Few works in the American Dramatic literature can hold the title of Queer. It is also true that so few works of Queer Dramatic Literature can earn the performative title of American. It seems then, that first, Queer issues are held as strikingly Un-American. Indeed, the far reality of normatively identified queer authors highlights the displacement distance to the synonymous status of Queerness and Americanness. Similarly, though of a different point, even those artists and authors whose work is decidedly Queer—and whose identities and expressions, themselves, are aptly called Queer—become inculcated to us as simply: mystical or quirky. The works of Whitman and Baldwin are presented to us as transcendental and souled, respectively. The euphemistic language effectively escapes accurate assignments of Queer. The American, it seems, is not Queer, could not imagine itself as Queer, and resists applications and additive extrapolations of Queerness. Jared Kushner’s Angels in America: A Queer Fantasia on National Themes (now referred to as Angels) works—on the American Theatre—to Queer modern conceptualizations about the National—the Nation: The United States of America.
I see this effect of American purification of queer authors—that desire, as if an existential one, in which we wish to hold Thoreau among the halls of the American Canon—emblematic of the ideology itself, of the true struggle itself. The desire is so strong that it goes to extinctive lengths, purging the canon of queer semblances. Queer, itself, as ideology becomes its own Sexual Disease Epidemic. The struggle of ideology articulates, well, how the battle is not one to Queer America but rather one to show how America has always been Queer.
This is all to say that no additive work is done. One is tempted to think that the queering process works through additive sabotage, as though someone is tampering with a well-protected family recipe by adding a long-despised array of mushrooms to the soup pot. The work, here rather, is one of revelation; that is, the true comparative is one in which it is being explained to children—who profess that they disdain mushrooms—that mushrooms have been in the soup all along. Kushner makes no attempt to add queer motifs to the American Narrative, nor can he! This reality of limitations is decidedly one in which the restrictive element occurs because the motifs of Queerness are already present. A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is not a Gay-ing (where the process rests on the gerund) Fantasia on National Themes. There are no normative portrayals (a scene of how it should look) only descriptive ones.
In regards to New York City (the play’s location); New York is significant as playing a role in the symbol of American enterprise and commerce consummated with entrepreneurs and consumers. New York is Capitalism and Consumerism, New York is American. The setting is not lost on the effects of the drama and the revelation. Indeed, Cohn could not exist—not in the same necessary way—without the placement of New York and all its accompanied motifs. Cohn, as the American Lawyer, the American Capitalist, signifies the resistant and radically conservative America. His death represents the same, with mortality: American Capitalism, or parts of it, die in the face of Queerness as if antithetical. This time, it is Queerness purifying this part of Americanness.
More than just New York speaks to the proximity of Queerness and Americanness. The implications of Mormonism’s repeating and ubiquitous presence in the drama hint at a radical proximity between Queerness and Americanness. The proximity is made radical precisely by the brand of Americanness associated with Mormonism. The ideology here is one of conservative, religiously rooted, American protectionism, in which constituents of the ideology work to protect the virtue of symbol by arrogance if necessary. The proximity between Americanness & Mormonism combines to give a product of Mormon-American: of Radical American Tradition. For Mormonism to be the vehicle through which salvation is delivered, Mormonism becomes inexplicably linked to Queerness. The convergence is radical and violent. It forces one to tarry with the mere sexual promiscuity and supposed ‘perversion’ of the relation. Mormonism’s consummation with Queerness—one that arises in a way equitable to the sexual encounter between the Angel and Prior (characterized by a condoned air of pressure)—creates a proximity of residue: something is left behind, beautifully stained on Mormonism and its brand of Americanness forever.
The queer testicular fortitude required to take on the ideological struggle between proximity of Queerness and Americanness is one tied to performance; Kushner’s craft is theatre. It seems, arguably, that such a revealed proximity is one that could have only emerged from a theatric performance, a queer practice.
*Lost my text before the assignment, I am sorry for the lack of quotes.
Thank you for your post!
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