Joe, chosen families, and incest
It’s a funny coincidence that this week’s readings feature Joe, a gay Mormon, and outsports.com just posted an essay by a gay ex-Mormon volleyball coach. Like Joe, she thought getting married would fix her homosexuality. Also like Joe, she tried to escape the “Mormon bubble,” by going to college at UCLA. Although she moved back to Utah to try to live in the closet, she ultimately fell in love with a woman, left her husband, and moved to California start a new life with her girlfriend.
Joe’s lack of a similar happy ending is all the more striking when compared to the other characters in Angels in America. Harper gets to escape, “go exploring” (Perestroika, Act 5, Scene 9), Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah get the “more life” blessing of the epilogue, and even Roy gets to carry on in all his corrupt glory representing the “King of the Universe” (Act 5, Scene 7) in his abandonment lawsuit. Joe certainly isn’t as nasty a character as Roy, and I don’t even think what he did to Harper is much worse than what Louis did to Prior. So why does he get the short end of the stick?
The last time we see Joe, Harper slaps him and asks him for his credit card. He pathetically begs her to call, even after using his marriage to her to live a lie and then deserting her to spend a month in bed with Louis. Joe, with one foot in the gay community (“Louis…I am in love with you” – Act 3, Scene 3) but unwilling or unable to give up his fantasy of having a “normal,” straight family with Harper (“I don’t know what will happen to me without you…I have done things, I’m ashamed. But I have changed. I don’t know how yet, but…Please, please don’t leave me now” – Act 5, Scene 9), ultimately can have neither.
What’s even more interesting to me, however, in light of Kath Weston’s essay, “Gay Families as ‘The Families We Choose'” is the relationship between Joe and Roy. For the majority of the two plays, the relationship has a nonerotic, father-son dynamic. But, in an example of what Weston describes a “family-centered discourse that bridged the erotic and the nonerotic” in Act 5, Scene 4, Roy’s ghost kisses Joe. This puts their relationship right in the center of Foucault’s discussion of incest in the deployments of alliance and sexuality.
According to Foucault, “The family, in its contemporary form…ensures the production of a sexuality that is not homogenous with the privileges of alliance;” additionally, “its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with permanent support” (108). This is apparent in the “chosen families” Weston discusses in general, and in Roy and Joe’s relationship, in particular. Their kiss, incestuous as it is within a father-son relationship, breaks the rules of the traditional system of alliance. Incest “is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden in the family insofar as the latter functions as a deployment of alliance; but it is also a thing that is continuously demanded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant sexual incitement” (Foucault 109).
If gay relationships within the community function as kinship networks (as Weston argues), but without the prohibition against incest, they are doing so outside of the deployment of alliance. Could this be one of the reasons the gay community earned a reputation for being immoral and promiscuous, especially when compared to heterosexual society, which is still constrained within the rules of alliance?
