SOURCE: Ogden, Daryl. “Cold War Science and the Body Politic: An Immuno/Virological Approach to Angels in America.” Literature and Medicine 19, no. 2 (fall 2000): 241-61.

[In the following essay, Ogden examines Kushner's representation of sexual identity in Angels in America in terms of the intersection of medical and political discourse around the AIDS epidemic.]

Early on in Millennium Approaches, Part One of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Roy Cohn's physician informs his patient that he's suffering from AIDS. Roy, the former assistant United States prosecuting attorney in the Rosenberg spy case and the right hand of Joseph McCarthy during the Senate Red Scare trials, feigns puzzlement with the diagnosis and outrage over his doctor's inference that he must be a homosexual:

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. … Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. 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 men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?¹

Despite his voracious sexual appetite for men, as a patron saint of right-wing politics Roy simply cannot occupy the ontological status of a homosexual. Roy recognizes that to be diagnosed with AIDS, a disease conflated with homosexuality, would signify the end of his powerbrokering ability in the high-Reagan era of the mid-eighties. It would also call ironic attention to his own closeted, socially subversive sexual identity from the 1940s forward, when his public life began in earnest. This identity is closely parallel to the politically and militarily subversive identity of the so-called communist infiltrators and homosexual federal employees whom he and his colleagues worked so hard to expose in that same era.

As far as Roy is concerned, AIDS is a homosexual disease. Therefore, to have contracted AIDS is an impossibility because he is a political insider who can “punch fifteen numbers” (Millennium, 45) and have Nancy Reagan on the other end of the telephone, because he is socially interpreted not as a homosexual but as “a heterosexual man … who fucks around with guys” (Millennium, 46). Homosexuality for Roy is incommensurate with clout. It is tantamount to being saddled with the leftist identity of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States of the 1940s and 1950s, three Americans who betrayed a decided lack of clout as far as the federal legal system was concerned. In fact, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg herself haunts Roy in Angels in America, appearing to him at increasingly regular intervals as the play proceeds. Along with communists, homosexuals in the federal government were the other principal target of McCarthyism. This was the case, first, because their sexual preferences purportedly made them vulnerable to blackmail by foreign powers and, second, they were demonized as “perverts” neither morally worthy nor psychologically capable of holding government positions.² As one of the men tapped in the 1950s to hound both homosexuals and communists into oblivion, the actual Roy understood it is better to remain in the closet. In the mid-1980s, Kushner's fictional Roy recognizes it is even more important to cloak your sexual identity if you happen to be a homosexual with AIDS.

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a play in two parts whose titles, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, suggest Kushner's grandiose themes. Set in New York City at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's second presidential term, the play explores the sexual, ethnic, political, and religious identities of five homosexual men, including Roy Cohn and Louis Ironson, a conservative and liberal Jew; Joe Pitt, a married Mormon still very much in the closet; Prior Walter, a WASP who can trace his lineage back to the Norman invasion of England; and Belize, an African American drag queen. These men are all afflicted to varying degrees by AIDS, ranging from the HIV infections of Roy and Prior to the responses of their friends and lovers, Louis, Joe, and Belize. Over the course of the play, Kushner masterfully weaves together realism, fantasy, and the supernatural and speculates on the nature of God, heaven, and the universe in the midst of a gay holocaust. More specifically for the purposes of this essay, Kushner elaborates on the political and historical meanings of AIDS, medical science, and the Cold War persecution of marginalized Americans identified as sympathetic to the political left, including communists and homosexuals.

In all of Roy's appearances in Angels in America, Kushner makes visible a Cold War political discourse that underlines the ideological similarities between the McCarthyite 1950s and the Reaganite 1980s, calling attention to the parallels between communism and homosexuality as American identities of otherness and disempowerment.³ Louis, Roy's liberal foil, understands this parallel well. He accuses Joe, his conservative lover (and Roy's protégé), of developing a legal argument for the Federal Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, to deny a gay army veteran benefits on the basis of his sexual identity. Despite his own gay identity, homosexuals, in Joe's view, are not entitled to Civil Rights protections. To make his case against Joe, Louis draws upon the famous words of Joseph Welch, special counsel to the Army during the McCarthy hearings: “Have you no decency, at long last, sir, have you no decency at all?”⁴ In pursuing an argument that Louis calls “an important bit of legal fag-bashing” (Perestroika, 110), Joe reveals himself not only to be filled with self-loathing but also to be Roy's intellectual and ideological heir, continuing the McCarthy-era legal persecution of homosexuals.

Kushner portrays Reaganism polemically, as a version of neo-McCarthyism. It is surprising, then, that no critical attention has been given to the fact that the nascent Cold War decades of Roy's early professional history also proved crucial for the formation of the medical sciences of immunology and virology, sciences that would wield inordinate power during the 1980s in the race to inscribe culturally dominant metaphors on AIDS and homosexual sexual practices.⁵ On one hand, reading Kushner's play within the context of the history of medicine highlights the central importance of immuno-virological metaphor to the political, social, and sexual identities of Kushner's characters and to the discourses of disease and identity generated by AIDS; on the other hand, reading Angels in America with an eye on the history of immunology and virology and their ideological relationship to American politics in the 1950s helps us to see the saturated Cold War consciousness of those two medical disciplines.

