Goldie and I just finished watching the 6-hour miniseries adaptation of Angels in America tonight. It’s a bit hard to give a short summary of a 6-hour production, but you could say it is a sort of “State of the (American) Union” address from the perspective of a gay man dying of, and then later living with, AIDS. It begins in the middle of the Reagan-era when the world is worrying about the growing ozone hole, “homosexuals” are still hiding in the closets and shadows, and AIDS is growing to epidemic proportions. Now for the spoilers….it ends with the Berlin wall coming down, the dissolution of the USSR, the life-saving powers of the new AIDS drugs, and hope. Why, goddamn, the audacity of hope.
The thing is, I saw the the play almost a decade ago. I saw the play when Clinton was still in office, I was just beginning my life out on my own, and I was out and proud in a liberal college town. I remember getting goosebumps at the end, I remember feeling a sense of liberation, optimism, invincibility…
Well, in the sevearal years that passed, I naturally forgot some of the details of the story. Goldie was the one who pulled it out at the video store and got me to watch it again. This time watching it, I was mesmerized by the characters who are walking between the lines of reality; not sure if they are having delusions or if the angels and ghosts visiting them are actually real. On the political side of things, I half-heartedly joked with Goldie: “Thank god we weren’t alive in the 80’s, things could be worse.” Well, irony came to bite me in the ass when I saw the ending again:
“This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all. And the dead will be commemorated, and we’ll struggle on with the living and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward, we will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now, you are fabulous each and every one and I bless you. More life, the great work begins.”
It’s been nearly 10 years since I first saw it, getting close to 20 years since the play came out and “the time” hasn’t come yet. The spoiler is that I’ve left the country, am now struggling to make my own life, and biting my tongue in a town where no one dares rock the boat. We, as in the fabulous gays and lesbians of the U.S., are not citizens. We’re refugees and political pawns in the illegitimate Bush-era where the world is scared shitless of global warming and war is growing to epidemic proportions.
*deep breath*
(Aye… I promised myself I would try to avoid ending this on a note of utter despair.)
I’ll just share the bit of comfort I found at the end: there is certainly no chance for hope if we don’t hold on, even in the darkest hour just before dawn.
