Love in the Time of HIV: The Gay Man's Guide to Sex, Dating, and Relationships

Increasingly, self-help volumes have been written primarily for the lay public that focus on the impact of sociocultural variables on the initiation, maintenance, and termination of gay men’s intimate relationships from a gay affirmative perspective (e.g. Kaminsky, 1999, 2003; Price, 2002). This volume by Mancilla, an openly HIV-positive psychotherapist, and Troshinsky, a writer and editor who has reported on HIV and LGBT issues, does an excellent job of complementing these existing volumes. Their contribution to this dialogue was to frame their entire gay affirmative discussion of love and gay men’s intimate relationship within the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic while simultaneously incorporating the variables of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status into this discussion. Mancilla and Troshinsky are to be commended for their courage in embarking upon such a venture. The basic assumption behind this gay affirmative work is the notion that gay men living with HIV can love, live vibrant lives, and thrive as sexual beings, which is a controversial notion to say the least. Similarly, everyone in the 21st century can learn a powerful lesson from these gay men since anyone who is dating or involved in an intimate relationship are experiencing love within the context of the HIV epidemic. Unfortunately, many experts fail to acknowledge this reality when focusing on love and sexuality within the context of close relationships. Mancilla and Troshinsky achieve their goal in educating their readers by holding a frank and honest discussion with them on how HIV impacts feeling of love, trust, attraction, and intimacy within the context of close relationships. They take the reader on a journey where there are no taboo topics that need to be swept under the rug. Instead, the reader is confronted repeatedly with the challenges associated with being authentic and being capable of coping with chronic and acute stressors. Moreover, the reader is confronted of instances when gay men living with HIV come to a fork in the road where they need to decide whether they choose to perceive themselves as being worthy of receiving love and support. This fork in the road is often a pivotal event within the process of moving away from internalized homophobia and towards a more healthy sense of self-esteem/self-concept and psychological well-being. This is a powerful message indeed. The volume is organized into seven chapters: Chapter 1 (when and how to reveal one’s HIV antibody status); Chapter 2 (how to integrate one’s HIV antibody status into all the facets of one’s life); Chapters 3–5 (how one’s serostatus can impact (both positively and negatively) one’s choice of sexual partners and life partners); Chapter 6 (physical/emotional health and HIV are addressed as well as how to recognize when intimate relationships are healthy or dysfunctional); Chapter 7 (how does one learn to cope with the losses associated with the deaths due to HIV of members of one’s social support network. Mancilla and Troshinsky utilized interviews of gay men as a means of personalizing for the reader these emotionally-laden topics. The interviewees were ethnically and culturally diverse gay men who lived primarily in urban metropolitan centers. These gay men were at varying points along the continuum with respect to their intimate relationship status as well as the length of time they were cognizant of their HIV antibody status. The affirmative C. W. Parks Jr. (&) Programs in School Psychology and Educational Psychology, Graduate School of Education at Alliant International University, 1000 S. Fremont Ave., Unit 5, Los Angeles, CA 91803, USA e-mail: cparks@alliant.edu