Walt Odets, Pioneering Gay Author & Psychologist, Dies At Age 79

Pioneering gay psychologist Walt Odets, author of Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men’s Lives, has died at age 79. According to partner Armen Davoudian, the cause was a complication related to Alzheimer’s disease. Odets died at his home in Berkley, California, on July 5, following an impressive 40-year career as a psychotherapist, and a lifetime of ceaseless activism.

Odets is remembered for his early work, which took place largely in the USA’s San Francisco Bay Area at the height of the AIDS epidemic. After qualifying as a clinical psychologist at the California Professional School of Psychology, he opened a private practice for gay men. As Odets watched the crisis take thousands of lives that should have just been starting, he began noting a rather insidious “psychological epidemic” taking root among the survivors.

Walt Odets’ First Book: “In The Shadow Of The Epidemic”

This ultimately led Odets to publish his 1995 best-selling book, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS. The book, deeply controversial at the time, was informed by Odets’ clinical observations, and his own trauma; just three years prior, he had lost his then lover, Robb Caramico, to AIDS. Accordingly, the book set out to document the immense loneliness and survivor’s guilt carried by HIV negative men. 

While critics at the time argued “healthy” gay people should not feel sufficiently self-important to have their own sob-story published when their contemporaries were dying in droves, Odets’ book has been hailed in retrospect. Thanks to Odets’ pioneering work, it is now widely accepted that many of the epidemic’s survivors were not healthy at all. Rather, they had simply resigned themselves to a sense of fatalism that, for many, actually motivated risky sexual practices.

Odets’ Journey Out Of The Shadows

Odets continued work at his private practice, and 25 years later, he published his second book, Out of the Shadows. The book arrived in a world entirely different to the one Odets had first documented. It had now been seven years since PrEP’s (pre-exposure prophylaxis) approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), AIDS deaths were dwindling in number, and same-sex marriage had even been legalised.

Still, Odets argued, “we are never completely free of shame acquired in childhood, adolescence, and early adult life, and the mere assertion of “gay pride” does not undo it; it hides it.” 

The book, which includes deeply moving memoir components, became a queer literature classic, documenting both gay struggle, and, according to New York Times reviewer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a “resilience, tenderness and a willingness to fashion an unapologetic gay life, sometimes against all odds.” 

Another notable praise of the book came from Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance.

“A gay man could read this book as if his life depended on it,” Holleran wrote, “and perhaps it does”.