Badpuppy Gay Today

Friday, 14 March, 1997

"Angels in America" playwright, Tony Kushner, argues persuasively in The Advocate, the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine (#728) for the need for gay men and lesbians to oppose persistent efforts by the Republican Party to do away with taxes on capital gains, better known, in democratic socialist vocabularies, as a greedy grab by business interests for "corporate welfare." Though previously opposed to this long-sought corporate-American move, President Clinton has recently indicated he's open to compromise. Some believe he could easily side with Republicans.

Kushner was attending Key West's recent "Literature in the Age of AIDS" conference, one where top names in U.S. journalism, including that of Frank Rich, The New York Times columnist, took part. Kushner says he was particularly enthralled ("she was brilliant all weekend") by Sarah Schulman's presentation. There was economic talk with which Kushner agreed, and he writes:

"If we are to understand AIDS as poverty medicine, then we must understand that more corporate welfare, no health care, and ravaged social services doom impoverished patients almost more effectively than the virus and hence are legitimate topics when talking about what we choose to write about when we write about AIDS."

Kushner also argues that anyone who says AIDS means "something" in particular, or that "AIDS has meant," something in particular is too haughty. "The desire for meaning, and the artifices through which meaning is pursued, wrest from inarticulate Nature--or from imponderable sorrow---ghostly, evanescent demarcations of who we are and what we mean to be," he writes. The artist, he believes, promotes what is needed: an essentially mystic view-- sewing a kind of inner magic-- in the hard realities of death's all-conquering ground.

The playwright's viewpoint calls into strong relief a human tendency to seek meaning while Nature itself is, in fact, an arena where life feeds on life, though few care to face this fact and it remains hardly noticed by vast numbers who would prefer to focus on Nature's sunsets, not on its freshly licked bones.

Frank Rich, a panelist, also recorded his reactions to the conference in his New York Times column. Rich's published perspectives on matters touching same-sex love or the AIDS crisis, are expressed, according to one literary jokester, with "a remarkable Richness."

Tony Kushner was concerned about a virtual non-attendance by the gay press at the conference. "Literature in the Age of AIDS?" sighed one reflective gay journalist, who was fearful he'd experience only mental fatigue. He'd assumed, he said, that attendees' divisions would be similar to those Kushner had actually encountered: "Aesthetics verses politics, literature as advocacy verses some ostensibly purer kind of writing."