Immunology traces its early modern origins to the eighteenth-century Englishman Edward Jenner, whose successful experiments on cowpox eventually led to a smallpox innoculation that signaled a revolution in the ways that communicable diseases could be prevented.⁶ Most medical historians, however, locate modern immunology's “birth” either in Claude Bernard's An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine of 1865 or to Louis Pasteur's groundbreaking series of papers on the Germ Theory of Disease published in the 1880s.⁷ Even though Pasteur's theory that germs were the principal causal factors in disease proved to be a medical dead end, his research cleared the ground for some of the early advances in immunological theory. The subsequent scientific internationalism in Europe that characterized the fin de siècle and early twentieth century made substantial theoretical gains in immunology possible, and science particularly benefited from promising developments shared between researchers in France, Germany, and Austria.⁸ With the tragic advent of World War I, the significance of new discoveries in continental immunology were diminished as researchers of rival powers were cut off from one another and government resources were diverted to other areas of scientific research that might more directly benefit the war effort. While pre-war immunology generated first-time interest in autoantibodies and autoimmune diseases, for three decades following the conclusion of World War I theoretical and experimental advances in immunology advanced at a snail's pace.⁹ For a variety of reasons, when they finally did advance, they predominantly did so during the Cold War.

Like immunology, virology also looks back to the experimental research of Jenner and Pasteur and their development of inoculations for two prominent viruses, smallpox and rabies.¹⁰ Jenner's and Pasteur's discoveries amounted to two successful shots in the dark, however, because at the time of their research viruses remained quite misunderstood, principally because even the largest viruses could still not definitively be seen, even with the best optical microscopes that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to offer. In the century between Jenner's and Pasteur's research, virus retained its generalized classical meaning of any poisonous substance that caused sickness. Finally, in the 1890s, one of the signature discoveries in modern virology was made by the Dutch scientist Martinus Beijerinck, who isolated tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Beijerinck theorized the existence of cell-free filtrate—later known as a filterable virus—as a frequent cause of disease in tobacco plants. Beijerinck's accomplishment was made possible by his findings that TMV could be transmitted even after infected tobacco juice was absorbed by agar up to one tenth of an inch. Beijerinck reasoned that if infectious juice could be transmitted through solid jelly then the infectious agent must have the structure of a protein and not of a cell. Over the next decade other important viruses were isolated using modified versions of Beijerinck's technique, including foot-and-mouth disease in cattle by Friedrich Loeffler and Paul Frosch in 1898, and yellow-fever virus by Walter Reed and James Carroll in 1901. In the years following these discoveries bacteria-proof filters were developed that allowed scientists to produce much less virulent versions of various viruses. These weakened viruses were in turn used to produce vaccines for a variety of plant, animal, and human diseases.

As a consequence of these theoretical and technological advances, the first third of the twentieth century proved to be a golden age for virology. Fueled by the research of Wendell Stanley, who became the first scientist to crystallize a virus, and Ernest Goodpasture, who inaugurated the technique of growing viruses in hen's eggs, virology enjoyed unprecedented success in determining the structure, size, and composition of viruses. These successes led to the production of vaccines for some of the deadliest diseases known to humanity, including yellow fever, influenza, measles, and, most famously in the research of Jonas Salk, polio.

Not until 1949, with the publication of Frank Fenner and Frank McFarlane Burnet's important The Production of Antibodies, did immunology achieve a theoretical breakthrough commensurate with those already realized by virology.¹¹ In their groundbreaking research, Fenner and Burnet proposed a theory as to how the body's immunological apparatus distinguished “self” from “nonself.” Employing a hypothesis that eventually became known as the Clonal Selection Theory of Acquired Immunity, they argued that so-called normal or healthy cells possessed something called a self-marker, a distinguishing characteristic signaling to antibodies that the healthy cell in question was in fact part of the body, a non-threatening part of the self and should therefore be ignored and preserved. The Clonal Selection Theory proved to be one of the cornerstones upon which later research on immunologic tolerance relied, opening the door to developing drugs and protocols that made organ transplants, for instance, a realizable goal.¹²

Summing up their theoretical findings at the conclusion of The Production of Antibodies, Burnet and Fenner adopted a rhetoric that nearly jumps off the page if read within the terms of anti-communist, anti-homosexual political discourses of the post-World War II era:

1. The basis of our account is the recognition that the same system of cells is concerned both in the disposal of effete body cells (without antibody response) and of foreign organic material (with antibody response).
2. In order to allow this differentiation of function expendable body cells carry “self-marker” components which allow “recognition” of their “self” character.

3. (p. 126)

What Burnet and Fenner describe here is a nearly perfect metaphor of how the American body politic, particularly in the McCarthy era, operated as a kind of large-scale human immune system, placing under surveillance and effectively eliminating citizens suspected of foreign sympathies that might weaken internal American resolve to fend off the debilitating disease of communism. Either consciously or not, Burnet, an Australian who would be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1960 for his immunological research, continued to employ politicized medical rhetoric that complemented Cold War anxieties and responses. In 1970, for example, he published Immunological Surveillance, a book intended for a more popular audience than his earlier studies.¹³ It goes without saying that Burnet's title, which resonates with the clandestine techniques employed against American citizens by the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, couldn't provide a more powerful illustration of modern immunology's Cold War consciousness.¹⁴

Burnet and Fenner's reference in the passage cited above to the elimination of “effete” body cells appears to have been prescient, because it evokes cultural meanings important to the way that AIDS was pervasively interpreted in the early and mid-1980s as a “gay” disease. “Effete” is a value laden word, conjuring up images of decadence, physical depletion, and effeminacy, words with connotations stereotypically associated among American heterosexuals with homosexual men. When AIDS was first diagnosed, homosexual men were widely accused of excessive promiscuity, drug abuse, and unnatural sexual practices that had overloaded their immune systems to the point of exhaustion. This created an implicit double meaning in the way that AIDS could be read at the personal and cultural levels: their immune systems under assault by a deadly virus, the homosexual men afflicted with HIV and AIDS might just as well have been the useless effete cells expunged by the body's immune system. And those men diagnosed as HIV-positive in the early 1980s, many of whom held responsible the indifferent response of the Reagan administration for the accelerating crisis, must have felt exactly like expendable cells within what was widely perceived as an otherwise healthy body politic.

