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1. Aesthetics and Protest: “Angels in America”
And the Politics of Selfhood
Topic Assigned:
Using the visual art in the Power Point presentation entitled Reaganite
Malaises as a lens (i.e. as visual texts raising certain issues and/or using
certain forms relating to homosexuality), analyze Toni Kushner’s Angels in
America (Part One) as a political text. You are welcome to refer also to the
HBO film version of Kushner’s text, but doing so is optional
Examination Subject: Political Fictions
Stanciu Elena-Larisa
Examination Number: 312079

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Introduction
The aim of this paper is to present a possible angle of analysis for “Angels in
America – A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”, Tony Kushner’s much acclaimed play.
Although this text is very complex and allows for many approaches, I will discuss its
potential as a political text, a tool for social criticism and investigation of human nature.
Generally, Kushner’s play aims at proposing a pluralist vision of liberalism in the quest
of countering the homogenizing, conformist American society of the last two decades of
the twentieth century. Homosexuality and the damaging effects of the AIDS epidemic
offered a frame for Kushner’s political stand. Consequently, this period of time meant a
disruption in the construction of masculine identity, the image of man being submitted to
different, sometimes incongruent, processes of articulation. I will try in the present paper
to underline the manner in which Kushner investigates this aspect of a merely chaotic
socio-cultural period. In his mixture of realism and fantasy, Kushner depicts specific
instances of personal experience within a wider political scene, combating individualism
while ambivalently employing it in the fictional construction of his characters. State
politics and the struggle for power are brought to an individual level, emphasizing the
effects they have upon the construction of the self.
Kushner’s position can therefore be integrated in a category of works of art charged with
a specific political message. Regardless of the nuances of this message, I find it relevant
to discuss the features of politically committed art and the trajectory of aesthetics and
politics (Section 1). Section 2 of the paper analyzes the play focusing on the issue of
masculinity – standard imagery attributed to men, challenges faced and stereotypes
countered by Kushner’s characters. The last part of the paper narrows down the

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discussion to each of the main male homosexual figures constructed throughout the play,
in the attempt of validating my argument.
1. Political Art – the politics of the self
The focal area of human experience and cultural development can be found at the
intersection of empirical experience and individual and communal projections of this
experience. Within a phenomenological frame of understanding humanity, making sense
of one’s self and constructing one’s identity is virtually impossible without integrating
the Self in a wider area of knowledge and perception. Human consciousness and
experience are thus seen as a multitude of intentional movements toward something, the
exterior of one’s own body, the Other as both non-Self and surface of projecting the Self.
In this understanding, art plays an essential role, since it is one of the basic ways in which
the non-biological Self of individuals can communicate with the exterior. Primitive
communities managed to develop by satisfying certain needs of the individual, needs that
were biologically and physiologically prescribed, but it also attributed an area to
aesthetics – cave wall paintings, dating thousands of years back, are proof of the
emerging influence of art (regardless of its complexity) as a manner in which individuals
can manifest their intentionality and need of attesting their existence, since “the body
image is a way of stating that [one’s] body is in-the-world”, as Merleau-Ponty writes
(Csordas, 2011; 139). It is clear how the relation between aesthetics and individual
existence and experience historically developed to the point of fusion; daily activities and
encounters with objects of immediacy needed to satisfy, apart from their mere
functionality, an aesthetic standard as well. Concepts such as aesthetically pleasant or
beautiful became part of the matrix of consciousness within societies, and were even

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transformed into signs of virtue and moral value. However, another essential relation
when discussing art and social existence is the relation between aesthetics and politics.
There are countless theoretical frames that regard the realm of politics and each of them
offers a specific definition for politics.
The way I understand politics and the politically defined features of the socio-cultural
milieu of a certain period of time has to do with the struggle stimulated by two or more
poles (individuals or more complex social entities), each of which defending its own
status and attempting at manifesting its own power over the other. Although this may not
be the customary way of defining politics, since I did not placed the state (the modern
main subject of political power) at the core of it, I believe it reflects most of human
actions, intentions and structures upon which individuals ground their consciousness. One
common understanding of the relation between aesthetics and politics regard the potential
that art has in supporting political propaganda; the need a political regime has to shape
the perspective of a population resides with this potential. In the chase for power,
political structures may attempt at controlling the cultural arena of a community, and the
aesthetic norms constitute a well chosen starting point. However, “the relation of
aesthetics and politics is tighter than this might suggest, and the function of the arts as
propaganda of domination or of resistance does not nearly exhaust the political
significance of the arts.” (Sartwell, 2010). Although art can be seen as representation and
even construction of a regime, it can also be employed as a tool of resistance, of revolt, of
protest from the part of those groups of individuals that manage to escape or challenge
the politically dictated shaping of their identities. This is particularly the case for the
modern and contemporary period, when resistance became inherent to the political

