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1. TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY
ACROSS AN UNMAPPED TERRAIN: SEXUALITY IN TONY KUSHNER’S
ANGELS IN AMERICA
A thesis submitted to the Central Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Arts in English
By
Madhav Prasad Kafle
Central Department of English
Kirtipur, Kathmandu
February 2006

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TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
This thesis titled " Across an Unmapped Terrain: Sexuality in Tony
Kushner’s Angels in America, " submitted to the Central Department of English,
Tribhuvan University, by Madhav Prasad Kafle has been approved by the
undersigned members of the Research Committee.
Members of the Research Committee
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
________________________
Internal Examiner
________________________
External Examiner
________________________
Head
Central Department of English
Date: ________________________

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present dissertation would have been impossible to emanate in this form
without the vision and guidance of Dr. Sanjeev Uprety, Lecturer, Central Department
of English. Words fail to communicate my heartfelt indebtedness for not only the rare
materials but genuine insight provided by my ‘guru’ unwary of the chilly mornings in
Maligaun for the present work.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to Prof. Chandra Prakash Sharma,
the Head, Central Department of English for providing me an opportunity to work on
this subject. I am equally grateful to Prof. Dr. Shreedhar Lohani, Prof. Dr. Abhi
Subedi and Prof. Dr. Padma Devkota for their precious suggestions and
recommendations. Many thanks are due to my teachers: Mr. Sajag Rana, Dr. Arun
Gupto, Dr. Birendra Pandey, Dr. Krishna Chandra Sharma, Devi Gautam, Baikuntha
Poudel, Sharad Chandra Thakur, Anju Gupta, Tika Lamsal, Toya Subedi and Hari
Adhikari for their continuous encouragement. Special gratitude goes to my teachers
Rajendra Panthi and Hem Sharma for supplying me essential materials.
I owe my profoundest debts of gratitude to Mr. John Schappi whose constant
guidance, talents and friendship have been indispensable. Thanks John for equipping
me with required materials, including criticism, both published and movie version of
the text and your unending succor. I feel myself lucky to have a friend like Ramesh
Pariyer, who always cheers me up to hold my head high.
Finally, family and friends I wish to thank are my parents: Jiba Nath and
Buddhi Maya Kafle; brothers: Surya, Kashi and Bishnu; sisters: Laxmi and Chandra
Pun; and friends: Bal Bahadur Thapa, whom I owe a lot, Kedar Shrestha, Dilli
Timilsina, Padam Giri, Shukra Tripathi, Mahendra Pandit and my maternal relatives
who invested a lot on my elementary education. Many thanks to Mr. Rabindra
Maharjan of University Computer Service for efficient typing and printing of the
present dissertation.
February 2006 Madhav Prasad Kafle

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ABSTRACT
Tony Kushner’s treatment of sexuality in Angels in America defies the binary
opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, by presenting, on the one
hand, the major characters with shifting sexual identities, and on the other, by
showing the characters performing outside the traditional dichotomies of masculinity
and femininity, thus showing that the binary norms are groundless and historically
contingent.

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract iv
I. INTRODUCTION 1
THE SPECTRUM OF SEXUALITIES 1
STYLES AND TECHNIQUES IN KUSHNER’S WORKS 6
SEXUALITY IN KUSHNER’S WORKS 11
II. READING AGAINST THE VISIBLE GRAIN: TRANSFORMATIONS AND
AFFIRMATIONS 16
INTERCONNECTION BETWEEN CONSTRUCTIONS OF NORMALCY AND STIGMA AND
SEXUALITY 16
FEMININITY AND MASCULINITY AS PERFORMANCE 23
DESTABILIZING THE BINARIES: SEXUALITY AS A FREE PLAY OF DESIRE 28
III. SWINGING ALONG THE CONTINUUM: CONSONANCE AMONG IDENTITIES 36
IMPACTS OF STIGMA AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ANGELS IN AMERICA 36
MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY AS CONTINUUM IN ANGELS IN AMERICA 42
PLAY OF DESIRE IN ANGELS IN AMERICA 47
IV. CONCLUSION 52
WORKS CITED 55

6. I. INTRODUCTION
The trend of pointing out the crisis in definition of categories that organize and
structure culture has now become almost an old story, though not a hoary one.
Obviously, the widely avowed inherent nature of the binary opposition–the system of
privileging one of the poles of the opposition at the expense of the other–has invited
the crisis of such categories which are structured by such oppositions themselves.
Among many terms that have shaped the culture, especially Western, the binary of
homo-/hetero-sexual identity has been claimed as being one of the master terms,
especially from the beginning of the late nineteenth century by a significant number
of theorists. The present dissertation is an attempt to show the futility of the very
binary in Tony Kushner’s towering two-play epic Angels in America.
THE SPECTRUM OF SEXUALITIES
Recent critical studies on “sexuality,” undoubtedly, have to deal with it as a
category consisting of wide range of sexualities rather than only a monolithic
heterosexual one. The traditional formula of ‘normative’ heterosexuality, it seems, has
erased the historiographies of many people or groups whose sexual behavior define
such norm. Contemporary studies on sexuality seek to describe these repressed
historiographies, and these “other” sexualities that were ignored or denied by
traditional scholars. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
among many others, have illustrated and emphasized the shift–worthwhile to be
noted–from sexual behavior to sexual identity with the commencement of modern
practice of putting mortals into either/or camp of sexuality from nineteenth century
onwards. In his influential The History of Sexuality, volume one, Foucault thus argues
that homosexuality and homosexuals date from the 1870s. Foucault argues:

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The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case
history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form,
and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a
mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition
was unaffected by his sexuality […] Homosexuality appeared as one of
the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of
sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the
soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual
was now a species. (43)
Foucault, however, does not mean to say that sexual acts that we refer to as
homosexual acts were unknown before the 1870s. Rather, such behaviors already had
a long rich history and as Sedgwick comments, “What was new from the turn of the
century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was
necessarily assignable to a male or female gender, was now considered necessarily
assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality […]” (2). This shift, obviously,
was a political one. In the name of maintaining morality, the society exerted a set of
limitations by constructing parameters of normalcy. It is interesting to note the use of
concept of ‘normalcy’ in the modern sense and its connection to the act of rendering
sexualities other-than-hetero-sexualities as deviant. Though early Christianity had
adopted anti-sexuality–as different from the sexual permissiveness of Hellenistic
times–as its major tenet, watertight classification of individuals into heterosexuals and
homosexuals occurred only in the late nineteenth century. The then bourgeoisie, by
making use of what Foucault calls deployment of ‘technologies of power’, was able to
make that arbitrary imposition of hetero/ homo division in seemingly natural ways,
which, in turn made hetero-desire a compulsion.

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No area was exempt from this strict regulation and policing of sexuality,
whether that be medical, legal, judicial, academic, or any other for that matter.
Classical psychoanalysis, for instance, simply takes heterosexuality for granted. So, is
the case with mainstream feminists; even though, sexuality and literature related to it
or representing it had first become an issue within the very movement. The
mainstream feminist contention of sexuality as a construction of patriarchy would not
satisfy the radical/lesbian feminists, for whom there was no less oppression within the
movement. In similar fashion, gay liberation movements–notably after Stonewall riots
in 1969–developed collective activism, openly affirming what they were. Many gays,
who were in ‘closets’ due to the rigorous sexual taxonomy of individuals, ‘came out’
only then.
Along with Foucault, Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist contribution of
deconstructive strategies, has similarly disclosed the credibility of the spectrum of
sexualities, demarcating “the insecure divisions between male and female, femininity
and masculinity, heterosexual and homosexual, friend and sodomite”(337), as Rachel
Adams and David Savran ascribe in introductory part of The Masculinity Studies
Reader. Since all such terms are historically contingent, talking only of homosexuals
and heterosexuals, for example, is not only insufficient to refer to conscious or
unconscious performances such as “queen, dyke, butch, transsexual, nelly, femme,”
(Chinn, 295) but absurd also, as the system of constructing such binaries is less a
condition of human nature than it is a feature of certain kind of society. If something
can be constructed upon some grounds, by the same token, the pendulum may swing
to the other side also to deconstruct that which was once constructed.
Binaries, such as Adams and Savran mention, especially their traditional
formulaic referential significance, are inefficacious to include the dynamic range of

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sexual desire and multiple identities. At present, the terms ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and
‘sexuality’ often blur into each other in a complicated way. ‘Sex’ not only refers to
what Sedgwick calls ‘chromosomal sex’ but to the cultural expectations of male and
female, namely masculinity and femininity. ‘Gender’ again fares the same schema, as
due to the hardcore imposition of masculine/feminine qualities, individuals are forced
to act accordingly. If gender was not limited to the logic of the binary, sexuality
would also be able to cater to wider range of other repressed or unacknowledged
desires and practices. Moreover ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ also overlap, as Sedgwick
clarifies:
[…] the whole realm of what modern culture refers to as ‘sexuality’
and also calls ‘sex’–the array of acts, expectations, narratives,
pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledge, in both women and
men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital
sensations but is not adequately defined by them–that realm is virtually
impossible to situate on a map delimited by the feminist defined
sex/gender distinction. (29)
Sexuality, thus, can be seen as a fluid category, which incorporates not only concrete
and real activities but ruminations, fantasies, and what-not. Moreover, due to the
individual differences it is very hard to define a precise boundary of sexuality. Even
identical sexual acts may mean very different things to different people. Many people
may even have richest mental or emotional involvement with sexual acts they do not
do, or which they even do not want to do. Thus, the homo-/hetero-opposition turns out
to be overtly constricting in this regard.
Rather than viewing masculinity/femininity or homo-/hetero-sexuality as
dyads of binary oppositions, they must be taken as performative variations. Needless

