When I first read Angels in America by Tony Kushner, one thing that\u00a0 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\u2019 conversation in Act Three Scene Two of Millennium Approaches. It\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n
Belize: \u201cYou promised Louis, Prior is not a subject.\u201d<\/p>\n
Louis: \u201cYou brought him up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Belize: \u201cI brought up Hemorrhoids.\u201d<\/p>\n
Louis: \u201cSo it\u2019s indirect. Passive-Aggresive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Belize: \u201cUnlike, I suppose, banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn\u2019t have\u00a0 a race problem.\u201d (Kushner 97)<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I first read Angels in America by Tony Kushner, one thing that\u00a0 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. … Continue reading “Prior is not a subject.” and Passivity in Angels in America.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5716,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5716"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1532"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1535,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions\/1535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}