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phenomena carried by those who seek to impose their power: “But aesthetics is not only a
central arena in the construction and imposition of power. It is central also to resistance”
(Sartwell, 2010). Consequently, a political regime consists of all its aesthetic
embodiments, be they favorable or resistant. The United States’ liberal democracy, for
example, has been reinforced during the 20th
century’s social and cultural resistance and
liberation movements; the cultural productions of the time are symbols of this close
connection between the socio-political arena and the artistic account of it, which echoes
history decades after the events: “during the ‘90s, all art is political and art criticism is
political analysis” (Sartwell, 2010).
Not only is art the perfect medium of recording history and restaging it for remote
audiences (in time or space), but it also plays a central role within the sphere of protest
itself. The need to aestheticize protest is part of a tendency to integrate the revolt into the
normative, by means of cultural production. An interesting phenomenon takes place at
this point: politically engaged art (textual or non-textual) takes on a fairly abrupt
“rejection of the Universal” (Krümmel, 2010) and is integrated into a particular social
agenda of contemporary art, rather than an aesthetic one (McKee, 2012). As Clemens
Krümmel suggests, at this point there must be discerned between “political art”, “critical
art” and “activist art”. I will not focus on the differences between these concepts, but on
their commonalities, that have to do, in my perspective, with the way individuals subject
them to one purpose: construction of identity and selfhood. It is, in other words, an
instance of the struggle I mentioned before, the race of imposing power, only in this case,
individuals seek to manifest their power in relation to whatever the outside of their Self
is; it is a case of asserting one’s own identity, while calling established power and roles

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into question. In Adorno’s words, we are dealing with “committed political art”, infused
with certain desires and expectations that cannot be satisfied only at the level of
aesthetics.
Artists like Kara Walker1
, LaToya Ruby Frazier2
or Glenn Ligon3
encode their works
with a specific discourse, one that overtly seeks to trigger attention and social stance
against practices labeled as undesirable for the contemporary American society. Art
becomes a means to an end; themes and symbols employed esthetically are expected to
produce more than mere emotions. Particular groups, considered marginalized, become
communicative cores for the discourse of art; moreover, this discourse contains, besides
the work of art, many other elements: the artist’s biographical details, mode of
production, distribution and consumption. The singular body of the work of art is no
longer enough to ensure its success as a vocal instrument in the power struggles; modern
and contemporary art needs to self-consciously claim some of the most stringent issues of
the social milieu and integrate them, and offer the aesthetic frame in which political
themes may evolve and reach the publics. Towards the end of the 20th
century, art
criticism shifted from seeing art as “an outlet from capitalist reification that allowed it to
satisfy residual needs” (Doane, 2004) to seeing art through the lens of mimetic
representation, inherent to the cultural context: “Fragmentation in art was perceived as a
true or accurate representation of fragmentation in everyday life” (Doane, 2004). This
form of understanding artistic experience makes it easier to legitimize the process of
considering artistic emotion and drive as synonymous with political belief and
commitment to social causes of marginalized groups. Among the issues of race and
1
Artist’s official web-page: http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker
2
Artist’s official web-page: http://www.latoyarubyfrazier.com/
3
Interview with the artist: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/glenn-ligon/#_

