Book Review: "Out of the Shadows" by Walt Odets

“True self-acceptance is readily recognizable: it is largely free of needless explanation, apology, and pandering, and free of reactive, unrealistic self-confidence and compensatory false pride. Self-acceptance allows realistic self-confidence, which is significantly unhinged in adulthood from the expectations and approval of others. In the end, authentic self-acceptance—or the lack of it—is almost the entirety of what defines a life. Without true self-acceptance, there is no true self-confidence or self-realization. Without self-realization, lives feel squeezed, purposeless, and truncated, cut short long before physical death finally ends them entirely.”

- Out of the Shadows by Walt Odets

This is not an easy or light read and possibly comes under one of the most intense books I have read for a long time. It covers some of the most harrowing details that encompass the AIDS crisis and the way in which the lives of homosexual men were (and in some cases sadly, still are) marginalised in comparison to their straight counterparts or even in comparison to their homosexual woman counterparts. Whilst the author begins by defining the terms 'homosexuality' and 'gay', he also begins by showing how they present different things about the homosexual man's experience.

He continues through this train of thought about defining the experience and life of the homosexual man as being infiltrated by society's inability to see anything past the straight experience. This has defined society's reaction to gay people so much that even the gay people themselves have internalised this hatred of themselves and thus, struggle in living authentic lives. Walt Odets' career of treating gay men with traumatic experiences holds weight upon this argument and shows the reader just how this plays out. Honestly, I cannot imagine how horrid this must make someone feel - to internalise hatred just because of a society's pervading beliefs. Society has basically told them to hate themselves and that's really upsetting to think about.

Odets litters the book with the experiences of some of his clients and people he has spoken to. These include men who have thought they were gay and then refused to act on it out of fear of being rejected by the man they found themselves in love with, these include men who have regreted an unrequited love and these also include men who have tried to push themselves away from gay relationships out of the fear of accepting that they are gay. The one that hit me the hardest is the man who didn't realise the man he was in love with was also gay until one day much later, he found out his friend had become romantically involved with a man. He decided not to act and became romantically involved with a different man himself. Only a year into his new found relationship did his partner succumb to illness and die. It was such a sad story to read.

Odets also argues that though there is a lot of support for people who are gay, there is still some sort of aversion to the expression of gay love in public. Usually defined as public displays of affection, there is still something disagreeable that even people who support the LGBTQ+ movement (and even some of the people themselves) find within what Odets calls the expression of the feminine internal self. I found this fascinating because of the fact that there is, today, a lot of support for gay rights and I do often wonder if these same people find nothing noticeable about the expression of gay love in comparison to the expression of heterosexual love.

Authentic lives are significantly nonreactive: they are primarily rooted in an internal center rather than in others’ norms and expectations.

- Out of the Shadows by Walt Odets

All in all, Odets teaches us about how a gay man may live as his authentic self, as his most free self regardless of how society has belittled and often killed gay men in terms of their social and psychological lives. Not just their ability to have romantic relationships freely, but also how society has made them practically hate themselves through internalisation. This book is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wishes to operate in society as a better human being. The wider and more liberated world calls to literature like this.