{"id":975,"date":"2022-10-31T22:21:08","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T02:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/?p=975"},"modified":"2022-10-31T22:21:08","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T02:21:08","slug":"im-not-like-the-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2022\/10\/31\/im-not-like-the-others\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Not Like the Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

The complexity of personality, morals, and relationships has been frequently highlighted throughout the play thus far. It has brought unlikely pairs together through friendship, romantic relationships, or simple tolerance, displayed contradictions between religious beliefs and the realities of life, and has skewed the perceptions of common labels. I believe that one of <\/span>Angels in America<\/span><\/i>‘s main goals is to portray the idea of similarities among differences and differences among similarities in order to combat the feeling of \u201cotherness\u201d that was so strong during this time period and even in today\u2019s current social and political climate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One way Kushner achieves this is through the romantic pairing of Joe and Louis. In the last scene of act 3 of Perestroika during a conversation between the two where Louis brings up that Joe is conservative, again, Joe says \u201cYou\u2019re obsessed, you know that? If people like you didn\u2019t have president Reagan to demonize, where would you be? <\/span><\/p>\n

Louis: If he didn\u2019t have people like me to demonize where would <\/span>he<\/span><\/i> be?[…] <\/span><\/p>\n

Joe: I\u2019m not your enemy . Louis. <\/span><\/p>\n

Louis: I never said you were my- <\/span><\/p>\n

Joe: Fundamentally, we want the same thing. (203-204)\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

In this,\u00a0 the emphasis on difference, between political stances, and similarity, in their attraction to one another and recently leaving a long term relationship (yet still for different reasons), is clearly stated. I think this scene, and relationship, is important in showing us how crucial it is to look further than surface level differences in order to truly know people and form connections. On the outside, Joe: a \u201cstraight\u201d, Mormon, conservative and Louis: an openly gay, Jewish, democrat would not seem to be likely friends, let alone each other\u2019s romantic interests. However, though these issues still do come up at times, they were able to find and bond over their similarities in a more meaningful way. <\/span><\/p>\n

This theme was so important during the AIDS\/HIV epidemic because too many years were wasted and lives were lost because of this idea of \u201cotherness\u201d. With the common perception that the disease was only affecting queer people, or \u201cthose people\u201d, there was unfortunately far too little action done to help stop the spread and combat the symptoms. There was so much emphasis put on the differences that the world seemed to forget that these were their friends, family, neighbors, doctors, teachers, servers, and so on. This relates to how Covid, upcoming elections, and other social issues have divided people in the present. However, through this play, we see the potential of relationships among what would seem to be polar opposites, which I believe is a key takeaway that has been repeated many times so far. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The complexity of personality, morals, and relationships has been frequently highlighted throughout the play thus far. It has brought unlikely pairs together through friendship, romantic relationships, or simple tolerance, displayed contradictions between religious beliefs and the realities of life, and has skewed the perceptions of common labels. I believe that one of Angels in America‘s … Continue reading I’m Not Like the Others<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4743,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975","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\/4743"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}