Gay playwright Tony Kushner, fresh from wrecking Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story with his talky, annoying screenplay (that no doubt encouraged a high proportion of the several thousand people who saw it in movie theaters to mutter, “Shut up and sing”), is falling behind the progressive curve:
Tony Kushner on the Republican ‘Fantasy’ of a Nation Controlled by ‘Straight White Men’
April 18, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
From Gov. Ron DeSantis signing Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill to Gov. Greg Abbott issuing a Texas directive that would classify medical care for transgender adolescents as “child abuse,” Republicans across the country seem to be doubling down on anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies. Their argument? It’s about “parental rights.” But the playwright Tony Kushner has seen this kind of battle play out before. His “Angels in America” hit two-part play examined the AIDS epidemic and L.G.B.T.Q. life in the United States. And Kushner says this new wave of legislation is just the latest incarnation of a clampdown on rights under the conservative “fantasy” of a nation under “exclusive control by white straight men.”
But that’s no longer deemed to be a fantasy. Instead, according to Kendi and Coates and the infallible Theory of Systemic Racism, that’s a reality. Hasn’t Kushner ever heard of redlining? (Don’t ask: he probably wrote a fifteen-minute discussion of redlining for West Side Story.)