One need only recall Reagan's famous 1984 re-election slogan “It's Morning in America Again” and consider the fact that he went on to win the electoral votes of forty-nine states to agree that the majority of the country's citizens believed Reagan had the United States heading in the right direction, back to an America of the past, when homosexuality was a taboo word and homosexuals were safely hidden in the closet. In true conservative fashion, the 1984 Republican campaign hearkened back to a mythical golden age in American history. For Republicans, one of those golden ages was certainly the 1950s, a decade in which the grandfatherly Eisenhower twice defeated Adlai Stevenson in a landslide and thereby preserved American conservative values against an unreliable congress and the liberal Warren Supreme Court.

But the first years of the 1950s was also a dark period for Republicans, particularly those Republicans later identified with Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigations against Americans accused of an allegiance to communism and, more damning, of harboring sympathies for the Soviet Union. For example, in his infamous speech delivered at Wheeling, West Virginia, on 9 February 1950, Joseph McCarthy used the following language to describe the communist threat within U.S. borders: “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation.”¹⁵ For the United States of the first half of the 1950s in particular, the “self-marker” of politics was equated with expressing in the strongest possible terms anti-communist sentiment. For Cold Warriors like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Roy Cohn, immunology's nascent language of the body's civil defenses and of identifiable markers of selfhood or loyal citizenship would have paralleled language they themselves would employ to root out whom they often imagined to be American spies and communist sympathizers in the service of the Soviets.¹⁶

For sociologists, theorists, and historians of science alike, it should come as no surprise that Fenner and Burnet's concept of the self-marker, which has proven to be among modern immunology's most powerful metaphors, occurred just as the Cold War was gaining the undivided attention of Americans from every political persuasion. While virology and its medical ancestor, microbiology, have long employed tropes of hot warfare to describe how enemy viruses invade or infiltrate the human host, immunology posited an entirely different set of metaphors and assumptions that paralleled if not parroted many post-World War II fears of communist traitors within the body politic.¹⁷ Far from attributing disease to the power of an invading virus, immunology contended that sickness was primarily the fault of an individual's own failed immune system. At the risk of mixing political and biological metaphors, immunologists claimed that for the body to succeed against disease it had to do two things: 1) extirpate “effete” self-marked cells that weakened the body's own civil and border defenses and 2) eliminate non-self biological agents. As Burnet wrote in his 1962 book, The Integrity of the Body: “Antibody production or any other type of immunological reaction is against foreign material—against something that is not self.”¹⁸ Virology and immunology therefore emerged as explanatory models of sickness and disease that drew in large measure on two distinct yet complementary Cold War horrors. Virologists postulated the existence of powerful viruses, dangerous enemies beyond the body's borders, capable of violating those borders under favorable circumstances. Quite differently, immunologists warned healthy and sick Americans alike of formidable enemies within the body that appeared—like communist sympathizers and homosexuals—to constitute the Self but were, in fact, the Other. Understood in political terms, virology capitalized on fears of a hot war with America's communist adversaries whereas immunology was predicated on fear of disloyalty and subversion within the body (politic) itself.

As the preceding narrative suggests, an implicit competition, at least partly fueled by historical phenomena and what once seemed to be fundamental and irresolvable theoretical differences, exists between the sciences of immunology and virology and their respective understandings of bodily health and disease. Not until the early 1980s and the introduction of AIDS into the national consciousness were immunology and virology compelled to form a reluctant détente. Ironically, AIDS proved to be the perfect vehicle for a truce, however uneasy, to be called between the competing sciences. For example, when Henry, Roy's doctor, explains the nature of his patient's illness, he speaks fluently in a hybrid medical language of virology and immunology:

The best theory is that we blame a retrovirus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Its presence is made known to us by the useless antibodies which appear in reaction to its entrance into the blood-stream through a cut, or an orifice. The antibodies are powerless to protect the body against it. Why, we don't know. The body's immune system ceases to function. Sometimes the body even attacks itself. At any rate it's left open to a whole horror house of infections from microbes which it usually defends against.

(Millennium, 42)

The extent of the truce between virology and immunology represented by Henry's speech should not be overstated, of course. When the AIDS crisis first began, immunologists and virologists clashed bitterly, with immunologists advocating that the new disease be named GRID for Gay Related Immune Deficiency and virologists arguing in favor of calling the same diagnosis HIV-Disease. An obvious tension between immunology and virology still exists in terms of the ways AIDS is read as sickness. For immunologists, to be HIV-positive is not necessarily to be sick until the body's immune system, finally diminished to dangerous levels, can no longer protect the host from disease and illness; by contrast, virologists argue that the disease begins with the infiltration of the virus into the body, not with what the American media dubbed for a while as “full-blown AIDS.”

Yet the apparent “facts” of HIV compelled scientists from each discipline to work together to develop an adequate explanatory model because neither immunology nor virology alone could account for how HIV works to produce AIDS. Though important etiological differences still existed between the two sciences, for the first time in their histories, immunology and virology had to depend more or less equally on one another to account for what was going on when it came to AIDS. For all intents and purposes, only when they finally did rely on one another to explain the basic causal factors of AIDS did the syndrome become, to employ the language of Bruno Latour, “black boxed” as scientific fact.¹⁹ For Latour, once a scientific concept or technique is black boxed, researchers and lay persons alike need no longer concern themselves with how or why that concept or technique works specifically. It is simply a given that a particular input will result in a particular output.

