When I first read Angels in America by Tony Kushner, one thing that stood out to me was the contradiction between the emphasis on camp and camp imagery and the bleak reality which the play is really focused on. For all the ghosts, hallucinations, and angels, reality remains the same, but the characters remain distracted. Angels in America is about the futility of queer infighting in the face of oppression. One of the scenes which stuck out to me the most was Belize and Louis’ conversation in Act Three Scene Two of Millennium Approaches. It’s a split scene with Belize and Louis in a coffee shop and Prior in a hospital room. Notably, Belize and Louis refuse to speak about Prior in this scene. Instead, Louis draws Belize into an unrelated argument which resolves nothing. When they eventually do bring up Prior, the conversation is steered back towards an argument:
Belize: “You promised Louis, Prior is not a subject.”
Louis: “You brought him up.”
Belize: “I brought up Hemorrhoids.”
Louis: “So it’s indirect. Passive-Aggresive.”
Belize: “Unlike, I suppose, banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn’t have a race problem.” (Kushner 97)
Eventually, the two do talk about Prior and the scene shifts to him and his deteriorating state. This scene reads like a critique of queer infighting. While Louis concerns himself with abstract theories and coffee shop debates, Prior is still dying of HIV/AIDS and Louis is not there for him. We even see Belize, who was initially simply nodding along, get sucked into an argument with Louis, which reads as an allegory about how it is easier to argue about abstracts than it is to do something about actual issues affecting queer people in the present. Angels in America is emphasizing the importance of action in the face of crisis as opposed to distracting oneself. We see this many times during the play, Harper hallucinates Mr. Lies , Roy Cohn insists he’s not gay and has liver cancer, and the angel itself may not even be real. But Harper is still in a dysfunctional relationship, Roy Cohn is still dying of aids, and so is Prior. Ultimately, Angels In America is a critique of inaction and passivity, the thing which made the AIDS epidemic so deadly in the first place.
This is such an interesting point, and I really like that you connected passivity in the play to the real-world passivity during the AIDs crisis. Passivity is a really interesting way to place emphasis on characters and subjects, and I think Kushner does a great job of this in Angels. I wonder if connections could be made with passivity and queerness in Saeed Jones’ “Prelude to Bruise.” While Jones’ poetry is understandably less direct than a conversation between two characters, he largely works to avoid speaking directly about queerness and defining his own identity. Rather, he talks about his interest in femininity as a child, his alienation in gendered spaces, and his complicated relationship with his parents. Jones’ method of revealing his relationship to his queerness speaks to the need for queer people to communicate in forms of art that are less direct than the difficult conversations in Angels in America.
I think this commentary on the play is really insightful and reveals a deeper meaning within the text that I hadn’t considered. In addition to revealing the lack of action on important issues in America at the time, I think this scene specifically highlights the intersectionality of the issues various marginalized communities are experiencing. After the excerpt which was used Louis and Belize are discussing the complicated nature of oppression in the US. They bring in the relationship between gay people and women, they discuss race, and they underscore religious stereotypes and how harmful they can be to people of color.