{"id":996,"date":"2022-10-31T23:29:53","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T03:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/?p=996"},"modified":"2022-10-31T23:29:53","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T03:29:53","slug":"acceptance-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2022\/10\/31\/acceptance-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Acceptance in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Angels in America<\/em> is a play that demonstrates the struggle in asking for help when one’s voice is hardly recognized. It’s fitting for a play centered around struggle to begin with a funeral, but the funeral differs from what follows in the rest of the play: it’s final. There’s a sense of completeness to the struggle of Sarah Ironson. Even though her journey lives on in her descendants, they “can never make the crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist,” according to Rabbi Chemelwitz. What she has lived and died for is, largely, secure.<\/p>\n

The same can not be said for the main characters in this play. The AIDS crisis in the ’80s presented an open-ended threat to the gay community pushed on by forces of negligence and ignorance. When these characters experience loss over the course of the play–whether a life or a relationship–there’s almost always a notion of social forces at play. Looking at Joe, he struggles deeply with the conflict between his sexuality and the influences of people most important in his life. When he drunkenly confesses his sexuality to his mother, she immediately rejects him and his words as “ridiculous,” asking him to return to his wife. When Joe later confesses the same to Roy, seeking an acceptance beyond a paternal blessing–an acceptance of his authentic self–Roy responds angrily and also orders Joe to reunite with his wife.<\/p>\n

Neither Joe’s mother nor the closest person he had to a father were willing to recognize him for who he was. Similarly, the AIDS crisis was able to occur because people willingly failed to recognize a growing problem: a problem that only became recognizable once it began affecting straight men and women. Perhaps this is exactly what Roy recognized when he said “Homosexuals are men… who have zero clout.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Angels in America is a play that demonstrates the struggle in asking for help when one’s voice is hardly recognized. It’s fitting for a play centered around struggle to begin with a funeral, but the funeral differs from what follows in the rest of the play: it’s final. There’s a sense of completeness to the … Continue reading Acceptance in America<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5017,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","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\/5017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}