Gayness in public, Judaism as identity, and insanity in women
Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America is heavy on sexuality, disease, politics, professional discrimination, religion, race, and gender. The two themes that stick out most to me are sexuality and gender. The portrayal of the Jewish identity as ethnicity versus religion is very realistic for the modern day, and it is not a treatment I have often found in literature. Homosexuality is often related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the play, and Kushner parallels it to the plague of Prior’s priors. Prior and Louis are established and together and gay, but when Prior becomes more and more affected by AIDS, Louis decides he can’t handle it. So he goes off looking for company in the park, a place for public anonymity as gayness. However, his development of a relationship with Joe in the workplace is a way to discredit the practice of public anonymity. Louis can hardly believe that Joe is gay and a professional in the courts, because gayness for him is associated with the non-professional scene. Roy blows up the misconception of gayness as night-time park interaction by exposing his “non-homosexual” playboy activities with high-ranking businessmen and politicians. He rejects the notion of homosexuality because if he were to accept it, he himself would be rejected from the position of power he has so dishonestly earned.
Gay is written as powerless and diseased for a majority of the play, but Woman has an even more distinctly difficult role. Hystericization of women arrives at new heights in this play. Hannah is the martyr mother, while Harper is lost in her own madness, and used by Joe to fulfill his effort at the pretense of “normalcy.” Harper is a bad Mormon because her insanity allows her to perceive so clearly religious flaws that are usually achieved through philosophical atheism. Her relation with the Mormon Mother mannequin in Perestroika is a glaring display of her powerlessness and voicelessness in her family, society, and religion.
The Angel is always played by a female actor, and when Prior orgasms during his meeting with the Angel at the end of Millennium Approaches, he describes the incident as reverting to straightness. Generally, all the women in the play except Hannah appear to be written in this kind of stereotypical female voice with an unintentional androgyny. I would never expect this of a gay playwright, but despite the flourish in his stage directions and notes to the actors, he appears to have a very feeble understanding of femininity. Belize exudes sexuality as a former drag queen, but the women in this play are utterly and entirely sexless. The Angel being the exception seems to draw sexuality out of her anger and abandonment, as well as the fact that as a heavenly body, she consists largely of this love-ish sexual matter. This, as well as much of her dialogue, leads me to perceive her as a more viscerally androgynous character because Kushner is mostly successful in writing male sexuality, and since it is crucial for the Angel to be a sexualized character, her femininity is warped in favor of androgyny, jealousy for God’s love of humans, and servitude to the other angels. The description of the angelic sexual experience is generally asexual and multi-sexual at once.
Tags: HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, hysterization, identity, perversion, power, women
