Tony Kushner: "Homosexual," "Socialism" on Sides of Minneapolis Buses
(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation) Over at our sister site, WNYC Culture, I've posted an interview I did with award-winning playwright Tony Kushner on his plays, old and new, and how they reflect back on American politics.
It's the third interview I've done with Kushner since 1995, and this time we talked about his new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures opening in New York later this month, Angels in America,the revival of which runs until the end of April, his work on the screenplay for Munich, and what he thinks of the The Kids are Alright.
And, yes, we did talk about buses (read to the end of this excerpt):
Here's an excerpt:
AB: Your new play is the…
TK: Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.
AB: Thank you.
TK: It’s about ten, God when was it, about 1997, my grandmother, my father’s mother, died in Louisiana where I’m from and I went down to Louisiana to help my father sort of pack up. Her husband—my grandfather—had been dead since 1984 and she died in 1997 and we went down to sort of pack up the house. They were wonderfully educated people and they had the kind of library that you’d expect very educated Jewish people of their generation to have. They had the Encyclopedia Britannica 11th Edition and they had the plays of Ibsen and the novels of Mark Twain, Dickens, and they had a lot of Shaw. And one of the things I found that I’d never even heard of it was this book that Shaw wrote called The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, which I thought was just a wonderful title.
And I sort of decided,
I took the book, and I decided on the spot I was going to use this the title somewhere. You know the subtitle to Angels in America, is A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which is borrowed from or stolen from Heartbreak House, a Fantasia on Russian Themes, I think is the subtitle. So I think something about the Intelligent Women’s Guide just really excited me. I read the book and I knew that I wanted, I wrote an essay with that title, and I wrote a weird sort of id fragment thing with that title and then you know when I was working on this play for the Guthrie I decided I would call it that. But I changed women to homosexual. And then for some reason, the key to the scriptures came in, which is from Christian Science, from Mary Baker Eddy,
A Guide to Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, a kind of foundational text of Christian Science, which I had never read and knew absolutely nothing about. But I knew I wanted to have it in the title. It's now emerged as a good thing in the title.
AB: But you know the word homosexual – in Angels in America when the word, when the line was uttered: Are you a homosexual? It was gasp moment in 1993 -- it was almost like using the N word, it was kind of bad. But now, I mean, you know, nobody really says it. I’m wondering why in 2011 we’re seeing that word in a title.
TK: Well, I’ve never thought of it as the N word, I mean, the gay equivalent of that would be, you know, faggot or queer. But we, the LGBT community, during the Act Up days, the Queer Nation people appropriated that epitaph and turned it into a label that we were sort of for the most part proud to own. And there are still young people I meet who were not really born yet who call themselves queer: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’ as we used to say. Homosexual is not so much an epithet as a clinical term.
I hear my father’s voice when I use the word. I mean, he’s really great on gay issues now and very accepting, but when he was struggling to come to terms with it he’d say, you know, since you are a ho-mo-sex-ual. And it was like every syllable contained worlds of ‘I can’t believe I’m having to say this.’ In the New York Times we used to be ‘avowed homosexuals.’ There’s something sort of quaint about it in a way.
The two main characters who are LGBT members are a brother and a sister. The brother is a homosexual. “The Intelligent Gay Man’s Guide” sounds like a self-help book. And while I don't necessarily agree that it’s equivalent to the N word, I don’t think it shocks us in the way that it did when we were still mortified and embarrassed and nobody ever said gay or homosexual or anything in public.
When I was in Minneapolis and the play was opening there, the Guthrie Theater put the title on all these buses all over Minneapolis and they made the words homosexual and socialism really big. So these buses were zipping around and I called my husband Mark who was in New York and I said if I’ve accomplished nothing else at least I’ve made something that makes buses all over Minneapolis, Minnesota driving around and all you can read is ‘homosexual socialism.’
The full interview is here.
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