Doomsday

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America consists of two plays/parts—“The Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika.” This particular post is going to focus on the events of the first part rather than the second.
In the mid-1980’s, when Kushner wrote this series, with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) hardly a decade old, this virus and the debilitating disease it created was bound to be the new trigger of world destruction. Moreover, since gay men were one of the high-risk groups and gays were already seen as morally deficient by the Christian right, AIDS appeared to those who believed as the ultimate punishment from God.
In Angels in America, Kushner give Prior Walter the privilege of being a Prophet of sorts. It is interesting that the Man who is to spread God’s Word himself was killed by the “pestilence” that many in mainstream America have seen as a result of God’s wrath. Two of the Prior Walters before the Prior Walter we meet in the story come to him before his death and tell him that he is to be the Messenger, or the Prophet.
Moreover, Prior is called upon to spread the Message that God does not want humans to procreate anymore – a message that is fitting for a Gay Prophet. It also makes a lot of scene that, if God wanted humans to stop procreating that He would create a very deadly sexually transmitted disease (STD) that could kill many.
However, in “Perestroika,” he wrestles “the Angel” who brings the Prophecy to him. In doing so he, Prior, invokes the image that Joe tells his wife about the experience of his life being a struggle (presumably because he was a homosexual man living in a strict Mormon society): in an earlier scene Joe tells Harper that he keeps remembering a scene when the biblical figure Jacob is wrestling an angel from a book he had as a child.
Kushner’s Angels in America, at least for the first half, seems to be recounting the days that look like the Armageddon for the gay community.