The question of calling is no stranger to me at this point. Having gone to a Jesuit school for five semesters the question of vocation knocks at my door with vigor at least a couple times a semester. Still, thinking about calling in the context of Angels in America is a new exercise altogether. Not simply because the characters are queer, but because the context wherein the characters are called is queer. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America seeks to take pieces of the world that people were living in the 1990s, the effects of Reagan politics, apathy, AIDS, and death, and challenge it— the themes and contexts of his work created a conversation about who and how one could be called into something bigger than them and how they might even say no.
Kushner’s ending of the play offers much in the calling department. His main character, Prior, says to us in an aside after successfully refusing to be a prophet that he gives us a blessing of, “More Life.” More Life. How is that not a call? In a context where queer men were especially dying gruesome and painful deaths by AIDS, how salient could a call to more life be? On top of that, if the message of more life is powerful to us almost three decades later, then imagine what it could have meant to people that were living in the moment. When the stigma and the deaths were higher. When there was nothing but confusion and powerlessness for many to experience.
Kushner’s ability to create characters that were as queer as his genre facilitated a creation of genuine humanity in all of them that you do not necessarily get in most literature. It was their queer manifestations that made them human in this case. My favorite character to examine through this lens is Belize. Throughout the entirety of the play he is teeter-tottering the line between his own convictions and beliefs and setting those aside to really be with others. Kushner could have very well made him a character that was only loyal to Prior, or only able to help people in meek ways, but he didn’t. Kushner wrote Belize as the character that carried truth and compassion, two things that did not necessarily go together and two things that Belize never seemed quite on the receiving side of as well. Belize’s character embodies notions of justice for me. If we take Prior’s blessing of, “More Life,” and apply it to the messy, complicated, but also loving aid that Belize provides to Roy throughout the play, you might be able to see how these two ideas converge.
Perhaps my favorite line from the whole play is when Belize says to Lou, “The white cracker that wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.” And what it seems like Belize does outside of this action is strive for freedom. Freedom to make his own choices and live his own life, even when there is conflict. Roy’s politics are the things that have landed Belize in the political-social situation that he hates the most in this world, and yet, he shows compassion and care to him. Belize’s actions don’t just show blank justice, but rather I believe that it embodies some sort of queered justice, a justice characterized by the pain and suffering that one goes through when they are saturated in precarity. When you have nothing else to give because it has already been taken, you can give more life and more love. How queer is that?
Three decades later and some things have changed. Queer is not this word that is outside of the culture. While still subversive and confrontational in many ways, it also is actively being interwoven into pop culture. Jason Chen from, the Cut, writes that, “the word nestle[s] itself in the vernacular, not just in headlines of The Advocate or Out but in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Huffington Post’s LGBTQ vertical Gay Voices is now Queer Voices. Condé Nast’s digital publication Them is dedicated to the best of what’s queer.” So, it’s clear that the context of queerness is different, but just because we have been able to center ourselves in pop culture does not mean that we do not have anything to worry about. Rights have gotten better for many of us, but with the new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the rights of queer folks in our country have a new layer of precarity set upon them. And yet, justice for queer folks in this country alone seems far from over. Just as much as the culture is growing to include queer voices, queer bodies are being beaten and legislated more and more, but that doesn’t mean that culture doesn’t propel change. Twenty years after Matthew Shepard’s death, he was killed by two men under the influence of hatred and homophobia, he is finally being put to rest at a Catholic Church that has been the final resting place of many American heroes. That shift, finding a home for his body to be laid is perhaps an example of Prior’s call to us. The prophetic nature of this play is that it calls us to live— not just live, but to live anyway, to really live life despite it all. What could be more queer than that?
Thank you for your post!
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