Category: Kushner: Angels in America

Speaking of the threshold of revelation… Part 2 of Angels in America provided the perfect set up for the second half of Middlesex, with Cal/Calliope providing the perfect portrait of the “threshold of revelation.”  Simply speaking, if I didn’t fully grasp it at the end of Angels in America, I certainly do now.

“I think love breaks all taboos. Don’t you?” (67)

Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction.  The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in […]

Finding Angels in a World of Loss The angelic prophecy has been revealed, and it has been rejected—by its own would-be prophet, Prior Walter.  The prophecy is to just stop: to stop moving and migrating and changing, and if that happens, maybe God will return.  Prior finds this prophecy a farce at best, dangerous at […]

Joe the Mormon is as uncertain about his decision to move to Washington as he is about coming out of the closet. Perhaps these two things are linked, and if Joe to moves to Washington, leaving his wife in the process, it would mean coming out of the closet—the closet called marriage let’s say. He […]

Beyond the Pleasure Principle First, in the document “Policing Public Sex in a Gay Theater, 1995” (Peiss, 454), I found the degree of detail mandated quite interesting.  Not simply “what act,” which would be the only legitimate question in regards to sanitation, but full bodied descriptions, proximity of the voyeur, and the lighting.  If an […]

Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America is heavy on sexuality, disease, politics, professional discrimination, religion, race, and gender.  The two themes that stick out most to me are sexuality and gender.  The portrayal of the Jewish identity as ethnicity versus religion is very realistic for the modern day, and it is not a treatment […]

The Beauty Remains “God has left the building.” That seems to be one of the underlying themes of Angels in America. The Angels are in uproar, their prophet – much like the biblical Moses standing before that little burning bush, like Jonah at the port city, convinced he can outrun infinity – spurns them, the […]

Once again the definition of the label “homosexual” is questioned and placed on the examining table in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. “Roy Cohn is not a homosexual.  Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.” (Millenium Approaches, 46)  This quote is part of a striking dialogue between Roy Cohn, a […]

Families with Fluid Boundaries The way power was used in Ronald Bayer’s essay, AIDS and the Bathhouse Controversy was quite interesting.  Essentially, the question was whether the San Francisco government could control the private lives of gay individuals in the name of public health.  As stated in the essay, the criminalization of homosexuality by the […]