Isaac Butler - The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America

To Kathleen Chalfant and Ellen McLaughlin

CONTENTS

If Ive made a fool of myself, I have at least made of myself the kind of fool I want to be:
That is the virtue and power of pretentiousness.

Tony Kushner

TONY KUSHNER: Around November of 1985, the first person that I knew personally died of AIDS. A dancer that I had a huge crush on, a very sweet man and very beautiful. I got an NEA directing fellowship at the repertory theater in St. Louis, and right before I left New York, I heard through the grapevine that he had gotten sick. And then, in November, he died.

And I had this dream: Bill dyingI dont know if he was actually dying, but he was in his pajamas and sick on his bedand the ceiling collapsed and this angel comes into the room. And then I wrote a poem. Im not a poet, but I wrote this thing . It was many pages long. After I finished it, I put it away. No one will ever see it.

Its title was Angels in America.

BARNEY FRANK(congressman from Massachusetts, 19812013) It was a bad time.

DAVID FRANCE(director and writer,How to Survive a Plague Ronald Reagan was brought to power by the religious right. And it was the first time the religious right got power. The Moral Majority kind of swept the slate into Washington.

FRANK: I remember having very mixed emotions the night I won in 1980I was obviously very happy that I got elected to Congress, but it was a slaughter. Not only did Reagan win by a big margin, but they controlled the Senate.

RICK PERLSTEIN(historian; author ofThe Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan The religious right wasnt as mature as a political formation until the latter part of the 1970s, when so many of these social issues were thrust into the center of politics.

FRANK: Things began to change in the mid-70s when the rest of the world began to regain its economic footing, when Americas dominant role eroded, and that began the process of people who were not highly skilled and not highly educated losing out in relative terms economically.

Religious protestors on the route of the Gay Pride parade in New York, June 1983. (Barbara Alper/Getty Images

PERLSTEIN: Through 1977 to 1978, there were the gay rights fights in Miami, the Briggs Initiative in California, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortionthe movement is beginning to take shape, and its taking shape in parallel to Reagans very aggressive, full-time efforts to begin working for the Republican nomination.

Thered been the successful campaign to overturn the gay rights ordinance in Miami in 1977.

Unfortunately, the battle that we won today is only that, a battle. The war goes on to save our children, because the seed of sexual sickness that germinated in Dade County has already been transplanted by misguided liberals in the U.S. Congress.

Anita Bryant, President, Save Our Children, April 1977

PERLSTEIN: Right around the corner on the general election ballot in California, you have the Briggs Initiative, the first statewide attack on gay rights. Not only that, but in the biggest state. It was an incredibly, incredibly scary prospect. This was a law that would have made it illegal for gays to teach in the schools and also illegal for supporters of gays to teach in schools. It was a very, very creepy law.

DAVID WEISSMAN(director,We Were Here From the beginning the numbers looked very bad.

CLEVE JONES(founder, NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt) Yeah, I dont think anybody thought we could win it when we started organizing, but we saw it as a great opportunity to organize. You know, this was before we had any really strong statewide or national organizations. That kind of infrastructure hadnt been built. So Harvey Milk and I and our counterparts in L.A. saw this as an opportunity to organize and not be passive.

PERLSTEIN: One of the organizers of the anti-Briggs campaign was David Mixner, who is this absolutely legendary organizer. He organized an anti-war demonstration in 1969 that got two million people. Federal agents set him up with a honey trap and showed him pictures of him with a man when he was still in the closet, and said, Unless you basically give us intelligence on the anti-war movement, were going to release these pictures. This was in 1969. He refused.

So hes back, hes out of the closet, hes leading this movement. Theyre thinking about this Hail Mary pass: What if we reach out to Ronald Reagan?

JONES: I was surprised when they said they were going to do it.

PERLSTEIN: It turned out that Mixner knew a leading Reagan advisor who was part of the gay underground. This guy, [Don] Livingston, was intrigued by the argument. An even more senior Reagan advisor, unnamed, who was married and gay, might be sympathetic, but couldnt even be seen with these people. So they met at a Dennys in East L.A., where nobody would spot them. What Mixner said was We dont want you to lobby Reagan, we just want a meeting with him to make our case.

Mixner bought a new suit. They made the argument that the Briggs Initiative would allow students to blackmail teachers, that it would destroy school discipline, and that it would waste taxpayer money in pointless litigationwhich would have been a striking argument for Reagan, because he was very much a budget hawk in his mind.

Whatever it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individuals homosexuality is determined at a very early age and that a childs teachers do not really influence it.

Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Herald Examiner , November 1, 1978

JONES: The main lesson that I learned from that was the power of retail politics. The power of ordinary gay people knocking on doors, precinct after precinct after precinct, saying, Hey. Im Cleve, I live down the street, theres this scary bill that will hurt me and my family.

Harveys constant exhortation to people to come out , I really think, became the main driving force behind everything weve achieved in the decades that followed. If you come out, if you live your life honestly at work, at church, everywhere, those people are less likely to fear and hate us and vote against us. One of the words we used a lot was demystify . You know, we needed to demystify homosexuality with the boring reality of our ordinariness.

BRIAN HERRERA(assistant professor of theater, Princeton University) In that moment, that period of Briggs until Reagans second election, this period before AIDS goes wide, is the period where gay culture goes big. There was an incredible cultural dynamism where you could live a gay life in certain subcultures in some cities. Those subcultures, whether it be music, or erotica, or fashion, or literature, they could travel out into other enclaves in Dallas or Atlanta or Chicago.