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feminine affirmation, homosexuality represented such a cause during the rise of
modernism and avant-garde in American culture.
During the first half of the century, homosexuality transparent in works of art may have
been frowned upon by the critics and raised questions regarding the autonomy of the
work of art. The art of Charles Demouth4
(1883 – 1935), for instance, represented a
rupture within the frame of defining male homosexuality at the beginning of the century.
In a time where homosexuality was explained mainly by invoking medical disorders,
clinical sexual inversion and psychological distress, Demouth escaped, through his art,
this dominant discourse: “such clinical discourses did not coincide with popular
knowledge or individual self-conception of sexual identity at the time” (Meyer, 1994).
The artist used a certain area of his account of the world to add something to the body of
work partly representing a protest. This stands as an example of the clash between power
poles within a given society: in this case, on the issue of defining one’s own sexual
identity, the struggle is between the freedom of the individual’s self-perception and the
vectors of normative structures of the society. It is a liberation strategy, a way of refusing
the normative texts ascribed by an exterior (questionable) authority and generating a
personal (resistant), discourse – a visual one, in Demouth’s case.
Late twentieth-century artistic account of homosexuality in the American society can be
analyzed through the lens of political engagement, which took the shape of a struggle
against established social norms. By the last decades of the century, homosexuality and
the AIDS epidemics became closely linked in the public discourse, the conservative
political scene of the time having no intention of eliminating the highly questionable
synonymy between the two. Again from the panoply of works of visual art on this
4
See Annex for examples of Charles Demouth’s works.

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subject, David Wojnarowicz5
(1954 – 1992) can be regarded as another art-activist, one
of the first gay American artists to respond to the crisis around the AIDS epidemics.
Comparing his works with those early in the century, it is clear that, beyond the mere
need of affirmation of sexual identity and sense of Self, Wojnarowicz and many other
artists of his generation employed in his works a great deal of anger, outrage, turning his
art into a polemical instrument, a tool with which to point to those social and political
structures he deemed responsible for the suffering and tragedy of AIDS.
2. Angels in America
Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” examines the labels attached to the gay
community especially during the Reagan administration years. As I said, one of the most
striking illegitimate associations of the period was the one of homosexuality with disease,
especially with AIDS, all imagery on the issue being surrounded by the idea of a
degrading lifestyle and loss of true American values centered on the heterosexual family
as an epitome of a healthy society.
Kushner’s epic play abounds with symbols of resistance, all within a political frame,
defined by ambivalence and binary imagery: “Angels in America” valorizes identity
politics while building an “anti-foundationalist critique against identity politics” (Savran,
1995); the play questions the ideologies of individualism, but it also investigates the ideal
of community. Kushner combines chaos and disease with irony and a comic tone,
comedy with tragedy, making all succumb to the liberating effect of revelation. “Angels
in America” represents a mixture of fantasy and realism, in which theological and
mythological narratives interweave, yet a strong sense of political presence and
5
See Annex for examples of David Wojnarowicz’ work.

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contemporary issues makes it impossible for the reader/viewer not to identify and easily
relate tot the reconstruction in fantasy of the battles and struggles on the political scene.
Throughout the play, Kushner creates powerful scenes (both visually and textually)
where the two poles of American politics of the time – liberals and Reagan conservatives
– come together, entering spaces outside time, neglecting the “materiality of history”
(Savran, 1995), and constructing their Identity using only the tension between their own
bodies and the Other’s. Although the play may be analyzed applying a reading of binaries
and dualities, Kushner keeps his characters outside any opposing moral categories –
demonical figures such as Roy Cohn or individuals guilty of cowardice and betrayal such
as Louis Ironson are not portrayed by means of stereotype as inherently antagonistic, but
are offered the liberty of affirming their individual account in the general quest for
identity, free of any moral hierarchy. The true villains of the story are represented by the
conformity, hypocrisy, lack of tolerance, homophobia, racism and bigotry of the
conservative Reagan Era.
Kushner focuses his “work of dramatic fiction” on the political struggle and the dynamics
of oppression revolving around differences of race, gender and political orientation. From
a liberal political standpoint, Kushner develops a dialectic of Utopia and Dystopia, a
binary reading of politics, which eventually leads to a synthesis, the revelation, the
approaching New Millennium, cured of the disastrous pathologising of individuals. The
political is thus integrated into the utopian fantasy “Angels in America” proposes with its
mixture of Absurdism and Brechtian alienation (Savran, 1995). The central argument of
this paper is that Kushner’s play is – besides being a voice of revolt and polemic – the
battlefield of an equally complex, more abstract problematic: images, symbols and tropes

