This essay examines the parallel yet superficially dissimilar relationships of Joe and Harper and Lewis and Prior in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Through close reading of both couples, the essay argues that each partnership is fundamentally unequal and built on illusion — whether rooted in closeted homosexuality, religious identity, fear of death, or self-deception. The paper traces how Kushner blurs boundaries between gay and straight, male and female, dream and reality to reveal that betrayal and dishonesty transcend sexuality. Ultimately, the essay contends that the play uses these two troubled relationships to interrogate the American dream of reinvention and honest selfhood.
The essay demonstrates comparative literary analysis: it establishes structural parallels between two character pairs, identifies shared thematic motifs (false faces, self-deception, the American dream), and then shows how those parallels deepen the play's central argument about identity and honesty. This technique allows the student to move beyond describing individual characters toward a synthesis about the play's moral vision.
The paper opens with a thesis that frames both relationships as equally unbalanced, then devotes focused paragraphs to each couple before drawing them together through shared motifs — cosmetics, dreams, self-hatred, and the American ideal of reinvention. The conclusion returns to the opening thesis with added weight, arguing that only the distinctly American context could produce such mirrored yet contrasting pairs.
The relationship between Joe and Harper in Tony Kushner's "gay fantasia" Angels in America can be seen as parallel to the relationship of Lewis and Prior, despite the apparent dissimilarities between the two couples. In both relationships, the two main characters exist in an unbalanced partnership riddled with inequities. Only by suffering the traumas of a closeted gay relationship and the horror of AIDS does the essentially unequal and unfulfilling nature of these relationships become "outed" within the structure of the play.
The relationship between Joe and Harper is perhaps the most obviously unbalanced of the two. Joe is a Mormon lawyer in the service of the homophobic, closeted gay McCarthy-era witch hunter Roy Cohn. Joe has moved to New York City because of his career, taking his wife Harper with him. However, Joe does not truly love Harper. As he tells her toward the play's end when he leaves her, he only married her in Salt Lake City because she was the only person who seemed "as screwed up as he was." By "screwed up," Joe means gay — for Joe himself is a homosexual, a man who is, unlike Cohn, closeted not only to the world but also to himself.
Cohn sees homosexuality in terms of power. "I am not a homosexual," Cohn proclaims. "Homosexuals have zero clout." Cohn openly engages in homosexual acts but refuses to label himself as gay. In his view, because no one cares about homosexuals and because homosexuals possess no political capital in America, he therefore cannot be a homosexual — since he does have political clout. Joe's closeted identity is of a far more insidious nature in some ways, because unlike Cohn, who directs his anger about his sexuality toward the outside political world in the form of red-baiting, Joe attempts to cloak his homosexuality by marrying Harper according to the dictates of his Mormon faith.
His wife Harper has been destroyed by his treatment, becoming a depressive Valium addict in response. At the beginning of the play, a rabbi proclaims how wonderful it is that in America's "melting pot," a Jewish woman's faith can become so diluted that her children have "goy" names. Yet such a dilution of faith and purity also occurs even among the supposedly devout Mormons. Against her creed, Harper takes Valium to numb the lack of passion she feels in her relationship. Against his creed, Joe feels desire for men and attempts to channel that desire into a heterosexual relationship that only makes his partner extremely unhappy. Despite his guilt, he still engages in relationships with other men. "Do homosexuals take long walks?" Harper asks at one point in the play. The confirmation that they do affirms that Joe has been visiting public areas and engaging in sexual encounters with other men.
The individual to whom Harper is able to put her question about "long walks" is, interestingly enough, the drag queen Prior. Prior has AIDS. Because of the medication he is taking for his illness, he finds himself hallucinating. Harper, also caught in a hallucination, meets him in the halfway world of her dreams — a space where much of the play's most profound emotional action takes place. Dreams are just as real for the characters of Angels in America, perhaps because so much of each character's life is founded upon dreams rather than reality. "Very Steven Spielberg," is the final quotation from Prior at the play's end, when he is visited by a giant angel from beyond. The angel has selected this AIDS sufferer to be her prophet. Also during the play, Prior is visited by a number of his ancestors — some homosexual and others not — all of whom engage with him in a relationship that is, if nothing else, as real and fulfilling as the relationship he has with his feckless lover Lewis.
Both Prior and Harper are dreamers, and thus they connect in dreams, even if life does not afford them the opportunity to connect elsewhere. Prior and Harper seem able to bond because both are good, decent people who have embarked upon relationships they believed were based in love, but were really only based in dreams and lies. Prior thought Lewis would stay with him; but Prior lied to himself, dreaming of a passion that was not there. "What are you doing in my dream?" Harper asks when she first encounters Prior, in drag, during her nightly wanderings through her own mind and his.
The play begins with two apparently unconnected relationships — homosexual and heterosexual, secular and Mormon. By drawing connections between the illusions and the inequities within each couple, the play finally creates a sense that only in America could parallels be drawn between such apparently dissimilar yet ultimately similar couples of liars and dreamers.
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