The presence of camp culture in Angels in America is found within the play\u2019s comedic structure while holding a theme of the AIDs epidemic. In Susan Sontag\u2019s \u201cNotes On \u201cCamp\u201d, she says, \u201cThe whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious\u201d, giving the thought that it is easier to joke about the serious than it is to look it in the eyes and deal with it. With AIDs being a very serious tragedy in our country\u2019s history, Angels in America brings a sort of lightheartedness to the subject, this balance of drama and comedy makes the play campy.<\/p>\n
The play shows several examples of camp, one including the funeral of a major drag queen in New York City. Rather than a funeral, it was a celebration. HBO\u2019s production of the play showed fellow people of the LGBTQ community, not mourning death, but singing along with the church choir to celebrate life. Belize also says, \u201cHe couldn\u2019t be buried like a civilian. Trailing sequins and incense he came into the world, trailing sequins and incense he departed it. And good for him!\u201d Taking death, a typically morbid topic and adding the joyful singing and sequins is camp because it makes a heartbreaking situation a little bit easier to swallow.<\/p>\n
On the contrary, Prior resists camp in this specific scene. While exiting the funeral he says, \u201cA great queen; big fucking deal. That ludicrous spectacle in there, just a parody of someone who really counted. We don\u2019t; faggots, we\u2019re just a bad dream the real world is having, and the real world\u2019s waking up. And he\u2019s dead\u201d. Here Prior lets seriousness take over the topic of death, referring to gay people as the real world\u2019s bad dream. Prior is being anti-camp because rather looking at the joy of the drag queen\u2019s sparkly life, he looks at it as nothing more than the death of another person that the rest of the world does not care about. Prior\u2019s anti-camipness makes the reader see the far end of the spectrum of an AIDs narrative, where people are dying and mourning their loved one\u2019s deaths and there is no mention of the beauty of the life that they had. This play\u2019s campiness allows a true tragedy to be brought to light, allowing the reader to see it as a story of life instead of a story of death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The presence of camp culture in Angels in America is found within the play\u2019s comedic structure while holding a theme of the AIDs epidemic. In Susan Sontag\u2019s \u201cNotes On \u201cCamp\u201d, she says, \u201cThe whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious\u201d, giving the thought that it is easier to joke … Continue reading Camp Culture in Angels in America<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3225,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","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\/3225"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}