Last week was World AIDS Day, it snowed in Flagstaff, George H.W. Bush died and my AP Literature class began reading Tony Kushner’s Angels in America — a play about AIDS, ancestry, politics, community, America itself.
The present moment often has a way of colliding with my curriculum. About this, I feel conflicted. On one hand, my students and I never run out of things to say to one another. On the other hand, we are forced to repeatedly contend with the painful complexities of the past as they are made manifest in our time.
I am glad to be teaching Angels in winter. The cold turns me inward, quiets me, makes me grow ever more introspective. Undistracted by an overabundance of color and heat, I can really contemplate the material I’m teaching.
When I taught in the Midwest, I used “cold” to illustrate the concept of “show don’t tell”: “If you write ‘cold’ in your story, that could mean anything. The reader in Milwaukee is going to picture negative five, while the reader in Los Angeles might picture 50. Do you mean 50 degrees when you say ‘cold’?”
My Chicagoan, Milwaukeean students would laugh ruefully at the rhetorical question.
When we’d practice “show” using “cold,” my midwestern students would invariably describe cold violently; cold pierces, stabs, cuts, punches, slaps and pinches. Cold was cruel — a familiar, albeit formidable, foe.
Describing the AIDS epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s to a room full of students born after the 9/11 terrorist attacks is far more difficult than describing Milwaukee cold to Los Angelenos.
I fumble for recognizable celebrity names, and am met with, “Who was Eazy E?” (I don’t even bother with examples like Rock Hudson, Alvin Ailey or Liberace.) I show them a clip of ACT UP protesters tossing the ashen remains of their loved ones onto the White House lawn and try to hide that I am crying a little at my desk.
I never saw my teachers cry — not even when the Challenger blew up on live television in front of my fourth-grade class.
Angels in America grapples with the notion of justice and law and how, when it comes down to the business of how we treat one another, there is no law, no rule and this fact makes interpersonal relations all the more difficult to navigate.
There are no rules governing how one must react to, say, a shuttle exploding, or mean-spirited, inarticulate presidents, or a roomful of teenagers for whom HIV is, mercifully, no longer a death sentence.
There is also no law against crying in English class.
In Angels, a character wills herself to Antarctica vis-a-vis an overdose of Valium. She is escorted to her hallucinogenic destination by a travel agent named Mr. Lies who, upon arrival, announces, “No sorrow here, tears freeze.”
When I lived in Chicago, a friend read a piece where she personified the city as a no-nonsense mother: “Chicago says, ‘I’ll give you something to cry about,’ and then freezes the tears to your face.” And though this was true of Chicago winters, the frozen tears were rife with feeling, rife with wool gloves shoved deep into down coat pockets, rife with scarf-wrapped faces creating uncomfortable humidity from mouths that muttered obscenities while waiting for the inbound Red Line train to arrive.
Despite countless miserable winters in Illinois and Wisconsin, I have an affinity for the cold. I get excited when it arrives to Flagstaff. Unlike in the Midwest, Flagstaff snow typically melts under brilliant sunshine before it turns to grimy blocks of curbside ice.
The day before this year’s first official “snow day,” a student asked me what I personally remembered about the AIDS epidemic.
“I was a kid when it first began,” I said, stopping there, but remembering adults talking about it in hushed tones, remembering teachers at Catholic school speculating about its origins, delivering oblique “woe unto the homosexual” sermons in the classroom, remembering a male teacher, in the sixth grade, asking us to look around the room at one another and acknowledge that in five or 10 years, at least one of us would be dead of AIDS.
I remember Ryan White. I remember our little brains garbled with misinformation, that my peers and I, still in middle school, worried mostly about contagion — what could be contracted on toilet seats, in shared soda cans, in sweaty hugs. I remember that we singled out the effeminate boys because this was an epidemic as much about disease as it was about homophobia. I remember that our little souls frosted over like the souls of the adults around us. I remember that Reagan said next to nothing about the body count, and George H.W. Bush was indifferent, at times vaguely defensive, over the gay community’s outrage at their own possible extinction.
I remember that it didn’t feel like my problem.
In high school, a friend’s brother had a bumper sticker on his bedroom door that proudly declared, “AIDS kills fags dead.”
By this time, I had an inkling that I was a lesbian, and a male friend had confided in me that he was gay. It was 1994, we’d both come of age during the AIDS epidemic and knew quite well what America thought about homosexuals.
We kept quiet. We were terrified.
When I say I love the cold, what I really think I love is cold’s anodynes: fireplaces, clanking radiators, soft sweatshirts, thick socks, hot coffee in the dark morning, heavy blankets. I love that in my classroom, whether the students are gay or straight, they empathize with the characters in the play. Sexuality is recognized, but ultimately they care about the humanity of the characters.
We talk extensively about community, about what we owe (or don’t) to one another, about the “law of love.”
Inspired by Kushner’s fictionalized version of the painfully real Roy Cohn, who was, among other things, a mentor to Donald Trump, my students and I discuss the difference between “loyalty” and “devotion.”
“Loyalty is transactional,” a student blurts. He’s 17. I am bowled over by his insight.
Loyalty is intractable and cheap, we decide.
Then we talk about “devotion,” which Kushner brilliantly, albeit subtly, pits against the concept of “loyalty.”
On the board, I draw the words “loyalty” and “devotion.”
We decide that purer forces drive devotion.
Under the word “devotion” we place “Faith,” “trust” and “love.”
We grow giddy defining devotion.
We have grown bored of “loyalty.”
In the early weeks of winter, I realize we have defrosted. At least, my students have.
In Angels in America, a character named Belize tells his friend Louis to look at the snow heavy sky, asks him if he can smell the snow.
Louis says, “Smell what?”
To which, Belize replies, “Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.”
