December 13, 2003

ANGELS IN AMERICA: AN APPRAISAL, PART II

Yale Kramer

(The following is the second part of a slightly abridged version of my review-essay published in the July 1993 issue of The American Spectator on the occasion of its Broadway production. Part I of the review can be found below.)

Despite the popular view of male homosexuality, sexual orientation is not the only socially relevant issue, or perhaps even the most important one. Tansgression is.

Transgression is one of the most persistent themes in “Angels.” In Act Two, in the process of seducing Joe, Louis says: “Sometimes, even if it scares you to death, you have to be willing to break the law. Know what I mean?” A little later in the play Roy Cohn’s parting words to his loved/hated protégé are, “Transgress a little, Joseph. There are so many laws; find one you can break.” Throughout the play Cohn argues with force and fascination against submitting to the law. It becomes a principle of vitality in the play through Cohn’s strength and persuasiveness.

JOE: Well it is unethical, I can’t…
ROY: Boy you really are something, what the fuck do you think this is, Sunday School?…This is…this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is politics, Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you’re… What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds! You’re on earth, goddammit! Plant a foot, stay awhile.

What seems to fascinate Kushner about his reinvention of the myth of Roy Cohn is the equation of illegitimacy and power. You get power by cheating and conniving and manipulating—you get things on people or you fix their parking tickets and then they owe you something and that’s clout. Kushner’s Cohn is driven by the same basic sense of impotence that drives Louis and Prior and Joe and Harper—the feeling that if he had to go up against real men in legitimate combat he would have no hope of winning, that it is only through illegitimate means that he can win. (In Part II of the play, “Perestroika,” Cohn is about to blackmail someone in order to get himself some AZT medicine and he says, “I’m no good at tests, Martin, I’d rather cheat.”)

That is why the need to transgress against (straight men’s) rules is so powerfully important. By being “bad,” or, really, naughty (gay men don’t want to do really bad things like murder or rape or rob) they can feel, in their heart of hearts, powerful, even a little triumphant over their oppressors—straight America.

What does being naughty mean? It means sexual transgression of any and all sorts. Whatever is unusual, abnormal, odd, shocking, scandalous, even frightful becomes desirable, and the more the better. The more shocking, the greater the dividend of personal power. Or rather, the less impotent, the less dead the shocker feels. It has to be in-your-face, by definition. And that is what is meant by the gay lifestyle.

The gay lifestyle is as important to some gay men, like Kushner, as sexual orientation is, or perhaps more important. Outing is part of that style, mockery and self-mockery is part of that style, and so, in some cases, is the provocation of punishment, as in Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story,” in which the gay man, Jerry, provokes an innocent bystander, Peter, to kill him. Kushner’s is a gentler soul, but the play is full of mockery, self-mockery, and one or two shockers—the depiction of anal intercourse on a Broadway stage may be a first.

The gay lifestyle is what gay liberation was all about back in the seventies. And it is the discrepancy between the gay lifestyle and the straight lifestyle that is what the sense of alienation in gays is all about—not merely sexual preference. For Kushner, more than anything, freedom means freedom to transgress, to be naughty. Louis says to Joe, “Maybe the court won’t convene. Ever again. Maybe we are free. To do whatever. Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.” Kushner uses these abstract allusions skillfully to conceal the more shocking meaning of freedom.

“The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” another gay play of the eighties, has a terrifying scene called “12 Inches, Single” that depicts what it means to be free “to do whatever.” The scene describes the frantic, feverish rush from one sexual partner to the next, performing all of the permutations and combinations that are possible with four opening and two penises. You go from bar to bar looking for the right dimensions, the right color, the right predilections. You comb the sex advertisements for the same attributes as though you were buying a piece of livestock. The scene is a bravura piece of performance art that illuminates this aspect of the gay life.

