Sexuality and American Culture

If we were to choose one of the main themes explored by Kushner in his plays entitled “Angels in America”, the homophobia that resides in the gay community would definitely be considered one of them. Throughout these plays, important themes such as alienation, identity, racism and confession are depicted through the characters’ actions and thoughts. Kushner is presenting to us the gay society, revealing its lifestyle, worries from a social, religious and cultural prospective. But more importantly, he is presenting each gay as an individual, one entity in oneself and not as one part of a homogeneous mixture.

             Throughout the discourse of homosexuality, we have been constrained to think of the gay community as an indivisible whole but in Angels in America, Kushner is compelling us to question our thinking by understanding that the gay community is indeed a group that shares the same sexuality however, similarly to the heterosexual community, each individual is a separate entity. When talking about the heterosexual world, we maintain a net difference in our language by separating the intellectual from the uneducated and the wise from the drunk. However, when talking about the gay society, we have the tendency to throw all of them in the same basket regardless their education, their culture and their place in the gay society. In Angels in America, Kushner is making this clear distinction. We see Roy as this racist and homophobic homosexual, denying himself as a homosexual because he feels that he will be undermined by accepting that he is a homosexual since homosexuals don’t have any power. He pretends that he is “a heterosexual who fucks around with guys”. He even denies that he has AIDS pretending that he has cancer instead because of the association of AIDS with homosexuality. In another category, Kushner presents us Joe who is also a gay and works with Joe but has a different personality than the former. Roy is portrayed as the “bad guy” who denies the law in order to get more power whereas Joe is very reluctant about doing things that would make him break his moral ethics. Although Joe is also homophobic of his sexuality, he is not homophobic because of the lack of power that the gay community has but because he feels that his religion forbids such sexual behavior. In both plays, we not only find the homophobia of homosexuals toward their homosexuality but also a homophobia of homosexuals towards AIDS. In scene four form Act 2 of the first play, when Louis is having sex with a stranger, the condom breaks, while he doesn’t care if he gets infected of the disease; his sexual partner suddenly leaves afraid that he might get infected.

        The correlation between homosexuality and AIDS is thoroughly explored in Bayer’s essay “AIDS and the bathhouse controversy”. Bayer gives us in a nutshell the case of the bathhouses that have existed in San Francisco and how their fate was to be determined by the state in their attempt to control the AIDS epidemic.  What I find really ironic in the final verdict is how the gays’ rights to privacy were violated by eliminating the possibility for them to retreat behind the closed door in the bathhouses. Furthermore, by inhibiting sexual relations in the bathhouses which is why they were intentionally created for, the bathhouses were deprived of their initial purpose and turned into anything else but an actual bathhouse.