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 about a nearly taboo topic, the survivor's guilt and depression experienced by men who were not infected with HIV, died July 5 at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 79 years old.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, said his partner Armen Davoudian.
Odets' 1995 book, “In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV Negative in the Age of AIDS,” appeared more than a decade after the crisis, before effective treatments arrived and while thousands of men dying in the prime of life remained mired in the pain, fear and anger of gay communities.
Odets, who was gay, wrote that there was also a “psychological epidemic” among those who were HIV negative, who were “anxious and lonely in their 'well-being'.”
“For many,” he added, “survival is so difficult that sometimes they wish they hadn't survived and other times they hope they hadn't.”
Talking about this population, he acknowledged, was complicated.
“It has often seemed selfish, inappropriate, or simply ridiculous for the uninfected to have important feelings about themselves,” he wrote. “Feelings about oneself seemed to be the exclusive right of those who were infected, sick or dying.”
But those feelings matter, he continued, because a sense of fatalism among HIV-negative men encouraged unprotected sex.
In his review of “In the Shadow of the Epidemic” for The New York Times Book Review, David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote that it belonged on the same shelf as two classic studies of populations living with trauma: Robert Coles’ “Children of Crisis,” about the effects of racism, and Robert Jay Lifton’s “Death in Life,” about Hiroshima survivors.
Walt Whitman Odets was born on February 4, 1947 in Los Angeles. He was the son of the playwright Clifford Odets, author of “Awake and Sing!”, “Waiting for Lefty” and other works, and the actress Bette Grayson. An older sister, Nora, was born with a mental disability; Her parents chose not to institutionalize her and she grew up with the family.
His parents died when he was 16, and Walt spent part of his adolescence in New York with his legal guardians, Lee Strasberg, the pioneer of Method acting, and Strasberg's wife, Paula.
He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1969. He was married to Paula Harrington, a Bay Area journalist, from 1983 to 1986. His sister died in 2008. His partner, Mr. Davoudian, is his only immediate survivor.
Photography was Mr. Odets' first career. His works are in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
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 the publication of his first book, Odets was best known in the Bay Area as a fierce critic of AIDS prevention campaigns that had failed to curb infections among younger men.
He juggled his practice by writing some of the first and most influential watch reviews on the Internet in the late 1990s. He took apart watches, examined their mechanics under a microscope, and wrote reviews for TimeZone, a website aimed at watch collectors and watch enthusiasts.
A quarter century after “In the Shadow of the Epidemic,” he wrote an update on the psychology of gay men, “Out of the Shadows: Reimagining the Lives of Gay Men” (2019).
Despite evidence of progress: treatments, beginning in 1996, that dramatically reduced AIDS mortality; same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land: Odets dismissed the idea that the United States had overcome its deep homophobia.
He wrote that shame remained an ever-present emotion for many gay men and “often still lurks unconsciously behind the most successful gay lives.”
Gay identity, he maintained, involved much more than a mere physical attraction to other men. Because his mother had died when he was a child and his sister was disabled, his emotional bond with his father, he wrote, was a major influence on how he understood what it meant to be a gay man.
“I have emotional feelings toward men and I'm cautious around women,” he explained to Publishers Weekly. “That's really the crux of the whole book, that being gay is a whole inner life and sensitivity, and it's much broader and richer than the conventional male identity that's so promoted.”
“Out of the Shadows” ends with a moving account of the lifelong bonds Mr. Odets forged with a gay college classmate and the man's lover. For decades, they were a bi-coastal couple, sometimes branching out romantically to others, including an associate of Odets, Robb Caramico, who died of AIDS in 1992.
“There is sadness in Odets's life story,” Benoit Denizet-Lewis wrote in a Times review of the book, “but above all there is resilience, tenderness and a willingness to forge an unapologetic gay life, sometimes against all odds.”
