Walt Odets > Quotes

“I sometimes find myself offering an obvious, often-ignored observation to men who are attempting to grieve disappointing lives: we can only start from where we are, never from where we wish we were.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

“We don’t change just because we understand something, we change when we put our understanding to use.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives

“Despite the illusion imparted by a diagnosis, people do not usually “have” an emotional issue in the sense of having a cold or a bacterial infection.8 Unlike medical diagnoses, few psychiatric diagnoses describe an underlying cause with a clearly useful course of treatment or a reliable prognosis. Depression, as one example, is not something people have, it is an experience, a way of experiencing oneself and the world. Some people characteristically—or in the shorter term, in an acute response to life events—have depressed feelings and sometimes live out the feelings in ways that are problematic and self-perpetuating.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

“People who are taught not to value themselves do not exercise self-care, and high-risk behavior is one way we play out the self-devaluation and shame that stigma creates.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

“If our characteristic selves are not changing in response to new experience, it is because we have stopped learning and growing. We have stopped living.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives

“Well, it’s important to me, so I wouldn’t generally call it an addiction. But it’s true—and this is where I think about the idea of addiction—I find it compelling. I sometimes crave it, and that sounds like addiction to me.” “Well, people quite naturally ‘crave’ sex—I think you’re describing the feeling of sexual desire, or being horny—and that in itself surely wouldn’t define addiction.” “It wouldn’t?” “Touching and being touched, doing intimate physical things with other people, having those kinds of connections to other people—these are all important, natural, and instinctual aspects of human life. Everyone needs that, whether they acknowledge it or not.” To my simple response, Peter suddenly teared up and was silent. After a few minutes, he continued, “I’ve never heard someone talk about sex that way. They talk about it as if we were out humping rocks, as if it meant nothing. The baths are the only place I feel like people think I have something to offer them. This is the only place I feel like a person. Just now, as I was thinking about what you said, I realized that I’m very lonely.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

“Shaming does not enhance self-care, it dispirits the effort, and it encourages the shaming of others, who are in turn dispirited. Shaming has no place in any kind of education, especially in education for gay men who have been raised in shame and long been shamed for the very sexual behavior that education most hopes to change.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

“All the diverse forms that true gay life has improvised constitute a special universe that should not be relinquished to meet the expectations of a pathological society.”
― Walt Odets

“We are never completely free of shame acquired in childhood, adolescence, and early adult life, and the mere assertion of “gay pride” does not undo it; it hides it.”
― Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives