Author: CategoricalNerd

One of my favorite TV shows is What We Do in the Shadows, a mockumentary-style show about a film crew that monitors the daily (or rather nightly) activities of a group of vampires. I highly recommend it due to its hilarious writing and the cast that make the delivery of every joke perfect.

This show relates to what we’ve been talking about in class because it is super campy, not in the way that is over the top in theatrics but in the sense that these vampires take themselves very seriously, which makes it difficult not to laugh at the ridiculous situations they put themselves in. This show makes me think of Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’, in which she says “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much'” (Sontag 7). Watching a vampire go to a funeral in a church and trying to keep their composure and not disrupt the funeral while literally burning and being able to interact with the audience is a great example of deliberate camp, and a very funny one at that.

Not only is the show camp, but it is also very queer in general. They casually bring up that they have had both male and female lovers in the past and one of the show’s characters, a human familiar named Guillermo, even comes out as gay in the later seasons. Most importantly, the show really emphasizes the idea of a chosen family, and that all of these people who are outcasts from the rest of the ‘human’ world can live together and love one another.

As I was reading this play, there was a theme that really stuck out to me: Power.  Both Roy and Prior are suffering from the same disease, yet the two could not be more different with the way they interpret power and the way they treat others. Power is used as a contrast between Roy and Prior, showing how the two use their power to shape their destiny and affect the world around them.

In Part 1, Act 1, Scene 9, we see Roy in a doctor’s office receiving his diagnosis with HIV, and as Roy grapples with this information, he also intimidates Henry because he is so insulted by the implication of his sexuality. He even outright dares Henry to say that he is a homosexual, which he never does because Roy said that he would sue into oblivion. In Part 1, Act 3, Scene 5, Roy lectures Joe about how he was the one who effectively killed Ethel Rosenberg because he sees life as a ‘dog eat dog’ world where one must “make the law or [be] subject to it” (Kushner 114). He also says in this scene to Joe that there isn’t anything wrong with him, contradicting what he said before regarding his ‘liver cancer’. To me it seems clear that Roy Cohn is a man obsessed with control and blinded by rage and denial that he ends up dying, sad and alone, all the while declaring victory.

In contrast, Prior freely declares that he is a gay man, for example in Part 1, Act 3,  Scene 7, and also admits that he is dying. By embracing his truth, he centers his power in courage and endurance, ignoring what the Angel tells him saying that he can’t just stop and go backwards, we must keep moving and we must make progress.

To summate, power is a lens through which we can view the play and a tool that Kushner uses to show that true power is rooted in hope and resilience, not in anger and hatred.

The text that I decided to focus on for my second blog post was another one of Saeed Jones’ poems, Boy in a Whalebone Corset, because it really stuck out to me as a poem that explores different a different theme than most of his other poems, which is his religious trauma.

In this poem, Saeed Jones makes a lot of references and allusions to biblical depictions of punishment, focusing specifically on the lines, “he’s in the field, gasoline jug, / hand full of matches, night made / of locusts, column of smoke / mistaken for Old Testament God.” (Jones 12) These allusions make me think of how homophobia is treated in religious contexts, and how faith can be used as an excuse for bigotry and abuse. Locusts represent coming punishment, as mentioned in the second line of the poem, and Old Testament God represents wrath, for example the wrath brought down when destroying the also referenced city of Sodom for the sin of homosexuality.

Another thing to focus on is the Nina Simone record playing in the background, and the lines “And the record skips / and skips and skips.” (Jones 12) I think the record skipping symbolizes something very important, which is that this event seriously traumatized him, to the point at which it is stuck in his mind repeating over and over again, like a broken record.

The reason I wanted to analyze this poem is because it is a very common experience in the LGBTQ community to suffer from abuse from a religious standpoint. Being told that what you are is wrong and that you will face eternal damnation just for being yourself is exactly what happens in this poem when Saeed Jones, exploring his gender, puts on a corset and his father catches him. Not only does the fire his father sets leave scars on his memory, hence the skipping record, but is also an attempt at purification since fire is used in the Bible as a metaphor for cleansing of sins and the father views his son as corrupted by homosexuality, needing to be purified in the eyes of the Lord.

When I’m up late at night, I think about all the things I should have done, all the things I shouldn’t have, all the things I wished happened and all the things I wished didn’t. Insomniac by Saeed Jones invokes those same thoughts when talking about a mother and her relationship with her child.

After reading this poem, I honed in on the 4th stanza, where the narrator refers to “the only inheritance of worth in your village of synapses”(1). I believe this quote references generational trauma and abuse the mother suffered at the hands of her own mother, and that she is the narrator. In this interpretation, the narrator is her internal thoughts, talking to herself, like many of us do (not just me hopefully) at night. Possibly coping with postpartum depression, she thinks of herself as a “mother of sorrows”(1), and that she tries to hide that side of herself from him. The regret she feels abusing the child manifests in the line, “Check the room you’ve locked him in” as she wants to fix her mistakes and be better.

One can also interpret the narrator as the child, all grown up, and reflecting on his childhood at night wishing he could change the past. Perhaps he’s trying to talk to his mother, begging her to just check on the “sweet little wreck”(1), in the hopes that it would lead to a better, different future. Shifting our focus to the 3rd stanza, the line “When he does not answer your latest call”(1) makes me think of how a mother suffering from PPD might use picturing the child all grown up as a coping mechanism. After begging the child to stop crying with no reply, she must do this to visualize how her child might turn out if she continues this cycle of abuse, or if she breaks it.

Even after writing this post, I’m not entirely sure which interpretation I believe , or if there’s even more interpretations that I am yet to think of. But the one thing I’m sure of is that whether it is the mother or the son speaking, they both want to change her legacy.