Tag: religion

Oranges for Queer Jews!

Throughout the play “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner examines the intersectionality between religious identity and sexuality. Joe Pitt is one of the protagonists in the play, and he is both a Mormon and a gay man. At first, he struggles to admit that he is gay, partly because he is married to Harper–a woman–partly because he is a republican politician, but also because homosexuality is seen as a sin in Mormonism. In the first act, Louis tells Joe, “well, oh boy. A Gay Republican,” to which Joe responds, “not gay. I’m not gay,” (Kushner 29). Joe cannot admit to his sexuality at first, not even to another gay man. But by the end of the play, Joe starts to accept his sexuality while still identifying as a Mormon.

When looking through this lens of homosexuality and how it is regarded in different religions, it made me think of the addition of an orange on a Passover seder plate and how this move is aligned with queerness. Passover is the holiday where Jews recall the exodus from Jewish enslaved life in Egypt, and this story is told at the Passover seder every year. At the seder there are different items placed on a seder plate to symbolize different objects. That being said, the holiday is thousands of years old, but the orange was only added in the 1980’s. So why an orange?

A Jewish feminist scholar named Susannah Heschel found a feminist Passover haggadah (the text that explains how the seder works) that told the story of a Hasidic rabbi. This rabbi had told a Jewish lesbian that there is as much room for lesbians in Judaism as there is space for bread on the Passover table (bread is the food that is forbidden to eat and even own during the holiday). So, this haggadah instructed people to put a crust of bread on the seder plate. But Heschel thought putting bread on the seder plate was too extreme, so she put an orange in order to show solidarity with gay and lesbian Jews. In this story, the Hasidic rabbi and Joe had the same thought process: they both thought that homosexuality has no place in their religions. However, Joe eventually learns that he can be both gay and a Mormon, and Jews learn that other teachings in Judaism are accepting of queer people.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/an-orange-on-the-seder-plate/

“God’s” Will

Something interesting I found was that Boy in a Whalebone Corset started and ended with mentions of locusts. At the start of the poem the grass is compared to a “sleeping swarm of locust” and at the end of the poem the night is said to be “made of locusts.” This repeated phrasing of “swarms of locusts” is reminiscent of the ten plagues in the Bible. In Exodus, the Egyptians are subjected to ten plagues until Pharaoh agrees to set the Israelites free. The plague of locusts specifically, is the eighth plague followed by the plague of darkness and the death of a first born. Parallels can be drawn between the father and Pharaoh in this poem, similar to how Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Israelites be free, the father refuses to allow the boy to be free to be himself and wear what he wants.  

I find it interesting that locusts specifically were chosen as a descriptor as they are known for destruction. Which mirrors that of the destruction the boy’s clothes are facing in the hands of his father. Continuing with the plague theme, the final plague was the death of a first born. While the boy didn’t physically die in this poem. One can argue that his soul did when his father burned his clothes thus essentially killing off his identity.  

I think the meaning behind the implication of religion in this poem is perhaps the reasoning behind the father’s discontent and disapproval of his son’s clothes. Which is further emphasized by the irony of the father burning the son’s clothes, and their smoke “being mistaken for Old Testament God.” Ending the poem on this note drives home the assumption of religion being the guiding factor of why these clothes are unacceptable and why wearing such items needs to be punished. 

Identity affected by external factors

Angels in America is a play that discusses the complexity of identity construction affected by external factors. In it, we can see how some characters struggle finding or accepting their identity in a world where being themselves was wrong or against their familiar and religious values.

First, Joe Pitt, a middle-aged Mormon man, who in an attempt to accept himself and his sexual orientation, left his wife Harper to be with Louis. In one of Joe’s first attempts to be open about his sexual orientation, he tells his Mormon mother, Hanna Pitt, and she answers, “You really ought to go home now to your wife. I need to go to bed. This phone call— We will just forget this phone call.” Despite the fact that he is a grown up man, Joe struggles accepting himself, in part, because of the family and religious values he has, which I consider are represented through the character of Hanna who shows herself really closed towards the LGBTQ+ community.

Second, the homosexual couple of Prior Walter and Louis Ironson is in crisis due to the cowardice of Louis to face the AIDS contracted by his partner, and decides to left him not knowing which was his role in this situation. The character of Louis is described during the funeral at the beginning of the play as a Jewish man and member of a religious family “how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home” (p.10) In this case, we can also observe the familiar and religious external factor affecting the character’s process of accepting and showing himself as homosexual.

In this play, we can notice the complexity of the character in a constant oscillation between what they consider they should do and what they really want to do in an attempt to accept or discover themselves. We can say that this process is even more affected by the influence of external factors such as their religion, family values, jobs, politics and a whole world that looks at them judging for going against social norms.