ONE OF THE MOST enduring cultural documents of the 1990s, Tony Kushner’s pair of plays collectively known as Angels in America, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and two consecutive Tony Awards for best play. The work was decidedly new material for Broadway, combining harsh criticism of the Reagan era with an unlikely hero: an HIV-positive drag queen who saves the universe. Kushner’s most recent work, Homebody/Kabul, deals with the Taliban and US policy in Afghanistan. It was written well before the events of September 11, 2001, and through a quirk of timing, it premiered just afterwards. Last week, Kushner joined a roster of well-known Americans who lent their names to an ad placed in the September 19 New York Times by the organization Not in Our Name protesting the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies. This Friday, September 27, Kushner will receive the third annual Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) Spirit of Justice Award. The award honors people who, as GLAD’s executive director Gary Buseck puts it, are "committed to civil rights and the advancement of a just society." The hope, Buseck adds, is that the award will "both honor that individual and inspire the rest of us." The Phoenix recently spoke with Kushner.

Q: First off, congratulations on the Spirit of Justice Award. With its first two Spirit of Justice Awards, GLAD honored lawyers, one working in advocacy and the other in gay-and-lesbian studies. A playwright is a departure in vocation, at least, but GLAD sees a continuum of some kind. How do you see play writing within that framework?

A: Abstractly, I don’t see a reason why someone from the arts couldn’t contribute to the movement for the creation of a more-just society. It’s certainly a praiseworthy goal and something to aspire to, and whether or not my work has had an effect in helping move things along in that direction, I can’t say. While I don’t think it’s the case that art is necessarily the most direct way to effect change, art or any form of human communication is an important part of building a progressive social movement and unleashing certain human energies that may get trapped by external circumstances. If I didn’t believe that, I don’t think I would be a writer.

I think that one should always understand oneself as being part of a process, not necessarily the principal motor of a process, and to that extent if what I write contributes to progressive social action, to help the create the possibility of progressive social action at a time when it’s so desperately needed, that would be a lovely thing.

Let me add that I feel very strongly that law is a matter of language; it’s a matter of trying to create justice through language, an impossible enterprise. Nonetheless, it’s one that is necessary to create at least some compromised form of justice. And in this country, at least, I think it’s done pretty well. I mean, the language of the 14th Amendment remains the greatest hope that minorities — including lesbian and gay sexual minoritarians — have of getting some measure of justice in American society.

Q: In placing your work in the struggle for — or language of — justice, what do you think of the description in Mother Jones magazine, where writer Andrea Bernstein defines your work as "describing the moral responsibility in politically oppressive times"?

A: I’m working on a new play now, a lesbian-and-gay play, and in a sense it’s also examining the ethical and moral responsibilities of people living in extremely revolutionary and permissive times. For instance, in the aftermath of the sexual and cultural revolution that occurred, I think that repression and freedom can go hand in hand and can be necessary concomitants of one another.

There are very complicated questions for people who are inescapably part of a revolutionary moment. I think that for everyone in the gay-and-lesbian movement, there is an inescapable revolutionary aspect to what we’re doing; I mean we’re radically transforming assumptions about the nature of human sexuality and gender that have existed and been codified in various orthodoxies for centuries. When one is a revolutionary, one also, in addition to grappling with ways in which one can overturn repressive mechanisms, one also has questions: what other mechanisms replace repressive mechanisms to give us structure and framework? Or is one an anarchist? And I’m not an anarchist.

I’d like to grapple with both sides of that question — I think that there are moral problems that are presented both by political repression and by political freedoms.

Q: When you’re looking at both sides of something like that, do you find that you meet with equally difficult reactions to the questions in your work from left and right?

A: I don’t think there’s a balance. When I say I’m interested in questions of both repression and freedom, I don’t think there’s the same dialectic, an equal or corresponding dialectic, between the left and the right. I’m talking about that dialectic existing entirely within the left. I’ve said this a thousand times: I don’t really write plays for conservatives or reactionary people because I think they have a real problem.

I think conservatism and other political movements to the right are forms of thought disorder. I think they can be pathologized. I don’t believe that everybody has an equal point or an equally valid perspective. [Angels in America] is vehemently and proudly anti-Reagan and anti-Republican.

