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Response to: Peiss' Chapter 13 documents 3-6 and essay by Weston; Chapter 14 essay by Bayer; Kushner's Angels in America

Thu, 04/23/2009 - 12:28 — Fae Aguda

 

This week’s readings in Chapters 13 and 14 of Peiss’ Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality focus on homosexuality, or more specifically, the gay and lesbian community. Kath Weston’s essay “Gay Families as the ‘Families We Choose’” discusses the connections gays and lesbians make with other people like them in terms of kinship. The idea of choosing one’s own family, especially if that person’s biological family has disowned him or something of that nature for admitting his (or her) sexuality, sounds appealing and creates a sense of solidarity between fellow homosexuals.

This sense of community is shown throughout the play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, especially between the characters Belize and Prior. They were former lovers and drag queens who are still friends even after they are seen as other people. They don’t go as far as to call each other “brother” or possibly “sister,” but Belize is there for Prior during his illness, and it is clear that Prior would do the same for Belize. Prior was also there for Louis, his boyfriend, while he had to mourn the death of his grandmother. However, unlike Belize, Louis could not handle the idea that Prior was sick and might not get better, so he eventually left the place where they were living together for four and a half years. This goes against Weston’s idea that gay families are always there for each other, but it also highlights the fear people have about a loved one’s mortality.

What I found interesting is why there was a need to create these kinship relationships in the first place; the isolation of the gay and lesbian community by the dominant society. Their sexuality and lifestyle was, and possibly still are, not acceptable by heterosexual standards. One of the ways in which homosexuals are separated from the general population is through stereotypes. One of these stereotypes was about AIDS. Back when it was introduced in the 1980s, AIDS was believed to be a gay disease that could be caught by casual contact. Because of AIDS, feared homosexuals because they thought could get sick just by associating with them. People with AIDS were seen as inferior physically and socially to the supposedly straight, moral, and healthy majority because of lack of knowledge, which the Denver Principles in 1983 tried to correct.

Act One, Scene 9 in Part One of Kushner’s Angels in America addresses the issue of AIDS and homosexuality well. Roy Cohn’s doctor, Henry, assumes that Roy is homosexual because of the diseases Roy has. While it is clear that Roy is a closet gay, he denies these accusations and says: 

“Your problem… is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean… Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does and individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order... [S]omething much simpler: clout.”

Roy understands that by admitting he has AIDS and is a homosexual, he will be seen as inferior. To him, being homosexual means he has no power or control. This is why he insists that he is a heterosexual man who happens to have sex with other men and that he has liver cancer, not AIDS.

Today, while AIDS is still prevalent, most people know that the disease spreads through bodily fluids like blood and saliva, not through simply touching people, and that it affects more than just homosexuals. But the stereotype still exists, as shown by the response by Cleveland’s Black community in 1998 to AIDS, where many were convinced that not only that it was a gay disease, but a white gay disease, so black people are not affected.

Fear of spreading AIDS led to laws that regulated sexual activity in the public sphere, especially in places where homosexuals were known to frequent. Two examples of this were the NYC Department of Health’s regulation of sexual activity in a so-called “gay theatre” and the regulation of bathhouses in San Francisco. Instead of Foucault’s notion that the people in power control themselves, government officials created these laws to control homosexual behavior. This further isolates homosexuals from the rest of the population, even though in theory all people should be affected by these laws.

Comments

Wed, 04/29/2009 - 08:25 — Lee Quinby

Patrick, this is an

Patrick, this is an insightful refinement of our discussion about friendship and how it differs from community, particularly in regard to the extrinsic versus intrinsic nature of exclusion.  Middlesex will further the complexity by showing how it might feel to one who has no community/fictional unity to be a part of, as yet.  With Kushner's concluding invocation of "More life," the concept of friendship as portrayed there moves toward a politics of friendship in which public duties of democratic citizenship mix with personal concerns over the well-being of one's loved ones.  It reminds me of Thoreau's counsel, "Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."
Mon, 04/27/2009 - 18:16 — Patrick Monte

Your point about the power of

Your point about the power of friendship is well taken. I would add also that the critique of friendship and its exclusionary aspects is limited at best. I say this because there is a fundamental difference between community and friendship in terms of the how people are interacting. While we can clearly trace the arc of a friendship from start to finish, a community makes a claim on immortality. This is because a friendship doesn't come into existence until two people start physically (or now, virtually) interacting and experiencing things together. The basis for any alienation or exclusionary practices thereafter are formed in terms of the relationship itself. So, while a friendship can be potentially exclusionary, a community is intrisically exclusionary. Here is a quote from the end of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (one of my favorite books) that highlights the nature of community: 

"Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of 'forgetting' the experience of continuity . . . engenders the need for a narrative of 'identity.' . . . In the secular story of the 'person' [here we can replace the word 'person' with the word 'friendship' to better illustrate the point] there is a beginning and an end. She emerges from parental genes and social circumstances onto a brief historical stage, there to play a role until her death. After that, nothing but the penumbra of lingering fame or influence. . . . Nations [or other imagined communities, more generally], however, have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural. Because there is no Origninator, the nation's biography can not be written evangelically . . . through a long procreative chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it . . . wherever the lamp of archaeology casts its fitful gleam. This fashioning, however, is marked by deaths. . . . From . . . remoreselessly accumulating cemeteries . . . the nation's biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as 'our own.'"

 

 

Mon, 04/27/2009 - 16:53 — Lee Quinby

Hi to all of you.  This will

Hi to all of you.  This will be another joint response because of the common thread of community and its difficulties that ran through your scary-smart posts.  I am impressed with the insights expressed here about the complexities of kinship, elective family, larger community, and friendship.  Thanks to Marcella for starting it off with her analysis of community and its discontents (with a nod to Freud).  As she and others indicated, we prosper through the mechanisms of community and yet belonging to them often means adhering to strictures imposed on us by the group.  Fae offers an astute discussion of the turmoil of isolation and blame from families and the larger society that fostered new social communities for gay men and lesbians during the time period that Angels covers.  As all you all point out in various ways, Kushner captures that moment so well to show the break-down in several of the relationships that were forged within and outside of that "fictional unity" of the gay community that Patrick discusses. As we discussed further in class, the play's ambiguities heighten the drama by having the pairings of love and hostility run through a variety of couples--Joe and Roy, Louis and Joe, Hannah and Prior, and so on.  Naomie (whose post I cannot at this moment retrieve) highlighted the kind of bonds between these characters that are rife with complex emotions to emphasize that the abstraction of community is not the same as the experience of it.
 
The disintegration of existing community that takes place in Angels and Perestroika is matched by the new creation of another kind of community, which Jaimie talks about in terms of friendship.  This too can be critiqued of course, as Dominic pointed out in saying that friends can be just as exclusionary as any other community.  And we probably have all witnessed that kind of ugly group (or seen "Gossip Girls"). But I don't want to lose her point here--or Kushner's.  Friendship as a theme in the play has a symbolic role of suggesting something other. Foucault referred to our right "not to be governed like that, or at that price" in talking about ways in which we can come together to alter current power structures and the dominant regime of truth. I think this is what Kushner is getting out in his depiction at the close of a collection of friends who have differing views and yet respect each other. That goal is one to aspire toward for democratic citizenry--and one doesn't have to be deluded into thinking it will necessarily happen as expected, or at all, to know its value and to strive for it.