Blog Post #3, by Aspen Sullivan

For my analysis of Angels in America the questions I want to answer are, “How does the play challenge its audiences (in the mid-1990s, or now) to think differently about HIV/AIDS, sexuality, religion, and/or politics?” and “How does the play represent the impact of AIDS on the characters, their relationships, and/or our country as a whole?”. For the first question I want to focus on the communities that the characters are involved in. I believe that Kushner is really trying to juxtapose themes and characters to represent society and America’s diversity as a whole. The character Roy, a lawyer who claims to be straight, ends up getting AIDS in the play. When told that he has AIDS, he gets very defensive saying to his doctor, “No Henry no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (Roy, Pt 1, Act 1, scene 9). To justipoze Roy, the character Prior Walter, a very flamboyant gay man, also gets AIDS. What Tony Klausner is saying about the AIDS epidemic is that it can happen to anyone by having two completely different men get AIDS in his play. This creates a community within the two, as much as they may not want to admit it, because they’re the only people who have AIDS and can understand each other. This can also be seen in other characters’ personalities, like Prior being very gay and flamboyant while Joe is also gay but he’s very closeted and reserved. Another two people who are more alike than they’d like to admit are Harper and Joe. Even though they’re different people they both have conflicts with their faith and religion. Harper is addicted to Valium and is mentally ill and Joe is a closeted gay man, which are things that they believe God doesn’t approve of. More on the religious side of the play, another controversy is the idea that just because you are religious doesn’t mean that you’re a good person. This can be seen with Harper telling Prior that her church doesn’t believe in his kind, meaning gay people, but Prior ends up being a supportive person in her life and a good influence. Two other people are Belize and Roy. Roy was very aggressive and mean to Belize because of his sexuality. In reality, Roy didn’t want to admit that he was bisexual, or even gay, so he took out the anger on Belize, who is very comfortable in his sexuality. Kushner is challenging his audience to think differently because he’s going against every stereotype in the book. Most of his characters has one quality about them that goes against every other thing about them, making the audience question the things they assume about people.

The other question I want to dive into more is “How does the play represent the impact of AIDS on the characters, their relationships, and/or our country as a whole?” This is related to the other question in the sense of it’s still looking at the audience and how do they see the impact of AIDS on these communities. With the process of AIDS and how it looks to the audience we look at Roy and Prior and see how the disease goes through each, previously healthy, man. We also get to see the disease through the lense of the loved ones. Louis realizes once Prior is diagnosed with AIDS that he’s going to eventually lose the man he loves. In this realization, Louis pushes away Prior before he dies so that Prior isn’t ripped away from him by the disease. Another character who is affected by their loved one being in the LGBTQIA+ community is Harper. While Joe is never diagnosed with AIDS, Harper can have the fear of contracting AIDS through her husband before he came out because it’s revealed that he did have sex with Roy, who is HIV positive. Kushner answers this question by showing the audience that AIDS does affect people, even if they aren’t diagnosed with it. It also proves once more, as said above, that anyone can get AIDS, even if they’re not gay or a junkie. Like we learned in the AIDS epidemic reading from before, AIDS affects everyone. People didn’t want to believe it until their loved ones were being diagnosed and then dying. In Angels in America, Louis was losing many people he loved in a short amount of time. The play was introduced by his grandmother’s funeral and then followed up by his boyfriend being diagnosed with a death sentence. In my opinion, Kushner really brought forth the indirect feelings about AIDS in this time period and how it affected the people living with it, and their loved ones. By doing this, he transcribed those feelings to the audience and gave them a taste of what it would be like to be in those shoes.