I didn’t get to see Angels dramatized until Mike Nichols’ 2003 HBO film, a year in which my father died, I finally understood myself to be gay, and I sought guidance from angels more than ever. Perusing my tattered copy, the underlined lines seem so juvenile and corny to me now, but they appealed to my 16-year-old soul. Though I couldn’t afford to see it when it came to Los Angeles, I bought a copy of Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches as soon it was published and devoured it in a single reading. Since my mom loved angels and our home was filled with representations of them, my obsession with a play about them wasn’t too suspect.Īnd obsessed I became. I didn’t yet clearly understand I was gay, but I was often cruising for things that were kinda gay though not too gay. I was a teenager laying on the floor of my parents’ suburban home watching the 1993 Tony Awards when a snippet of that mystical play first caught my attention. These stories place black people at the heart of the American AIDS story, something the most celebrated play about AIDS, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, fails to do. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea, to Kevin Mumford’s Not Straight, Not White to the poems of Danez Smith and Justin Phillip Reed - share something with that morbid CDC statistic and Villarosa’s grim observation. So many HIV/AIDS narratives written by writers working in poetry, journalism, history, and drama today - from Cathy Cohen’s Boundaries of Blackness to E.
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