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of constructing and defining modern masculinity. The common fragmentation of the
discourse on sexuality, race and gender that characterized the second half of the last
century enabled the same fragmentation in the process of defining, understanding and
reproducing a cohesive image of masculinity. This rupture, I believe, was enhanced by
the highly visible polemics that surrounded the male homosexual status; not only did this
produced a social crisis, emphasized by the horror of AIDS, but also at an individual
level it led to a crisis of identity, a struggle of men caught between the essentialist
prescriptions of their gender (strength, dominancy), the normative definition of their
bodily Selves (male reproductive role) and the tendencies of their own sexuality,
sometimes against the norm. Kushner underlines the one-sidedness of Reagan
conservative view as to what “a true American” is and what groups of individuals are
allowed to be defined by genuine American features. Incidentally, the gay community
was subjugated to a series of stereotypically charged process of social labeling, compared
against an ideal of manhood and heterosexual masculinity that need to be protected.
Defining homosexuality as a challenge to a healthy society revolving around the ideal of
heterosexual family is contested by Kushner, who offers an alternative to the “pretend
happy” standardized by the conservative social norm: a “union by dissensus”, “the post-
nuclear family” (Freedman, 1998), a new sense of community that counters the
“politically charged homophobia” of the Reagan years (Piggford, 2000). Kushner has his
character – Prior Walter – announce this “Utopian Americanness” (Piggford, 2000) in the
Epilogue of his the play: “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time
has come”. There is hope and optimism in this image, in reverse of that announced by
Rabbi Chemelwitz in the beginning of the play: “Such voyages do not anymore exist”.

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The male homosexual experience of the last decades of the twentieth century can be seen
as a corporeo-ontological statement of a late modern masculinity, perpetually stepping
outside the boundaries of pre-set indicators of manhood, in the quest for identity. Tony
Kushner uses the masculine body as a nuclear unit in his play, the visual and tangible
incorporation of a political struggle, a social crisis and a rise of individuality. Again
blending into a post-modern milieu, Kushner has his characters go through specific
processes of fragmentation while trying to define their identities: homosexuality and
power (Roy Cohn), homosexuality and ethnicity (Louis), homosexuality and conservative
religion (Joe Pitt), homosexuality and disease (Prior). Each of these conceptual pair
revolves around specific power practices and clashes that the characters experience, their
bodies giving them “a sense of being in the world with others” (Barron, Bradford, 2007).
Embodiment is thus central to the construction of identity in late modern American
society, and also a characteristic of consumer modernity, where the body is both a
receptacle and a source of symbolic capital. The “gay body” becomes essential in the
construction of gay identity, the starting point in the individual’s own mode of perceiving
his Self, in the space between his own bodily experience and the others: “The body is
accorded particular significance in late or high modernity as it is increasingly subject to
regimes of self-control and self-surveillance (rather than being disciplined externally)”
(Barron, Bradford, 2007). Kushner’s male characters manage to escape the socio-political
labels ascribed to them and to counter the common imagery surrounding the gay body.
The illness is essential in this scenario since it allows Kushner question the basis of
considering the disease, in this case – the AIDS malady, a manifestation of the Self. This
Cartesian perspective on the individual seemed to empower some of the conservatives

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principles at the core of the process of defining the ideal individual: bodily illness became
the sign of a diseased mind and a sinful life. This social determinism and cultural
constructivism that characterized that period of time manifested a great influence on the
need for self-affirmation; since “bodies cannot be reduced to socially constructed forms
of meaning” (Barron, Bradford, 2007), Kushner’s characters enter individual struggles of
acquiring a sense of who they are. As such, Kushner’s play has its gay male characters
face two major components of corporeality – gender and metabolism (Csordas, 2011;
147). The interaction among sex, gender and sexuality is prevailing; elements and signs
of “sexual difference” (as Luce Irigaray sees the concept) help eliminate the duality
“same and other”, and rather acknowledges the multitude of “differents”; In “Angels in
America”, Prior’s oneiric experience is an example of how the duality subject-object in
the process of sexual embodiment may be eliminated and in its stead introduced a regime
of “different subjects or subjectivities” (Csordas, 2011; 144). Although already part of a
fight the conservative social norms launched against the challenges to masculinity, this is
a way of how male homosexuals may attack the structures on which “negative images of
gay body as well as negatively constructed gay body practices” are based. (Barron,
Bradford, 2007). The main pressure for gay male individuals in a conservative society is
to confirm their social status as men. Again, the attributes of masculinity are socially and
culturally inscribed, and the male body becomes a battlefield for those who try counter
these inscriptions. As Goffman observes (Barron, Bradford, 2007), “the visual” is o great
importance in a discursively constituted reality, since it has the power of reinforcing and
reaffirming facts of reality (desired, prescribed).