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to explicate, the structure of their ‘constructedness’ modulates the performance in
such binary system. The subject can not perform according to it’s free will but acts
only by subjugating itself, because the performativity begins right from the moment
of birth with the remarks: “It’s a girl/boy.” The whole social matrix pullulates the age-
old system of performance even before the body can opt as a subject. Butler in her
introduction to Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” opines:
In the first stance, performativity must be understood not as a singular
or deliberate “act” but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice
by which discourse produces the effects that it names. […] the
regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute
the materiality of bodies and more specifically, to materialize the
body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the
consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. (2)
Such endemic impact of performance, though replicated in many forms, can be
denaturalized by bringing it into the forefront as a configuration of society. So, not
only performances such as ‘female masculinity’ as treated by Judith Halberstam in her
essay “An Introduction to Female Masculinity,” and ‘male femininity’ as discussed
by Don Kulick in “The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes” for example,
but a number of other back and forth and overlapping in variations are possible in the
uneven, heterogeneous terrain that we know as “sexuality.” In other words, the
binaries of homo-/hetero-sexuality and masculinity/femininity break and collapse into
one another to liberate an infinite possibilities of other “sexualiti(es).”
In a nutshell, rather than being embroiled in the accuracy of biological
essentialism versus historical constructivism regarding, sex, gender, and sexuality, it
would be more reasonable, as Sedgwick argues, to keep such understanding, and

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“cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argues-eyed, respectful
and endlessly cherished” (44). And as Garber’s concept “clothes make the man” in
her Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety also suggests, the concept
of male and female or masculinity and femininity and, by extension, sexuality, must
be viewed as an unstable historical and political construct in our societies and such an
awkward issue has continually to be revisited, disavowed, rediscovered, and
affirmed.
STYLES AND TECHNIQUES IN KUSHNER’S WORKS
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in the words of famous drama critic John
M. Clum, “marks a turning point in the history of gay drama, the history of American
drama, and of American literary culture” (324). Such a history shaping dramatist as
well as activist was born to a couple of classical musicians in New York in 1956.
Though Kushner felt attracted, as he later disclosed, at a young six to his male
Hebrew teacher, he “came out” only after his B.A. in 1978. Among many factors,
both his Jewishness and gayness equally contribute to the style and technique of his
works just as his relation with Carl Weber, his mentor and friend, did in directing
course of his career.
Politics, religion and sexuality seem the major themes of Kushner’s works,
and a sense of social responsibility looms large in almost all of his texts. Kushner
draws insights mainly from Brecht’s epic theater to underscore that feel of duty he felt
as an artist. An engagement with history, thus, gets profound significance in his
works. For Kushner, “the best stories are the ones you find in history” (Jacobus,
1634). In his book Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope, which examines all of
Kushner’s full-length, one-act, and adapted works, theater scholar, James Fisher notes

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about the Kushner’s way of representing typical moments of history, moments when
social change may erupt from unstable dynamism of fabric of every day:
Kushner found such a moment for Angels in the rise of the “neo-
conservatism” of the later twentieth century. Kushner seeks out similar
historical moments in all of his plays, finding them in the premodern
rise of capitalism in the late seventeenth century in Hydriotaphia or
The Death of Dr. Browne, in the collision of the old world shtetls of
Eastern Europe and the new technologies of the modern world in his
adaptation of the Yiddish theater classic A Dybbuk, in the Nazi party’s
seizure of power in 1930s Germany in A Bright Room Called Day, in
the American Deep South of the 1960s in Carline or Change, in the
collapse of the Soviet Union in Slavs! and in the struggles for survival
in the decaying American infrastructures of the late twentieth century
in Grim(m). (4)
Kushner’s characters are generally caught between two worlds: “one dying
and one being born” (Fisher, 9). Kushner’s treatment of history is thus inextricably
connected with concept of change. In other words, history for Kushner is not merely a
simple recounting of facts but is intricately bound to the personal, and can perhaps be
best understood through the experiences of ordinary individuals living through storm
of events, chaos and change. In both Angels; and Slavs!, Kushner’s play about the
collapse of the Soviet Union, theme of change is prominent. According to critic
Dixon, Kushner asks in both plays “‘How much is change possible and what kinds of
models for change and transformation do we have beyond the traumatic, beyond the
revolutionary […]’” (qtd. in Fisher, 97). In other words, history seems inevitably
recuperative for Kushner.

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Kushner’s activism is firmly tied to his art .He believes, as Fisher notes, “that
good politics can produce good aesthetics” (xiv). That’s why, Kushner has affinities
with the politics of ‘New Left’ and he has been a spokesperson for the marginalized
people “most noticeably gays and lesbians, Jews, socialists, agnostics, political
activists and artists […]” (Vorlicky, 1). His voice appeals to a wider audience that
ranges from people with transitional and immigrant experiences to others who feel
similarly dislocated in one or another way. In almost all of Kushner’s work such
characters are “caught in brutish, bellicose societies under siege,” writes critic Janis
B. Holm (502). Moreover, such characters who appear as the major ones in Kushner’s
plays “represent a mixed bag of classes, races, cultural backgrounds, and ideological
principles” (Fisher, 3). Similarly, according to Fisher, “fear of future, moral
uncertainty and a sense of inexplicable loss drives Kushner’s tormented and confused
characters in all of his plays” (148). While talking about Kushner’s adaptations, the
same critic comments about the dramatist’s “major women characters–Agnes in
Bright Room, Dome Dorothy in Hydriotaphia, Harper in Angels. Bunfila and
Katherina in Slavs–who find themselves living through social and personal stresses
beyond their capacity” (139). Thus, Kushner chooses characters mainly from so-
called marginal strata of the society.
The social commitment, noted earlier also, of Kushner’s works–and the
influence on him of writers such as William Shakespeare, Karl Marx, G.B. Shaw,
Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Tennessee Williams, among others–is evident
in several aspects of Kushner’s works. But, Kushner has a typically unique style of his
own as Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger in Approaching the Millennium
subtitled “Essays on Angels in America” note:

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Kushner’s play, implementing a ‘new’ genre that he calls Theater of
the Fabulous, enacts what might be termed a postmodern American
epic style in the theater. This style is reflected in the play’s two-part
(eight-act, seven-hour) form; in the complexity of its narrative
structure; in its mixing of everyday experience with the stuff of dreams
and fantasy; its interruption of the realistic mode by the “angelic” and
the metadramatic; in its commingling of dialogue with monologue,
diatribe, poetic and vatic voices. (2-3)
Similarly, virtually all reviewers have praised “Kushner’s mastery of
langauge, imaginative theatricalism, thematic ambition, and prophetic insights”
(Fisher, xiii). Kushner’s way of mingling reality and fantasy, which Holm terms
“magic theatrism,” to quote Fisher, “pushes the borders of realistic theater further by
combining fundamentally realistic characters and situations with ghosts, historical
displacement and outright fantasy to alter the way audience experience in character’s
ordinary lives” (58). Furthermore, Kushner is very skillful in weaving biographical
elements into a richly textured and complex web of fantasy and reality. Through such
merging of the real and the fantastic, Kushner portrays his usual collision of comic
and tragic moments in most of his plays.
While talking about techniques, critic Per Brask sees Kushner’s technique less
Brechtian than what others have claimed. For him Kushner’s works inspire
imagination than critical thinking, and, instead of using the concept of alienation
effect, which is often used to interpret Brecht, the term “imagination effect” (11) can
be used more productively to refer to Kushner’s impact on audiences. But in the view
of many critics, “Like George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, Kushner uses stage

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as a platform for social, political, and religious arguments, but in ways that neither
Shaw nor Brecht, nor any other American dramatist has” (Fisher, 3).
Finally, Kushner’s work has been praised for its outstanding thematic sweep
and emotional scope. Theme of love–a prominent theme in Angels–runs as a
significant thread through most of his plays. With a firm belief in progress, in
compassion, in transformative power of love, in true community, Kushner “provides
his audiences with strategies for living past old hopes and creating new ones” (Fisher,
xiv). This is not to claim that each and every critic acclaims Kushner’s works. It has
also come under the scrutiny of religious fundamentalists and some other critics
adopting a more suspicious gaze. Among these, as quoted by Montgomery in the
essay “Angels in America as Medieval Mystery,” are: “Arlene Croce, who includes
Angels as an instance of ‘victim art’, Leo Barsani, who finds the play ‘muddled and
portentious,’” (596) and Graham Dixon. Dixon in his essay “The Obscene Paradox:
Hope and Despair in Angels in America” sees more despair in Angels than hope, and
expresses his bleak view as “The final message is one of despair, the Great Work is
merely a repetitive cycle of anomie” (125). For David Savran, Kushner’s work has as
much positive qualities as it has flaws due to his utopian longings. Kushner’s work
has catapulted him to the forefront of American theater and earned him praise on
stages around the world–not to mention the numerous prizes including Pulitzer Prize
that he was awarded, and the fact that Angels has been produced in dozens of
countries around the world and translated into several languages, including Chinese.
That, according to Blanchard as quoted in Fisher, is because of his contention that “all
theater is political” (6) and a correspondingly permeating activism that is reflected in
his works.

