Dilemma And Blessing Of Homosexual Characters In Angels In America

Tony Kushner is regarded as one of the essential playwrights of contemporary American theatrical world.Critics and pundits have placed Tony Kushner's masterpiece Angels in America:A Gay Fantasia on National Themes in the pre-eminent position of rescuing the American theatre.This thesis attempts to analyze the pursuit of homosexual love,responsibility and life of homosexual characters in the play from a gender studies perspective.The thesis falls into three chapters.Chapter one focuses on the pursuit of homosexual love and the restriction they faced in the process of "coming out".Chapter two mainly deals with the quest for responsibility through the restraint of the conventional family.Chapter Three is devoted to the discussion of homosexuals in quest for blessing. The thesis is written on the base of close and repeated reading of the text.Through the analysis of the play,it can be seen that Kushner is one of the few playwrights who depicts homosexual community from an insider's perspective.From an "insider" perspective,his portrayal of homosexuality becomes more penetrating and humanistic.This kind of portrayal also negates the opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Meanwhile,by presenting a world inside the homosexuality,it seems what Kushner wants to convey is that homosexuality bears more pressure from AIDS,conventional morality and conventional family restrictions.In a larger sense,Kushner's Angels in America provides the reader with a humanistic perspective to approach homosexual community.At the same time Angels is a genuine appeal for equal status and more tolerance to individuals with same sex orientation.