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In this sense, homosexuality and visual indicators of a transgressive sexual identity
(weakness, effeminacy, signs of disease, behavior labeled unmanly) are clearly
understood as a threat to masculinity. Moreover, homosexuality is seen as a danger to the
public status gained through sexual embodiment, a status that reflects the male
reproductive role, essential in defining masculinity: “having a penis, being able to
sexually penetrate and produce offsprings” (Wentzell, InHorn, 2011; 308). Kushner’s
Mormon couple – Joe and Harper – articulates some of these issues, through their barren,
childless marriage. Joe is portrayed as an agent of Conservatism, a gay men in self-
denial, who enables his own fragmentation, in what seems to be a paradoxical self-
destructive projection of his identity: “Does it make any difference? That I might be one
thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought
with everything I have to kill it. … There’s nothing left, I’m a shell. There’s nothing left
to kill. As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. “(Kushner, 1;8). Normative
instances of identity replace the genuine experience of the Self, and this is what Kushner
critiques; if, as Roy’s doctor affirms, “sometimes the body attacks itself”, Joe is an
example of how a mindset may just as well attack the body, and itself, by complying with
the requests of an empty, conservative norm. Discussing the construction of identity as an
acknowledged personal enterprise, Joe is an example of how the “projective nature” of
the experience of the Self works; as Paul Ricœur writes, the experience of the
individual’s self is part of the experience of Otherness; the same and the other become
one, the individual perceives his own embodied existence as part of his identity, but also
the presence of the other, essential in drawing the line and setting the limits of one’s own
identity. (Ricœur, 2007; 263). For Roy Cohn neglecting the non-desireable gay Otherness

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as part of himself – “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (1;9); for Joe,
on the other hand, this self-denial, although not connected to the horror of suffering from
AIDS, it is just as damaging.
As I discussed earlier, one feature of the conservative discourse on homosexuality had to
do with the connection of homosexuality and AIDS, almost impossible to combat. The
public discourse ignored almost completely other modalities of reporting on the
syndrome and centered on the assumed connection between homosexuality and morbidity
and sodomy: “AIDS theorists of the 1980s and 1990s closely associated the dis-courses
of the syndrome with cultural perceptions of homosexuality; AIDS is seen in many
theoretical texts as a horrifying literalization of the disease that homosexuality is already
perceived to be in homo-phobic discourses” (Piggford, 2000; 172). A socio-political
conservative agenda was applied to the phenomenon, a discourse infused with politically
motivated decisions, medically misleading facts led to the point of AIDS being
“sexualized, gendered, racialized, ethnicized” (Piggford, 2000; 172). From a pre-modern
understanding of the syndrome in which AIDS is seen as “incomprehensible” and
obscure (Susan Sontag), common knowledge shifted to a post-modern depiction of the
reality of the syndrome, one textually constructed. As such, the signifier “AIDS” needed
to be culturally deployed and attributed a discursive existence. In this case, “the
distinction between body and text tends to blur” (Piggford, 2000), a situation emphasized
by Kushner through his Roy Cohn character: “Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung
up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS.
Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps
with, but they don’t tell you that.” (Kushner, 1;9). Here, Kushner takes his character out

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of the hard-core conservative frame of mind, suggesting that personal experience may be
a way of escaping ideology. Roy Cohn deconstructs the system of signs that attempts to
suppress his will of power and reaffirms himself and his unique way of perceiving his
masculinity: “Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys” (1;9).
The element that made the connection of homosexuality with AIDS easier regards the
visibility of the disease. In this sense, visualization means that the codes attributed to
homosexuals are highlighted, associated with instances of body movement and
appearance, which enhanced by a conservative tendency to stigmatize, help introduce a
modern kind of panopticism (M. Foucault). Moreover, the infected, suffering bodies, as a
result of AIDS, are brought to attention by the same structures of preconceived politically
charged realities, sustained by medical authority. As with the tendency to racialize AIDS
(considered by many as a syndrome specific to African population,; Fassin, 2011),
another process of illegitimate association visually sustained was represented by the
identification of Kaposi Sarcoma lesions. The skin is the a place of projection, the are
that makes the world tangible for the body, and it is for this reason an interface for
identity and the embodied experience of selfhood. Again in the discourse on
homosexuality and illness, these lesions became more than external signs of a medical
condition, but social indicators of sexual promiscuity, decaying masculinity and
undesirable social status: “the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death” as Prior describes his
lesions. In a Lacanian perspective, these exterior, highly visible traces of a disease and
ascribed sexual identity represent the core elements of the phenomenon of “the gaze”: the
“American leisonnaire” is now aware of the other’s gaze upon him; he sees them see him
and therefore sees himself as they see him. This is another segment of the process of

