However, no drama in recent years, gay or straight, has received the attention and acclaim of Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America (1992). Commissioned by the Eureka Theater in San Francisco, Kushner's two-part, seven-hour "Gay Fantasia on American Themes" is the most comprehensive dramatic commentary on the moral, sexual, and spiritual state of America during and since the Reagan revolution.

Angels in America is structured like a Shakespearean romance. A seemingly stable world atomizes to be reconstructed and redeemed. Relationships are quickly brought to a crisis point. Destiny or coincidence causes unlikely collisions. Characters thought dead miraculously reappear. The real and the dream merge. Seemingly disparate actions are analogous. Comedy and tragedy alternate and, at times, coalesce.

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Kushner takes the multiple plot lines of Shakespeare a step further by using a "split screen" method and playing analogous scenes simultaneously.

Angels in America focuses on four homosexual men who represent, in various ways, not only positive and negative possibilities for homosexuals, particularly the perils of the closet, but the moral and spiritual plight of America.

The symbolic center is Roy Cohn, the powerful, ruthless, closeted, conservative who died of AIDS in 1986. For Cohn, one is defined by one's power, not one's sexuality, and power and gay identity are irreconcilable opposites. For him, the law is not an agent of order but an expression of the chaotic, dangerous universe. Kushner's Cohn is a moral monster, but his energy, both godlike and demonic, makes him an image of America itself.

Cohn's protégé is a young Mormon lawyer, Joseph Porter Pitt, who believes in the new order of the Reagan revolution (it is 1985) and the Jehovah-like fury and arbitrary power of Roy Cohn. Like Cohn, Joe cannot fit his homosexuality positively into that order. Since homosexuals do not exist in the Mormon faith, or in the Reagan revolution, Joe has tried his best to deny his sexuality and live within a loveless marriage, performing the "cheerful and strong" persona demanded of Mormons.

But whereas the shameless Cohn can live his contradiction happily, Joe hates his dishonesty and sees himself only as "a shell." Joe leaves his unhappy, valium-addicted wife, Harper, and joins in a turbulent liaison with another self-hater, the literal and figurative "word processor," Louis Ironson.

Louis has left his lover, Prior Walter, because he cannot deal with the gruesome reality of Prior's AIDS-related illnesses and impending death. He has failed "the hard law of love," and put his own needs and fears before those of his partner. Linked in their attraction and their self-hatred, Joe and Louis feel that they are doomed. Both have betrayed their commitments to lovers. They cannot go back, neither can they forgive themselves.

The dissolution of relationships and the various unmoorings of Part I: The Millennium Approaches seem to be the prelude to a revolution, the creation of a new order, heralded by the climactic appearance of an angel to the ailing Prior Walter.

However, when Part II: Perestroika opens, Prior learns that the angel, instead, calls for stasis, death. Prior, however, wants "more life" and will, like Jacob, wrestle with the angel to get it. When Prior ascends the ladder to heaven to argue for his life, he finds that heaven is a simulacrum of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, ruled by squabbling, leaderless angels.

Perestroika continues and develops a series of alliances and misalliances begun in The Millennium Approaches. The brief romance of Louis and Joe ends in a fight that gives Louis, at least, the punishment he wanted for abandoning Prior. Joe Pitt's stern mother, Hannah, becomes Prior's caregiver. Belize, the Black drag queen, becomes Roy Cohn's private nurse and guardian of his stash of AZT.

But this conventional series of collisions and separations is punctuated by more mysterious interventions, more links between the historical and the spiritual.

The principal issue in Angels in America is not what stance heterosexuals should take toward gay people (the answer to that is obvious) or even the more complex question of what stance gay people should take toward heterosexual adversaries but what, in defining our community, do gay people do with homosexual adversaries like Roy Cohn or Joseph Porter Pitt. The answer comes from the key words in Angels in America: love, justice, blessing, and forgiveness.

Like the classics of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Angels in America manages to bring serious drama to the commercial theater. More important, this uncompromising, unabashedly gay play has become the most talked about mainstream dramatic work in New York and London (where it has been produced at the Royal National Theatre) in decades. Its critical and commercial success signifies the centrality of gay artists to the contemporary American theater.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

Since the 1960s, Canadian gay and lesbian writers have produced a vibrant body of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

Before Stonewall, censorship of the theater caused authors to encode homosexual content in publicly-presented plays.

The musical has been a significant aspect of American gay male culture, manifesting itself both in diva worship and, more recently, in the presentation of openly gay characters and shows written by gay writers primarily for gay audiences.

