Author: burgerwithpickles

One of my favorite, albeit dated, movies of all time is Johnathan Lynn’s 1985 masterpiece Clue. It’s also a movie that thrives when thought about within the context of Angels In America. Angels is an undeniably campy play, with angels who give you orgasms, ghostly confrontations, witty comedy juxtaposed against incredibly serious subject matter, and more. But it is camp with a purpose. Camp in Angels is used as a form of societal critique, all the seemingly bizarre happenings happen for the purpose of telling a gripping story and scathing critique of the AIDS crisis, mixing in political and religious critiques as well. Once one understands this, one can understand Clue in a different light as well. One would think that Clue is a traditional family comedy movie. It is a film adaptation of the classic board game. But, set during the height of McCarthyism, Clue pokes fun at Cold War terror, with its entire cast being blackmail victims forced to solve an increasing number of murders. When we look past the ridiculous antics which early reviewers criticized as leading the film nowhere, we see meaning.

But Clue is not just about McCarthyism or comedy or how boring the board game is, it’s about deconstructing media as a whole. It famously released in theaters with three separate endings, seemingly jokingly. However this encourages one to not only re-watch the film but to analyze its insane premise, pick it apart, and put it back together. Over time, you begin to see things which may or may not even be there. It’s a movie which is both wholly unserious and obsessed with itself. Ultimately, Clue is whatever you want it to be.

Much like Angels, critically analyzing its camp instead of simply laughing at it builds the film up, the absurd board game format of the movie exists to mirror the absurdity of McCarthyism much like Angels uses actual angels as a way of critiquing religion and politics during the aid crisis. Why does this matter? Because Clue and Angels are a deconstruction of how artists smuggle queerness into media, of how we pick up on queerness: through innuendo, clever tricks, and camp. Much of the, primarily older, media that we understand as queer today is understood as such because we bothered to pick them apart. Clue and Angels in America encourage and remind us to ask to interpret, to ask why.

 

(it has been a while since I’ve seen Clue and though I always knew it had a lot to say these two sources were very helpful in getting me up to speed,)

Herring, Kyle. 9/17/2013. “Not Just a Red Herring – The Political Subtext of Clue”. theretroset.com

Vaughn, Joy. 8/29/2025. “Communism Is, Was, and Will Always Be A Red Herring” https://vaughnjoy.substack.com/p/communism-is-was-and-will-always

 

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.

One poem that stuck with me after I read it was Cherríe Moraga’s The Slow Dance, which itself is a part of the larger text: Loving in the War Years. It starts off placing us in the head of our perspective character, presumably Moraga, watching two other people, Elena and Susan, dance. She is envious of the two, describing how they navigate the dance floor and each other’s bodies with ease.

She enters the dance floor, remembering how her mother described how a “real man” holds a woman. Moraga writes, “I am my mother’s lover. The partner she’s been waiting for. I can handle whatever you got hidden. I can provide for you,” (Line 28-29). This highlights this sense of heteronormativity, which is almost explicit in the poem. You are either a provider or you’re not. In simple heteronormative terms, you’re either the man or the woman of the relationship.

She searches for Elena, stating, “I am ready for you now, I want age. Knowledge,” (Line 34), but she finds her still dancing with Susan. Moraga writes, “I am used to being an observer. I am used to not getting what I want. I am used to imagining what it must be like,” (Lines 43-45)

To me, this poem isn’t like a lot of the other ones which we’ve read, which seem to ease in to being about queerness. I read this poem as a kind of sequel to those poems, as it begins explicitly queer but does not end there. Moraga is desperate for, as she puts it, age and knowledge. In terms of Saeed Jones, she wants to know where she goes after she punches a hole to daylight. We see her place herself into regressive heteronormative dynamics in order to cope, and in the end she doesn’t get what she wants. Being openly queer is not treated like a victory, here it is just another reality. Here, the struggle of being queer is ongoing, and not simply something that ends at daylight.

Daedalus after Icarus, a poem by Saeed Jones in his 2014 collection Prelude to Bruise, begins with a description of Daedalus on a beach being followed by a group of young boys pretending to be birds. The title already evokes a sense of loss, referring to the death of Daedalus’s son. The boys are described as carefree and clumsy, but a dramatic weight follows them. Their footsteps are described as burning holes in the sand, and, when they imitate flying in reference to Daedalus’ wax wings, the sand is described as tugging at their feet, pulling them back to the earth. The children are shrouded by a vague sense of imprisonment, much like Daedalus and his son were imprisoned in the Greek myth. Daedalus himself is hardly described at all in this sequence, as it is almost entirely focused on the boys. It isn’t until one of the mothers of the boys shouts out, joking her son should ask Daedalus to make her wings so she could leave her husband, that Daedalus stops his march and sprints into the sea. The boys follow him excitedly, and declare they no longer want to be birds. Instead, the boys declare they want to be fish. Throughout the poem, the children do not understand Daedalus, viewing him with a childish wonder, unaware of Daedalus’ true emotions or his past.

Daedalus is subtly portrayed as a fearful and unwilling father figure, never acknowledging the children and literally running away at the idea that he might contribute to a family. Perhaps he is traumatized from the loss of his own son, or perhaps the poem wants us to use that loss as a means to assume he is a bad father. Tragically, all the characters are bound together. Daedalus cannot fly away, and the boys continue to follow him. It is implied by the mother’s comments that they come from possibly abusive homes and fathers. The boys cling to Daedalus as an escape, not only is he a potential father figure, but he also provides a literal and figurative means of escape in his wax wings and the whimsy they bring to the boys. The poem, at least in my interpretation, ultimately portrays themes of the naivety of children and how it comes into contact with neglectful or abusive parents.