Green Angels in America: Aesthetics of Equity

I do know that if AIDS, for instance, has environmental cofactors, and if the environment is crumbling, and if there is a reason for the environmental disintegration that's going on, it is my concern as a gay man as well as a human being that the environment is collapsing, and I have to be able to think that large to be able to think small. - Tony Kushner, The Charlie Rose Show, June 24, 1994.1 Tony Kushner's remarks above about wanting to be able to "think large" shed light on the sprawling, lively, capacious quality of his most famous play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Kushner's "think large" sensibility translates into a play that explodes barriers and builds connections among various forms of oppression and social justice issues: AIDS discrimination, racism, queer oppression, women's rights, the violence of capitalism, and the earth's environmental deterioration - all of which are present in this work. In fact, according to Kushner "[T]o be a progressive is to seek out connection" among communities, activism, ideas, issues, and politics ("American Things" 7).2 As such, Kushner's play resonates with many progressive social justice movements in the United States, including the very active environmental justice movement, a grassroots effort that emerged in the 1980s to combat systemic environmental racism (Bullard, "Anatomy," Confronting 15-39). This resonancecoupled with Kushner's dual interests in human rights as well as the earth's rights - renders Angels in America an uncanny example of a comingled queer environmental justice play, making it a candidate for inclusion in the emerging field of queer environmental justice theory.3 Although the focus of environmental justice is primarily on how people-of-color communities - urban and rural - are treated as dumping sites for various toxicities,4 the environmental justice movement has also worked hard to theorize what "counts" as the environment; in so doing, it has offered activists, artists, and critics a profound redefinition of what constitutes our environment. It is this theoretical transformation of the environment that opens up a possible link between a queer play such as Kushner's and the field of environmental justice theory and activism. By shifting the definition of the environment away from a focus on rescuing wilderness from human interference to a new definition of the environment to mean wherever people live, work, worship, and play, the environmental justice movement has constructed a dynamic way to foreground everyday lived experiences of people and communities as pivotal to environmental activism, policy, and theory (Bullard, Unequal 11). This fresh perspective on the environment means that people's bodies, lives, communities, and cultural identities/ spaces are as important as disappearing species and polluted rivers. It also means that human and animal bodies, communities, and cultures - all over the globe - are connected through a shared endangerment by toxic ideologies. Racism and corporate greed are as detrimental to the environment as vinyl chloride, and traditional ideas of nature and environment as pastoral retreat must be subjected to continual critique for their role in fueling environmental racism and other social ills.5 But the overarching goal of this reconstruction and theorization is an effort to alleviate social injustices and to appreciate everyday people and their cultures and lives. The environmental justice movement's redefinition of the environment did not, however, intend to include LGBT communities and environments - or plays such as Kushner's Angels in America - in its work. Nonetheless, the changes in perception and definition of nature and environment that the movement has wrought could assist queer theorists, activists, and artists (such as Kushner) in their creative and political efforts to overturn the "against nature" idea so often leveled at LGBT citizens.6 By focusing on multiple issues and histories through a diverse group of gay and straight characters, Kushner's play foregrounds AIDS, racism, queer citizenship, and environmental destruction as central national issues, challenging the legal, political, and economic structures that have relegated these social justice issues to the closets and margins of American life. …