A crisis of meaning

by Steven Schwartzberg

For gay men, the demands of the AIDS epidemic are enormous and unrelenting. Regardless of HIV status, all are called on to maintain vigilant safety with sex, to face down a cultural stigma greater even than homophobia, and to somehow find a way to go forward in a world heavy with loss. At long last, current medical breakthroughs offer the hope of changing the face of the epidemic, but the psychological crisis continues. New infections are on the rise among young gay men. Exhaustion and grief threaten to overwhelm the activism and optimism of earlier years. In a world turned upside down, the challenge of finding meaning is more than an idle philosophical exercise. It is a matter of psychological and perhaps even physical survival. . Dr. Steven Schwartzberg grounds his insights in his own experiences as a gay man and as a practicing psychotherapist, and in in-depth interviews with nineteen men living with HIV. Ranging in age from twenty-seven to fifty, the men include a construction fore