Paws and Reflect: Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs

By Bryan Ochalla

I’m a bit hesitant to admit this, but this past weekend I not only read a book with the unusual title of Paws and Reflect: Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs, but when I turned the final page my eyes were full of tears (a state in which I found myself at many points along the way, I should add). They weren’t tears of sadness—at least not entirely. Sure, some of the stories shared in Paws and Reflect, wonderfully written and compiled by Neil Plakcy and Sharon Sakson, are heart-wrenching, but just as many are powerful, inspiring and heart-warming. Take Kevin Anderson’s entry, “The Dog Who Outed Me.” The ages-old saying may be that dogs are man’s best friend, but that couldn’t have been farther from the truth for Anderson, a self-described pooch hater. “I hated all the dogs I had ever come across,” he shares. “As far as I could tell, they were whiney, needy, clingy, sad creatures whose favorite things to do were mount your leg, stick their nose in your genitals, pee on your furniture, demand to be taken out even in cold weather, and generally make life awful.”

Anderson’s brother didn’t know that little factoid about his big bro, nor did he know another important piece of information about him: he’s gay.

Anderson is forced to come clean about both secrets during a Christmas Eve mountain climbing (and bonding) excursion with his estranged sibling. Jimmy’s heretofore dreadful beast of a dog, Sasha, not only saves Anderson from plummeting off a cliff, but has a hand (or should that be paw?) in coercing him to come out to his little brother as well.

The story ends, of course, with Anderson not only eschewing his hatred of man’s best friend, but adopting and befriending one of his very own.

Authors Plakcy and Sakson have heard that story before—many times over, in fact. The pair sifted through thousands of stories about the coupling of man and canine to find the 25 shared within Paws and Reflect. Along with Anderson’s touching turnaround tale are stories from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, actor-playwright Charles Busch (who reveals how a guardian shepherd saw him through the bleak aftermath of his mother’s death) and several men with AIDS who write with admiration about the dogs who have acted as therapeutic companions, friends and family members.

It doesn’t take going through a life-threatening or life-altering experience to appreciate the companionship of our furry, four-legged friends. In fact, reading just a few of the stories included in Paws and Reflect produces nearly the same affect—and doesn’t leave your shoes covered in dog slobber or couch coated in errant dog hair.

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