SOURCE: Fisher, James. “‘The Angels of Fructification’: Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, and Images of Homosexuality on the American Stage.” Mississippi Quarterly 49, no. 1 (winter 1995-96): 12-32.

In the following essay, Fisher compares the representations of homosexuality in Kushner's Angels in America and the plays of Tennessee Williams.

Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?¹

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Still obscured by glistening exhaltations, the angels of fructification had now begun to meet the tumescent phallus of the sun. Vastly the wheels of the earth sang Allelulia! And the seven foaming oceans bellowed Oh!²

—Tennessee Williams

For centuries, Angels have been symbols of spiritual significance. Residing in a realm somewhere between the deity and his creations, they watch over humanity as unspeakably beautiful harbingers of hope and of death. Such rich and profoundly unsettling icons are central to Tennessee Williams's poem “The Angels of...