Another illustration of what Kushner only alludes to in order to make his hidden agenda more acceptable to his general audience is to be found in “As Is,” by William Hoffman, a play produced several seasons ago. Rich and Saul, two gay men, are reminiscing about what it was like before AIDS took the liberation out of gay liberation:

RICH: Remember Sunday afternoons blitzed on beer?
SAUL: And suddenly it’s night and you’re getting fucked in the second-floor window of the Hotel Christopher and you’re being cheered on by a mob of hundreds of men….God, I used to love promiscuous sex.
RICH: Not “promiscuous,” Saul, nondirective, noncommitted, nonauthoritarian—
SAUL: Free, wild, rampant—
RICH: Hot, sweaty, steamy, smelly—
SAUL: Juicy, funky, hunky—
RICH: Sex.
SAUL: Sex. God I miss it.

What becomes clear from these plays is the degree of disingenuousness in press reports of testimony at congressional hearings to the effect that what is involved in the issue of gays in the military is sexual orientation and only sexual orientation. Even though the advent of gay liberation thirty-five or forty years ago brought with it a demand for and realization of radical sexual freedom—which to this day remains a hallmark of certain gay men, the kind of freedom that Louis in “Angels” still yearns for—it brought with it, too, conflict even among those it liberated. Did gay love, sexual partnership (in men) imply permanence? Fidelity? Commitment?

In “The Boys in the Band,” by Matt Crowley, produced in 1968 and now considered to be politically incorrect by some younger gays, the issue is clearly defined but ambiguously resolved. Hank has left his wife and children for a relationship with Larry. They have been lovers for two years, squabbling all of that time over the issue of fidelity. Hank now wants the rules of marriage to prevail, “till death do us part,” but Larry, with a long history of sexual promiscuity, asserts his right to sexual freedom. In fact he wants Hank to be unfaithful, so that he can be free to follow his own impulses. Larry cynically asserts, “The ones who swear their undying fidelity are lying. Most of them anyway—ninety percent of them. They cheat on each other constantly and lie through their teeth. I’m sorry, I can’t be like that.”

AIDS, perforce, shifted the balance in the direction of stable monogamous relationships. Fidelity became an issue now not only for the sake of safe sex, but to deal with survivor guilt. How do you betray your partner and let him die alone and miserable? Once you begin to face that problem you’re in big-time moral country. Honor, Commitment, Fidelity, Loyalty are those same nasty old straight, American, conventional values Louis has been running away from. The ones that make you feel dead inside if you’re a character in “Angels in America.” For Kushner, the choice is between the freedom to be sexually unbridled or to submit to the Oppressors: the Republican Fathers and their suffocating conventional values. His lifestyle or theirs.

The solution for him, as for many of the other gay playwrights, is a magical solution, one that is wishful and self-serving and denies reality in a significant way. By turning to a vague mystical philosophy (which may seem profound to some) Kushner tries to resolve an irreconcilable psychological conflict. He rejects as unacceptable the view that it is possible for gays and straight to live together peacefully if gays exercise more self-restraint and straights exercise more tolerance.

In a New Yorker article in 1992, Kushner described the revelation to his parents that he was gay:

Soon after the phone call to his mother in 1981, Tony wrote his parents an angry letter. “I felt they had to acknowledge a parental failure….Instead of looking at me and seeing what I was all about and trying to make a world in which I would be at home being who I was, they had chosen to make things comfortable for themselves. The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it’s ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they’re attacking the center of your being.”

What Kushner and other gay theorists seem to do when it suits their rhetorical needs is to use the word “love” as a euphemism for sex, since no one considers the emotional component of love between men, such as the love between fathers and sons or close friends, to be perverse or ugly. What he means when he says “give love” in this case is have sex. And to refer to having sex as “profoundly human” is a little baffling. Having sex is the thing we have in common with all mammalian species. Conventionally what we mean when we use rhetorical phrases like “profoundly human” is the very opposite of having sex—what we usually mean is something that has to do with soul or spirit or mind rather than genitals.

Kushner went on:

I said to them, “You can’t love me without understanding that I’m gay. My being gay is central to the person you pretend to care about. I won’t accept anything less than that. I don’t want to be tolerated.”