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SEXUALITY IN KUSHNER’S WORKS
Kushner’s treatment of sexuality appears almost “queer”–to use the word in its
modern positive sense, that is, not as a deviation–in most of his works. The concept of
the queer, though, is not necessarily connected with sexual practices, as Adrian
Kienander’s definition makes clear: “anyone is at least a little bit queer who has ever,
even for a moment, fantasized about the possibility of engaging in sexual activity
which is not heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative and in the missionary
position” (qtd. in Olorensha, 78). Queer sexuality, according to Tyson, contends that
“our sexuality may be different at times over the course of our lives or even at
different times over the course of a week because sexuality is a dynamic range of
desire” (337). Kushner’s own position in representing sexuality, as quoted earlier as
well, is clearly marked by Angels’ momentous record “as a turning point in the history
of gay drama […]” (324), in the words of eminent drama critic John M. Clum. Angels
itself is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” Like its predecessors, it
openly features same-sex kissing scenes and sex scenes on the stage. Similar is the
case with his representation of the naked, gay body.
Resemblance between the depiction of homophobia and anti-Semitism, is
deeply rooted in most of Kushner's works. In the essay “Troubling the Waters” Fisher
proposes, following Alisa Solomon’s image of ‘the metaphorical Jew,’ that in many
of Kushner’s plays the symbol of ‘the metaphorical homosexual’ and ‘the
metaphorical Jew’ “provide an exploration of the profound and often contradictory
issues of otherness, assimilation, and oppression” (66). Similarly, critic Jonathan
Freedman, in his essay “Angels, Monsters and Jews: Intersections of Queer and
Jewish Identity in Kushner’s Angels in America,” explains, “Along with many other
projects, the play undertakes an extensive mapping of the place where figurations of

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the Jew meet figuration of sexual other, the deviant, the queer”(91). Similarly, in her
marvelous essay, “Wrestling with Angels: A Jewish Fantasia,” Alisa Solomon
examining the ways Kushner subverts these parallel myths, professes thus: “Kushner
audaciously declares new apocalyptic period, when the gay man with AIDS will
become the essential myth of the whole Western world. Kushner assigns Prior this
metaphoric role, as he does so by making him, in iconic terms, Jewish” (131). These
considerations clearly show how homosexuality and Jewishness, occur side by side in
Kushner’s works.
Though Tennessee Williams contributed significantly in introducing both gay
and straight sexual issues to the American stage, he did not venture to produce overtly
gay-themed plays–despite the subject of homosexuality and gay characters appearing
in his works. As different from his predecessor, however, Kushner does not hesitate to
produce works that are openly gay. According to Gerard Raymond, as quoted in
Fisher, Kushner says “I feel very proud that Angels is identified as a gay play. I want
it to be thought of as being part of gay culture, and I certainly want people to think of
me as a gay writer. It does also seem to speak very powerfully to straight people”(67).
So, it is not that Kushner incurs the limits of particularly gay audience. Rather, his
works constitute a wider appeal that invokes a multi-dimensional human sensibility
that appeals to a wider audience.
Since sexuality is constructed within a socio-political matrix, it is interesting
to note the convergence of the relationship between sexuality and power in both
Williams and Kushner. The present dissertation explores that relation in Angels in
depth. As is also true for Williams, not all or even most of Kushner’s plays are about
homosexuality. Even Angels, which is regarded a milestone in gay drama and in the
movement for gay rights and the war against AIDS, is not simply a gay play. It is

18. 13
about many facets of American life, of which sexuality and homophobia are ever
crucial though not the only issues. In the words of Fisher, “regardless of the
significance of a given character, sexuality informs Kushner’s work, much as it does
Williams’s. If Williams can be said to sexualize American drama, Kushner queers it
and the historical events he examines” (10).
Many critics, including the ones mentioned above, think that the Western
theater and theory is experiencing a shift from ‘gay and lesbian’ to ‘queer’. This shift,
it occurs to them, is exemplified by Angels. In this context, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch
Song Trilogy and Alex Hardings Only Heaven Knows, among others, might be seen as
exemplifying gay theater. Another genre of gay plays that deal with AIDS, such as
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, had already become hits preceding the publication
and performance of Angels. In his essay “Angels in Australia,” critic Ian Olorenshaw
describes the intersection between gay and queer sexuality as:
Angels is seen to illustrate the ever present and needful concept of
coming out, the conflict created through the binarism of sexuality,
'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' relationships, and most frankly AIDS.
It also plays with a limited sense of gender and sex distinction, an
ineffectuality of sexual identity, racial tension, class distinction,
fantasy, imagination and ‘national themes’ The epic presentation is
both ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’ (78)
Contrary to the concept of queer as a dynamic range of sexual desire, there are
some critics who view the queerness of the play as its limitation. For them such
portrayal is only utopian. As noted by Montgomery, David Savran, despite his
positive view regarding the play, in his essay “Ambivalence, Utopia and a Queer Sort
of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” “unravels the

19. 14
play’s ambivalences to show not only that it is seriously at odds with its own apparent
intentions, but that its immense popularity can be accounted for in the way it supports
the ‘binary oppositions’ of the status quo […]” (596). Thus, for Savran the queerness
in the play becomes the victim of traditional binary opposition between masculine and
feminine. In a similar vein, Natalie Meisner in her article entitled “Messing with the
Idyllic: The Performance of Femininity in Kushner’s Angels in America” agrees with
Savran, and quotes him thus: “‘Angels seems to replicate many of the structures that
historically have produced female subjectivity as Other’” (187).
On the contrary, for other critics, Kushner’s very utopian dramaturgy is one of
Angels’s major strengths, an integral part of the radical potential of his play. In the
essay “Free[ing] the Erotic Angels: Performing Liberation in the 1970s and 1990s,”
Gregory W. Bredbeck argues that Angels makes best mixture of history and politics to
interrogate sexuality “By historicizing Liberation and showing its theory to be a still
present but nonhegemonic possibility, Kushner also liberates history from its illusory
pose as a unified and determining trajectory” (286). In an interview taken by novelist
Michael Cunningham titled “Thinking about Fabulousness,” Kushner clarifies that if
‘theater of the ridiculous’ is to be taken as the great antecedent form of gay theater,
then the new theater that he calls ‘theater of the fabulous’ has really wider celebratory
undertones. For Kushner “fabulousness is […] an issue of investiture, that you
become powerful because you believe yourself to be” (74). In short, this sort of
fabulousness, as frequently witnessed in many gay prides and marches, gives people a
power to transform their trauma into celebration, even though no one can be fabulous
all the time.
The examples and views discussed above make us conclude that, though the
issues of politics are overtly foregrounded in Kushner’s plays, the dominance of

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sexuality is not less in his works. While most of critics have discussed the queer
sexuality per se in Angels, no one, it seems, has linked the fluidity of gender with that
of sexuality, or shown the interconnection among constructedness of normalcy,
sexuality and stigmatization in the play. These are the gaps in critical appreciation and
interpretation that the present dissertation hopes to fill in.

21. II. READING AGAINST THE VISIBLE GRAIN: TRANSFORMATIONS AND
AFFIRMATIONS
INTERCONNECTION BETWEEN CONSTRUCTIONS OF NORMALCY AND STIGMA AND
SEXUALITY
Modern society judges all human experiences by putting them through the
parameters of ‘normalcy’, whereas this very concept has been shown as a matter of
social and historical construction rather than a condition of human nature. The
boundaries and strictures of normalcy, which we think of as “natural” givens now,
seem to have constructed just one and a half century ago. Before that, the concept of
normalcy was not pervasively prevalent. Lennard J. Davis, in his essay “Constructing
Normalcy” in The Disability Studies Reader, says:
The word ‘normal’ as ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or
different from the common type or standard, regular, usual’ only enters
the English langauge around 1840. (Previously the word had meant
‘perpendicular;’ the carpenter’s square, called a ‘norm’ provided the
root meaning). Likewise, the word ‘norm’ in the modern sense, has
only been in use since around 1855, and ‘normality’ and ‘normalcy’
appeared in 1849 and 1857, respectively. If the lexicographical
information is relevant, it is possible to date the coming into
consciousness in English of an idea of ‘the norm’ over the period
1840-1860. (10)
If any dimension of human experience did not fall within the requirement of
‘norm’ it became inevitably deviant. One of the factors determining such a
conceptualization of the “norm” is the rise of scientific knowledge such as statistics.
According to Davis, the French statistician Adolphe Quetchet “contributed most to

22. 17
the generalized notion of normal as an imperative” (11). There was the concept of
‘ideal’, which also dates only from the seventeenth century, before the construction of
the concept of the norm. However, since the ideal was impossible to achieve by
mortals, the concept was linked to the world of the divine. Within such a schema of
the “ideal” there could be no room for the notion of deviance. Disability, for example,
did not mean deviance but part of the ideal. After the construction of “norms” around
the mid-nineteenth century, rules and regulations were created in each and every
dimension of human experience. The same happened to sexuality as well. This is not
to say that there were no rules and laws on sexuality before the nineteenth century.
The earliest laws regarding sexuality of which there is knowledge date back from
second millennium BC. What was new following the construction of normalcy was
the rigorous demarcation between legal and illegal, norm and transgression, and so
on. Once the demarcation came into existence, then the series of repression,
marginalization and torture started to shower towards the “other” sexualities. Such a
stigmatization of what Foucault calls “peripheral sexualities” (40) was endorsed
through a definition of the norm of sexual development, and through a simultaneous
description of the possible deviations. Many watchdogs came into existence to
regulate the regime of sexuality, which in turn only consolidated the “normative”
heterosexual practices.
The construction of ‘normalcy,’ thus, can be seen as giving a firm background
to the production of ‘sexuality’. As already noted, the practice of assigning
individuals to homo-/hetero-sexuality binary dates only from late nineteenth century–
from the 1870s, according to Foucault, to be more specific. More interestingly, the
term ‘homosexual’ came into existence even before the invention of the
corresponding term ‘heterosexual’ as many writers have argued. In a sense, thus, the

23. 18
notion of ‘abnormality’ preceded the idea of ‘normality’. Taking those ‘norms’ as
base, lists of desired and undesired traits were defined. Anyone having “undesired
differentness” had to carry the burden of stigma, as Erving Goffman also indicates in
his essay “Selections from Stigma.” Goffman explains that the term ‘stigma’–which
can be seen as linked to the concept of the “norm” and the exclusions generated by it–
itself came across various usages through history. According to Goffman, the Greeks
originated the term ‘stigma’ to denote bodily signs, especially to expose something
unusual and negative about the moral status of these signs. In Christian times, the
term ‘stigma’ referred metaphorically to two new areas: religion and medicine. In the
first sense, the bodily signs that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin, were
referred to as signs of holy grace. The second allusion was in a medical context, when
the signs were seen as the outcome of bodily disorder. At present, according to
Goffman, “the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is
applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it” (203). Thus, the
same signs sometimes became holy and at other times were discredited, and were
relegated to the arena of stigma. This shows how norms of today can be non-norms
tomorrow. And also, by the same token, deviations and stigmas of today may become
norms the next moment. Additionally, describing the process of stigmatization,
Goffman portrays how anyone can be victim of it under certain circumstances:
While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his
possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the
category of person available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind–
in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad or dangerous or
weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person

