Psychologist Walt Odets, Pioneer in Understanding Gay Male Trauma, Dies at 79

Walt Odets, a psychologist whose profound clinical work with gay men during the height of the AIDS crisis led to groundbreaking research on survivor’s guilt and depression, passed away at his home in Berkeley, California, on July 5. He was 79.

His companion, Armen Davoudian, stated that the cause of death was complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Odets’s seminal 1995 work, “In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being H.I.V.-Negative in the Age of AIDS,” was published a decade into the epidemic. It emerged at a time when effective medical treatments were not yet available and gay communities were grappling with widespread grief, fear, and anger as many men died in their prime.

Odets, who was gay himself, identified a parallel “psychological epidemic” among H.I.V.-negative men, describing them as being “anxious and lonely in their ‘wellness.'”

“For many,” he noted, “survival is so difficult they sometimes wish they had not survived and sometimes hope they will not.”

Addressing this demographic was a sensitive task. He observed that it often felt “selfish, inappropriate or simply ridiculous” for uninfected individuals to express deep psychological distress, as the right to have significant feelings seemed reserved for those who were ill or dying.

However, Odets argued that these feelings were vital, noting that a sense of fatalism among H.I.V.-negative men often contributed to unsafe sexual behaviors.

In a review for The New York Times Book Review, David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, compared Odets’s work to classic trauma studies, such as Robert Coles’s “Children of Crisis” and Robert Jay Lifton’s “Death in Life.”

Born on February 4, 1947, in Los Angeles, Odets was the son of playwright Clifford Odets and actress Bette Grayson. He grew up with his sister, Nora, who had a mental disability that their parents chose to manage within the family rather than through institutionalization.

Following the death of both parents by the time he was 16, Odets spent part of his adolescence in New York under the guardianship of Method acting pioneer Lee Strasberg and his wife, Paula.

Odets earned a B.A. in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1969. He was married to Bay Area journalist Paula Harrington from 1983 to 1986. His only immediate survivor is his companion, Mr. Davoudian.

Before becoming a psychologist, Odets was a photographer; his work is held in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

After training in clinical psychology at the California Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco, he earned his Ph.D. in 1989 and began practicing in Berkeley, providing therapy to gay men and couples. Prior to his first book, he was well-known in the Bay Area for his critiques of AIDS prevention efforts that failed to protect younger men.

In the late 1990s, he balanced his clinical practice with writing influential horology reviews for the website TimeZone, where he examined timepieces with scientific precision.

Twenty-five years after his first major book, he released “Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives” (2019), an update on the psychology of gay men.

Despite significant social and medical progress—including the advent of highly effective HIV treatments in 1996 and the legalization of same-sex marriage—Odets remained skeptical that America had moved past deep-seated homophobia. He argued that shame remains a pervasive emotion that “often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives.”

For Odets, gay identity was far more complex than simple physical attraction. He believed that being gay involved a rich internal life and sensibility that went far beyond conventional male identities.

His final book concludes with a moving reflection on the lifelong connections he maintained with a college classmate and his partner, Robb Caramico, who died of AIDS in 1992.

As Benoit Denizet-Lewis noted in a review of his work, while Odets’s life story contained sadness, it was defined primarily by “resilience, tenderness and a willingness to fashion an unapologetic gay life, sometimes against all odds.”

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