In spite of the fact that a great deal of controversy still remained over the causes and consequences of HIV and AIDS, by the mid-eighties the “input” and “output” of HIV were more or less agreed upon: HIV was a virus passed from one host to another through bodily fluids. Once HIV was present in the human body, T-cell counts crucial to the success of the immunological system began to decline, eventually dropping to such a low figure that the body became increasingly vulnerable to opportunistic diseases such as Pneumocystis carinii, an unusual form of pneumonia, or Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare type of cancer that manifests itself in the form of painful skin lesions that, in the absence of sufficient T-cells, eventually leads to the death of the host.

Within this drastically simplified black-box picture of HIV and AIDS existed a large quantity of questions and uncertainties still too complex to be resolved definitively, but the picture represented what most in the scientific community accepted as certainties.²⁰ The black boxing of the syndrome explains why Prior, announcing to his lover Louis that he has AIDS, declares his life effectively to be over because there is “[n]o wall like the wall of hard scientific fact” (Millennium, 22). Prior, diagnosed with AIDS in the fall of 1985, draws his conclusions largely on the basis of mainstream findings at a relatively early stage in medical science's understanding of the syndrome. These findings unspokenly represented the initial compromise that immunology and virology had struck, a compromise that, as far as Prior is concerned, sentenced AIDS sufferers to an early death without any hope of a reprieve.

Angels in America uses the physical phenomenon of HIV, a virus that attacks the immune system, as a trope to investigate the degree to which homosexuals qualify as the Self or the Other in the United States. That is, Kushner asks a medical question that may just as usefully be paraphrased in the register of politics: do homosexuals strengthen or weaken the body politic? To recast the question more directly in terms of U.S. history: are homosexuals of the 1980s, particularly HIV-positive homosexuals, analogous to the communist sympathizers (and homosexual federal employees) of the 1950s, as Roy Cohn and his protégé, Joe Pitt (closeted homosexuals both), suggest they are? Are homosexuals themselves effete cells in an otherwise vigorous body politic, expendable for the health of the nation or are they, quite differently, a powerful national antibody capable of regenerating and making whole the body politic? More generally, is Kushner seeking to depathologize homosexuality to such a degree that gay identity is seen as inextricably linked to a healthy national identity? These questions form the political foundations of the complementary immuno-virological discourses of Angels in America.

Tony Kushner is a master of conflating a literal language of the diseased body and a metaphoric language of the body politic. In most cases these languages are spoken by, or associated with, the two characters directly afflicted with AIDS in the play, Roy and Prior. In Prior's case, his physical symptoms, particularly repeated references to blood and bleeding (fluid vehicles of transmission and infection) are intended to function as a metonymy of the devastation wreaked upon the entire American homosexual community by AIDS. Over and over, Prior is forced to face his blood. He informs Louis that he has “shat blood” (Millennium, 34). He later loses control of his bowels, whereupon Louis discovers an enormous quantity of blood in his stool (Millennium, 48). On another occasion, reflecting on his diagnosis, Prior observes, “My heart is pumping polluted blood” (Millennium, 34). Contrast this with Roy, the farthest thing possible from a bleeding-heart liberal, who informs us that his heart is a “[t]ough little muscle. Never bleeds” (Perestroika, 27).

Over the course of the play, a reluctant Prior is contacted by angels who invest him with the powers of a prophet of homosexuality and AIDS. Prior gradually acquires the status of a visionary who makes transparent the facades of the play's characters, particularly Joe Pitt, whom Prior rightly identifies to Harper Pitt, Joe's wife, as a closeted homosexual. In his prophetic relationship to the angels and in his eventual ascent to heaven and return to earth, Prior emerges as the play's figure of Christian redemption. The constant references to blood in fact associate him with Christ's bleeding wounds and the suffering that accompanies them.²¹

Important as blood is to Kushner's representation of Prior, the most emblematic signifier of AIDS found on the young man's body is a Kaposi's sarcoma (K.S.) lesion, what he calls “the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death” (Millennium, 21). In the early days of AIDS diagnosis, the frequent identification of K.S. among homosexual men was among the most puzzling symptoms for physicians to explicate. Well into the 1980s K.S. was still considered a rare and rather exotic form of skin cancer that afflicted mostly men with a Mediterranean heritage, particularly Jews. According to Louis, Prior can trace his WASP heritage back to 1066 and the Battle of Hastings in which the Norman invaders led by William the Conqueror defeated the Anglo-Saxon warriors of Prior's kin who fought under King Harold's banner.²² As far as we know, nothing close to Mediterranean blood flows through Prior's veins. When Prior calls Louis's attention to the K.S., he playfully observes that the cancer is a “Foreign Lesion. An American Lesion. Lesionnaire's disease” (Millennium, 21).

But in Prior's joke there is also an important truth for the question of ethnic identity, otherness, and immunological metaphor in Angels in America. Normally alien to non-Jewish bodies, but now an all too frequent part of the bodies of American homosexual men, K.S. is paradoxically at once the most American and foreign of entities, Self and Other at the same time. In his lighthearted call for Louis to see the horrific lesion as intrinsically American, Prior strives to disrupt the otherness of K.S. and he does so, appropriately, with a Jew, someone who in a previous era would have had a much better chance of being afflicted with the cancer than Prior.

