Joe and Harper in Tony Kushner\'s \'Gay

¶ … Joe and Harper in Tony Kushner's 'gay fantasia' of a play entitled "Angels in America" can be seen as parallel to the relationship of Lewis and Prior, despite both relationships' apparent dissimilarities. In both relationships, the two main characters exist in an unbalanced partnership, riddled with inequities. Only by suffering the traumas of a closeted gay relationship and the horror of AIDS does the nature of these essentially unequal and unfulfilling relationships become 'outed' within the structure of the play.

The relationship between Joe and Harper is perhaps the most obviously unbalanced relationship of the two. Joe is a Mormon lawyer, in the service of the homophobic, closeted gay McCarthy witch hunter Roy Cohn. Joe has moved to New York City because of his career, taking his wife Harper with him. However, Joe does not really love Harper. As he tells her towards the play's end when he leaves her, he only really married in her Salt Lake City because she was the only person who seemed "as screwed up as he was." By screwed up, Joe means gay, for Joe himself is a homosexual, a gay man who is, unlike Cohn, closeted not only to the world but also to himself. Cohn sees homosexuality in terms of power. "I am not a homosexual," Cohn proclaims. "Homosexuals have zero clout." Cohn openly engages in homosexual acts but refuses to label himself as gay.

In Cohn's views because no one cares about homosexuals, because homosexuals possess no political capital in America, ergo, Cohn is not a homosexual because he does have political clout. Joe's closeted identity is of a far more insidious nature in some ways, because unlike Cohn who directs his anger against his sexuality towards the outside political world in the form of red-baiting, Joe attempts to cloak his homosexuality by marrying Harper according to the dictates of his Mormon faith. His wife Harper has become destroyed by his treatment, turning into a depressive Valium addict in response. At the beginning of the play, a rabbi proclaims about how wonderful in American's "melting pot," a Jewish woman's faith can become so diluted that her children have "goy" names. However, such diluting of faith and purity also occurs even amongst the supposedly pure Mormons. Against her creed, Harper takes Valium to succor the lack of passion she feels in her relationship. Against his creed, Joe feels desire for men and attempts to channel this desire into a heterosexual relationship that only makes his partner extremely unhappy. Despite his guilt, he still engages in relationships with other men. "Do homosexuals take long walks?" Harper asks at one point in the play. The response that they do is confirmation that indeed, Joe has been visiting public areas and engaging in sexual relationships with other men.

The individual, whom Harper is able to inquire about "long walks," is, interestingly enough, the drag queen Prior. Prior has AIDS. Because of the medication he is taking for his illness, he finds himself hallucinating. Harper, also caught in a hallucination meets him in the halfway world of her dreams, where much of the play's most profound emotional action and reactions take place. Dreams are just as true for the characters of "Angels in America" perhaps because so much of the character's lives are founded upon dreams rather than reality. "Very Steven Spielburg," is the end of the play's final quotation from Prior, when he is visited with a giant angel from the great beyond. The angel has selected this sufferer from AIDS to be her prophet. Also during the play, Prior is selected to be visited by a number of his ancestors, some homosexual and others not, all of whom engage in a relationship with him that is, if nothing else, as real and fulfilling as the relationship he has with his feckless lover Lewis. Both Prior and Harper are dreamers and thus they connect in dreams, even if life does not afford them the opportunity.

Kisses from the angel of death," Prior says when he first exposes the scars from Karcopsi's sarcoma on his arms to Lewis. Lewis is terrified of these legions, terrified of dying of AIDS. Although Lewis has embraced his homosexuality unlike Joe, he is no less selfish and self-absorbed than the Mormon lawyer. When his lover most needs him, Lewis flees. To Kushner's credit, the author does not portray either gay or straight relationships as intrinsically superior to the other. Instead, betrayal is betrayal in the eyes of the author. "What are you doing in my dream?" Harper asks when she first encounters Prior, in drag, during her nightly wanderings in her mind and Prior's mind. Prior and Harper seem able to connect because both are good, decent people whom have embarked upon a relationship they believed was based in love, but was really only based in dreams and lies. Prior thought Lewis would stay with him, but Prior lied to himself, Prior dreamed of a passion that was not there.

The dream-like nature of relationships further blurs the distinction between the divisions of gay and straight, of male and female that exist in the world of the play. The play suggests that the two dominant relationships are both equally unequal, if such a paradox may be used, by continually blurring the distinction between male and female and socially sanctified and socially condemned relationships. "Why are you wearing makeup?" asks Harper when she first sees Prior. "So are you," he points out, suggesting that the two are connected both by the false faces they have chosen to wear in life, and the false relationships they have entered that have come to define their lives.

Both Lewis and Joe chose to wear false faces, Joe the more obvious one of a self-hating homosexual, but Lewis that of a man who is afraid of death. Lewis is so afraid of caring that he would rather immorally abandon his lover than risk death and illness. He would rather risk to his own self-conception that he is a moral human being. Lewis believes that as a gay man, he ought to be freed from the constraints of ordinary life such as commitment, just as Joe feels that as a Mormon, and a married Mormon at that, he simply "cannot" be a homosexual. Joe and Lewis are even more interconnected by self-hatred as characters than Prior and Harper by dreams, however, because Lewis himself shows elements of despising his homosexuality. He reviles Prior's open effeminacy as disgusting, just as he is disgusted in particular with catching "the gay disease" that is AIDS.