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"The right is the group that always sees the other as the enemy. The other is not the enemy. The other is the back part of what you are"

ethics are not negative values. His inability to deal with his gayness is linked to that.

I didn't write the play and say I'm going to chose this for this character and that for that character. I really let the characters find their own paths. Joe simply proved to be the hardest nut to crack. I believe that if I ever write a Part III to Angels, it's going to be about him. Because I think he's the person who has the most changing to do. I think he's the most confused. I think he's the most ideologically burdened. He's right-wing, he's Mormon, he's a closet case, he may even be bisexual; he never really told me that.

I feel that human change is an incredibly difficult thing. I've certainly in my lifetime experienced it as being preposterously difficult. The thing that makes me more pessimistic than anything else is my own awareness of how hard it is to change a single bad habit. Even when you know how destructive that habit may be. And I consider myself to be a reasonably sane human being.

In the second part you find out things about him, that you, like Louis, may not have asked yourself. And some of those things are very ugly. He turns out to be not such a nice guy. Although there are hints of that in Part I. In the end I feel that he's gone a real distance. And I think that he will become a better person, although I actually was sort of thinking about this sometime in the farthest future as to what his likely path would be. It wouldn't be a straight one, but he's not going to go out and join GMHC or ACT UP the next day.

He speaks for some kind of desire for goodness which isn't in itself bad.

In his own way he makes some choices in the play, in Part I, that I consider very moral. He's sort of offered a choice, I think of it as between breaking one law and going to Washington and fucking people over to get Roy off the hook with the disbarment committee, or breaking another law and going to bed with Louis. And he chooses the right law to break. And even as much as he loves Roy, he can't break the law, can't do wrong, can't lie to Harper. He can't try to lie.

I had a kind of optimism for the character and a hope that it would work out with Louis.

Essentially, I think as I was working on Perestroika part of the challenge of writing Joe was that I really wanted to explore a conservative mind in somebody that I wouldn't automatically prejudge as being sort of despicable and not worthy of exploration. That's one of the reasons he's a Mormon. I did find ultimately that there wasn't any way around it. I don't think that anyone who is conservative has asked the right questions or thought hard enough about what they do. You always end up with the Eichmann situation, where at some point they simply disconnect their desire to know what the consequences of their actions are in the world. Because otherwise you couldn't possibly be a conservative. And I include gay Republicans in that as much as anybody else.

In this country that conservative position is more often than not linked to religious values. Traditionally Midwest-

ern Protestantism is closely linked to all the conservative political values. In making him Mormon you set him up as an

extreme.

Yes, although I sort of find the Mormon theology delightful and free of a certain psychopathic sexuality that Protestants are ridden with.

It's a problem of sexuality and sexual values being so deeply ingrained. I got a sense from your interviews and from the play that religion was involved in the guilt.

Well, I'm not from a religious background really. It's always astonishing to me the extent to which religious beliefs and spiritual beliefs are tremendously powerful things. We have people who feel that they are basically free of them. In the foxholes, I think they'll discover they're not so free of them after all.

I think that real agnosticism, which is probably the most honorable position for one to adopt, is tremendously difficult, because it means constantly straddling this sort of great gap about knowing. But I feel everybody wrestles very strongly with their notion of what God is and what system of norms rules the universe. They assign it other words or other names. I, myself, could not imagine living without a belief that there is some meaning and purpose to this.

In my experience most of the wars and battles that are fought within and without are struggles intrinsic and extrinsic to systems of meanings and ideologies.

Are we trying to redefine the language of sexuality? The gay and lesbian community is going through a set of arguments that are very close to what the feminists were going through ten years ago. Related to this is something you've mentioned about the glorification of the perfect body in gay porn. Negatively, this is an objectification of the body, which is something I've always objected to. But, on the other hand, some of that imagery represents a liberation of sexuality, which was an important issue in the sixties.

[Porn] does have a double edge to it, of being an act of liberation at the same time that it's objectification. I think it isn't a smart thing to say that it's all one thing or the other.

I think that's ultimately the reason women against pornography failed as a movement. First of all, it uses a legal weapon to address an issue of human behavior that isn't appropriately addressed legally. I honestly have no idea what one does about any of it. It's a problem.

It's something I want to write about now, because I don't feel I'm so completely absorbed by any other system as I am by the sexual. It's very hard to even imagine the kind of resistance that one can mount to such a thing.

It's deeply irritating to me that the gay community is, or tends to be, sort of uncritical in a blanket way about all issues of sexuality. That's the most progressive stance that anyone can come up with: What anybody likes is okay. So I think one has to reserve the right to criticize what turns people on, even though we are people who spent years fighting oppression.

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