The presence of camp culture in Angels in America is found within the play’s comedic structure while holding a theme of the AIDs epidemic. In Susan Sontag’s “Notes On “Camp”, she says, “The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious”, giving the thought that it is easier to joke about the serious than it is to look it in the eyes and deal with it. With AIDs being a very serious tragedy in our country’s history, Angels in America brings a sort of lightheartedness to the subject, this balance of drama and comedy makes the play campy.
The play shows several examples of camp, one including the funeral of a major drag queen in New York City. Rather than a funeral, it was a celebration. HBO’s production of the play showed fellow people of the LGBTQ community, not mourning death, but singing along with the church choir to celebrate life. Belize also says, “He couldn’t be buried like a civilian. Trailing sequins and incense he came into the world, trailing sequins and incense he departed it. And good for him!” Taking death, a typically morbid topic and adding the joyful singing and sequins is camp because it makes a heartbreaking situation a little bit easier to swallow.
On the contrary, Prior resists camp in this specific scene. While exiting the funeral he says, “A great queen; big fucking deal. That ludicrous spectacle in there, just a parody of someone who really counted. We don’t; faggots, we’re just a bad dream the real world is having, and the real world’s waking up. And he’s dead”. Here Prior lets seriousness take over the topic of death, referring to gay people as the real world’s bad dream. Prior is being anti-camp because rather looking at the joy of the drag queen’s sparkly life, he looks at it as nothing more than the death of another person that the rest of the world does not care about. Prior’s anti-camipness makes the reader see the far end of the spectrum of an AIDs narrative, where people are dying and mourning their loved one’s deaths and there is no mention of the beauty of the life that they had. This play’s campiness allows a true tragedy to be brought to light, allowing the reader to see it as a story of life instead of a story of death.
I thought this response brought up a lot of good points and claims. The purpose of camp in Angels in America, which at times was very depressing is to “de-thrown” the serious or at times exaggerate it so much where the message is so clear to the reader. Camp is very evident in almost every scene of Angels in America, but especially the example provided in this response with the funeral and how something so serious like death can be turned around into a time of celebration. I agree with the response claim that this can provide a way for the reader to understand that something so sad like the AIDs crisis can still involve happiness like remembering the lives they once and still are living.