24. 19
to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially
when its discrediting effect is very extensive […].” (204)
Such reductive identity can be attached to anyone according to the specific
contexts. If gays, as it usually happens, are stigmatized by the heterosexuals in the
name of their majority, a similar stigma might be applied to heterosexuals themselves,
in a gay club/society, for example. Since no two humans are exactly alike, there can
be as many differences as there are individuals, hence as many stigmatizing gazes as
there are men. In such contexts, “what is undesired or stigmatized is heavily
dependent on the social context and to some extent arbitrarily defined” (217) as Lerita
M. Coleman, in her essay “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified,” also expresses.
Goffman makes it clear that stigmas differ depending upon the culture and the
historical period within which they are constructed, and that when a person opens his
eyes for the first time on this earth, that person may or may not inherit presage of
stigma. Similarly, Coleman argues that it is “mere a chance whether a person is born
into a non-stigmatized or severely stigmatized group” (217). However, the majority
pays no attention to this bitter truth and constructs an ‘othering’ of the minority often
stigmatizing the members of minority in the process. Coleman reinforces the similar
idea in the following way:
Stigma allows some individuals to feel superior to others. Superiority
and inferiority, however, are two sides of the same coin. In order for
one person to feel superior, there must be another person who is
perceived to be or who actually feels inferior. Stigmatized people are
needed in order for non-stigmatized people to feel good about
themselves. (218)

25. 20
This idea is equally applicable even within the stigmatized/marginalized
groups themselves. In other words, there can be different layers of stigma even within
seemingly homogenous groups. A complex web of factors come into play in the
process of stigmatization. With the help of those arguments, obviously, the
stigmatization of borderline sexualities can be traced out as an outcome of so-called
normative heterosexuality. Thus, the normativity of such stigmatization can be
questioned. There are some cultures which have been viewing the same-sex relations
in a quite different manner from modern Euro-American culture. As was common in
ancient Greece, age-grading homosexuality, as an essential stage to be performed for
person’s full sexual development, was and still is normal in some cultures. In the
system of age-grading homosexuality, anyone can take a homosexual partner prior to
the point of marrying another partner. Such relation was and is seen to fructify the
later sexual relationship. Similarly, in a number of Latin American cultures, the
stigma of same-sex relation is not attached to the partner who takes traditionally
masculine role within the homosexual coupling. The other male who takes a
“feminine” role in such a coupling is the only person stigmatized and dubbed as
effeminate. And in some parts of the world such as Brazil and Java same-sex relations
were indigenous customs, though the people of those areas are converging on to
Western model at present.
Impacts of stigmatization can be seen as determining the common friendly
relationship between men themselves. Intimacy between men, which was rarely
doubted in Elizabethan England–as until now is the case in Nepal–may come under
suspicious gaze in modern North American and European context. Alan Bray, in
“Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” an essay
anthologized in The Masculinity Studies Reader, observes thus:

26. 21
Perhaps there is always a potential ambiguity about intimacy between
men. It may be so. But in early modern England such intimacy was
peculiarly ambivalent, for the protecting conventions that ensured that
it was seen in an acceptable frame of reference were often absent by
the end of the sixteenth century. […] The intimacy between men in
Europe and in North America today is protected to a large extent by
the notion of a quite distinct homosexual minority for whom alone
homosexual desire is a possibility. This was a shield Elizabethan
England did not have […].” (350)
This shows once again that past normal behavior may denote stigma later and vice-
versa. Correspondingly, today’s “normal” action may be converted into a deviant one
tomorrow. By extension, normal heterosexuality, if anything, may be a matter of
stigma tomorrow or within specific situations such as a homosexual club or meeting,
for example. From such a perspective, assumptions concerning normalcy/stigma
cannot be considered as based upon some unchanging “natural” grounds. Garber, in
her book Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, provides a startling
example from the New York Times:
Baby cloths, which since at least the 1940’s have been routinely
divided along gender and color lines, pink for girls, blue for boys,
were, said the Times, once just the other way about. In the early years
of the twentieth century, before World War I, boys were pink […]
while girls were blue (understood to be “delicate” and “dainty”). Only
after World War II […], did the present alignment of the two genders
with pink and blue came into being. (1)

27. 22
This kind of diametrical reversal is apparently, possible in other nodes as well. In
other words, such process applies not only to the treatment of concrete signs and
objects but also to the various signifiers including the concepts of normalcy and
stigma.
Inimical repercussions of stigmatization of homosexuals have been still
reigning in full bloom even years after years of decriminalization and
depathologization. In 1973 American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality
from the official manual that lists mental and emotional disorders. Two years later
American Psychological Association passed a resolution supporting the same
removal. Despite both associations’ bestowal to help dispel the stigma associated with
homosexuality, the 1980s, the decade that functions as a setting for Angels, was still a
conservative period. This is the period, in which gay people were often doubly
stigmatized. In the early years of the epidemic, when it seemed to have afflicted
mostly homosexuals, AIDS became a severe stigma; though after the death of
American movie star Rock Hudson, and the news that the basketball star Magic
Johnson also had AIDS, the vulnerability to AIDS came to be seen equal to everyone,
and the degree of virulence gradually weakened. Even then, the process of
stigmatization did not become less. Many individuals treated persons with stigma in
an inhuman way. For them, as Goffman argues, “person with stigma is not quite
human, on this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we
effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances” (Goffman, 205), and so is
the case in Angels in America. Louis deserts his lover Prior, an AIDS victim on the
same basis, ironically reducing his own life chances as well.
After all, norms are human constructions and so they cannot be universally
applicable. On the basis of norms, stigma is created. As norms may be changed, so

28. 23
stigmas may be inverted. Similarly, homophobia, the fear and loathing of
homosexuals, is based on the ‘norms’ of heterosexuality. Such pathological fear has
no more valid ground, and is often produced by the hegemonic dominance of the
concept of heterosexual normalcy.
Finally, since norms are the production of majority or power, they exert harsh
impacts on the minority. In addition, people who are treated as members of the
minority, often start ‘acting normal’ in order to avoid being the objects of stigma.
That is, they do their best not to be perceived as different from the majority. At times
such kind of acting, done in order to be perceived normal inflicts fatal consequences
upon others. Roy, the closeted homosexual, for example, does the same in Angels in
America. Further, the relation of both couples–Prior and Louis and Joe and Harper–
disintegrates mainly due to their inability to resist the so-called norms of the society.
On the one hand, Joe cannot profess his homosexuality as he is a Mormon, and
marries Harper in spite of himself, on the other; Louis cannot cope with Prior’s AIDS
and flees away not knowing how to proceed.
Until and unless the socio-cultural and political ground upon which ‘norms’
are constructed is critically analyzed and realized their traumatic impacts keep on
repeating. Such impact of homophobia and AIDS dominate Angels in America. It is
only after knowing “the very term that permeates our contemporary life–the normal–
is a configuration that arises in a particular historical moment” (Davis 26) and that all
human differences are potentially stigmatizable, possible transformations and
affirmations may be at hand.
FEMININITY AND MASCULINITY AS PERFORMANCE
Traditional thinking equates maleness and femaleness with masculinity and
femininity respectively. Anybody who has male sexual organs or judged as male,

29. 24
compulsively must go through certain expectations that he is supposed to fulfill as
that male subject; rationality, active role in society or in the bed, and power, for
example. And the analogous process applies to femininity as well. This notion had
remained unchallenged till feminists in the 1960s and 1970s claimed otherwise. For
them, femininity/masculinity binary opposition denoted sheer cultural inculcation
rather than being natural given. Second-wave feminists felt a great sense of
achievement by declaring that, but also stopped at that point. Unlike them, many
poststructuralist feminists, drawing from deconstruction, among other theories,
viewed femininity/masculinity binary as unstably merging into an infinite possibilities
of performances.
Performance, role, and style are the terms often used to refer to certain
patterns of acting regarding masculinity/femininity. Among them, performance is
widely in use at present. Performance can emanate either from true inner will or can
spur outwardly as well. Kristin G. Esterberg, in “‘A Certain Swagger When I Walk’:
Performing Lesbian Identity,” notes that Erving Goffman had outlined a notion of
performance in sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. Goffman saw individuals
themselves as acting specific roles, and for him “the notion that identity as
performance is a useful one” (265). On the other hand, there are critics who see
performance less an expression of free will than as society’s imposition. Judith Butler,
for example, assumes Goffman’s view as antithetical. For her, whatever expression a
subject makes can never be performance, since the ‘I’ cannot act due to preliminary
imposition that is obligatorily orchestrated by society. Rather than performance, for
Butler, it is ‘performativity’, which is a crucial term. Butler clarifies the modes of
performativity thus:

30. 25
Performativity is thus not a singular “act”, for it is always a reiteration
of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like
status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of
which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily, theatrical;
indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its
historicity remains dissimulated […]. (12)
Performativity–the term performance will be used in an analogous manner in
this paper–thus, is yoked with power. This is to say that, acting as a beacon of
normalcy, power imposes a regulatory apparatus of heterosexuality upon the social
subjects. Heterosexuality presumes hetero-gender. In other words, even before gender
is developed, the laws of gender regulation start to function. Before the body is able to
follow law, the law effects its power upon the body. With respect to the functions of
the regulatory laws, Butler says: “The forming, crafting, bearing, circulation,
signification of that sexed body will not be a set of actions performed in compliance
with the law; on the contrary, they will be a set of actions mobilized by the law […]”
(12). Furthermore, “this ‘law’ can only remain a law to the extent that it compels the
differentiated citations and approximations called ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’” (15).
In other words, since the so-called natural bases of masculinity and femininity, male
and female themselves are social constructs that are imposed upon social subjects, it is
rarely convincing to claim that femininity/masculinity is constructed upon natural
grounds–such relation between power and concepts of masculinity or femininity, can
be traced in a number of areas, and not only in construction of sexuality. Sexuality
seems constructed because there is difficulty in properly naming the sex of many
people who report feeling disparity between their anatomical interpretation of the
body and their sense of themselves, tomboys for example. Even before the gendered