In many respects, Kushner gives Prior K.S.—which formerly marked those afflicted with the disease as Jewish, and in 1985 marked most sufferers as gay—in order to call attention to how the disease, informed consciously or not by immunological metaphors, impinges differently upon its victims' identity in the age of AIDS. Interestingly, Prior reveals the K.S. lesion to Louis immediately following the Orthodox Jewish funeral of Louis's grandmother, Sarah Ironson, a woman who migrated to the United States from Russia. This connection symbolically associates Prior, identified alone among the play's principal characters as a genuine WASP, as an eastern European Jew. The ethnic provenance of K.S. therefore links Louis and Prior, but it also links Prior with Louis's grandmother and with Ethel Rosenberg, another Jewish woman who would have been approximately the age of Sarah Ironson had she not been executed in 1953. By giving the gay and Jewish Roy K.S., Kushner drives home the double cultural association K.S. shares among physicians in a post-AIDS medical environment in which the cancer is most frequently diagnosed among HIV-infected homosexuals and Jewish men. Among homosexual men of WASP descent in general, and in Prior's case in particular, K.S. creates a tangible connection between WASP and Jewish identities.

Joe Pitt's Mormon identity bears a close relation to the connection between WASP and Jewish identities in the play. Ethnically a WASP, Joe's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints makes him in some ways more like a Jew because Mormons and Jews each share a long history of persecution and prejudice. The Mormon faithful were originally hounded out of both Illinois and Missouri before embarking on an epic trek across the continent to Utah, their New Zion. Before their arrival in Utah, Mormons were widely regarded as pariahs by local and state governments and federal authorities, in large part because of the practice of polygamy pursued by the Church's male elders, most notoriously by Joseph Smith and the church's second leader, Brigham Young. Members of the Mormon faith—arguably the only important world religion that can boast an American origin—explicitly identified themselves as Mormons first, Americans second, and formally bracketed themselves off from American society by creating a closed, highly ceremonial, alternative society. Until 1890, Mormons flirted with Otherness in American culture before acceding to federal demands and stamping themselves with the self-marker of monogamy.

As a conservative Republican, Joe Pitt's political ideology is consonant with most of his Mormon brethren, but as a homosexual Joe reluctantly repudiates the enormous value that Mormons place on heterosexuality. Mormonism no doubt appealed to Kushner because it is a genuinely American religion that has, through much of its history, been marginalized as Other. Unafflicted with AIDS, Joe Pitt nonetheless suffers from a bleeding ulcer, which implicitly links him with Prior's bleeding and once again emphasizes Kushner's recurrence to medical metaphors to describe the degraded status of homosexuals in the American body politic.

Quite different from Prior and Joe—who both emphasize the shedding of their blood to drive home the situation of homosexuals in the 1980s—Roy employs metaphors of body to describe the law and politics. Roy ironically calls attention to the deteriorating status of his own body as well as to the utter corruptibility of the U.S. legal and political institutions he has manipulated from the beginning of his career:

The whole Establishment. Their little rules. Because I know no rules. Because I don't see the Law as a dead and arbitrary collection of antiquated dictums, thou shall, thou shalt not, because, because I know the Law's a pliable, breathing, sweating … organ, because, because …

(Millennium, 66, [Kushner's ellipses])

Disgusted with Joe's equivocation over whether to accept a job at the Department of Justice and help him to avoid disbarment after years of skirting legal ethics and protocol, Roy launches into a speech peppered with metaphors of body: “This is … this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is politics, Joe, the game of being alive” (Millennium, 68, [Kushner's ellipsis]).

In a quasi-Nietzschean will to diagnosis, Roy insists that he be identified as a liver cancer patient so as not to have the indelible mark of homosexuality placed on him by a medical chart that reads “AIDS.” By having the character whom Louis calls “the polestar of human evil” (Perestroika, 95) diagnose himself with liver cancer, Kushner cleverly recalls our introduction to Roy in Act I, Scene II of Millennium Approaches, where he devours a number of liver sandwiches, wildly punches the hold buttons on his office telephone, and wishes out loud to Joe that he were an octopus, “[e]ight loving arms and all those suckers. Know what I mean?” (p. 11). As Roy bites into one of the sandwiches and pleasurably responds, “Mmmmm, liver or some. …” (p. 12, [Kushner's ellipsis]), it anticipates his later intentionally erroneous self-diagnosis. In terms of immunological metaphors and their relation to a conservative body politic desirous of eradicating the other, liver cancer is, like AIDS, an ironically appropriate illness for Roy because the liver is responsible for purifying the blood against foreign elements and sending cleansed blood back into the body. When the liver ceases to function effectively the body is poisoned by toxins.

For Roy, the two elements of otherness that he tries to purify from American culture are homosexuality and communism, first by keeping his own and others' homosexuality in the closet, and second by pursuing and punishing those Americans ideologically identified with communism and marked as homosexual. In both cases Kushner shows Roy to have failed. First, with the exception of Joe, all of the other gay men in the play—and presumably also most New Yorkers who care—know definitively that Roy is gay, political clout or not. Furthermore, when Joe reveals to Roy, who is in rapid physical decline, that he is living with a man, his mentor demands that Joe return to his wife. Joe half-heartedly attempts to comply but cannot carry through because Roy's paternal admonishment is not strong enough to overcome Joe's desire for men. Second, although Roy successfully achieved Ethel Rosenberg's execution for her limited participation in relaying sensitive atomic bomb technology to the Soviets (Roy accomplished this, we learn, as a consequence of illegal ex-parte communication), Ethel's ghost haunts Roy throughout Angels in America, revealing to him just before he expires that he has been disbarred, thereby stripping him of the one identity that mattered most to his self-conception.

The cancer-ridden liver that Roy claims is his, which he symbolically cannibalizes in his first scene, is a double metaphor that highlights his growing incapacity to cleanse America of what he considers to be the undesirable political elements that have infiltrated it and of the cannibalization of the law (“because I know the Law's a pliable, breathing, sweating … organ,”) that he has engaged in since the inception of his career. By drawing a connection between the Law as a metaphorical organ and attempting to make a cancer-ridden liver the bogus centerpiece of his illness, Roy ironically calls attention to the fact that the Law as he practices it is diseased and no longer able to expunge from the U.S. body politic genuine forces of corruption. As represented by Kushner, Roy embodies legal corruption.

