As the first African country to record a prodigious drop in national HIV-prevalence rates by the late 1990s, Uganda holds a mythical status of sorts within broader narratives about HIV and AIDS in Africa. Today, Uganda is widely hailed as a model for how to correctly approach enormous rates of infection among populations. The drop in HIV-prevalence is largely credited to the Ugandan government's advocacy for international HIV-related aid and national community-based AIDS policies, which are believed to have drastically altered sexuality and gender relations.

AIDS and Masculinity in the African City by Robert Wyrod critically queries this assumption and offers a much overdue exploration of how over three decades of HIV in Uganda has influenced gender relations and normative discourses of masculinity with attention paid to male sexuality in Bwaise, a poor neighbourhood in Uganda's capital of Kampala. Today, well into its fourth decade, the epidemic's prevalence rates are again increasing and while conventional approaches to HIV prevention in Uganda focus on reducing the number of sexual partners through moralising campaigns promoting ‘being faithful’ or abstinence, the book demonstrates that one's number of sexual partners is not the issue. Rather, ‘the persistence of men's privileges to dictate the terms of sex and the freedom to choose … multiple sexual partnerships whether these partners are wives, girlfriends, or short-term sexual relations’ (p. 10), a phenomenon Wyrod terms ‘masculine sexual privilege’, are crucial to efforts to address Uganda's AIDS epidemic.

While much research has shown how normative ideals of masculinity has shaped the AIDS epidemic across Africa and contributed to its spread, AIDS and Masculinity in the African City seeks to demonstrate the inverse relationship between masculinity and HIV and AIDS. Methodologically, concerns and impacts of global health programs and the history of Uganda's ever-changing AIDS policies remain in the background as Wyrod chooses to keep his interrogation of masculinity close to his informants’ everyday experiences living and working in Bwaise. The book follows a decade's worth of residents’ intimate anxieties about HIV and AIDS, sexual relationships, human rights and precarious employment.

Drawing on masculinity theory, Chapter 1 charts the main themes and avenues through which masculinity is practised in Bwaise. Wyrod identifies three intertwining aspects of masculinity important in Bwaise: masculinity and work, masculinity and men's authority over women, and masculinity and sexuality. The book analyses how these three domains of sexuality and gender relations – work, authority and sexuality – are influenced and mediated by masculinity and HIV and AIDS. Chapter 2 traces how these masculine ideals came to be central to life in Bwaise, giving examples of how conceptions of masculinity and femininity have continually been remade over the past century. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 examine masculine sexual privilege and how it is lived out in Bwaise today, revealing its salience despite precarious employment, men's inability to live up to the ‘family provider’ ideal, the promotion of women's rights, and the persistent threat of HIV.

Lucidly written, AIDS and Masculinity in the African City is accessible to a wide audience, but it would especially interest readers seeking to understand how HIV and AIDS have impacted gender relations in urban Sub-Saharan Africa. While much of the analysis in the book is insightful, the book fails to provide a thorough description of the social history of HIV and AIDS in Uganda. It makes no mention of how life-saving antiretroviral medication, becoming widely available over the decade in which this research was carried out, influenced peoples’ perceptions of HIV as a newly chronic illness. Nevertheless, the book provides policymakers, health care workers, donor agencies, and social scientists with an important alternate narrative about HIV and AIDS in Uganda and by extension, in Africa as a whole. With an insightful account of intimate urban life, AIDS and Masculinity in the African City gives readers a unique approach to studying the relationship between masculinity and persistent HIV-prevalence rates.