And here is Louis expressing the modern gay activist’s dismissal of mere tolerance:

“I mean it’s the really hard thing about being Left in this country, the American Left can’t help trip over these petrified little fetishes: freedom, that’s the worst; you know Jeane Kirkpatrick for God’s sake will go on and on about freedom and so what does that mean, the word freedom, when she talks about it, or human rights; you have Bush talking about human rights, and so what are these people talking about….These people don’t begin to know what, ontologically, freedom is or human rights, like they see these property-based Rights-of-Man type rights but that’s not enfranchisement, not democracy, not what’s implicit, what’s potential within the idea, not the idea with blood in it. That’s just liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance, and what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.”

What Louis wants is not the kind of freedom that we talk about in Poli-Sci 101. What he means by “the idea with blood in it” is the freedom to transgress without consequences. And to be tolerated is not good enough; what he wants is to transgress (sexually) and be accepted despite the transgression, or even loved for it the way Roy Cohn wants to be loved for his monstrousness. What Louis and Joe actually yearn for is not only freedom to transgress but the freedom to transgress without judgment or guilt:

Joe and Louis sit in front of the Hall of Justice:

“JOE: It just flashed through my mind: the whole Hall of Justice, it’s empty, it’s deserted, it’s gone out of business. Forever. The people that make it run have up and abandoned it….I just wondered what a thing it would be…if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice or love, had really gone away. Free. It would be…terrible, and…very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unencumbered, into the morning.”

What Kushner/Louis cannot accept about the world is the reality of human nature, and therefore they must deny its existence. If gay men can’t help their feelings, neither can straight men. If gay men are uncomfortable in the straight world, straight men are just as uncomfortable in the gay world, and a gay man’s discomfort is no more valid than a straight man’s. Xenophobia is a component of human nature, and is universal. It is probably rooted in our biology, having served adaptational needs throughout the evolutionary process. After all, one human primate could never be sure about whether a stranger primate was dangerous or not. These facts of human nature may be unfortunate but they are incontrovertible and inescapable, and the only solutions that mankind has found to deal with people we don’t like or who make us uncomfortable are the essential tricks of civilization: hypocrisy and self-restraint.

This is what makes it possible for civilized men and women who do not have intimate relationships with each other to interact without killing one another. Hypocrisy, tact, tolerance on the one hand and self-restraint, good manners, consideration, on the other, are within the compass of human nature, because they consist of behavior, of actions, and actions can be learned—whereas matters of the heart, feelings, cannot. Alas, tact, good manners, conventions, may sound awfully subversive to some gay men—positively Republican perhaps.

In “Perestroika,” Part Two of the play, Kushner raises the yearning for innocence and rebirth to a more mystical level. In Part Two, Prior, who was on his deathbed at the end of Part One, has a miraculous remission for dramatic rather than medical reasons so that at the end of the play he can assume the role of a Lazarus/Christ-like prophet and speak directly to the audience. This long speech, in which Prior talks about Community, for all its verbosity sounds suspiciously like Forgive us our trespasses and love us for them, and we will forgive your trespasses even if you’re a Republican as long as you are gay.

Despite its magnitude, despite its pretentious language and pyrotechnics, “Angels in America” lacks the prerequisite for greatness—the transformation of universal experience into art—and what it substitutes for universal experience is messages. It is a propaganda play. The problem is not Kushner’s homosexuality but his provinciality.

Despite its ambiguity and the world-class ambivalence of its characters, “Angels in America” is shallow. Talk about high-sounding ideas like Love and Justice and Good and Evil does not qualify a play for profundity—it’s what you do with them that counts. And despite his best intentions Kushner never really comes to grips with the dilemmas he invents. Beyond a few nice paradoxes, he ends up in a cloud of mystical, pseudo-religious cliches like Love and Forgiveness Conquer All. To be precise, Prior’s final words are, “Bye now. You are fabulous, each and every one, and I love you all. And I bless you. More Life. And bless us all.” (Tiny Tim, take note.)

Unfortunately, universal love is beyond the capacity of human nature. This is what Kushner—who will not settle for anything less than unqualified love and forgiveness not only from his parents but from us—cannot accept.