31. 26
masculinity came into existence, according to R.W. Connel, the basic concept of
masculinity arose during the time of Renaissance, with the focus on the individuality
of expression. From that time onwards, being linked to competitive imperial
expansion of European nations, masculinity became related with nationalism. In “The
History of Masculinity” Connell notes:
With the eighteenth century in seaboard Europe and North America at
least, we can speak of a gender order in which masculinity in the
modern sense–gendered individual character, defined through an
opposition with femininity and institutionalized in economy and state–
had been produced and stabilized. (248)
The views of Connel simply provide additional evidence to prove
masculinity/femininity as productions of power politics. According to him, power-
politics regarding masculinity and femininity was more obvious in national, so public,
level from Renaissance onwards and only from around the eighteenth century the
gendered sense of the masculinity/femininity came into focus. Whether the reference
be of national or of individual level, different layers of masculinity or femininity may
be at work depending on the context. Connell writes, “The British in India
constructed different images of masculinity of different people under their rule, for
instance, contrasting effeminate Bengalis with fierce Pathans and Sikhs” (254). This
does not mean that those people were necessarily always effeminate or fierce. If it
meant so, that would just be a matter of stereotyping. So, what is important is rather
than making stereotypes, people should be viewed according to relative degree of
their performances. This helps to form a range of performances. As much the power
networks can function in convoluted ways, so the perfomative dimensions of both

32. 27
traditional poles of femininity/masculinity can appear. Judhith Halberstam in “An
Introduction to Female Masculinity,” subtly mentions such multiple possibilities:
Masculinity in this society inevitably conjures up notions of power and
legitimacy and privilege, it often symbolically refers to the power of
the state and to uneven distributions of wealth. Masculinity seems to
extend outward into patriarchy and inward into the family; masculinity
represents the power of inheritance, the consequence of the traffic in
women and the promise of social privilege. But, obviously, many other
lines of identification traverse the terrain of masculinity, dividing its
power into complicated differentials of class, race, sexuality and
gender. If what we can call “dominant masculinity” appears to be a
naturalized relation between maleness and power, then it makes little
sense to examine men for the contours of that masculinity’s social
construction. Masculinity … becomes legible as masculinity where and
when it leaves the white middle-calls body. (356)
Gender, then, may have no inevitable connection with the performances of it.
Male can appear as feminine and female as masculine as far as their performances of
masculinity and femininity are concerned. Moreover, the same person can switch
back and forth in the continuum of performance. Rather than attaching an unalterable
seal of either masculinity or femininity upon specific individual, there should be an
open ground to legitimize all variants of performances in a full-fledged manner.
Following this assumption, instead of compartmentalizing masculinity/femininity in
several groups such as female masculinity, male femininity, gay
masculinity/femininity and so on and so forth, the present dissertation analyzes all of
those possibilities according to the degree of inclination that various people may

33. 28
experience in multiple ways towards the so-called two traditional poles. Superficially,
such process may appear in no way different from the traditional grip of the
prototypical binaries; but the way is drastically different from such grip, as all the
potential performances come into the forefront of consideration in this approach. Such
performances are evident in the actions of many characters in Angels in America. Joe,
for example, seems masculine when he is with his wife Harper, at least initially in the
play. By the end of the play, however, there is a reversal of the role. Harper is
determined to lead her own life alone, whereas Joe is still vaccilating in dilemma.
Similarly, Louis acts masculine when he is in family and feminine at other times.
Such a behavioral approach is similar to what Sedgwick calls “nonce taxonomies” in
which “the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution” (23) of
masculinity and femininity may be conceivable.
DESTABILIZING THE BINARIES: SEXUALITY AS A FREE PLAY OF DESIRE
With the binaries failing to cater to the polymorphous concatenations of
sexuality, not only the now master category of homo-/hetero-sexuality, but its other
major binary associations, such as feminine/masculine; essentialism/constructivism,
the contradictory theories regarding the construction of sexuality; or
minoritizing/universalizing views which see homosexuality as a particular or
universal case; male/female, and many others, are facing the urgent need for
denaturalization. These binaries are self-contradictory, too restrictive, confining and
unrealistic. In this regard, Sedgwick says:
[…] first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A;
but, second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its
meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B;
hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and

34. 29
the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable,
an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once
internal and external to term A. (10)
Thus, the moment one of the poles of the binary gets uttered, the next pole
finds itself at once and simultaneously in exclusion and inclusion. In exclusion,
because that gets no subjectivity, and in inclusion, paradoxically, because without it
the next term will be invalid. Similarly, Amber Ault in “The Dilemma of Identity: Bi
Women’s Negotiation,” writes that “the margin, the deviant, the other precedes the
center, the normal, the dominant construction, anchors and stabilizes it, and serves as
its foil” (312). This kind of absence by presence or, by analogy, presence by absence,
leaves no area untouched beginning from the very point of the initiation of a subject.
As noted earlier also, when a baby is born, it looks just like a mass of flesh. If that
flesh is to be regarded the raw material upon which the subjectivity of the very baby is
to be developed, even then the process of material construction cannot move forward
by its own voluntary and independent subjectivity. In other words, before a subject’s
subjectivity is developed, extrinsic forces begin to confront the ‘to be developed
subjectivity’. Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,”
reinforces the similar idea as:
This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires
the simultaneous production of a domain of object beings, those who
are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the
domain of the subject. […] This zone of unihabitability will constitute
the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of
dreaded identification against which and by virtue of which the domain
of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.

35. 30
In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of
exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitute outside to the
subject, an abjected outside, which is after all, “inside” the subject as
its own founding repudiation. (3)
In this way, when a subject comes into discourse–for instance boy, man, and
masculine–due to social conditioning, the subject’s ‘other’–girl, woman and
feminine–automatically creeps into the background. The problem is not the “other”
that comes into the being but rather the very process of “othering” that makes the
other into what it becomes. The system, as already mentioned many times, privileges
only one pole and always the same one. If there were equality, or even a sense of
equality, the contention would take no arms. All the arguments regarding sexuality, as
is the case in other areas, follow a similar procedure. When gender and sex get
blurred, such a blurring often has overarching consequences. To put it in a simple
manner, sex is thought, on the one hand, to be the base for the production of gender,
and on the other, gender is thought to correspond to sexuality. This very association is
now questioned by theorists such as Butler:
[…] what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movement,
will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of
power, as power’s most productive effect. And there will be no way to
understand ‘gender’ as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the
surface of matter, understood either as ‘the body’ or its given sex.
Rather, once ‘sex’ itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality
of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that
regulatory norm. ‘Sex’, is then not simply what one has or a static
description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the

36. 31
‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within
the domain of cultural intelligibility. (2)
This is to say, the nature versus culture debate seems to be grounded upon a
dangerous terrain. Regarding sexuality, especially sexual orientation and identity, the
major debates have been occurring among those who hold two contradictory
positions, namely: essentialist and constructivist. But both of these views seem
problematic. If sexuality, on the one hand, is a matter of biology as per essentialist
view, then the minority sexualities are marginalized in the name of their body’s
unalterable condition. On the other hand, if sexuality, as constructivist’s claim, is a
matter of social construction, then again, those assuming minority sexualities are at
risk. For them, sexuality can be regulated to the ‘norms’ by applying therapeutic
measures. Currently there is no ground to claim the verity of any side. As Sedgwick
notes:
[…] just as it comes to seem questionable to assume that cultural
constructs are peculiarly malleable ones. It is also becoming
increasingly problematical to assume that grounding an identity in
biology or ‘essential nature’ is a stable way of insulating it from
societal interference. […] Increasingly it is the conjecture that a
particular trait is genetically or biologically based, not that it is ‘only
cultural’, that seems to trigger an estrus of manipulative fantasy in the
technological institutions of the culture. (43)
Rather than opposing these two sides, their interactive roles should be taken into
account. Similar is the case with minoritizing/universalizing views. Both views have
been used to attack homosexuality. Those holding minoritizing views claim the
distinctness of homosexuals, and may treat them pathologically. And those who see

37. 32
homosexuality as a universal potential, again criticize homosexuality by
stereotypicalizing the same fact. More interestingly, same grounds can be used to
defend or celebrate homosexuality as well. Tyson reinforces this idea by making the
following points:
(1) it is biologically natural for some people to be gay, no matter what
environment they are born into, and therefore, they should be accepted
as natural; (2) homosexuality is a normal response to particular
environmental factors and therefore gay people should be accepted as
normal. (302)
This shows the futility of arguing between the essentialist and constructivist positions
which in themselves must be destabilized. To some individuals biology may play
prominent role than culture and to others vice-versa. Furthermore, sexual relations are
currently denoted by object-choice, the choice of a male or female body, in most of
the cultures. However, there are also cultures, many Mediterranean and Latin
American cultures, for instance, in which the same-sex relation may not be taken as
the determinate factor. In other words, they distinguish sharply between insertive and
receptive sexual roles. Thus, they assess the masculinity/femininity of the involved
persons according to particular contexts rather than attaching them all to some
singular homosexual identity. At least, in these cultures, then, the binary of homo-
/hetero-sexuality does not function in totality. This gives some impetus to rethink the
validity of the very binary.
Etymology also posits a problem regarding term homo/hetero. Though
etymologically ‘homo’ means same, to think of “sameness” regarding this binary is a
misconception, because, no two same-sex bodies can be similar. Or if both sexes are a
matter of construction, there can hardly be any difference between them. Thus, a

38. 33
man’s love of other man, for example can hardly be a love of same sex. As Sedgwick
believes:
I do not, myself believe same-sex relationship relationships are much
more likely to be based on similarity than are cross-sex relationships.
This is, I do not believe that identification and desire are necessarily
more closely linked in same-sex than in cross-sex relationships, or in
gay than in non gay person. I assume them to be closely linked in
many or most relationships and persons, in fact. I certainly do not
believe that any given man must be assumed to have more in common
with any other given man then he can possibly have in common with
any given woman. Yet these are assumptions that underlie, and are in
turn underwritten by, the definitional invention of ‘homosexuality.’
(159)
Thus, no two individuals can be of same-sex. Everyone is different–just different. The
definitional defect must be rectified for this reason. This consequently allows the
instability and multiplicity of sexuality, and in turn, of identity as well. This kind of
view, which approaches identities as multiple, unstable, and regulatory, however,
does not undermine identities. Rather, as Seidman says in the introductory part of
Queer Theory/Sociology, such approach’s
aim is not to abandon identity as a category of knowledge and politics
but to render it permanently open and contestable as to its meaning and
political role […]. The gain […] of figuring identity as permanently
open as to its meaning and political use is that it encourages the public
surfacing of differences or a culture where multiple voices and
interests are heard and shape […] life and politics. (12)

