RE: Kushner Part 1, More thoughts of part two upon completion
Joe the Mormon is as uncertain about his decision to move to Washington as he is about coming out of the closet. Perhaps these two things are linked, and if Joe to moves to Washington, leaving his wife in the process, it would mean coming out of the closet—the closet called marriage let’s say. He fears the label “Homosexual” and it is clear, from the beginning of part one to the end of part one, that he does not want to be branded. Drunk, He calls his mother and tells her, “I’m a homosexual”; disapprovingly, she does not respond to his confession, rather she scolds him about drinking alcohol—“Drinking is a sin!” His mother does not want to face the truth of having raised a gay son.
In these two excerpts from a tirade, Roy talks about labels: 1) “AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.” 2) “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.”
Roy acknowledges the insignificance of a homosexual faction. He identifies them as a minority and that political positions transcend sexual orientation. To Roy the egomaniac, Power makes the individual. He doesn’t identify himself as a homosexual, because, he claims, he is too powerful. Labels, therefore, are oppressive; Roy says, “Homosexuals are men who know who in fifteen years cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council.”
His agoraphobic wife, who fears knife-wielding men in the bedroom, hallucinates on account of her intake of Valium. She is frequently visited by Mr. Lies, who tells her, when she begins to imagine the infinite possibilities of her imagination, “Even Hallucinations have laws.” And it is true that human freedom is bound by laws of all sorts, flying in from all directions like a sudden rainfall of swan corpses.