Roy's growing physical and political weakness is well illustrated in his contentious bedside relationship with Belize, Roy's nurse and Prior's close friend, a man whom Roy identifies as “the Negro night nurse, my negation” (Perestroika, 76). Roy initially demands medical attention from a white nurse, but, soon attracted to the force of Belize's personality, lies back and accepts the IV needle that Belize menacingly wields with the threat that he can make it feel as if “I just hooked you up to a bag of Liquid Drano” (Perestroika, 27). Belize's victory with the needle is a harbinger of more victories to come. The former drag queen's medical knowledge, it turns out, exceeds that of Roy's “very expensive WASP doctor” (Perestroika, 29). Scheduled for radiation therapy to treat the telltale K.S. lesions, Roy is informed by Belize not to accept the therapy, under penalty of death. Belize, apparently well schooled in the discipline of AIDS immunology, tells Roy that “radiation will kill the T-cells and you don't have any you can afford to lose” (Perestroika, 29).

Belize's lines, indebted to immunological theory, are important precisely because of who speaks them and what they mean to the history of Cold War political metaphor in immunology. In the 1950s immunological metaphors relied largely on a Cold War discourse of Self and Other that targeted the Other—figured as leftists, communists, and homosexuals in American political terminology—for exclusion from the body politic. By contrast, the Other is here embodied by the gay, African-American Belize, who speaks in the language of immunological resistance to the ultimate conservative Cold Warrior and persecutor of American political Otherness. In giving Belize these lines, Kushner appropriates immunological tropes for leftists and homosexuals alike by showing that in this play those groups are not Other, but Selves crucial to the constitution of the healthy American body politic.

Roy's political conception of medical knowledge and power is conventional—he simply can't believe that a gay black nurse's knowledge can surpass a white doctor's—but, true to form, he omits an important variable in his calculations: the possibility that homosexuality could actually be a politically powerful identity, especially when it comes to circulating knowledge about AIDS that can be translated into effective treatment. Although New York City's gay population might not have been able, in Roy's words, to pass a “pissant antidiscrimination bill in the city council,” several branches of the U.S. homosexual community in the 1980s, determined to overcome what they regarded as governmental institutions, medical communities, and pharmaceutical companies unresponsive to the catastrophe befalling gay men, pursued alternative medical treatments, including foreign (especially French) treatments and in many cases generated their own therapeutic discourses by publishing in local newspapers targeted at gay audiences. These treatments and discourses both typically challenged conventional American medical wisdom on AIDS.²³ Among the most important challenges to mainstream AIDS research were passionate and politically effective attacks against double-blind drug testing of control groups that received nothing more than placebos.

Belize taps into this critique when he instructs Roy, on the heels of admonishing the ailing attorney not to accept radiation therapy, to demand actual AZT, the first effective drug to slow the advance of HIV, rather than risk the possibility of being treated with placebos that will “get the kind of statistics they can publish in the New England Journal of Medicine” (Perestroika, 30). Belize goes on to force upon Roy the sexual identity of homosexuality that he earlier rejected from his WASP physician. At the close of their first conversation Roy asks Belize what could possibly motivate him to divulge valuable information to a man who is his ideological adversary. Belize replies in a double-voiced language of leftist labor politics and gay appropriation of the vocabulary of oppression, “Consider it solidarity. One faggot to another” (Perestroika, 30), to which Roy responds with toothless threats. In his relationship with Belize, Roy isn't a heterosexual who fucks around with guys, he isn't even a homosexual—he's a “faggot,” someone who may be able to telephone Nancy Reagan but without nearly enough clout to resist an African American drag queen.

But Roy still certainly has clout in Washington and, more specifically, in Bethesda, Maryland, where the National Institutes of Health is located and where AZT is administered. Later in Perestroika, Belize is astonished to discover that Roy is the beneficiary of his medical advice and, partly as a consequence of that advice, personally controls a huge private stash of AZT like “the dragon atop the golden horde” (p. 60). Belize manages, however, to turn this material illustration of Roy's political power into his own gain. Through Roy, Belize has access to the drugs that represent the last best chance for prolonging the lives of his friends afflicted with HIV/AIDS, most notably Prior. At first Roy flatly refuses Belize's request for the AZT, even though Belize assures him that “[i]f you live fifty more years you won't swallow all of those pills” (Perestroika, 60).

Both men turn belligerent, hurling racial, ethnic, and sexual epithets at one another. Significantly, Belize's utterance of “kike,” an insult that forges linguistic and ethnic ties of solidarity between Roy, the Rosenbergs, the Ironsons, and all the rest of the “loser Jews” who in Roy's estimation “went Communist” (Perestroika, 27), turns out to be the key to the arch-conservative dragon's treasure. Roy subsequently ceases to resist Belize's entreaties and gives the nurse permission to take a single bottle, whereupon Belize removes three. Belize takes several more bottles in the short time that is left to Roy and, when the disbarred attorney dies, takes the remaining bottles. By giving Belize this important role of resistance to Roy, Kushner allows him to tap into governmental resources reserved for the vast minority of HIV/AIDS sufferers and to circumvent the experimental logic of double-blind testing.