39. 34
And, similarly, as Sedgwick remarks:
To understand these conceptual relations as irresolvably unstable is
not, however, to understand them as inefficacious or innocuous […].
To the contrary, a deconstructive understanding of these binarisms
makes it possible to identify them as sites that are peculiarly densely
charged with lasting potential for powerful manipulation through
precisely the mechanism of self-contradictory definition or more
succinctly, the double blind. (10)
Many instances of such contradictions abound in Angels in America. The
protagonist Prior, for instance, who is also afflicted with AIDS, is initially depicted at
the threshold of death, but in the epilogue of the play which occurs five years later, he
seems more exuberant than even before and even when he continues to live past hope.
He is an angel and a human at the same time.
In conclusion, the arguments above show that the assumptions of ‘norms,’
‘normalcy,’ and ‘normality,’ which are taken as natural now, are relatively recent
innovations. They are not universally applicable and can change along with the
passage of time. Many dichotomies, which are constructed on the basis of such norms,
are now treated as unalterably fixed categories. Such dichotomies as man/woman,
masculinity/femininity and homo-/hetero-sexuality are too restrictive, groundless, and
inevitably asymmetrical and privilege one of the terms over another. Moreover,
culture demands a person to be either male or female by imposing corresponding and
inescapable expectations that we call masculinity and femininity. Since such
imposition begins to influence right from birth, the terms man/woman or male/female
can not be essence of individuals, rather they are sexed categories and do not
correspond to what is understood as masculinity and femininity. Biological woman

40. 35
can perform in ways typically coded as male and the other way round is also possible.
Further, the concept of masculinity and femininity differs in various cultures, as does
the concept of homo-/hetero-sexuality. Such binaries must be taken as gray areas
where we can see continuities or fusion between the categories that seem at the first
glance to be antithetical. Thus, sexuality ultimately is a free play of desire, a
continuum. In the end, the above arguments constitute an attempt to destabilize the
present lopsidedness of the vital terms that have close connection with sexuality, as
well as that of sexuality itself. By pointing out the hollowness of current binary
system of ascribing sexual identity, the present dissertation strives to speculate across
an unmapped terrain of sexuality.

41. III. SWINGING ALONG THE CONTINUUM: CONSONANCE AMONG
IDENTITIES
IMPACTS OF STIGMA AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ANGELS IN AMERICA
Homophobia affects the lives of almost all characters directly or indirectly in
Angels in America. Not only the lives of gay characters are deeply influenced by the
social norms, and stigmas created on the basis of such norms, but the lives of other
characters are also at times endangered by the same norms. At this point, a brief
description of characters in the play seems essential prior to the direct plunge into the
textual interpretation. The play deals mainly with the story of two couples: the
homosexual couple of Prior and Louis, and the heterosexual couple of Joe and Harper.
Prior is an openly gay character, whereas Louis can be viewed as a semi-closeted
character, since he performs openly homosexual role only with friends. Joe actually is
a bisexual but his religious beliefs hinder himself to perform such role overtly. Joe,
his mother Hannah, who lives alone in Salt Lake City, and his wife Harper constitute
their Mormon family. Joe and Louis work as chief clerk and word processor
respectively in the Brooklyn Federal Court of Appeals. Roy, a successful New York
lawyer and unofficial power broker is a closeted homosexual. And Belize is a former
drag-queen and former lover of Prior’s. Among the angelic characters, the Angel,
whom Kushner calls the Continental Principality of America, has the prominent role
in the play. There are many other characters as well including Mr. Lies, Harper’s
imaginary travel agent, and Henry, Roy’s physician. The plot of the play moves
forward with frequent split scenes and intermittent mingling of reality and fantasy.
The play is set in America in the 1980s against a backdrop of greed, conservatism,
sexual politics, and the discovery of an awful new disease: AIDS. Millennium
Approaches, the first part of the play, opens in 1985 with the funeral service of

42. 37
Louis’s grandmother, and the epilogue of Perestroika, the second part of the play,
occurs in 1990 with the portrayal of characters sitting on the rim of the Bethesda
Fountain in Central Park and talking about the importance of a new sense of
community that they have come to realize in the play.
Joe, on the one hand, cannot disclose his homosexuality either to Harper or to
his mother, as he finds the act ‘coming out’ very difficult to perform. Louis, on the
other hand, deserts his AIDS-stricken lover, Prior, being unable to cope with the
stigma of the disease. Joe, a devout Mormon, tries “very hard to become good” (46) in
the eyes of the society even by fighting to kill everything that he has. He views
himself as “a shell” (46). Despite Joe’s efforts to be a good husband, Harper feels
something wrong in their relationship. Because Joe does not stay home most of the
time, Harper suspects Joe's whereabouts, and the little time Joe gives her fails to
match up to her expectations of love from him. She wants to talk with Joe about the
problem. Yet, it is very difficult for her to ask directly the cause of the problem due to
the existing norms concerning heterosexuality. Eventually, she tries to make Joe tell
himself what exactly is bothering him:
HARPER. Stick to the subject.
JOE. I don’t know what that is. You have something you want to ask
me? Ask me. Go.
HARPER. I … can’t. I’m scared of you.
JOE. I’m tired, I’m going to bed.
HARPER. Tell me without making me ask. Please.
JOE. This is crazy, I’m not ... […]. (43)
Quite frankly, if there were not such watertight laws in Mormonism concerning
heterosexual normativity, Joe might have been able to come out of the closet early

43. 38
and also to save both his and, logically, Harper’s lives. Harper, as per her religious
beliefs, thinks homosexuality “a sin” (43) that is killing them both. She uses Valium,
but tells Prior in their first mutual dream scene that “Mormons are not supposed to be
addicted to anything” (38). In the same dream sequence, Harper is informed by
Prior–who knows that through “threshold of revelation” (39)–that Joe is a
homosexual. Now, Harper’s intense feeling of loneliness gets more visible as she
hears “A man with a knife” (30) at home and thinks that she is going to have a baby
“addicted to pills (47). Her dream later takes her into imaginary Antarctica where
emotions freeze. When she burns Joe’s dinner due to her obsessive thinking, she
envisions herself as a “mentally deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife” (42).
All these effects on Harper are less due to Joe’s nature than the harsh imposition of
so-called norms and values that makes it impossible to discuss the fact of his
homosexuality with his wife.
In the meantime, with great difficulty, Louis breaks the law of his religion,
Judaism, which supports neither homosexuality, nor the act of leaving a loved one in
time of need. Both Joe and Louis are ensnared by their religions. Seared by torment
and still in dilemma, Louis advises Joe to infringe the rules by telling: “Sometimes,
even if it scares you to death, you have to be willing to break the law” (79). This
encourages Joe to make a phone all at 4 a.m. to Hannah, his mother. When his mother
asks why Joe has come to such a place as “CENTRAL PARK” (81), Joe answers
“Just to watch” (81). In fact, he outs himself after visualizing what he had been
searching for a long time. Joe, on the pretext of being drunk tells his mother on the
phone:
JOE. Mom. Momma. I’m homosexual, Momma.
Boy, did that come out awkward.

44. 39
(Pause)
Hello? Hello?
I’m a homosexual.
(Pause)
Please, Momma. Say something. (81)
Ultimately Joe cannot help contravening the religious or normal codes, still, Joe finds
disclosing his homosexuality extremely difficult. Hannah pretends not to have heard
what Joe said as she says “We will just forget this phone call” (82) and advises Joe to
go home. Later, she sells her house in Salt Lake City and comes to help Joe with his
case but in vain. The root causes of these problems and their dreary consequences
spring from the well of norms that define homosexuality as a matter of stigma and
deviance.
Trying to be seen normal is one of the dire effects of homophobia and
stigmatizing society. Despite being in a powerful position of a successful New York
Lawyer, Roy Cohn, a homosexual, tries his best to 'act normal'. When Henry, the
doctor, diagnoses his AIDS, Roy reacts “No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals
have. I have liver cancer” (52). When Roy tries to both sponsor and seduce Joe calling
him a “Royboy” (70), that time also he calls Joe the same. Roy is outed posthumously
only. The ghostly Roy discloses to Joe his motive for lying. He says: “You could have
read it in the paper AIDS. I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression” (258). Roy
defies the doctor’s finding by telling he has problem with words. Roy claims that the
doctor does not understand the role of clout and says:
Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I
am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong.
Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are

45. 40
men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant
antidiscrimination bill through city Council. Homosexual are men who
know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout […]. (51)
Roy argues that because he has clout, he cannot be a homosexual. He further says,
“What I am is defined entirely by who I am” (52). It is very hard even for him to
disclose his sexual orientation, and so he lives in dissimulation throughout his life.
Louis seems terribly frightened when he observes Prior with infected blood.
Louis quietly moans: “Oh help. Oh help. Oh God Oh God Oh God help me I can’t I
can’t I can’t” (54). So he flees to Joe to get solace and happiness. Joe keeps walking
often till late nights in the Central Park gay cruising area, Louis calls such walking
“Internalized oppression” (100). Similarly, for Joe, the norms drive hot spikes
through his chest as he tells Harper in a split scene:
JOE. I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl. I try to learn live
dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it’s like a nail,
like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I’m losing.
(83)
While Joe tries to learn live dead, as he says in the above dialogue, Prior finds Louis’s
heart already dead. Prior says in a legal style, “We have reached a verdict, your honor.
This man’s heart is deficient […]” (85). That heart would function later but by that
time Prior is able to recuperate from the trauma caused by Louis. Louis cannot realize
his love for sick friend is greater than his fear of Prior’s disease until it is too late,
after all; an outcome of his beliefs. He believes in guilt rather than in forgiveness,
since he is a Jew. Louis makes Prior suffer by making a philosophy of love in which
one can “love someone and fail them” (84). After Louis’s abandonment, Prior also
resorts to hallucination as Harper does due to Joe’s abandonment. Prior tells his pitiful