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identity construction and self-affirming of masculinity employed by Kushner male
homosexual characters.
Particular stories, one narrative
This section discusses the particular stories of Kushner’s main male characters in “Angels
in America”. As I previously said, Roy Cohn, Prior Walter, Louis Ironson and Joe Pitt are
nodal points in a nexus of relations that develop within a specific political structure, but
also represent individual enclaves, cultural and psychological territories, parts of Kushner
fiction that allow him to investigate different angles of the issues he addresses. In
discussing different aspects related to the characters, I will use specific scenes from the
HBO film version of the play.
Prior Walter is a central figure in the play; his story makes for an attempt at humanizing
what would otherwise be an abject body. Kushner creates his disease as a disruption –
both in his relationship with Louis, and in his very being; a dismantling effect is produced
on his identity, to the point where he seeks recollection with himself inside a dream. His
body is the carrier of a message on illness and the liminality of AIDS, both in medical
terms and in the social understanding of the phenomenon. As one of the scenes in the
film version shows6
, Prior embodies abjection, the undesirable effects of illness; the
hidden morphology of the syndrome becomes visible through his bodily experience,
exteriorizing the pathology, in a symbolic attempt of cleansing the interior space of his
being, “the most inner part, entirely free of disease” (1;7). Employing the ambivalence
already characteristic for this play, Kushner uses here the duality body-soul/mind/inner
self in order to critique it; if the conservative view separates the body and the mind and
6
See Annex 1, Capture 1 for the scene where Prior crawls on a corridor, covered in bodily fluids and
infected blood he advises Lois not to touch.

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sees the bodily illness as an infliction of a metaphysical disease, Kushner keeps the
distinction but offers an Utopian alternative in which the mind can also cleanse the body.
Prior is also subjected to a crisis in his sexual identity. Again, his body is the screen for
this crisis to be projected. In a visually elaborate film version of Prior’s dream conjoined
with Harper’s hallucination, some symbols of this crisis are clearly underlined. While
entering his dream, Prior walks along another corridor, where statues showing strong
male arms come to life (Annex, 1, Capture 2). In a scene again of Lacanian inspiration,
Prior sees himself dressed as a woman, a drag queen (Annex1, Capture 3). Sexual
difference meets gender difference as the issues this scene seeks to explore. Prior
experiences the phenomenon of looking “away from his own body in order to find his
gender” (Blackwood, 2011; 207).
As an investigation of normative masculinity, it is clear here that Prior is placed by
Kushner at the limits of his gender identity. His body is required to “affirm cultural
expectations of masculinity, by showing reliable signs and prescribed body
characteristic” (Blackwood, 2011; 208). The fact that Prior is able to give shape to these
non-normative gender expressions only in a dream suggests again Kushner’s critique
against the conservative society. His dream and Harper’s hallucination portray Prior still
sick, but no exterior expressions of the disease are present, as an attempt of the play to
“move the human condition from abject to sublime”(Lather, 1995). The self-surveillance
imagery created by Kushner in this scene suggests a struggle against objectification
carried by male homosexuals during the Reagan Era; Prior is both subject and object of
his own gaze, in an attempt of settling his subjectivity.

