We’ve had a week to come to grips with the disturbing, disheartening, and nauseating results of the presidential election, but many of us are no closer to accepting what a Trump win means for queer life for the next four years.
As queer people, we know how to be resilient. But it’s also hard to find ourselves in this moment yet again, the progress we hoped for and dreamed of having managed to slip out of our grasp once more. We’re scared, tired, frustrated, and dispirited. But if there’s one thing we know about queer history, it’s that anyplace we find ourselves in now, we’ve surely been before.
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When gay playwright Tony Kushner wrote his epic American parable Angels in America, it was 1991. The AIDS crisis had scaled to a full-blown pandemic, and thanks to Reagan’s anti-gay legacy, help for queer Americans was not forthcoming even under a new administration.
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Kushner’s play spoke with urgency about the crisis of faith queer people were facing during those times. It showed characters who had been forgotten in many mainstream queer narratives and it shoved a microphone into their hands. It forced them to speak the truth, even when it felt like no one was listening or caring. Many of Angels in America‘s dispossessed, disillusioned, and closeted characters—including Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn—shouted their unpleasant realities into the void, and in the process, they were allowed to say things about America that feel even truer today.
In the star-studded 2018 Broadway production of the play, Candyman and Femme actor Nathan Stewart-Jarrett electrified audiences as Belize, a nurse who must attend the bedside of the loathsome Roy Cohn (Nathan Lane.) Belize has to deal with the human toll of the crisis on a daily basis, tending to patients dying from complications related to AIDS as well as having to witness his own community getting smaller and more divided by the minute. He sees that the disease doesn’t discriminate: not only does it strike down Cohn, it comes to claim Belize’s best friend and ex-boyfriend Prior. Belize has to face the problem of a government that doesn’t care that his community is dying, as well as a healthcare system that only provides meaningful care to those who can afford it.
But nothing surprises Belize: he’s used to living in this country. As a Black queer man, he’s always lived with his eyes fully open to the way American prioritizes certain lives over others. So when he tells us about hating America, we can’t help but understand exactly where he’s coming from.
“I hate America, Louis!” Stewart-Jarrett proclaims in a short clip currently making the rounds on TikTok. “I hate this country. It’s just big ideas and stories and people dying.” He continues: “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing when he set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.”
After last week, we need to remember these words more than ever. This country has never been good to the people who built it, and it’s never hesitated to throw its most marginalized citizens under the bus in the name of a regressive, poisonously nostalgic agenda. We have a right to be heartbroken, and to feel angry and betrayed by the people who voted against our rights. We can feel all of that, but what we can’t do is give up. Kushner’s play ends with an assurance to the audience: the Great Work has begun, and it can’t be stopped.
It’s up to us to keep that work in mind, even when things feel hopeless. The Great Work continues, and it’s what connects the past to the present, often in painful ways. It’s the work of so many who came before us that got us here, to this world. We have to do what those people did and find ways to create an even better world for the generations that come after us. For now, that’s all we can do.
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