Fucking Miraculous

This weekend, I’ve been writing a paper about the nature of community among queer men; about how it shapes what kinds of authentic, meaningful ritual we can devise for ourselves and one another. I wanted to talk about gay camp: about how we simultaneously throw ourselves into an experience and stand back to evaluate, lampoon, and critique the very values we seem to embrace. So I reached for my copy of Tony Kushner’s ever-astonishing Angels in America.

You can find a YouTube clip of one of the play’s most moving scenes, in the HBO version for television that stars Al Pacino as Roy Cohn and Meryl Streep as nearly everyone else, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H0Fi83wEWk.

During Part Two, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg has been keeping vigil by Cohn’s hospital bed during the last hours of his life: she’s haunting him in revenge for his role in her execution during the McCarthy witch hunt. Immediately after Cohn’s death, the drag queen/nurse Belize charged with his care at the hospital summons Louis, a disaffected gay Jewish leftist, to say Kaddish over the body--ostensibly to give Belize an opportunity to smuggle Cohn’s private stash of experimental AZT (the year is 1985) out of the room for distribution to PWAs with no access to treatment.

Louis protests, in keeping with his leftist principles, that he will not recite the commemoration of the dead for Cohn; he then adds that in any case he can’t remember the prayer. Giving in, he stumbles through the first phrases, halts, then begins limping through half-remembered tags from the Shabbat blessings, from the Sh'ma.

Ethel’s ghost rises from her chair in the corner of the room to coach Louis phrase by phrase through the long Aramaic text. At the last "Amen," Ethel adds, and Louis repeats, "Yousonofabitch." Loading the stolen drugs into Louis's backpack, Belize responds, “Thank you Louis. You did fine.” Louis responds, “Fine? What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous.”

The line brought down the house both times I saw the play. And it’s as good an example as I know to illustrate something said by Ronald Grimes, a leading scholar of contemporary ritual theory. “Ritualizing” Grimes observes, “is not incompatible with criticism, nor a sense of mystery with iconoclasm, provided self-critical actions are embedded in ritual itself.”

What’s more, the scene from Angels is a wonderful example of the astonishing ways that gay camp builds up layer upon layer of meaning. When Louis delivers his astonished quip, “What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous,” the miracle is revealed to the audience as unmiraculous because we see Ethel’s ghost coaching Louis as neither of the characters onstage sees her. Yet on another level, it remains a surreal marvel, if not miraculous in any theological sense, by the sheer fact of Ethel’s ghostly presence.

But most importantly, it’s truly miraculous not because it’s a paranormal marvel, but because of the profound recognition of common humanity that Ethel in this moment of closure manifests towards the man responsible for her execution decades before. In this act of forgiveness, in which the evil that Cohn did is not ignored but transcended, the scene thus offers a powerful foreshadowing of the protagonist Prior’s direct address to the audience in the last scene of the play: “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you.”

And finally, the transgressive edge of queer experience is aggressively foregrounded. Louis’s prayer isn’t just miraculous, but fucking miraculous, at the deathbed of a demonically powerful, hypocritical bully fallen victim to a disease transmitted by fucking and being fucked.

Camp isn’t just a touchstone of our culture as queer men. It’s an extraordinary resource as we grope for symbols, actions, and words that speak to the deepest Truth of our lives that lies beyond all capacity to express.