Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

“Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need?”

Louis has just learned that Prior has AIDS, and he is already afraid and looking for a way out of the relationship. He looks for absolution in the framework of religion, but the rabbi tells him that Judaism offers guilt, not absolution. This condemns Louis to wallow in the guilt of his decision.

“I don’t think there’s any uninfected part of me. My heart is pumping polluted blood. I feel dirty.”

Harper has just revealed to Prior that there is a part of him that is free from infection. But Prior feels as if the virus has permeated his entire being. This reflects the way AIDS patients are isolated and treated as if they are unclean.

“Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.”

Roy identifies what is at the root of anti-gay bias and terror of AIDS. Gay people are oppressed with limited social power to demand respect and equality. AIDS, especially in 1985, commands a fear that isn’t matched by other deadly illnesses. What scares people about AIDS is the stigma of sex, and particularly the stigma of insinuating gay sex.

“I’m… It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of fight is that? Losing means your soul is thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.”

Joe compares himself and his fight against his own sexuality to Jacob’s biblical wrestling match with the angel. The angel is a beautiful man, and in a sense, Joe wants him to win and take him down, so he is absolved of responsibility. This foreshadows Prior’s wrestling with the Angel and winning, because he demonstrates that winning the fight is a matter of will.

“It’s the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do. […] But you can almost always live with the consequences.”

Martin Heller tries to convince Joe to ignore his ethics, take the job, and help Roy. He speaks from the perspective of someone who has compromised himself many times for Roy. Once he has broken his moral code, it will only become easier to do it again.

“No no really I mean… What’s it like to be the child of the Zeitgeist? To have the American Animus as your dad? It’s not really a family, the Reagans, I read People, there aren’t any connections there, no love, they don’t ever speak to each other except through their agents.” 

Louis is teasing Joe, but his description of Reagan as the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the era, reflects Reagan’s popularity with the people. He also sees the Reagan family as an empty shell, an image of the ideal with no familial affection. They are the performance of a family, which is the same performance that Joe is trying to maintain.

“You’re old enough to understand that your father didn’t love you without being ridiculous about it.”

Hannah confirms for Joe that the family that raised him was as much of an illusion as the family that he is pretending to build with Harper. Hannah is blunt and expects Joe to accept this information without emotion. But Joe is reconsidering what kind of life he wants.

“But still. Late in the day… for saints and everyone.”

Hannah prepares to sell her house in Salt Lake City, which her friend sees as the only sanctuary on earth where saints live, suggesting that Hannah is going out into the dangerous wilderness. Although Hannah is leaving because she sees that Joe is in trouble, she doesn’t have any illusions about saving him. Late in the day is a play on Latter-Day (Saints), or Mormons, and Hannah is implying that they came too late in history to do any good.

“This is a retreat, a vacuum, its virtue is that it lacks everything; deep-freeze for feelings. You can be numb and safe here, that’s what you came for. Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” 

As Mr. Lies warns her, Harper’s hallucination of the Antarctic is meant to protect her from her feelings. But Harper is a sensitive and intuitive person, and she cannot escape her emotions. Her sense of longing will quickly break through and destroy the frozen vacuum she has tried to hide in.

“In the new century, I think we will all be insane.”

The woman in the South Bronx as demonstrated a tenuous grasp on reality. However, Hannah manages to ground her long enough to get her help. The woman’s mental state is unbalanced and implied to be different from the norm, and her prediction suggests that the idea of a baseline of rational thought will be broken apart.

“Fuck nice. They say terrible things about me in the Nation. Fuck the Nation. You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law, or subject to it. Choose.”

After Joe rejects the job, Roy is bitter about Joe’s preoccupation with ethics and doing the right thing. The Nation is a liberal political magazine that enjoys clout among progressives but, in Roy’s mind, wields little real political power. Roy believes that power can only come from cutting throats, which is part of the political spirit of the 1980s.

“I’m immortal. Ethel. […] I have forced my way into history. I ain’t never gonna die.”

