by Robert Schmad
The Biden-Harris administration is paying to put on a play that portrays God as bisexual, sharply criticizes former President Ronald Reagan and paints communists in a positive light, all in an effort to push gay rights on Southeastern Europeans, federal grant records show.
Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about “LGBTQ+ issues” in the country, federal grant records reveal. The play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS.
Prior Walter, the man with AIDS, begins to have prophetic visions in his hospital room after his lover, Louis Ironson, abandons him, according to the play’s text.
In one such vision, he finds that angels have “eight vaginas” and are “equipped as well with a bouquet of phalli” and that the universe was created by God “copulat[ing] ceaselessly” with these hermaphroditic beings. Ejaculate from angels “fuels the Engine of Creation,” the play recounts.
Walter recounts these visions to a man named Belize, a former drag queen who is tending to him as a nurse.
The State Department has committed $20,000 to staging the play in Macedonia, according to grant records. An additional $10,500 in non-federal funding has also been allocated for the production.
“In the Manichaean world of Angels in America, everything Reagan stood for (capitalism, etc.) is evil,” a National Review critic wrote of the play’s HBO adaptation in 2003. “The most vocal Republican in the film is Roy Cohn — the unscrupulous gay lawyer who denied his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis to his death. In Cohn, a man ultimately undone by his own lies and hypocrisy, Kushner finds his embodiment of Reagan’s administration.”
Angels in America portrays Cohn, a real lawyer who was deeply involved in the conservative movement and helped Reagan get elected, as a bigoted hypocrite prone to outbursts of anger.
Cohn was instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted in 1951 of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. Activists long maintained that the Rosenbergs were innocent, however, documents released by the government in the 90s proved that the couple was involved in a Soviet espionage operation.
Rosenberg, portrayed positively in the play, antagonizes Cohn throughout the story, telling him on his deathbed that she “take[s] pleasure in [his] misery.” She later guides Ironson, who is a secular Jew, through a funeral prayer for Cohn, who also had Jewish ancestry, symbolically forgiving him.
“We have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan,” Kushner wrote in his play’s afterword, blaming those purported problems on “individualism.” A gay character, at one point in the play, asks “if [Reagan] didn’t have people like me to demonize where would he be?”
“Kushner strips Reagan of any merit, and reduces him fictionally to an anti-gay crusader,” the National Review critic wrote of the play.
The State Department’s production of an anti-Reagan, pro-LGBT play is not its first exercise in using theatrics for the purposes of social engineering as it spent $120,000 in 2023 to “improve communication at the level of the local community on the social issue of LGBTQ rights and domestic violence via participatory theater” in the African nation of Chad.
The new grant isn’t even the State Department’s first theatrical operation in North Macedonia, as it paid to teach the country’s residents about environmental issues through theater and dance in 2023, federal grant records show.
“Culture — from music to sports to theater — is a vital component of the United States’ people-to-people diplomacy efforts in Chad and around the world and supports broader U.S. foreign policy goals,” a spokesperson for the department told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time.
The State Department did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Robert Schmad is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Angels in America” by Uark Theatre. CC BY 2.0.
