Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival - Review

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by Gilbert Meilaender

Andrew Sullivan Alfred A. Knopf, $23, 255 pp.

Gilbert Meilaender

In his preface, former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan says that he had intended to write a book about friendship. Distracted from that task by the death (from AIDS) of a close friend, he turned instead to write the essay "When Plagues End." Returning to the subject of friendship (in the essay in this volume titled "If Love Were All"), he decided that both of these essays were "different answers to the same questions, different responses to the same period in my life, different parts, I hope, of the same book." The third essay in this book, "Virtually Abnormal," is a sustained examination of psychological debates about the origins of homosexuality.

I confess that I cannot find many connections among the essays, other than that all three take up questions important to the author's own sense of himself. Unless we are especially interested in that, however, we are probably better off simply taking the essays as three quite separate pieces. Indeed, the one that makes the fewest references to Sullivan's own life and identity - "Virtually Abnormal" - is surely the most tightly argued of the three. It examines Freud's views on the origins of homosexuality and turns, then, to more recent theorists - both reparative theorists and defenders of the "normality" of homosexuality.

What is never quite clear, even at the end of the essay, is what readers - or the author himself - should conclude from the evidence he discusses and the arguments he dissects. He summarizes the long course of the argument in this way: "Homosexuality is not, in the usual sense of the word, normal. But nor is it, from a psychoanalytic context, necessarily abnormal. It is different." None of this, however, gets us to a moral judgment - as Sullivan himself realizes in his clearer moments. He does, though, outline the two most important moral issues to be considered when evaluating homosexual relationships: the lack of "an intrinsic ability to create new life within that relationship," and the lack of "true gender complementarity" or otherness in such a bond.

These features suggest to Sullivan that narcissism and promiscuity are likely to be permanent features of gay culture, and in this book, despite his status as a strong proponent of "gay marriage" (see Sullivan's Virtually Normal), he seems strangely at ease with that conclusion. At some points, indeed, he attempts to make a virtue of these limitations. Thus, for example, he argues that "precisely because such a same-sex relationship cannot in itself create new life, it is more pellucidly entered into for its own sake." One wonders whether this is really a good thing, a question to which I return below.

"When Plagues End" is in part the story of the death of a friend, and in part reflection upon the significance - psychological and otherwise - of the fact that it is now reasonable to think of "surviving" AIDS. Sullivan explicitly recognizes that AIDS has not really been a plague in the normal sense; yet his discussion does not seem to assimilate that acknowledgment. This essay also contains the book's most sustained analysis of and response to the fact that Sullivan's own faith community - Roman Catholicism - condemns homosexual conduct. His response, at least in my view, is one of the most disappointingly weak elements of the book. Having acknowledged that his own HIV infection might have come from any one of many sexual partners, having argued that "gay marriage" would be a better way of channeling desire, he can still defend his refusal to give up promiscuous activity as "an act, at some level, of integrity. It was simply not possible for me to change my entire makeup...."

Hence, a religious ethic that calls for abstinence outside marriage requires "the arid emptiness of complete self-denial, which is to say, to end one's life altogether." Evidently Sullivan must think that this is also what the church has asked of unmarried heterosexuals - not faithful obedience to the ordinance of God, but a loss of integrity and end to meaningful life. Thus, he can describe his own view, which holds that sex is most humane when expressed in faithful love but also permissible in other contexts as a more "nuanced" and less simplistic ethic than that which the church has taught - a claim that sounds more condescending than persuasive.

"If Love Were All" is the essay that would have become a larger book about friendship according to Sullivan's original design. It discusses, in varying degrees of detail, many of the important writings on friendship; yet, many of the judgments Sullivan offers about this diffuse body of writing seem to me either imprecise or just mistaken. Thus, for example, he describes Montaigne's famous essay as the "first and last serious treatment" of friendship in the modern world. He is right, of course, to make the general point that friendship received more attention in the classical world, but that judgment overlooks writers as diverse as Jeremy Taylor, Emerson, Simone Weil, and C.S. Lewis. Taylor's A Discourse...of Friendship is at least as serious a treatment as Montaigne's - and far more carefully argued. Having described Montaigne's as the "deepest" essay on friendship, he later distinguishes (romantic) love from friendship by suggesting that "love is sudden, [but] friendship is steady." We fall in love, but not into friendship. Yet, of course, all readers of Montaigne's essay know that he says of his friendship with Etienne that "at our first meeting...we found ourselves so taken with each other...that from that time on nothing was so close to us as each other." Sullivan also suggests that friendship, again in contrast to love, permits "a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person." Montaigne, by contrast, writes that "in the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again." Now, of course, on any or all of these matters Sullivan's views may be correct, but they do not, without considerably more argument, flow very naturally out of Montaigne's essay.