"Visible Love" (Baltimore, MD: Publish America, 2002) is an irreverent satire of sex, marriage, and anxiety in the age of AIDS. In a set of intersecting stories, seven heterosexuals survive, without dignity, the end of the sexual revolution, when risk factors were publically exaggerated, safety trumped eroticism, and bathroom sex was the straight man's perfect secret.
In 1979 UCLA Hospital nurse Rebecca Turnan dreams of a romantic liaison to enliven her marriage with the affable but predictable Charles. When she begins an affair with a steely corporate lawyer, Charles takes on a lover of his own, Miyeki Fukumoto, a staff doctor. Friends and neighbors eagerly choose up sides. They split up, but as the safety of monogamy becomes strangely attractive, it even begins to look like rekindled love.
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 tries to 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 identify as gay or even bisexual; in fact, he is mildly homophobic and socially isolated. Through hand signals and glory holes, Josh never even sees the faces of his partners. Or wants to. His fantasy is that he is part of a vast, coursing network of shared DNA, connected biologically with hundreds of families across the city. But when AIDS threatens to "out" him as something he feels he's not, panic pushes him to attempt a surprising "cure."
Miyeki is so stressed by her incurable patients, paranoid conspiracy theories about the origin of AIDS and imaginary co-factors, she develops pseudo-symptoms mimicking AIDS and attempts suicide. Only by starting her own AIDS hospice is she able to see sex for what it is not and love for what it is not.
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