SOURCE: Ogden, Daryl. “Cold War Science and the Body Politic: An Immuno/Virological Approach to Angels in America.” Literature and Medicine 19, no. 2 (fall 2000): 241-61.

In the following essay, Ogden examines Kushner's representation of sexual identity in Angels in America in terms of the intersection of medical and political discourse around the AIDS epidemic.

Early on in Millennium Approaches, Part One of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Roy Cohn's physician informs his patient that he's suffering from AIDS. Roy, the former assistant United States prosecuting attorney in the Rosenberg spy case and the right hand of Joseph McCarthy during the Senate Red Scare trials, feigns puzzlement with the diagnosis and outrage over his doctor's inference that he must be a homosexual:

Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You...