Taking responsibility for your life is the first step in moving forward and changing the world inside and around you. Rob Eichberg's Coming Out: An Act of Love, written for both men and women, is a step-by-step guide to understanding and accepting your homosexuality and dealing with others' reaction to it. Using clear, empathetic, and direct language, Eichberg, a trained psychotherapist, explains in detail how coming out radically alters self-perception and your relationships with others. Using examples from his own practice and letters from gay people to their mothers, fathers, siblings, and friends, Eichberg puts a positive, forceful, but gentle face on the process of coming out and the complications that it sometimes raises.

Eichberg discusses coming out as a psychological and political process that affects not only individuals but their families as well. Because this book continually reaffirms gayness as a gift for everyone--straight and gay--it can be read by gay people coming to terms with their sexuality and by their parents, friends, and coworkers. There are also chapters on how AIDS has affected the coming out process and how to deal with AIDS-phobia on a personal and political level. Coming Out: An Act of Love centers on the individual, but understands that one person's actions of self-respect and love can begin to change the world.