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At the level of desires and Utopian scenario, Kushner allows Prior to give shape to his
sexual “Other”; as part of the same social critique, the Other here has a woman’s exterior
characteristics. Following this line of argument, some critics attribute the feminine
appearance of the Angel to ”Prior’s released female essence”(Savran, 1995).
Prior is a symbol of the contradictory human nature, carrier of both premature ending and
Utopian assimilation of marginal social groups into one community of unlabeled
“citizens”. The ambivalence that characterizes him rests also with the genders tensions he
experiences in the search for his authentic self-affirmed definition of masculinity.
Roy Cohn is another remarkable character in Kushner’s play. Based on the real life Roy
Cohn (1927-1986), victim of AIDS7
and important political player, Kushner’s Roy Cohn
embodies dystopia, homophobia, individualism, Reaganism, echoes of McCarthy Era.
His experience is also tangible to the search of identity, although, as opposed to Prior,
Roy Cohn tries to maintain an already solid mental perception of himself. Through this
character, Kushner investigates the foucauldian conceptual pair power-knowledge with
relation to sexuality. As Foucault writes, “relations of power are immanent in other types
of relationships”, including sexual ones (Foucault, 1978; 94). For Ray Cohn,
homosexuality as transgression of social norms means loss of power; his self-denial,
unlike Joe’s, has nothing to do with the need of being tolerated, but with the pragmatic
desire for power: “homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are
men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound
like me, Henry?” (1;9).
Roy Cohn is aware of the powerful discursive reality surrounding the phenomenon of
AIDS and is ready to give rise to a counter-discourse, applying his own process of
7
Roy Cohn received a square in the AIDS Quilt (See Annex 2)

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naming and labeling his bodily experience: “AIDS is for homosexuals. I have liver
cancer.” (1;9). He masters the processes of ascription and recognition afferent to identity
construction and attempts to reaffirm his sense of Self as a man through performance. In
the end, Roy Cohn is the element that needs to be sacrificed so that Kushner’s Utopian
liberal pluralism to prevail.
Joe Pitt is another character whose life abounds with elements of crisis and denial
revolving around his sexuality. Joe develops a phobia of the self, emptying his own
identity, which is not resonant to the social standards to which he subscribes. Joe is
defined by a sense of obeying norms and adopting a conservative rationale, which finally
lead him to being the one inflicting suppression on his sexuality. Again, the social
pressure is inherent to his status: he is a man, a husband, active member of a church, all
of which are elements of a normative other he acknowledges in the process of smothering
his homosexual tendencies. The body-mind duality is present in his construction also: he
gets an ulcer, as a psycho-somatic response to a conduct he considers to be questionable,
despite natural. Once again, the body finds a way to attack himself. Joe’s male
homosexual portrayal is a depiction of Reagan conservatism almost organically inscribed
into one’s own individuality: human nature is politicized, sex and health are rationalized
beyond limits, and ultimately affecting the very individual they try to mold.
Louis is the emblem of cowardice and refusal. His relationship with Prior ends once Prior
experiences the hardest part of his disease. Louis is also caught in the midst of an identity
crisis – he refuses in Prior what it may be possible for him as well. Nevertheless, Kushner
offers him the same ambivalence he offered to the other characters, this is why the finds
himself having sex with a stranger: “Keep going. Infect me. I don’t care, I don’t care”

20. 20
(1;4). Louis is also a symbol of ambivalence about “jewishness”, the connection between
the Jewish Other and the sexual other. As Freedman suggests, Kushner attempts to map
all the places where the sexually deviant and the Jew Other meet as a way of creating a
sense of community, albeit Utopian, where invested norms proclaim disruption.
In conclusion, Kushner’s play may be considered a work of art that undertakes a tone of
protest, employing signs and symbols of a revolt within an established order. Kushner’s
characters manifest as individual poles of power, entering a struggle for their own
identity. Homosexual men in an age of homophobia manage to rise from the status of
objects of the Other’s critical gaze and construct their own subjectivity, through
experience, performance, disease and revelation.

21. 21
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Other Sources:
 Charles Demouth, Turkish Bath with Self Portait, available on
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Demuth_Charles_Turkish_Bath_with_Self_Portrait_1918.jpg
 Charles Demouth, My Egypt, available at http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/modernart/large/29.jpg
 David Wajnarowicz, Untitled, 1991, available at
http://www.harkeyahh.com/harkgall/David%20Wojnaro/5faceLg.jpg
 Roy Cohn AIDS Quilt Square, available at http://ahistoryofnewyork.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/cohn-aids-
quilt-480x326.png
 Stills from HBO production Angels in America, 2003

22. 22
Annex 1, Capture 1 :
Annex 1, Capture 2:

23. 23
Annex1, Capture 3:

24. 24
Annex2
1. Charles Demouth (1883 -1935)
Turkish Bath with Self Portrait, 1916
My Egypt, 1927

25. 25
2. David Wojnarowicz
Untitled, 1991
3. Roy Cohn – AIDS Quilt Square