The Reagan administration's delayed action to fight AIDS resulted in thousands of deaths, especially among young gay men.

Imagery like "perfect stasis" and "body's paradise" is used by Doty to paint a future beyond brutality and discrimination for AIDS sufferers.

According to Landau, Doty's poems were "humane and comforting narratives" that offered hope to people living with HIV and stood in contrast to the hostile climate of the United States.

[6] His third book of poetry, My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press, 1993), reflects the grief, perceptions and new awareness gained in the face of great and painful loss.

When the book was published in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape, Doty became the first American poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize, Britain's most significant annual award for poetry.

[11] Doty's three memoirs include Heaven's Coast, described as "searing" by The New York Times, is the excruciating journaling of his thoughts subsequent to hearing his lover's diagnosis with AIDS, a work "layered" with awarenesses like Dante's trip through hell[12] (HarperCollins, 1996), and Firebird: A Memoir, an autobiography from six to sixteen, which tells the story of his childhood in the American South and in Arizona (HarperCollins, 1999).

His most recent memoir, Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2005), was a New York Times Bestseller and received the Barbara Gittings Literature Award from the American Library Association in 2008.

He was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at The University of Houston Creative Writing Program for ten years, and is currently[update] Distinguished Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he directs Writers House.