Kushner wants us to read the overlapping medical and political discourses in Angels in America in terms of what it means to be a homosexual in contemporary America. Almost all of the homosexual characters in the play occupy an implied racial, ethnic, or religious position of marginality, if not of being a “nonself” in the American body politic at least of being a “less than full Self.” These include the right-wing Roy and left-wing Louis, both Jews; Belize, an African American; and Joe, a Mormon.²⁴ Indeed, the only gay man who descends from the ethnic “mainstream” is Prior, a WASP of eminent bloodlines whose K.S. implicitly unites him to Jewish culture. Obviously, just as two Jews, one African American, one Mormon, and one ethnically identified WASP can't speak for everyone within their specific identity group, neither can one homosexual speak for all homosexuals. Nowhere is this more true than in a play where the so-called homosexual community is racially and ideologically divided along fault lines that can scarcely be negotiated. No character in Angels in America emerges as a mouthpiece for “all homosexuals.”

Tony Kushner has long been an activist for the equal treatment of homosexuals. Yet to answer the question of whether or not in Angels in America he represents homosexuality as a healthy or diseased feature of American life, whether he sees homosexuals as Selves or Nonselves in the body politic, we must turn to the final pages of Perestroika, the parting words of his Gay Fantasia on National Themes. In those pages the work's right-wingers who deny their own homosexuality, Joe Pitt and Roy Cohn, are absent, Roy because he's dead and Joe because he has elected to cut off his personal and political ties and forge out on his own in what Louis calls “the ego-anarchist-cowboys-shrilling-for-no-government part” of conservatism (p. 35). In their place are Hannah Pitt, Joe's mother, and Louis, Belize, and Prior, all seated at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. This fountain is an appropriate destination because in ancient Jerusalem Bethesda was a pool or public bath where miraculous cures were performed. Manhattan's version of the pool is appropriately dominated by a sculpture of the angel Bethesda, and it is surely no accident that the AZT procured by Roy, which has made its circuitous way into Prior's system, thus prolonging his life, originally comes from Bethesda, Maryland. While Louis and Belize debate the merits and deficiencies of liberal politics, Prior, still stricken with AIDS but having been granted a stay of execution never made available to the Rosenbergs, reserves his remarks for the status of HIV-positive homosexuals in national life: “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will 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” (Perestroika, 148).

Prior's concluding statement of gay citizenship, a medico-political discourse of full selfhood within the American body politic, deploys and revises the language of immunology that Burnet and Fenner proposed half a century ago. Perestroika is therefore less a title intended to remind us of the reform-minded Soviet Union of the Gorbachev era and more a manifesto calling for the kind of radical restructuring of U.S. society that would make Americans reflect seriously on their McCarthyite past as well as politically “naturalize” and medically depathologize gay Americans and other marginalized groups into full citizens. For Kushner, the American body politic may only be diagnosed as healthy when it finally embraces all of its citizens, all of its selves, not simply those endowed with the kind of de facto immunity achieved by circulating themselves within a straight and narrow political and sexual economy.

Notes

1. Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches, Part One of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 45. All subsequent citations to Millennium Approaches will appear parenthetically in the text by page number.

2. Homosexuals and communists shared common representational and discursive terrain in the 1950s. See, for instance, Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians & Gay Men in the U.S.A., A Documentary History (New York: Meridian, 1992); Robert J. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993); and John D'Emilo, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983). Communists and homosexuals alike were regarded as groups uniquely equipped to subvert U.S. security because they could “pass” as heterosexual and patriotic despite underlying identities regarded as subversive by the social and political mainstream. For more on the cultural, social, and medical history of homosexuality in the twentieth century, see David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988); Domna C. Stanton, ed., Discourses of Sexuality From Aristotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992); and Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993).

3. The parallels between communism in the 1950s and homosexuality in the 1980s are discussed in Michael Cadden, “Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997), 78-89. Cadden writes, “Kushner's play reflects a new gay self-recognition about the ways in which the oppression of gay men and lesbians, like the oppression of other minority groups, has been integral to majoritarian self-recognition, especially during the Reaganite 1980s, when antihomosexuality served many of the same purposes that anticommunism did in the 1950s” (pp. 83-84).

4. Tony Kushner, Perestroika, Part Two of Angels in America (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 110. All subsequent citations to Perestroika will appear parenthetically in the text by page number.

5. I am indebted to Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), for bringing my attention to the Cold War histories of immunology and virology. Patton, however, focuses on the immunological breakthroughs of the 1960s when, she observes, “[t]he idea of a delicately balanced internal ecology nicely mirrored the growing perception of the human being precariously perched in a world ecology. Immunology met the cultural needs of an ‘America’ fascinated by a return to homeopathic ideas, but unwilling to abandon the miracles of modern medical technology” (p. 59). While Patton is right to underline the cultural importance of immunology for Americans in the sixties, reading immunological metaphor in terms of Angels in America only makes sense when we focus our historical gaze on the immunological breakthroughs following World War II and during the McCarthy years when Roy Cohn was a key figure in the drive to identify communists within the U.S. body politic.

6. Edward Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of the Cow Pox (London: Sampson Low, 1798).

7. See Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. Henry Copley (New York: Dover, 1957); and Louis Pasteur, “De l'atténuation du virus du choléra des poules,” Comptes Rendus. Academie des Sciences 91 (1880):673-80, and “Méthode pour prevenir la rage après morsure,” Comptes Rendus. Academie des Sciences 101 (1885):765-73.

8. Important immunological discoveries before World War I included, for example, Richard Pfeiffer's research on bacteriolysis, “Weitere Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der Choleraimmunitat und uber specifische baktericide Prozesse,” Zeitschrift fuer Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten 18 (1894):1-16; Max von Gruber and Herbert E. Durham's findings regarding specific agglutination, “Eine neue Methode zu raschen Erkennugn des Choleravibrio und des Typhusbacillus,” Deutsche Medizinal Zeitung Wochenschr 43 (1896):285-86; Georges F. I. Widal and Arthur Sicard's test for the diagnosis of typhoid (the Widal test) on the basis of the Gruber-Durham reaction, “Recherches de la réaction agglutinate dans le sang et le sérum desséchés des typhiques et dans la sérosité des vésicatoires,” Bulletin et Memoires Société de Médecine de Paris 13 (1896):681-82; and Paul Ehrlich's theory of antibody production, “On Immunity with Special Reference to Cell Life,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 66 (1900):424-28.

