To quote Tony Kushner's Ethel Rosenberg, history is about to crack wide open--and with it (say the stage directions), goes the ceiling, too!We'll spend the first half of tomorrow's class thinking about what these cracking angels of history in America have to tell us about the world at the end of the cold war. The second half we'll hand over to Evgenii Kharitonov and his gray "gay fantasia" set a little earlier in the socialist East.
I encourage the class to approach his manifesto, "The Leaflet," as a conversation with the West about "queer time" and the place of the homosexual in world history (which always pitches itself as straight, no matter which ideology--communism or capitalism--is catching). Whereas "The Leaflet" is self-consciously political and aesthetic-philosophical in its subject, "The Oven" is inversely and intensely lyric. Consider it immanently, on its own terms, while also in sync with the asynchronous protagonists of "Pkhentz" and Queer, and similarly suffocated/liberated like Hedwig and the Angry Inch--whose namesake re-heats our cold war class in an East German oven before the Berlin Wall comes down and the semester ends...
