Related topics: •  Book Review: The Adonis Complex •  Men's Health

Men Like Us: The GMHC Complete Guide to Gay Men's Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Well-Being
By Daniel Wolfe
Ballantine Books
656 pp $24.95

A reference book is never meant to be read cover-to-cover. Who could sit down and plow right through 600 pages about the myriad aspects of gay men's health as if it were Anna Karenina or The Perfect Storm? It would be like reading Webster's dictionary from A to Z. You'd find out lots of great information but your eyes would glaze over before you got to the letter C.

So I took a different approach to Daniel Wolfe's book, a sort of male version of the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves. I browsed through it over the course of several days, jumping around from chapter to chapter following my interests and whims.

At the outset, I had my reservations. I'm a gay man who grew up in New York and now lives in San Francisco, and I have remained healthy through it all. What could I possibly learn from Men Like Us that I didn't already know?

Lots of things, as it turned out. Because Men Like Us is a highly informative and wide-ranging almanac that not only addresses the expected topics -- AIDS care, exercise and diet, prostate cancer, finding a gay-friendly doctor, coping with depression -- but ventures further afield to explore questions of spirituality, the psychological aspects of getting older as a gay man, coping with aging parents, gay friendship networks, and more. And it treats all these issues from the perspective of health.

All right, I confess, I did turn first to the opening two chapters -- "The Anatomy of Pleasure" and "Sex Acts and Facts." It's no coincidence that Wolfe leads the book with those spicy topics. But after that I quickly jumped to Chapter 8, about the ways gay men react and change when they hit midlife (but midlife starts at 50, right?); Chapter 12, about how gay men create families out of their friends, lovers, and ex-lovers; and Chapter 13, about spiritual paths.

The book is surprisingly well-written -- engaging, entertaining, and witty without being overly cute. The prostate, we learn, is the "Energizer bunny of the body." And here's what the author says about aging: "None of us likes to be described by that most blistering of designations, an aging queen. But you are, Blanche." (If you have to ask what the heck that means, never mind -- you probably don't need this book.)

In a section on diet, the book includes close-ups of the eating habits of a few well-known gay men under the rubric "Out of the Closet and Into His Pantry." The playwright, screenwriter, and humorist Paul Rudnick offers his take on nutrition:

"Pringles are my idea of progress: a food that stacks. Other marks of quality include hot-pink marshmallows, breakfast cereals shaped like the animated characters from Anastasia, and anything in the form of a bunny. ... An ideal buffet should duplicate the contents of a display case at a movie theater."

Obviously, the book is not all laughs. It discusses issues surrounding AIDS and death with clarity and compassion. The information is thorough without being overwhelming, full of medical facts without being dense and incomprehensible. And it breaks up the copy with easy-to-digest checklists (how to tell if you're too obsessed with working out at the gym, danger signs for skin cancer) and charts (herbs for your medicine chest, the effects and potential dangers of various illegal drugs).

Much of what is presented, of course, can apply to all men, straight or gay. The book does include material that may turn off the average heterosexual male, but few are likely to purchase this book anyway. There is, for example, an extensive discussion of anal health, including diagrams showing how to perform Kegel exercises and insert the "female" condom. There's even a short section on gay men having sex with women (yes, it happens sometimes).

Anyway, here are a few of the things -- some useful, some just plain interesting -- that I learned:

•If you suffer a sunburn, you should drink orange juice and eat bananas to boost your potassium. Applying plain yogurt or apple cider vinegar to the burn may alleviate the discomfort.

•The word sphincter has the same root as the Sphinx, the mythological creature said to strangle all who could not solve its riddles.

•An estimated 1 million males -- half of them teen-agers* -- take steroids to pump up their bodies, fueling a thriving black market in these dangerous substances.

•To perform a proper testicular self-exam, check yourself after a bath or shower, weighing each testicle in your palm and rolling it softly between your fingers. Oh, and the left testicle hangs lower in 85 percent of men.

Obviously, not all of the tidbits gleaned from Men Like Us will be useful to me or to any particular reader. But when some ailment strikes -- and something inevitably will -- I'll feel better knowing that Men Like Us is sitting on my shelf.

-- David Tuller is a former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and health editor of Salon.com. He has written for The New York Times and the Washington Post and is the author of the book Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia (Faber &Faber, 1996).

*In 2005, there was a significant decrease in steroid use for 8^th, 10^th, and 12^th graders.

Last updated October 27, 2008
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive