JOE: I think we ought to pray. Ask God for help. Ask him together …
HARPER: God won’t talk to me. I have to make up people to talk to me.
JOE: You have to keep asking.
HARPER: I forgot the question.
Oh yeah. God, is my husband a …
JOE (Scary): Stop it. Stop it. I’m warning you.
Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it. What do you want from me? What do you want from me, Harper? More than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left, I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.
As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. Decent. Correct. That alone in the eyes of God.
HARPER: No, no, not that, that’s Utah talk, Mormon talk, I hate it, Joe, tell me, say it …
JOE: All I will say is that I am a very good man who has worked very hard to become good and you want to destroy that. You want to destroy me, but I am not going to let you do that.
(Pause.)
HARPER: I’m going to have a baby.
JOE: Liar.
HARPER: You liar.
A baby born addicted to pills. A baby who does not dream but who hallucinates, who stares up at us with big mirror eyes and who does not know who we are.
(Pause.)
JOE: Are you really …
HARPER: No. Yes. No. Yes. Get away from me.
Now we both have a secret.
— Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
i remember sobbing when i first watched this scene—sobbing a deep heart-sob. i was, during that period of time, trying so hard to convince myself—every day and every time i felt myself longing for a relationship or grappling with sexual feelings—that acting on my gay desires was not in line, at all, with God’s will for my life. and every single day—every night before i fell asleep, every time i caught myself daydreaming again—was a constant battle of trying to harden my heart against these desires, so that i could be “good” before God. which was so exhausting and painful.
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