A decade into the AIDS crisis thousands of gay men were dying in their prime, as their communities faced the epidemic wracked with grief and fear. As the crisis deepened, the American clinical psychologist and writer Walt Odets, published his 1995 best-selling book In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS.
Dr Odets, who has died of Alzheimer’s disease aged 79 drew attention to the “fraught situation” of AIDS survivors before any effective treatment was available, and who were “anxious and lonely in their ‘wellness.’”
“For many,” he said, “survival is so difficult they sometimes wish they had not survived and sometimes hope they will not.” He added: “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.”
Many of those not infected with HIV experienced survivor’s guilt and depression. But their feelings were important and they needed support, he argued, because a sense of fatalism among HIV-negative men encouraged unsafe sex.
The New York Times listed the book among the “Notable Books of the year 1995”, while the spring 1996 issue of Positive Impact Journal described the author as an “important voice in the AIDS education and prevention arena.” Praise also came from David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who believed the book 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.
In the Shadow of the Epidemic was lauded by many HIV-negative men, because it alleged that the HIV establishment prioritised HIV-positive men over them, despite the inevitable controversy it aroused. Odets’ long-term friend, Ed Wolf, analysed the book’s impact: “When no-one else would take the time to acknowledge the burden of not having it, when so many do, it really, really helped redefine prevention.”
At the time, Wolf explained, “HIV-negative men had few resources to dealt with what has become known as survivor’s guilt. Many HIV-positive men were dying, but their caregivers didn’t have the disease....The book was hailed, especially in retrospect, that prevention needed to adapt and change.”
Controversial in its time, the book made its author a persona non grata in San Francisco until awareness grew that both negative and positive people experienced health issues in a broader sense than HIV, for example in substance or tobacco use and exercise. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, clinics had no capacity to handle these, overwhelmed as they were with the AIDS epidemic. Odets called for a more sustainable approach.
Dr Odets, himself a gay man, has been described as an influential writer on HIV and its effects on gay men’s mental health, who brought a paradigm shift to the way the LGBT leadership regarded gay health. He investigated the early development of gay men, their psychological experiences of stigmatisation and adolescent trauma, and how they coped with society’s conventional notions of “the homosexual”, and the effect it had on their own identities and relationships.
In 2019 Dr Odets wrote a follow up book: In the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives, considered the aftermath of the epidemic at a time when newly HIV positive people could take advantage of newer treatments.
Walt Whitman Odets was born in Los Angeles in 1947 to playwright Clifford Odets, the author of Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! Among others, and the actress Bette Grayson. His older sister Nora was born with a mental disability, and she grew up within the family, who refused to send her to an institution.
Both parents died by the time Odets was 16 and he spent part of his late adolescence in New York with his legal guardians, Lee Strasberg, the Method acting pioneer, and his wife, Paula. He gained a BA in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1969 and was briefly married to the journalist Paula Harrington in 1983. The marriage was dissolved in 1986.
Odets had many interests and talents. A noted photographer, his work is in several leading collections, including California’s Oakland Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
He trained in clinical psychology at the California Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco, and on receiving his doctorate in 1989 he offered therapy in Berkeley to gay men, as individuals or in couples. Within the Bay area, he had earlier been an outspoken critic of AIDS prevention campaigns that had failed to slow infections among younger men.
Odets was also a keen horologist who could disassemble timepieces to examine their mechanics with a microscope. He published influential watch reviews on the internet in the late 1990s and wrote for TimeZone, a website catering to collectors and horology buffs.
His update on gay men’s psychology, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives (2019) was published a quarter of a century after his first book. It arrived at a time of progress when successful treatments for AIDS sufferers had sharply reduced deaths from the disease, and when same-sex marriage was legalised. Yet, Dr Odets alleged that despite all this evidence of progress, he hid not see any decrease in America’s profound homophobia.
The shame suffered by many gay men, he wrote, remained an ever-present emotion and “still often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives.”
Many of his views had been formed by his personal childhood experiences. The death of his mother during his childhood and the enduring disability of his sister brought a deep connection to his father. That emotional attachment, he wrote, was a major influence on his understanding of what it meant to be a gay man.
That identity went far beyond physical attraction to other men. “I have emotional feelings for men that I’m cautious about with women,” he told Publishers Weekly. “That’s really the crux of the whole book, that being gay is a whole internal life and a sensibility, and it’s much broader and much richer than the conventional male identity that’s so heavily promoted.”
He was also influenced by his own personal experience of AIDS, when a former partner, Robb Caramico, died of AIDS in 1992. “There’s sadness in Odets’ 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.”
Dr Odets remained in the Bay area where he had run a private practice in psychotherapy and couples counselling in Berkeley for 40 years. His sister Nora predeceased him in 2008. He is survived by his companion, Davoudian.
Walt Odets: Born February 4, 1947. Died July 5, 2026
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