In 1998, while doing his PhD at UC Berkeley, Rofes wrote "Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures", in which he argued that the AIDS crisis had passed and gay men needed to free themselves from the sense of emergency and victimhood. A review in "The Nation" described "Dry Bones Breathe" as "perhaps the most important book about gay male culture and community of the past decade." However, the book has also been castigated for only limning the experiences of 'middle-class, urban, white, gay men' instead of being more societally inclusive.