I recently purchased my third hard copy of "Love Undetectable", not for myself, but rather for an acquaintance of several months, who I had met at an online "hookup" site. It was my recollection of the incredible combination of logic, candor, and a quality I can only describe as a kind of philosophical grace that caused me to obtain a copy for someone who, by a recent confession, revealed that his affections for a straight and married man, twice stricken with cancer, had been unrequited. Worse, in his eyes, was the revelation that, after years of solicitous attention from my troubled friend, the object of his longstanding interest had, for the last year, been secretly conducting an affair (his first) with another man.For this reason, my new friend was in considerable distress. So much so that, in a rejection of all loving feelings, he had determined to discontinue the intimate habits which had brought us together in the first place. I thought such a stunning piece of transference and role reversal was worthy of Shakespear. To state the obvious, his objections to his friend's discovery of a compatible partner in what may be his last year showed how oblivious he was to the strained affections he himself had unwittingly placed upon me, his married friend's wife and children, and the lover in question.Had I been inclined to dole out brutal truth I might have pointed this out. Instead, I attempted to help him see that, if in fact this was a transcendent moment for his friend in discovering a new breadth in his capacity for love, that he should be happy for him and take pleasure in the fact that he had very likely helped him come to terms with a latent and unfulfilled condition of his own character. At that moment, this counsel represented considerable heavy lifting on my part. I knew that, if he was to take this to heart and examine these convoluted facts in a compassionate light, it would take just such considerable reinforcement, in the form of objective thought upon the standards and double standards which constitute the norm in our society. I could think of no single reading more capable of guiding this meditation than Andrew Sullivan's "Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival".It may be that modern philosophical reasoning is free of the constraint of being qualified through practical application. So much has been said about the uniqueness of each individual's perception, yet Sullivan's work represents a kind of archeological literary dig into the consensual reality of our civilization's treatment of socio-sexual response. It traces the evolution of moral values represented by same sex relationships right through to the chaos of the sexual revolution and on past the plague years of the AIDS virus. It is a kind of summation of a battle that has been fought and won. After so much misunderstanding and suffering, it stands as the terms of a peace treaty that everyone who still finds themselves in conflict should read.