![]() ![]() Rather than go deeper, Downs’ work stays stubbornly on the surface of things, reducing interesting and complex ideas to so many slides in a PowerPoint presentation. But while Odets looks at a huge sampling over many years of practice to examine what those individual stories say about the shared experience of being gay, Downs uses what feels like a handful of composite stories to simply and blandly illustrate his talking points. ![]() ![]() Both men are clinical psychologists with private practices (Odets in San Francisco, Downs in New Mexico) both books examine the unique experience of being a gay male through the lens of their patients’ stories. Commonalities can be found in both the writers and their books. I eagerly tracked down Downs’ book, published in 2005, imagining he might be a kind of spiritual forebear to Odets. I first caught wind of Alan Downs’ The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World in writer Emily Nussbaum’s profile of television auteur Ryan Murphy in The New Yorker, when Nussbaum connected Murphy’s relentless work ethic with “the fury gay men feel in a straight world.” I’d recently become aware of this rage within myself, brought to the surface after reading Walt Odets’ stunning 2019 opus on authenticity, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives. ![]()
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