Queer Community Calling, by Andrea Trevino

Kushner’s Angels in America not only functions as a piece of literature in form for a play which, in the end, will serve as an entertainment piece but more importantly, a breakthrough to social and queer calling of the community during the time of the AIDS epidemic. The play represents the impact of AIDS on the characters, their relationships with one another along with the community and country as a whole. Kushner takes us on a journey in which we witness two kinds of communities being destroyed and then recreated again. In the first part of Millennium, Roy’s character falls into loneliness as he distorts the law. This section is one which also shows the physical destruction of the Angel’s appearance at the end of Part One. Perestroika shows the repairmen of the crumbled bonds within the community in unconventional ways seen through Hanna and Prior’s and Prior and Harper’s relationships. The play’s most difficult character even in the end comes full circle in not being abandoned to the wilds of his isolation. His death links him to the communities which he abandoned; those who suffered from AIDS and even his Jewish roots.

All of these characters came to experience what it was like for the queer community to be seen as the sickness. The AIDs epidemic became surrounded by toxic rhetoric and pathology which saw it as a criminal disease which only added more fire to how homosexuality in the mid 1990’s was seen as a type of pedophilia—a threat to minor and children in the community. In Feinberg’s work, We Are All Works in Progress, sie alludes to the injustices the LGBTQ community faces in our health care system. On page 194, hir tells the story of hir encounter with a health care professional to diagnose his terribly sick symptoms. He said “you have a fever because you are a very troubled person.” Feinberg explains how the doctor’s prejudices, directed at sie during a moment of catastrophic illness, could have killed sie. Bigotry exacts its toll in flesh and blood which is why the play importantly challenges its audiences both in the mid 1990’s and now to think differently about HIV/AIDS. A scene in the play which reminded me of Feinberg’s encounter with the health professional is the interaction between Roy Conn and his doctor Henry in Act One, Scene Nine. Ironically it seems like the tables have turned in responses to symptoms of each individual because Roy’s deluded world does not consist of values such as love or trust but instead all human relationships can be strengthened and have the base of owing and doing favors or seconds needed in returning a phone call. Roy rambles on in trying to process his diagnosis, “Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean… Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout.” (Kindle Locations 964-966). I see Roy’s interaction with Henry as not only a denial of his diagnosis of HIV, but a processing of what his life will now be like because of how apart from the fatality of this disease but how he will be seen by society.

In a Seattle Times article titled “A Q&A with Tony Kushner on his ‘Angels in America’ revisiting the Intiman Theater” Kushner explains major themes such as the impact of AIDS on not only the characters but country as a whole. He also touches on another main theme that shapes the characters desires and identities; the theme of religion. When Kushner encounters the question of why he decided to write about the theme of AIDS, he responded with “I set out to write about what it was like to be me, a gay man in New York, in the mid 1980s, and it was not possible to do that without placing it in the middle of the epidemic. The world I was born into was receding and something new and rather terrifying was taking its place” (Berson, 2014). Two religions which are irreconcilably different—Jews and Mormons, are rarely linked in the popular imagination or indeed in real life. Mormons and Jews living alongside one another and with America itself. Both religions are separated from the wider society by their own focus as well as by prejudice and lack of understanding. Religious commandment to loyalty overshadows both Louis and Joe after they leave their partners, also adding to their feelings of guilt. The main theme I was intrigued by the heavy presence of religion was how both of them traditionally do not support homosexuality. As Kushner stated in the interview, “behind that breathtaking speed (of progress in the last decades) was because of incredibly dedicated work by many, many people who helped prepare the way.” That is what we should remember after this play