46. 41
condition to Belize during a drag-queen’s funeral. Since Prior has been staying alone
for a long time, Belize thinks, Prior might have experienced the strange things like
being visited by an angel. Prior tries to make the point clear:
PRIOR. Then I’m crazy. The whole world is, why not me?
It’s 1986 and there is a plague, half my friends are dead and I’m
only thirty-one, and every goddamn morning I wake up and I think
Louis is next to me in the bed and it takes me long minutes to
remember … that this is real, it isn’t just an impossible, terrible
dream, so may be yes I’m flipping out. (181)
Prior expresses a similar torment during the diorama scene, when he sees Joe kissing
Louis. Prior bursts into tears and says to Harper “I JUST SAW MY LOVER, MY …
ex-lover, with a …with your husband […]” (199). Later Prior says to Hannah that he
has been “driven insane” (234) by her son, and by that lying beast, Louis. After the
diorama, when Louis comes to Prior to try a “make up” (215), that is reconciliation
with Prior, Prior proves himself a prophet by surprisingly telling Louis about the
latter’s “new lover” (220). Louis tries to be seen an innocent by denying Joe as a
lover, and says he took Joe just for companionship. At that point, Prior teaches Louis
a lesson about what true friendship in supposed to be:
PRIOR. Companionship. Oh.
[…] How good. I wouldn’t want you to be lonely.
There are thousands of gay men in New York city with AIDS and
nearly everyone of them is being taken care of by … a friend or by
… a lover who has stuck by them through things worse than
my…. So far. Everyone got that, except me. I got you. Why?
What’s wrong with me? (220)

47. 42
While Louis cries as he listens to Prior’s words, Prior asks him to come back
with visible bruises if he really feels bruised inside. Louis takes Prior literally, and
comes back to him after he is beaten by Joe. Prior finally forgives Louis but still
doesn’t allow the latter to join him. In his long struggle against AIDS Prior has learnt
the value of self-affirmation, which he expresses by saying “This is my life, from now
on, Louis. I’m not getting ‘better’” (271). Harper similarly, has learnt to make a life
of her own; at the end of the play, Harper heads to San Francisco aboard a jet leaving
Joe alone broken into pieces.
In all, the disintegration of both major couples–that of Joe and Harper, and
Prior and of Louis–is caused by the ultimate effects of homophobia, and is a
consequence of stigmatization of homosexuality as well as AIDS. Stigma has more
devastating power here as the characters are not only gays, but some of whom also
have AIDS. The characters come to know the adverse effects of homophobia only at
the end of the play, and realize that unless they create their own norms by defying the
existing unjust ones, or until they accept their true ‘self’, their fate and lives would
remain traumatic forever.
MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY AS CONTINUUM IN ANGELS IN AMERICA
Kushner’s projection of masculinity and femininity in Angels in America
seems flexible. Unlike traditional view, which yokes masculinity only with males, and
females only with femininity, Kushner attributes his male and female characters
different degrees of inclination towards both of these poles. Needless to say, the
characters perform both traits depending upon situations. The same person becomes
masculine sometimes and feminine at other times with varying degrees of masculinity
and femininity. In the very beginning of Millennium Approaches the following

48. 43
dialogue makes clear how Louis acts out a masculine role within his family
environment:
LOUIS. […] Sorry I didn’t introduce you to … I always get so closety
at these family things.
PRIOR. Butch. You get butch. (Imitating) “Hi Cousin Doris, you
don’t remember me I’m Lou, Rachel’s boy.” Lou, not Louis,
because if you say Louis they’ll hear the sibilant S. (25-26)
Since pronouncing that sound would make him effeminate, Louis drops it.
While Louis performs masculine role at family surroundings, he, obviously, at times
acts feminine role when he is with friends. Similarly, Prior does not always stick to
the masculine aspects of his character. When he meets Harper in the mutual dream
sequence, just after his appearance of kaposi’s sarcoma that he calls “wine-dark kiss
of the angel of death” (27), he assumes a feminine role. Harper inquires:
HARPER. What are you doing in my hallucination?
PRIOR. I’m not in your hallucination. You’re in my dream.
HARPER. You’re wearing make up.
PRIOR. So are you.
HARPER. But you’re a man. (37)
While Prior says that he is applying makeup just to “feel better” (37), the use of make
up obviously asserts his femininity, at least is the traditional sense of the concept.
Similar is the case with other characters. Belize, who is an ex-drag queen, still keeps
alluding to other gays as females. Such gay banters occur often in Angels in America.
When Prior is still in hospital bed, sick but improving, Belize, who is a duty nurse and
coincidentally a former lover of Prior’s, visits him there. It is interesting to observe
that they call each other by feminine names:

49. 44
PRIOR. Miss Thing.
BELIZE. Ma cherie bichette. (65)
Prior jokingly calls Belize ‘Miss’, and Belize responds to Prior using an even more
effeminate French word ‘bichette’ (bitch). They sense themselves as feminine
sometimes and masculine at other times, and try to perform the related cultural
expectations as well. Though Belize reminds Prior such “girl-talk shit is politically
incorrect” and they should have left it back when they “gave up drag”, Prior
underscores his point of feeling better, as he says, “I’m sick, I get to be politically
incorrect if it makes me feel better [...]” (67). It is clear that they previously used drag
to give themselves match to their sense of being feminine. But that sense may have
changed later or they might have left drag to take it in future. Though for some,
politics of gender identity is important, but for Prior feeling better is at premium than
other motives. Thus, this shows the possibility of back and forth in performing the
gender roles.
Various manifestations of masculinity can be found in female characters as
well in Angels in America. When Joe asks Harper if she could think about going to
Washington, to start over new and to be happy, she confidently answers: “I don’t want
to move to Washington” (29). Unwaveringly, she tells him that for her Washington is
like a “giant cemetery” (29). Later, she even asks Joe to move alone if that is what he
wants, and forecasts that she is going to leave him. At other times, however, Harper
flees reality being unable to confront it and often resorts to hallucinations. When she
in her dream appears in Antarctica which Mr. Lies calls a “deep-freeze for feelings”
(108) she imagines giving birth to a baby that will “have a pouch” that she “can crawl
into” (109). Here she sounds really shattered, and seems more feminine.

50. 45
Likewise, instability of masculine/feminine performances traces the relation
between Roy and Joe, on the one hand, and that between Joe and Louis, on the other.
In the beginning of Millennium Approaches, when Joe goes to see Roy, Roy keeps
himself busy by phoning several people at the same time while Joe patiently waits for
Roy to resume talk with him. Joe seems very feminine here and Roy very masculine.
In addition, Roy uses typically masculine terms in order to persuade Joe to go to
Washington, where he can help Roy by taking a job in Justice Department. Roy
praises Joe in front of Martin by saying:
Roy: Gravity, decency, smarts! His strength is as the strength of ten because
his heart is pure! And he’s a Royboy, one hundred percent. (70)
Notwithstanding, when Joe turns down the job offer later, Roy angrily
addresses Joe by a feminine name “Mary Jane” (112) and christens him “sissy” (113).
Though Joe is not performing overtly in a feminine manner, Roy still makes his
performance look feminine. Whenever Roy displays his ability to manipulate power
including his threats of systematically destroying Henry’s reputations and career, and
that of electrocuting of Ethel and Julius Rosenbergs, who were spies, he seems or
pretends to be masculine. Actually, whenever he becomes alone, and especially when
he gets racked by spasms due to his disease, he seems really feminine. After
repudiating his job, Joe becomes more masculine and reaches almost to the point of
beating Roy. When Joe leaves after an argument, Roy is alone and cries: “Ah, Christ
…/Andy! Andy! Get in here! Andy!” (116). Instead, Ethel appears to say that she
came to forgive Roy, but can’t help but see his plight. Roy confesses to her he is
getting weaker and weaker “since the body thing” (117) started. Thus, the
performance of both types of gender roles abound in varying degrees in Angels in
America.

51. 46
Regarding the relation between Joe and Louis, which lasts for about a month,
Joe seems passive in the initial stages and Louis does the “exploration” (202), to
quench his thirst of Joe. Both of them have deserted their lovers around this time and
that is the major common thing between them. Initially, Joe being a novice, Louis has
to coax Joe sometimes during the sexual encounters. When Joe describes the fact of
his unhappiness, Louis finds it appropriate to tempt Joe and asks “Want some
company? For whatever” (79)? A while later Louis goes up to Joe and “licks his
napkin and dabs at Joe’s mouth” (79). Here, Joe seems very feminine, and Louis
keeps on playing masculine role and takes the former to his apartment. Even after
reaching there, Joe finds it uneasy to remain there with Louis. Louis blackmails Joe in
the following way:
JOE (Stepping back): No, wait, I’m, um, um, uncomfortable, actually.
LOUIS. Me too, actually. Being uncomfortable turns me on.
JOE. Your, uh, boyfriend,
He’s sick.
LOUIS. Very. He’s not my boyfriend, we …
We can cap everything that leaks in latex, we can smear our
bodies with nonoxynol-9, safe, chemical sex […]. (162-63]
After slaking the passion of exploring Joe’s body, Louis starts to feel bad about Prior
and wants to go back. It is this time Joe switches over to a more masculine role in
order to keep Louis with him. Joe follows the same technique of seduction that Louis
had applied to him earlier. In the dunes of Jones Beach, a place famous for gays
cruising for sex, Joe reminds Louis: “You and I, Louis, we are the same. We both
want the same thing” (203). Instead Louis says he is missing Prior and is very
worried. Then, Joe starts removing his own clothes saying, “I can give up anything.