There has always been homosexual involvement in American musical theatre and a homosexual sensibility even in straight musicals, and recently the Broadway musical has welcomed openly homosexual themes and situations.

Performance art has been embraced by queer artists as a means of challenging the very idea of traditional in art and culture.

Although gay and lesbian Québécois literature has only a fifty-year history, it has flourished and seems destined to merge into mainstream Québécois literature.

Gay and lesbian theater companies attempt to create their own communities, while also fostering a sense of solidarity with the glbtq community and educating the larger society.

A leading contemporary American playwright, Jon Robin Baitz produces works that are both morally serious and politically conscious.

An eminent professor and translator as well as a drama critic and playwright, Eric Bentley--whether writing from inside or outside the closet--has consistently supported the representation of same-sex desire in the theater.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy has written some of the greatest homoerotic poems of all time.

Jane Chambers was one of the first American playwrights to create openly lesbian characters who were comfortable with their own homosexuality.

In British law, Section 28 of the Local Government Act, enforced from 1988 until 2003, prohibited the promotion of homosexuality and teaching the acceptability of homosexuality as a "pretended family relationship".

A homosexual from a liberal background, Roy Cohn can be seen as a deeply twisted, complicit victim of the anti-liberal, homophobic ideology of his era that he thoroughly internalized.

Indian playwright, screenwriter, dancer, director, and actor Mahesh Dattani is an important figure in South Asian gay culture by virtue of his recurrent depiction of queer characters.

Historian, biographer, essayist, playwright, and academic, Martin Bauml Duberman is an astute commentator on gender and race issues and a pioneer in glbtq studies.

A fiercely comic playwright, as well as actor and screenwriter, Christopher Durang often incorporates gay themes and characters in his plays.

Award-winning Harvey Fierstein is one of the finest gay male playwrights currently working in the American theater.

Although best known as a writer of young adult fiction, Brent Hartinger is also a playwright and an activist against censorship.

Playwright, librettist, and educator William M. Hoffman is best known for his ground-breaking play As Is, one of the first theatrical works to focus on the AIDS epidemic.

Lesbian feminist performance artist Holly Hughes has a flair for telling the outrageous stories of everyday lesbian life.

The prolific and pseudonymous writer Gary Indiana may be best known for his three-novel series based on real-life crimes that explores the way victims and criminals alike are often distorted and exploited by the mass media.

Award-winning writer and director Moisés Kaufman specializes in theatrical works that explore watershed moments in glbtq history, such as the Wilde scandal, the murder of Matthew Shepard, and the experience of East Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.

Controversial playwright, novelist, and essayist Larry Kramer has been a pioneer in the gay political response to AIDS in America.

In addition to being a prize-winning playwright, Tony Kushner has become a celebrity spokesman for gay politics and AIDS activism.

An innovator in the "Theater of the Ridiculous," actor and playwright Charles Ludlam drew on many elements of camp and farce, but never allowed them to obscure the seriousness of his themes.

Christopher Marlowe represents homoerotic situations and incidents in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that any other major English Renaissance writer.

Arguably the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, Ian McKellen was the first British subject to be knighted after publicly revealing his homosexuality, an event that proved more controversial within the gay community than in the mainstream.

Texas-reared Terrence McNally, whose first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, was one of the great scandals of the 1964 New York season, emerged in the 1990s as America's most important gay playwright since Tennessee Williams.

Robert Patrick is a founding father of gay drama in America and an influence in the development of gay drama in England.

Homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Manuel Puig's eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman, homosexual desire is central to the fiction.

Out American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick brings a gently subversive wit to all of his projects.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler, a prominent member of the New York School of poets and painters, wrote openly about his homosexuality.

Best known for his groundbreaking play Bent, iconoclastic playwright and screenwriter Martin Sherman has created an impressive body of work.

Having created a unique style, the Split Britches theater company has led the way in innovative lesbian performance.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

The works of Thornton Wilder are landmarks of American literature, but they reveal scant traces of the author's homosexuality.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.

A pioneer in the development of contemporary gay theater, Doric Wilson has been instrumental in Off-Off-Broadway theater in New York City since the early 1960s.

In his occasional depictions of gay subjects, Lanford Wilson proves himself to be a powerful voice speaking of the lives of gay men today.

A trailblazer in post-Stonewall gay theater, Cal Yeomans explored sex and sexuality so directly in his critically-acclaimed plays that it made his work difficult to produce even in the gay community.

Critically acclaimed Asian-American playwright Chay Yew has consistently produced provocative drama addressing issues of racism, homophobia, and censorship.