9. To learn more about the history of immunology, see Arthur Silverstein, A History of Immunology (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1989); and Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1994).

10. For more on the history of virology, see Greer Williams, Virus Hunters (New York: Knopf, 1959); A. P. Waterson and Lisa Wilkinson, An Introduction to the History of Virology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978); Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1991); and Michael B. A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

11. Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Frank Fenner, The Production of Antibodies (Melbourne: MacMillan, 1949). Burnet and Fenner's book was a revision of Burnet's single-authored The Production of Antibodies from 1941. All citations of the later edition will appear parenthetically in the text by page number.

12. The extent to which Burnet and Fenner's discovery shaped the rhetoric of immunology can be seen in the title of Jan Klein's textbook, Immunology: The Science of Self-Nonself Discrimination (New York: Wiley, 1982).

13. Burnet was named a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1942 and later the President of the Australian Academy of Science. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with the British researcher Peter L. Medawar. Among the most highly decorated scientists in his lifetime, Burnet's other major honors included the two highest awards for research available to a British scientist, the Order of Merit, an award directly given by the Queen and which is limited to twenty-five living recipients at any one time, and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. Only being elected to the Presidency is considered a higher honor within the Royal Society (see Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Immunological Surveillance [London: Pergamon, 1970]).

14. Immunology and anti-communism's shared discursive preoccupation with surveillance also underlines a cultural disposition of western modernity, most comprehensively explored by Michel Foucault, to construct elaborate apparati of surveillance at both the molecular and molar levels. For the history of technologies and techniques of western cultural surveillance as understood by Foucault see, for instance, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980); and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Harvester, 1980).

15. Ellen Schrecker, ed., The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), 211.

16. In recalling the Alger Hiss case, Richard Nixon in Six Crises (New York: Doubleday, 1962) described Hiss—and the apparent unlikelihood that he could have been a communist—as follows: “Hiss … had come from a fine family, had made an outstanding record at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, had been honored by being selected for the staff of a great justice of the Supreme Court, had served as Executive Secretary to the big international monetary conference at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944, had accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta, and had held a key post at the conference establishing the United Nations at San Francisco. Was it possible that a man with this background could have been a Communist whose allegiance was to the Soviet Union?” (p. 18). And finally, in The Autobiography of Roy Cohn (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1988), written in collaboration with Sidney Zion, Cohn describes William Walter Remington, a defendant in a perjury case that Cohn prosecuted, with the political language of American Self and communist Other to emphasize Remington's guilt as a Soviet operative: “A handsome, brilliant WASP with everything going for him. Born in New York City in 1917, he was raised in Ridgewood, N.J., a picture postcard of a town that could have been the home of Judge Hardy. At 16, Remington enrolled in Dartmouth and made Phi Beta Kappa. Later he got a masters in economics at Columbia. In 1939, he married his college sweetheart, Ann Moos, and moved into her banker father's home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Then to Washington with the Commerce Department, the War Productions Board, the Navy, and after the war back to Commerce. Behind this All-American facade was a dedicated Communist who ultimately became a spy for the Kremlin” (p. 53). Nixon and Cohn both depend on a representational opposition between the “All-American” official biographies and seditious unofficial biographies of their nemeses. Cohn implicitly juxtaposes his own Jewish identity against Remington's markers of WASP respectability.

17. See Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999).

18. Frank Macfarlane Burnet, The Integrity of the Body (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), 68.

19. For a more complete explanation of the ways that science is black boxed, see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers and Scientists through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 1-21.

20. Notwithstanding the objections of figures like Peter Duesberg, a research scientist on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (see Peter Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus [Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996]). Duesberg utterly rejected the correlation between AIDS and HIV and was so confident of his position that he even offered to inject himself with HIV to prove that it was not the cause of AIDS. For more on Duesberg, his allies, and the controversy they stirred, see Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1996). Epstein calls Duesberg the “premier ‘HIV dissenter’” (p. 105).

21. In “Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner's Angels in America,” PMLA 113 (1998):90-102, Jonathan Freedman argues that Kushner, a Jew himself, actually engages in anti-Semitism in his metonymic portrayal of sexual deviance and Jewishness. Kushner, Freedman contends, eventually falls back on Christian imagery and teleology that assimilates the Jewish identity of the play.

22. Allen J. Frantzen, in his essay “Prior to the Normans: The Anglo-Saxons in Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, 134-50, informs us that Louis gets his history wrong. Louis bases his understanding of Prior's WASP genealogy on the fact that there is a Prior Walter depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, presumably as an Anglo-Saxon defender. Frantzen writes, “Louis's view of when and where the tapestry was made is popular but wrong. The tapestry was made in England, under the patronage of William's half-brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux and vice-regent of England, within a generation of 1066, not during the conquest itself, and then taken to the Bayeux Cathedral. … The original Prior Walter might [therefore] … have been a Norman who took part in the conquest of the English. If so, in a line of thirty-one men of the same name … Prior Walter claims Anglo-Norman rather than Anglo-Saxon ancestry. His long genealogy, to which Louis proudly points, is hybrid in its origins” (pp. 140-41).

23. For more on the activism of AIDS treatment, see Epstein, 235-65.

24. Exploration of the play's Mormon themes can be found in David Savran, “Ambivalence, Utopia and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, 13-39.