Sexuality and American Culture

Marcella brings up some really crucial points regarding the issue of community, and I would like to sort of follow her train of thought. In many ways, a community is a fictional unity. Like sexuality, community is one of those huge structures that encourage certain social, political, and economic arrangements and enable a certain type of society exist. As we have explored with the discourse of sexuality, there are many cracks in the discourse of community.  Unlike a family, the mechanisms that bind members of a community do not necessarily rely on person-to-person contact and shared experience. Instead, a community exists in relation to other communities and is validated through collective language, culture, and memory. As such, a community is inherently a political entity. It enables large numbers of people to feel as though they are intrinsically bound to one another, even though they have never met and most likely will never meet in the span of their lifetimes. This type of connection is essential to political movements. Members of national communities go to war when duty calls. The Irish-American community, the Puerto Rican-American community, and the gay community all march down 5^th Avenue every year in celebration of their respective collective identities. Communities can use their political power to transform society either constructively or destructively because they validate a relationship between total strangers and utilize that relationship as an instrument in pushing forward social agenda.

Kushner plays with the idea of community in some fascinating ways. His characters are all members of multiple communities, many of which are opposed to one another in their belief systems—the gay community, religious communities (Jewish, Mormon, secular), the black community, etc. Furthermore, they are all part of the national community, they are all American. Most of Kushner's scenes involve juxtaposing communities through odd and often conflicting member pairings. We have a liberal secular gay Jew sharing a bed with a closeted gay Republican Mormon, a gay black nurse taking care of a vulgar Jewish conservative paranoid bigot who is “a heterosexual male . . . who fucks around with guys” and is dying of A.I.D.S., an ill homosexual man dressed in drag and a sexually deprived and depressed Mormon housewife meeting in each other's dream/hallucination, and a widowed Mormon mother who has just arrived in New York City from Utah asking a psychotic old homeless black woman how to get to Brooklyn on a run-down street in the south Bronx. Kushner rips these people out of the safety nets of their communities and forces them into human interaction often marked by conflict. The substance of community disintegrates in these instances. Interaction causes characters to break away from their communities or reveal disunity within them, but it also allows the characters to form very strong new bonds.

The disintegration of communities, or the realization of their fiction, is part of Kushner's larger theme of things falling apart. It is played out through abandonment—Louis abandoning Prior, Joe abandoning Harper, Hannah selling her home and abandoning Salt Lake City, Harper abandoning reality for an icy safe space, Roy being disbarred. Kushner is also questioning what this whole American thing is all about.  Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz tells Louis and the other descendents of Sarah Ironson, “You do not grow up in America . . . You do not live in America. . . . You can never make that crossing that she made . . . But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. . . . In you that journey is” (Kushner 16-17).  Belize says to Louis,

“‘America’ is what Louis loves . . . Well I hate America . . . I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. . . . You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. . . . I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it.  (228)

Joe says, “You have to reconcile yourself with the world’s imperfectability by being thoroughly in the world but not of it” (204).” All three of these statements reveal the crucial tension and contradictions intrinsic to simultaneously being a member of a community and feeling disconnected from the reality of the community.