Walt Whitman Odets was born in Los Angeles in 1947 to playwright Clifford Odets, the author of Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! His update on gay men’s psychology, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives (2019) was published a quarter of a century after his first book. Yet, Dr Odets alleged that despite all this evidence of progress, he hid not see any decrease in America’s profound homophobia. The shame suffered by many gay men, he wrote, remained an ever-present emotion and “still often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives.” “There’s sadness in Odets’ life story,” Benoit Denizet-Lewis wrote in a Times review of the book, “but there’s mostly resilience, tenderness and a willingness to fashion an unapologetic gay life, sometimes against all odds.”