Tony Kushner has a sexy mind. There's no other way to put it. Angels in America, his Pulitzer-winning play turned Emmy-winning HBO miniseries, puts it out there, and talking to him brings it home. Now, Kushner is the subject of a new documentary about his life and work, Wrestling With Angels, and soon his musical, Caroline, or Change, will open at London's National Theatre.

The musical is about a black maid working for a Jewish family in the South, a complex and absorbing mix of class, race and politics. And politics is a subject about which Kushner clearly feels great passion and knows a great deal.

The political scandal du jour, about Florida Republican Rep. Mark Foley, is on Kushner's mind these days. When asked what he thinks about the subject, Kushner responds in a way that many gays have probably felt during this the whole sordid affair: “Oh, great, thanks! It's good for you [Foley] to take this moment to come out of the closet now that you have been revealed as a sexual predator.”

Kushner does not limit his ire to Republicans. He's not a fan of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who has recently published a memoir titled The Confession, either. “I'm horrified by McGreevey,” Kushner says, because McGreevey's resignation, after appointing his lover to a government position for which he wasn't qualified, has severely tarnished the reputation of Democrats in New Jersey.

In this fall's race for the U.S. Senate seat from New Jersey, the Democratic incumbent, Robert Menendez, now faces the possibility that he will lose his seat to a Republican due to the corruption in New Jersey's government, including McGreevey. It seems that Kushner's expectations for liberals, of which he is unapologetically a card-carrying member, may be higher than his expectations for conservatives.

But he doesn't hold back what he thinks about the Republicans, either. Returning to the subject of Mark Foley, Kushner says, “Of course, the religious right has already tried to claim that the reason that the House leadership held back this information about a sexual predator is that they were afraid of the gay lobby. This is idiotic.”

The Foley affair is reminiscent of parts of Angels in America, which featured a fictionalized version of Roy Cohn, a conservative gay lawyer who was willing to sell other gay people and Jews down the river for political expediency and the conservative movement of the '80s, which treated gays as perverted.

“All this really does is that it reminds us over and over again that the closet is a horrendous place,” Kushner says of the Foley scandal. “People who really need psychological help don't seek it. When you pathologize your entire sexual being, you are making it more likely that you aren't going to openly seek the kind of psychological help that you actually need.”

He captures the root of this political scandal in much the same way that the character of Joe Pitt — a closeted, gay, Mormon Republican — captured the pathos of the closet during the early days of the AIDS crisis. Kushner's closeted gay Republican ultimately did not affect much in the grand scheme of things, but the Foley scandal may influence the course of this year's elections.

“It's hard to predict,” Kushner says of whether the Democrats will win in November. “What I hope will happen is that we will take both the House and Senate in the midterm election, but I don't think that will happen. I think there is still a chance that we could take the House.”

Page 1 / 2 / 3 - Next