Roy’s cruelty and unscrupulousness sometimes seem to be without reason. But he makes it clear that he is clawing at immortality at any cost. Even infamy is better than anonymity, and it is the only way that Roy feels he can really cheat death.

“You’re in a hospital, you don’t have any constitutional rights.”

After Roy has tried to demean Belize and demand a white nurse, Belize points out that Roy is at his mercy, since Belize is the one who is handling his medical care. Although Belize is a compassionate nurse, and Roy needs to be knocked down, this also illustrates the way hospitals have the power to dehumanize, which was the reality for many AIDS patients.

“Oh you only think you know all I know. I don’t even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties.”

Here, Roy is blackmailing Heller. But his reference to the 1950s is an oblique admission that McCarthy’s communist hearings and the Rosenberg trials were based on lies and lucky guesses. Roy doesn’t see himself as beholden to the truth as much as he is someone who creates the truth.

“Sssssh. Words are the worst things. Breathe. Smell. […] Let’s stop talking. Or if you have to talk, talk dirty.”

For Louis, having sex with Joe is just a placeholder because he misses Prior. He doesn’t want Joe to talk, because Joe is a Reaganite conservative. The more Joe says, the less plausible deniability Louis will have about what kind of person he has invited into his bed.

“In making people God apparently set in motion a potential in the design for change, for random event, for movement forward.”

Based on his encounter with the Angel, Prior has learned that angels are severely limited by nature. Humans may do terrible things to each other and perpetuate atrocities, but they have the ability to create and exercise free will. In this sense, humans are like God. 

“The worst thing about being sick in America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for sick. Look at Reagan: He’s so healthy he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in the chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJ’s. I mean who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm.”

As much as Roy denies the nature of his illness, he cannot deny that he is sick, and the system that he has helped to create marginalizes the sick. In capitalism, sick people can’t be exploited for labor. And Reagan, who presides over capitalist America, represents an impossible ideal of health and heartiness.

“We get a lot of distracted, grief-stricken people here. It’s our specialty.”

Here, Harper speaks to Prior at the Mormon Visitor’s Center. She describes the types of people the church appeals to. In doing so, she wryly acknowledges that religion tends to prey on those who are suffering and seeking answers to unanswerable questions.

“You shouldn’t do that in here, this isn’t a place for real feelings, this is just storytime here, stop.”

Prior starts crying about Louis. However, Harper insists that there is no space for genuine emotion in religious doctrine. This reflects the way Harper has been constantly taught to cover up her mental illness and addiction, because Mormons aren’t allowed to have existential problems.

“You believe the world is perfectible and so you find it always unsatisfying. […] You have to reconcile yourself to the world’s imperfectability by being thoroughly in the world but not of it. […] That’s what being Mormon is.”

Joe tries to defend and describe Mormonism for Louis, but his explanation reveals a system of distancing oneself from reality and pretending that the conditions of one’s life are inconsequential, even when they are unsatisfying. For Louis, who feels deep guilt over his actions, this dissociation with emotions and self-accountability seems absurd.

“The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on the earth sounds less like freedom to me.”

As a Black gay man, Belize sees the world differently from Louis. Belize makes it clear that Louis doesn’t really see him as a person with a complex life outside of Louis’s perception. But from Belize’s perspective, freedom is a nebulous concept with no real-life experience to match, at least for most people in America.

“An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek something new.”

Hannah is one of the most sincerely religious characters in the play. However, she reveals that she sees the supernatural aspects of her faith as metaphorical. She doesn’t recognize yet that the Angel is a literal force to be fought, but her advice leads Prior to stand his ground.

“I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do.”

Prior makes the choice to return to life, but he recognizes that there may be no reason to live other than his own survival instinct, which tells him to keep fighting for his life, even when there is no hope left. Similarly, humanity continues to fight to survive, regardless of whether it is the wisest choice. Ultimately, Prior will set his goal to simply have as much life as possible.