I think that these people are very bad people and up to incredible mischief, guided primarily — as I think has become incredibly transparent in the Bush administration, a sort of quasi-legitimate administration — by being nakedly interested in their own enrichment at the expense of the rest of not only this country but of the world. There’s an ideology that has been shaped by whatever doesn’t clash with free-market pirateering, the main purpose of which is to make a very small oligarchy very wealthy and comfortable. It’s really a community of people — rather than a community of multinational corporations — robbing the developing world to make the post-industrialized world even wealthier.

I’m quite serious. There’s a way in which the Bush language disorder, which the father had and the son clearly has as well, is a wonderful on-the-surface manifestation of a kind of thought disorder, an inability to think clearly through all the various meanings and the various impacts of one’s stated policies and ideologies and to choose instead a kind of shorthand that often goes off in the wrong direction and leaves one operating at a sort of radical disconnect from the truth, from reality.

Society needs to progress. Human life exists insofar as it’s dynamic; things never go backwards in time. There is no safe or sane way to attempt a return to the past — which is essentially the gesture of reactionary politics and conservative politics: the idea that if you’re not absolutely opposed to political change, then you don’t want it to happen too quickly. But I think that there’s ultimately more danger in attempting to slow down change by throwing out repressive means than to try and change too quickly.

Q: You say there is a progressive nature to things, that it’s pointless to return back, and Angels in America ends with the quote, "The world spins only forward." So what do you see us spinning forward toward right now?

A: Well, in a sense, it’s the old Brechtian maxim that everything new is better than everything old. We’re spinning forward into something frightening, but the only hope for the world is to embrace change as a given and to try and to grab hold of the dragon as it comes roaring past and use all of your strengths and will to control the direction that the dragon’s traveling in. If you try and stop the dragon, you’re making a terrible mistake; it won’t work and I think holocaustal levels of damage are done.

The devastation when the Kyoto accords are trashed; when Salt II is replaced by nonsensical treaties with the Russians that basically leave us free to begin arming ourselves at new and terrifying levels; when public education is abandoned as a social good; when the federal government abandons its role as a protector of minority rights, including lesbian and gay minority rights — I think what is lost is immeasurable and devastating. Hundreds of thousands of people either live their lives in terrible misery or are actually killed by the consequences of these moments.

Q: Which leads to the ad placed in the Times by Not in Our Name. Do you think the ad can make a difference as the drums are beating?

A: I think that there is latent opposition to Bush and Bushism and Reaganism and the restoration of the Bush presidency that this scandalously illegitimate election made possible. But the resistance has lain dormant because of the shock of 9/11 and a great deal of confusion as to what we do now.

I gave a commencement speech [which discussed Bush’s policies] at Vassar in June and it got published in the Nation, and I got all these responses from people saying it was so great to have somebody talking about Bush. I think there’s a sort of starvation. It reminds me of the years under Reagan, the sort of Teflon presidency — only toward the very end of his appalling administration did people start to speak out against him and say, "This guy is a bastard." And I think he absolutely was; there’s a sort of consensus formed that we’re all going to be quiet about Bush. So I hope that the [Not in Our Name] statement contributes to a willingness of people who really oppose what he stands for to start to act like they oppose it.

Q: Following down these paths, of people’s silence and not feeling able to criticize the administration or anything around 9/11, I wonder if you found elements of that in the reception of your play Homebody/Kabul?

A: There was an expectation that it would. The Wall Street Journal called me a Taliban foot soldier, but of course that’s a badge of honor — if the Wall Street Journal loves you, start to worry.

Certainly, the press interviews, everybody asked the questions that you’re asking, "Is this gonna be upsetting to people?" But in New York, Trinity Rep, and Berkeley Rep — where it was the biggest box office they’ve ever had — and in London, [the play] was not full of audiences storming off or questioning what it said.

America likes to tell itself over and over again in many, many ways that we’re either apolitical or not very smart politically, or we’re not very progressive politically, but I don’t think that any of those things are true. I think Americans are deeply political people, very credibly sophisticated, much more than our politicians or media ever recognize.

David Valdes Greenwood is lecturer in English at Tufts University. He can be reached at valdesgreenwood@att.net