent from our clenchingagainst the future and remember the past.

IF I COULD PINPOINT a moment when the reality sunkin for me, it was a summer evening in 1996. I was atthe July 30 meeting of something called the Treatment ActionGroup, an AIDS activist organization, in Manhattan.In its heyday, in the early 1990s, this group had livedand breathed a hard-edged skepticism. They were, afterall, the no-nonsense successors to the AIDS action group,ACT UP. But as soon as I arrived--for a meeting to discussthe data presented at a recent AIDS conference--I couldsense something had changed. Even at eight o'clock, therewas a big crowd--much larger, one of the organizers toldme, than the regular meetings. In the middle sat DavidHo, a pioneering AIDS researcher, and Marty Markowitz,the doctor who had presided over some of the earliestclinical trials of the new "combination therapy" for HIVinfection. As the crowd stared at them and they starednervously back, the two scientists interspersed their whispersto one another with the occasional, gleeful smile.

    The meeting began with a blur of data. Ho and Markowitzdetailed again what had already hit the headlines:how, in some trials of patients taking the new proteaseinhibitors used in combination with older AIDS drugs, theamount of virus in the bloodstream had been reducedon average by between a hundred- and a thousand-fold.Within a few weeks of treatment with the new drugs, theyelaborated, levels of up to six million viral particles in amilliliter of a patient's blood had been reduced to belowfour hundred in most cases. That is, no virus could befound on the most sophisticated tests available. And, sofar, the results had lasted.

    When Ho finished speaking, there was, at first, anumbed silence. And then the questions followed, likefirecrackers of denial. How long did it take for the virusto clear from the bloodstream? What about the virus stillhiding in the brain or the testes? What could be done forthe people who weren't responding to the new drugs? Wasthere resistance to the new therapy? Could a new, evenmore lethal viral strain be leaking out into the population?The answers that came from Ho and Markowitz were justas insistent. No, this was not a "cure." But the disappearanceof the virus in the bloodstream was beyond the expectationsof even the most optimistic of researchers. It waslikely that there would be some impact on the virus--althoughless profound--in the brain or testes, and newdrugs were able to reach those areas better. And since theimpact of the drugs was so powerful, it was hard for resistanceto develop because resistance is what happens whenthe virus mutates in the presence of the drugs--and therewas no virus detectable in the presence of the drugs.

    The crowd palpably adjusted itself; and a few rusty officechairs squeaked. These were the hard-core skeptics, Iremember thinking to myself, and even they couldn't disguisewhat was going through their minds. There werecaveats, of course. The latest drugs were very new, andlarge studies had yet to be done. There was already clinicalevidence that a small minority of patients, especiallythose in late-stage disease, were not responding as wellto the new drugs and were experiencing a "breakout" ofthe virus after a few weeks or months. Although somepeople's immune systems seemed to recover, others'seemed damaged for good. The long-term toxicity of thedrugs themselves--their impact on the liver and heart, forexample--could mean that patients might stage a miraculousrecovery at the start, only to die from the effects oftreatment in later life. And the drugs themselves wereoften debilitating. After testing positive in 1993, I had beenon combination therapy ever since. When I added the proteaseinhibitors in March of 1996, the nausea, diarrhea,and constant fatigue had been overwhelming.

    But I remember that meeting all too vividly now, and thesimple, unavoidable future it presaged. The next day, in afriend's apartment, I spoke the words I never believed Iwould speak in my lifetime. "It's over," I said. "Believe me.It's over."

MOST OFFICIAL STATEMENTS about the disease, of course--thestatements by responsible scientists, by AIDS activistorganizations, by doctors--do not concede that theplague is at an end. And, in one vital sense, obviously it'snot. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, someonesomewhere will be infected with HIV. Worldwide, thenumbers affected jump daily--some 30 million humanbeings at the latest estimate. Almost all of these people--anda real minority in America--will not be able to haveaccess to the treatments now available. And many, manyof these people will still die. Nothing I am saying here ismeant to deny that fact, or to...