Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.

All the best plays are the long ones, right? O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night means it. It's long. It's, like, four hours long. It's another way of saying that we remember the epic. People think Gravity's Rainbow is such a good book because it's almost three times longer than it should be. Ditto Underworld and maybe even Moby Dick, though I haven't read either.

Women don't write epics, which is interesting, though the argument could be made for White Teeth and The Golden Notebook. Wonderland?

Angels in America is seven hours long. You need to break the two parts up over the course of a weekend, probably. And it might be the first and it might be the only gay epic ever written. And this is why it's one of the most important books I've read. Luckily it's also one of the best.

Its project is a tough one: look at the rise of AIDS in the culture of Reagan-era New York City as experienced by three men who identify as gay, one Mormon who's oriented sexually toward other men, and Roy Cohn—who spent a lifetime in the closet and died in 1986 of complications due to AIDS. Introduce angels to the scene and try to humanize everyone no matter how villainous they might act. More than its length, AiA is magnificent for the honest way it goes about compassion. Hannah, the mother of the closeted Mormon, becomes at the end of the play a New Yorker in looks and all, amiable friends with a gaggle of gays without having gone all haggy about it. She is able to make this change because she knows herself, and her selfhood is as strong as her faith. She's in the end a kind of hero.

I will always remember Prior's final lines, will let them ring in my head long after I've forgotten everything else. He's talking to the audience:

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.

Bye now.

You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins.

This afternoon, my boyfriend received in the mail a response from our congressman, Jeff Fortenberry (R), explaining his concerns over ENDA. "I am deeply concerned," he writes, "that this legislation elevates sexual orientation to the status of a protected class, similar to race, gender, or religion. In my view, this is not appropriate public policy."

Jeff, you may try to use your power in office to keep gays in a controllable second class, to deny us the protection you've enjoyed without ever having to fight for. You may get all proud to be legislating from your own moral universe, but we're not going away. Your children will grow up to work alongside us, to consider us friends and peers, and together we'll look back on your legacy and wonder what you were thinking.

You're not going to win. We will be citizens. The world only spins forward.