"Angels in America": A tearjerker about AIDS, Mormon angels, and some 1950s guy. With dicks and butts to keep your spirits up

 

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, won numerous awards during its run at the Mark Taper Forum and then on Broadway.  I saw it in 1997.  Well, the first 300 hours, anyway -- it's divided into two parts, Millenial Approaches and Perestroika, each requiring superhuman endurance and thinking about butts and cocks to sit through.  

Very, very depressing: people dying have never been my idea of entertainment, and this dude is dying of AIDS, very slowly, with all of the symptoms displayed in graphic detail.  Meanwhile he thinks he's a Mormon prophet and turns straight, having sex with a female angel with multiple breasts and vaginas, and this guy named Roy Cohn is dying of AIDS, too, and an elderly lady in a 1950s outfit is comforting him although she hates him.

Are we supposed to recognize these people?

Plus the names are bizarre and off-putting, and you never know what's really happening and what's an AIDS fever dream, and people are dying.  Help!

Ok, very slowly, let's try to get through this mishmash of obscure history, with illustrations of actors from the tv miniseries that appeared in 2003:

Part 1: Millenial Approaches. Not the year 2000, the 1000 year reign of Christ on Earth.

1. New York, of course, in the 1980s. the Jewish Louis, played by Ben Shenkman, discovers that his Mormon boyfriend Prior -- prior to what? --  has AIDS, and dumps him.

Prior is played by Justin Kirk, top two photos.  He will have delusions of becoming a Mormon prophet.

2. Prior is comforted in the hospital by an ex-drag queen nurse named Belize.

3. Meanwhile, Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson, butt and dick left), conservative Republican Mormon politician in Boyfriend Louis's office, becomes interested in him, which causes friction with his crazy wife and conservative mother, and causes him to dream about meeting Prophet Prior. 

Republican Joe comes out to his mom, who travels to New York to coddle him, and to his wife, who flees from the house and believes that she is in Antartica.  Then he starts dating Boyfriend Louis.

4. Joe's boss is Roy Cohn.  Yes, that Roy Cohn, played by Al Pacino.  I had never heard of him at the time, but he was one of the instigators of the Red Scare in the 1950s.  He was gay in real life, but closeted and homophobic. 

In the play, he  claims that he is dying of liver cancer, but actually it's AIDS.  

The elderly lady who is comforting him, although she hates him, is Ethel Rosenberg.  In 1953, Roy prosecuted Ethel and her husband Julius as Soviet spies, and got them the death penalty.  They were widely presumed innocent, being railroaded because they were Jewish. 

5. Prophet Prior has a lot of disturbing fever dreams.  He meets his ancestors, also named Prior, and a Mormon angel with several breasts and vaginas, who has sex with him and tells him to prepare for the Great Work.

Left: Simon Callow, one of the prior Priors

The first play ends there.  Sort of a cliff hanger, innit?

Perestroika after the break

"Cruising": Homophobic classic about sin, degradation, and dicks in a doomed gay world. With a nude Mr. Big.

During the 1970s and 1980s, gay men appeared in movies almost exclusively as limp-wristed hairdressers and drag queens with murderous split personalities.  Cruising, 1980, promised something different: gay men with apartments, jobs, and hangouts; and who were masculine, actually super-macho, with muscles, club bulges, and leather chaps.

Sounds like fun, right?  Wrong.

The tv promo said only that Al Pacino would play a cop who "disappears into the darkness," and the theatrical trail showed him putting on makeup, plus men dancing together, and brief flashes of the words "homosexual,"  "violence," "murder," "fear," and "sex").  
The movie wasn't playing in Rock Island, so one cold Saturday my boyfriend Fred and I drove an hour west to the college town of Iowa City to see our first gay movie, ever.

The plot: in sleazy, decadent gay bar, a "homosexual" played by Arnaldo Santana cruises a mysterious stranger.  After discussing what turned them gay, they go home together, where the stranger politely asks the "homosexual," to lie still while he stabs him to death.  Santana complies!

During the 1970s, criminologists often theorized about why gay men would pick up total strangers for sex.  Some said that they were unable to control their "deviant" sexual desires, and others, that they were looking for a quick, easy way to destroy society by "wasting their seed" instead of making a baby. But most said that they felt so guilty over being gay that they wanted to be murdered.

More bar pickups, more murders. There's a gay serial killer out there "targeting his own!"  Police detective Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is asked to go undercover and catch him.  

So he moves into a sleazy apartment in the bad part of town, puts on a leather vest, applies makeup, and goes cruising.

He befriends his next door neighbor (Don Scardino), but runs afoul of Ted's effeminate, histrionic dancer-boyfriend (James Remar).

Occasionally Steve sees his girlfriend, but he becomes less and less interested in her as he is infected by the "gay lifestyle."

More sin, degradation, and dicks after the break