52. 47
My skin […]” (206). Joe is trying to show how much he loves Louis. Later, when
Belize gives clues of Joe’s relationship with Roy, Louis comments about Joe’s ethics,
and the debate turns into a brawl till visibly enraged Joe beats Louis severely. In this
way, their performance oscillates between masculine and feminine roles.
By the end of Perestroika, Joe remains very feminine, whereas his wife
Harper seems determined to start a new life of her own, and thus assumes a masculine
role. In the form of a consolation, she offers Joe her stash of valium and suggests he
goes exploring:
JOE (Small voice, not looking at her). Call or … Call. You have to.
HARPER. No. Probably, never again. That’s how bad.
Sometimes, maybe lost is best. Get lost. Joe. Go exploring.
(Harper digs in the sofa. She removes her Valium stash. She
shakes out two pills, goes to Joe, takes his hand and puts the
Valium in his open palm).
HARPER. With a big glass of water. (She leaves) (273)
A while later Harper is seen aboard a jet, headed to San Francisco, while Joe,
to the contrary, remains in misery in Brooklyn.
These instances elucidate the intersection of masculine and feminine
performances in most of the major characters in Angels in America. Thus, the
traditionally binary dyads of masculine/ feminine are used not in a fixed way but with
multiple possibilities of performance.
PLAY OF DESIRE IN ANGELS IN AMERICA
Sexuality in Angels is presented in such a manner that, some of the major
characters find themselves in a position which they may never have imagined or
accepted previously. They feel confronted with something unnameable. The range of

53. 48
Joe’s sexual continuum of homo/hetero is already wider than other characters’,
because of his bisexuality. Prior and Hannah also come to an awareness of their
sexual continuum when the Angel helps them to ‘come out’. They come to know
themselves at this point. Desire, after all, functions in association with a complex
matrix of visible and invisible factors. Subtitled a “Gay Fantasia” by Kushner, many
characters are presented in Angels with multiple potentialities of tunes of sexual
manifestations.
Though Joe does not seem to have profound attraction towards Harper, it is
not that he has no desire for her at all. Harper comments about Joe’s weight “in the
bed at night” (43) before asking if he were a homosexual. Harper, for her part, tries to
arouse Mr. Lies, her travel agent, in her imaginary Antarctica, and tells him: “I can
have anything I want here–maybe even companionship, someone who has … desire
for me. You, maybe” (108). Harper looks as if she is not getting adequate sex from
Joe, but vice-versa may be true when we consider Joe’s outlook. When Harper and
Joe have sex, Harper accuses Joe of imagining men. The following dialogue shows
this:
HARPER. When we have sex. Why do you keep your eyes closed?
JOE. I don’t
HARPER. You always do. You can say why, I already know the
answer.
JOE. Then why do I have to …
HARPER. You imagine things. Imagine men. (238)
Apparently, their sexual life is not quite inactive, as Harper’s use of the word ‘always’
in the dialogue suggests. Rather, Joe cannot bear Harper’s verbal torture, so gets
dressed and heads immediately to Louis’s apartment, not knowing that relation too

54. 49
has also reached at the threshold of crumbling. There Joe faces a brawl with Louis
who suspects the former having relationship with Roy, who has got AIDS and is also
a well known supporter of president Ronald Reagan. Their one month long
relationship falls into pieces hereafter. This shows that Harper, drives Joe away
herself. Despite being torn between his sense of duty and his actual needs, Joe
struggles to look after his wife. He has more flexible sexual proclivities than Harper
can cope with.
Prior, similarly, turns out not to be bound to homosexual urges only. After
Louis deserts him, a voice starts to haunt Prior. In the beginning, Prior thinks it to be a
dream, but later feels real. Prior comes to know that the voice is angelic. When Prior
hears the sound he gets “hard” (66), that is to say that he has an erection. At the end of
Millennium Approaches, Prior listens the same voice and “He is washed over by an
intense sexual feeling” (123) as the stage direction notes. Later in Perestroika, he
feels the same, and when the Angel asks Prior to read the Book of revelations Prior
says, “It’s very hard to concentrate” (173) due to his erection. Finally, he loses control
and starts to hump the Book. This is how Prior tells Belize as to what happened to
him:
BELIZE. Whoa whoa whoa wait a minute excuse me please. You
fucked this angel?
PRIOR. She fucked me. She has … well, she has eight vaginas. (174)
A while later, when the Angel presses the Book against Prior’s chest, “They both
experience something unnameable […]” (180). For Belize, as for most of us, “The
sexual politics of this are very confusing […]” (175). The confusion arises because, at
that moment Belize discovers his ex-lover, Prior, to be a heterosexual as well.
Moreover, Hannah also feels this kind of ‘coming out’ later, towards the end of

55. 50
Perestroika. When she instructs Prior to “wrestle” (250) the Angel, he acts
accordingly and gets an entrance into heaven. After this, the Angel turns her attention
to Hannah. Hannah first tries to shove the Angel away, but at the same moment she
has an orgasm unexpectedly. The following lines make this clear:
HANNAH: What? What? You’ve got no business with me, I didn’t
call you, you’re his fever dream not mine, and he’s gone now and
you should go too, I’m waking up right … NOW!
(Nothing happens. The Angel spreads her wings. The room
becomes red hot. The Angel extends her hands towards Hannah.
Hannah walks towards her, torn between immense unfamiliar
desire and fear. Hannah kneels. The Angel kisses her on the
forehead and then the lips–a long, hot kiss.)
ANGEL: The Body is the Garden of the Soul.
(Hannah has an enormous orgasm, as the Angel flies away to the
accompanying glissando of a baroque piccolo trumpet). (251-52)
Hannah, who must have been thinking herself a heterosexual woman, realizes she has
a repressed feeling of lesbianism as well. In this context, it is interesting to note that
Kushner uses the pronoun ‘she’ to refer to the Angel and equips her with both male
and female sexual organs. When Prior says Belize that she has many vaginas, Angel
retorts by saying, “Hermaphrodically Equipped as well with a Bouquet of Phalli …
[…]” (175). Thus, Kushner assigns multiple sexual identities to both Hannah and
Prior, and to other characters as well in the play. As the Angel says, the body is the
garden where many kinds of flowers of desire may bloom.
Sexuality, as shown in the previous chapter, can be a matter of both biology
and environment, though the dominance may differ as per individuals and contexts.

56. 51
Roy spots Joe perhaps by his ‘gaydar’ in the very beginning of the play, and finds Joe
“Delectable” (21). Roy seems to be using this word with sexual connotation.
Similarly, Louis spots Joe in the men’s room of his office and “pecks Joe on the
cheek” (36). Louis doesn’t hesitate to ask a stranger in Central Park to provide him
sex, while his lover, Prior, is fighting against death in the hospital. In her dream
sequence Harper says to Prior that she cannot expect someone “who’s really sick to
entertain” her (39). Louis declares nose to be “really a sexual organ” (163) as he
smells Joe. These examples seem liable more to natural than social causes.
On the contrary, there are other examples in Angels where sexual desire is
shown as being shaped due to social rather than biological factors. Prior, for example,
thinks that he made Louis gay. Outside a funeral home after Louis’s grandmother’s
funeral service Prior says thus:
PRIOR. You don’t notice anything. If I hadn’t spent the last four years
fellating you I’d swear your were straight. (26)
Similarly, when Joe and Louis are enjoying each other, Louis notices hints of Joe’s
Mormonism, and feels uneasy due to the clash of their religions. Furthermore, when
Louis suspects the relation between Roy and Joe, he experiences regret and thinks that
he should not have left Prior. In these cases, social factors seem dominating the
biological ones. On the basis of above examples it can be concluded that in Angels in
America the fixed assumptions which constitute the background to homo-/hetero-
sexual identities are inconsistent, and such inconsistencies, in turn, make the master
binary opposition of homo/hetero redundant.

57. IV. CONCLUSION
The binary of homo-/hetero-sexuality is a relatively recent construction of
human society. The dichotomy–as is the case with other dichotomies–is backed up by
the concept of normalcy which itself is a historical configuration having its genesis in
the nineteenth century. Prior to that, the concept of ‘norm’ in the modern sense was
non-existent. The strict categorization of normal and deviant sexualities dates only
from the late nineteenth century. Sexuality fell prey to the power politics which
assigned each individual either heterosexual or homosexual identity, and, on the same
basis, assigned each person as having either masculine or feminine attribute. Sexual
behaviors, which were common before that shift took place, were relegated to margins
due to the hegemony of normalcy of the so-called heterosexuality. In Angels in
America, Kushner shows how such fixed extremities are self-contradictory, incapable
of encompassing the multiple forms of sexual identities, and hence ultimately
groundless.
Just as the norms were created to fulfill the interests of the then bourgeoisie,
so, non-procreative sexualities were stigmatized for sheer mercenary reasons. Myths
were created to support the stigmatization of so-called deviant sexualities and to
criminalize the practices associated with them. Slowly and gradually, the vast
majority of people started to view such regulatory practices as natural. Due to the
policing of sexual behaviors, hetero-desire became a norm. This corresponded to the
ideology of the patriarchal, heterosexual society that sought to exterminate ‘peripheral
sexualities’. To accomplish this purpose epistemology was brought into action.
Pathologization of and discrimination against homosexuals in various ways came to
be seen as normal. Even after the decriminalization of homosexuality and gay

58. 53
liberation movements, homophobia and the process of stigmatizing the “other” have
been still wrecking lives of many people.
In Angels in America, Joe and Harper have to live a miserable life mainly
owing to the austere tenets of Mormonism. Joe tries his best to be a good son and a
responsible husband by repressing his hidden homosexual desire. The opposing forces
cannot help but tear Joe apart. Roy cannot ‘come out’ throughout his life due to the
fear that he will lose his power. The fear is so great that he does not even accept the
doctor’s diagnosis of AIDS on the account of the severe stigma attached to it as a
homosexual disease. Homosexuals with AIDS can be stigmatized even by other
homosexuals as can be seen in the case of Prior in Angels. Louis flees away from
Prior forgetting their four-year-long relationship and not realizing the value of true
love, until it is too late. Prior’s life remains agonizing till he becomes a prophet and
accepts his life as it is. His trauma, however, ultimately transforms into power and
hope as the epilogue of the play makes clear by using the biblical reference of
Bethesda fountain.
Sexuality gets blurred when the cultural expectations of males and females
become instable. Traditional association of masculinity with males and of femininity
with females does not hold true. Gender is performance rather than some unchanging
essence. Extrinsic or cultural factors start to mould the material of the body in
advance, and by the time body is able to make choices on its own, it has already fallen
into the shackles of society’s ‘norms’. Body can never act in real sense, but reiterates
what has been predemarcated. Since masculinity and femininity are social
constructions, they need not necessarily conform to biology/anatomy; rather can be
manifest in various degrees of inclinations to the prototypical poles. Any person can
perform–Louis and Joe in Angels can be taken as an instance–not only one exclusive