Irreconcilable Differences?  Intellectual Stalemate in the Gay Rights Debate

Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002

What happened to the "debate" in the gay rights debate? Warfare has replaced dialogue. Anti-gay groups condemn GLBTs as deviates threatening the nation's moral fiber; pro-gay groups condemn the Christian Right as bigots threatening civil freedoms. It's more than just about sex.  At issue are the tensions between religious dogma and secular pluralism, the rival authorities of science and religion, the rights of minorities versus majorities in a democracy, and the diverse meanings and practices of desire.

Irreconcilable Differences is a non-partisan textbook designed to provide students with a fair and accurate introduction to the core, unresolved issues in the gay rights debate.  While both sides bring something valuable to the discussion, progress is handicapped by the different ways opponents understand the world and interpret evidence.  This book examines in detail the scientific research(biology, psychology, sociology,anthropology), theological origins (Christian and non-Christian, orthodox and liberal biblical scholarship), and the political, legal and social implications (constitutional law, hate crime legislation, secular pluralism and the public good) of how Americans think about sexual diversity. It considers how past translators edited ambiguous passages in the Bible, and how theological disagreements over interpretation need not be demonic nor bigoted, but enriching. Science offers evidence that sexual diversity is worldwide, non-pathological, and may even have a biological basis, but how do we translate scientific values into religious, political, and personal values? Can "natural law" keep up with the natural sciences? Is a "gay gene" necessary or even helpful for determining constitutional protections? And how can biological models explain fluid bisexual identities, the emerging sexualities that defy gay/straight categories? Politically, can government legislate moral and social values (either liberal or conservative)without discriminating against those who do not accept them? What kind of government intervention would best serve both religious freedom and personal freedom?

This is a book both sides should read, especially those who feel unrepresented by the armed camps of the Left and the Right. Can we begin thinking about this debate outside party lines?  For a more detailed, chapter-by-chapter description, and a free reading of the book's Preface and First Chapter, click here:  PREFACE & CHAPTER ONE  

ISBN: 0-275-97721-8.  This book is for sale in paperback (less than $25) and hardback at   AMAZON.COM and BARNES & NOBLE

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A BOOK ON BIPOLAR DISORDER

THE FLIGHT OF THE MIND:
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ART AND MANIC-DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992

      This book examines Virginia Woolf's bipolar disorder (mood swings) and her fiction in light of research about the genetic and biological nature of bipolar disorder--findings allied with drug therapies that today help nearly one million American manic-depressives and five million depressives live happier, more productive lives.  In the real world of the clinic, treatments using lithium, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics have revolutionized psychiatric care for mood disorders and produced miracle remissions for cases that thirty years ago would have been considered hopeless. But in the rarefied atmosphere of literary academia, many critics still cling to the outmoded and simplistic Freudian model of this disorder as a neurotic conflict that the patient is unwilling (either consciously or unconsciously) to resolve. 

     I argue that a responsive and insightful Woolf wrote her novels--hardly a surprise since most people suffering from bipolar disorder are thoughtful and perceptive when they are not ill, just like "normal" individuals.  Bipolar disorder is periodic; it comes and goes, and when it is gone, individuals are not sick or insane (unlike neurotics, whose unconscious conflicts seep into and determine even "normal" behavior). By remembering this, we can hear what Woolf wants to say without thinking it must somehow be implicated in a twisted desire to remain ill. 
For a more detailed Synopsis and a free reading of Chapter One, click here.

