HIV/AIDS: Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead...

          

     At a very crucial moment in American history, there was the rise of panic. As more people became aware of HIV/AIDS, what the disease meant, what it could do, many lost control, many were afraid at what this meant for society. Many were afraid of how HIV/AIDS would tear apart at the fabric of society.  

We can see a similar panic rise in Harper Pitt, of the play Angels in America, described by author Tony Kushner in the stage notes as “an agoraphobic with a mild Valium addiction.” Poor Harper is trapped within a cycle of disintegration. She spends most of the first half of the play squawking about the collapse of the ozone layer, which she has heard on the radio will burn skin and efface the entire planet. She says, “everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way…”  At the same time, her husband, Joe, is finally bringing to her attention the hidden truth of his sexuality. He has spent his entire life attempting to hide his gayness from himself and from her, but it is finally revealed, and this tears Harper’s world apart even more. From how Harper is described and how she is portrayed, we can gesture to say that she is not necessarily the most stable individual in the first place. Because of her susceptible nature, she is at risk of being affected by these ideas more so than someone we would call “normal.” Something that is very enchanting about Harper’s character, though, is that her reactions seems to be perhaps more authentic and realistic because of this. There is something about her unbalanced life, her wonky way of imagining, her unusual lack of structure and rigidity that has us – upon witnessing her terror at homosexuality and the ozone layer – saying, “of course.”

            It does not seem wrong, given the play’s tendencies for the magical, the mystical, to extend onto it a little creative thinking. Perhaps we can say, then, that Harper’s sustained hysteria throughout the production is a bit of a metaphor. As “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” this play sets itself up in response to American issues. As such, we can identify with a character like Harper, who is so unlike us that she feels incredibly like us, and we assume similar reactions to what she is presented with. We, too, worry about what might happen with the ozone layer, with Joe’s self-esteem and also the strength of their relationship. More abstractly, we worry just as Harper does about all things that are collapsing, about all the lies which are surfacing, about all our systems giving way in our current social-historical-cultural-economic environment. For example, when the knowledge of the power HIV/AIDS holds over the body began to surface, this sort of sorrowful worry found in Harper was found in everyone. In some ways, it still is.  We panicked. We did not hold ourselves together. Our thoughts joined together in irrational patterns that fueled our anxiety.

            That is why Harper’s resolution at the end of the play is so powerful, because we see her future as something we can attain as well. In her final monologue, she describes a dream where the souls of those who died “from famine, from war, from the plague” float up, “like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great neat of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.” In some ways, our response to the reality of HIV/AIDS was like this. We lost control, we wheeled and we span. But Harper shows us that always – always – there is a possibility to join hands and settle ourselves, to come back together even when we are fractured and make something good out of that joining. HIV/AIDS threatened, and continues to threaten, our social infrastructure  by informing us with irrational fears, but we can always return to what is lost in the panic. Harper tells us, then, that “nothing is lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”