The World Only Spins Forward by Isaac Butler

Author:Isaac Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Joe (Patrick Wilson) and Louis (Ben Shenkman) in the HBO miniseries, 2003. (HBO/Stephen Goldblatt)

NUSSBAUM: One thing that was great about it was that the relationship between Louis and Joe was incredibly hot! And that was weird, because they were doing something wrong, but it was driven by sex in a dirty romantic way. That was thrilling to see.

JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN (director at Yale Dramatic Association, 2008): I was in the closet when I first saw Angels. I was so into the love story of Joe and Louis that I really wanted them to get together. Years later, as an out gay man, I directed the play, and I realized, Oh, that’s really not cool, you’re not supposed to have that thought.

NUSSBAUM: We watched Melrose Place every week because we were so absurdly grateful there was a gay character. But of course he was just a cookie-cutter dignified best-friend neighbor. And then it was in the news for weeks that he was going to kiss someone, and when he did, it was filmed as though the cameras were panicked birds spinning around their heads.

BIRKENHEAD: It really is vile, the choice Louis makes, to not only leave Prior but to leave him for this closeted, Ayn Rand–loving, self-loathing Reaganite. But that’s the point of it, I guess.

MANTELLO: The audience had sympathy with Louis through the end of Millennium and then that ran out very quickly in Perestroika. The only way I can describe it is that they were willing to go down the road with him a certain distance and allow for terror, allow for contradiction. But I’ll tell you, once Perestroika started, it was like a cold shower. I felt their impatience. I felt their anger.

BIRKENHEAD: I think I would have been failing if audiences had not had a hard time liking Louis, and also if they’d not felt some small amount of something like forgiveness for him. I wanted both. I remember once, in a restaurant in Los Angeles, as I was getting up to leave my table, someone called out, “We’re rooting for you, Louis!” And, I mean, my heart just lifted. It was the perfect thing to hear. Much more so than “We love you” or “We hate you” would have been.

MANTELLO: I remember coming out of the stage door one day, and this woman was fawning all over Stephen. Then she turned to me and said, “I hated you!” That was hard.

JOSEPH HAJ (Louis at Alley Theatre, Houston, 1995): I remember audience members asking me, “How could Louis leave Prior when he is dying of AIDS?” And I remember saying, and maybe I got it from Kushner: “There are people who leave their lover because their partner has gained fifteen pounds.”

CROMER: You know, it’s a club, the guys who have done Louis. When I meet actors and they’re going to play Louis, I say, “I have to tell you, they’re going to hate you.”

MACLACHLAN: I kinda felt like I was his defending attorney sometimes.

MANTELLO: It felt that a verdict was reached on Louis, and it wasn’t good, and it was guilty.

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