Neither a cautionary tale nor a polemic, Men as Friends is about a variety of male friendships and a variety of men. A “coming-of-old-age story,” it speaks to an audience of men who love or have loved other men but are too embarrassed to say so, opening the reader to the deep sadness of loss as well as the joy of its acknowledgment.
Irwin Epstein, PhD, is a professor emeritus of the City University of New York and has enjoyed an award-winning international career as a health and mental health educator and researcher on topics ranging from neonatal abnormality in the UK to "good death" in Hong Kong. Irwin became a Fulbright senior scholar at the University of Wales (Cardiff) at thirty and has authored several research texts and innumerable journal articles too boring to describe. A onetime single father who raised two writers, he has been married to a courageous cancer-battler for thirty years.