Visible Love
by T. C. Caramagno | History | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 1592861709 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 1592861709 Global Overview for this book
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"Visible Love" is an irreverent, dramedy of love, sex and anxiety in the age of AIDS. In a set of intersecting stories, seven friends survive, without dignity, the end of the sexual revolution, when risk factors were unknown or inflated by a Reagan-era NeoPuritanism. What we could imagine about sex became our reality, but our imaginations were already infected.
The story begins in 1979, in the condo jungles of west Los Angeles, as Rebecca Turnan dreams of a romantic liaison to enliven her marriage with the affable but predictable Charles. When she begins an affair with Sean Norton, a steely corporate lawyer, Charles rebels by taking on a lover of his own. But as sex becomes more dangerous, the safety of monogamy becomes compellingly attractive; it even begins to look like "rekindled love." Their neighbors, the ultra-svelte Ginger and Troy Zoe, are weekend swingers whose Palm Springs sex club must choose between fear and boredom; what was once the sport of suburban kings with matching RVs and gold chains must change with the times, but can "radical sex" also be "safe sex"? In mall restrooms, husband Josh Webb secretly has sex with other men whose wives are happily shopping at J.C. Penney's for new jeans for the kids. Josh doesn't self-identify as gay or even bisexual; in fact, he is totally unprepared for his sudden joy connecting hiumself biologically hundreds of anonymous families across Los Angeles. But when just the possibility of AIDS threatens to out him in a rigid sexual category, he panics and attempts a surprising "cure." Finally, Miyeki Fukumoto, a staff doctor at UCLA where the first AIDS cases appear, is so stressed by whispered conspiracy theories about the origin of AIDS, imaginary co-factors, and by her own risk factors as a woman that she develops pseudo-symptoms and becomes her own worst patient. She founds an AIDS hospice, cares for a former lover who dies, and searches for an answer to why she must suffer the indignity of hypochondria when others are dying of the real thing.
Will casual sex ever be fun again? Will we even be told when it does? Or has anxiety become erotic?
The first chapter is available for free reading at http://www.caramagnobooks.com/77704.html.
Thomas C. Caramagno
The story begins in 1979, in the condo jungles of west Los Angeles, as Rebecca Turnan dreams of a romantic liaison to enliven her marriage with the affable but predictable Charles. When she begins an affair with Sean Norton, a steely corporate lawyer, Charles rebels by taking on a lover of his own. But as sex becomes more dangerous, the safety of monogamy becomes compellingly attractive; it even begins to look like "rekindled love." Their neighbors, the ultra-svelte Ginger and Troy Zoe, are weekend swingers whose Palm Springs sex club must choose between fear and boredom; what was once the sport of suburban kings with matching RVs and gold chains must change with the times, but can "radical sex" also be "safe sex"? In mall restrooms, husband Josh Webb secretly has sex with other men whose wives are happily shopping at J.C. Penney's for new jeans for the kids. Josh doesn't self-identify as gay or even bisexual; in fact, he is totally unprepared for his sudden joy connecting hiumself biologically hundreds of anonymous families across Los Angeles. But when just the possibility of AIDS threatens to out him in a rigid sexual category, he panics and attempts a surprising "cure." Finally, Miyeki Fukumoto, a staff doctor at UCLA where the first AIDS cases appear, is so stressed by whispered conspiracy theories about the origin of AIDS, imaginary co-factors, and by her own risk factors as a woman that she develops pseudo-symptoms and becomes her own worst patient. She founds an AIDS hospice, cares for a former lover who dies, and searches for an answer to why she must suffer the indignity of hypochondria when others are dying of the real thing.
Will casual sex ever be fun again? Will we even be told when it does? Or has anxiety become erotic?
The first chapter is available for free reading at http://www.caramagnobooks.com/77704.html.
Thomas C. Caramagno