Copyright 1992  ISBN: 0-520-20504-9

To order this book in paperback (cheap) or hardback (expensive), click here:  Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's Books

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IT ISN'T JUST ME, IS IT? The Racing Thoughts of a Suburban Anarchist

Baltimore, MD: Publish America, Winter 2004

A Humor Book

     FROM THE BOOK COVER: What if Monty Python recruited Noam Chomsky to write for Eddie Izzard? The result might be this collection of humorous essays that subvert enshrined certainties with inspired lunacy and a postmodern twist. Irreverent & heretical, stately & plump, Caramagno skewers American icons, political pundits, and western philosophy alike with a combination punch of silliness and cultural criticism. What began as anecdotes for his lectures on postmodernism has become both intellectually challenging, absurdly stupid, and devastatingly funny–no, that’s three things. Sorry. I’ll begin again. Among his weaponry are such diverse elements as a keen though disturbed mind, a freewheeling cynicism that makes Nietzsche look like a true believer, a love of life, and a deeply held commitment to fucking it up for the rest of us.

 Topics include: growing up Catholic in suburban Los Angeles; the real story of Genesis; the panopticon of police surveillance; how FATED COINCIDENCES rule our lives; a history of cussing; a public appeal for sympathy for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, & Michael Savage--victims of brutal liberals; Sexuality and its Discontents; couplehood be damned; love's cliches; the strange state of Nebraska; the secret lives of inanimate objects; road rage and why we love it; a conspiracy theory about the sequencing of city traffic lights; sports pages with photos of manly men tacked up over restaurant urinals; food (and the terrible thing our bodies do to it); deconstruction (and the terrible thing our minds do to themselves); the commonplace terrorists--airplane passengers who cough; the evolutionary advantage of nose hair; guilt in public places; Hoserball--the University of Hawaii's standard for excellence; the new hero worship after Ronald Reagan; Best Buy Service Contracts and the inescapable clause; psychic John Edward and tidiness of the afterlife; and the tyranny of language.  

Copyright 2004.  ISBN: 1-4137-0946-X

This book is now available for $13.95.  To order by phone from Publish America, call (301) 695-1707, or you can order it from Amazon.com by clicking here.   You can read four chapters here for free and think about it.  Just click here for free chapters.

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Visible Love

A Novel

(Baltimore, MD: PublishAmerica, 2002)

     Four 30-ish couples cope with love, fidelity, swing clubs, and Reaganomics in the 1980s.  Can sex be more neurotic?

 Visible Love 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.

     Read Chapter One of Visible Love, free of charge, by clicking here.  Chapter One

     ISBN: 1-59286-170-9.  This novel is available in paperback at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Publish America.  To order from Publish America, call (301) 695-1707, or access their website (www.publishamerica.com), click on the "online bookstore" tab, and enter the words "Visible Love" into the search window.

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"DENIAL" 

A Twice-Told Tale of Long Lost Love

      This is a love story about a happily married woman who returns to Nebraska to bury her grandmother, only to find that long lost loves can never be buried. What begins as a nostalgic visit to scenes of childhood memories soon challenges Julia Stephen’s own sense of identity, and her memory of the past. For, shortly before her death, her grandmother arranged to be buried, not with Grandpa Joe, the revered patriarch of the family, but next to a stranger, a WWI veteran who had lived for many years in a bare, Victorian house just two blocks away, unacknowledged and invisible. Julia's past, which she remembered as idyllic and normal, is revealed as full of conflicts and self-betrayal. Paralleling her detective work, Julia discovers her own long denied yearnings, which threaten to destroy her marriage. Realizing that denial can be passed on from generation to generation, she asks, “Is it enough to just think you’re happy, and not really be happy?”

  This novel is finished but not yet published.  You can read the first chapter at no charge.  
Just click here.

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"One Sin, I Know"

A Victorian Murder Mystery

      A jaded actor turns detective when bodies appear in London's West End theater district in the early 1880s.  Sydney Saxon-Turner, veteran of vapid melodramas and bowdlerized Shakespeare, sleeps too late, smokes too much, and drinks brandy at most unsuitable hours of the day.  But, from his third floor digs at the Russell Square Hotel, he looks out upon London as if from a high tower in his mind, watching, fascinated, human nature caught in the act of murder. Using his talent for building a character out of the scraps and orts of imagination, he pursues his prey, a walking shadow who knows, only too well, his sins. 

     This is a novel in progress.  But you can read part of the first chapter here at no charge.  Just click here.

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