Hello!

This book gave me an understanding of the queer community that I hadn’t found anywhere else.

Today we meet David Reddish and we’re talking about the queer book that saved his life: Angels in America by Tony Kushner.

Self proclaimed uber-geek David Reddish is the award-winning author of Sex, Drugs & Superheroes trilogy. The third novel in the series, The Wrath of Comic-Con, came out earlier in 2024. His novel The Passion of St. Sergius & St. Bacchus celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. David is also a noted entertainment journalist having written for such publications as MovieWeb, ScreenRant, Queerty, and Playboy.

One of the most honored American plays in history, Angels in America was awarded two Tony Awards for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was made into an Emmy Award-winning HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. This two-part epic, subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” has received hundreds of performances worldwide in more than twenty-six languages.

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Instagram: @thegaymagneto
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Host/Founder: J.P. Der Boghossian
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Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated by our recording platform Riverside.fm. This transcript may not include episode narration and contains the original interview between J.P. Der Boghossian and today’s guests. Any time-stamps do not correspond to the released audio file and tend not to be fully generated throughout the entire interview. It is approximately 85% accurate and will include spelling and grammatical errors. For any quotation purposes, we strongly recommend referencing the audio.

J.P. Der Boghossian (00:06.774)
Okay, David, would you like to introduce yourself?

David Reddish (00:09.247)
Sure. I am David Reddish. am an author and a journalist, the writer of The Passion of Sergius and Bacchus and the Sex, Drugs, and Superheroes trilogy, and noted entertainment journalist, having written for such outlets as Wealth of Geeks, Queerty, Screen Rant, Movie Web, and Playboy.

J.P. Der Boghossian (00:27.028)
Let’s start with your books. Tell us about your books and the… Well, let’s start with the comic book one because that’s a great series. So start there.

David Reddish (00:34.997)
Yeah, so I am the writer of Witch Corps, which is a new comic book that I’m doing with Joe Phillips, the great gay comic artist Joe Phillips. We have our first issue drawn and ready to go. The others are ready to go. And I have an outline for what’s going to be volume two. We’re just waiting on the final word from our publishers to when it’s coming out and how much we’re all getting paid. So.

If I have no fingernails or even, you know, like metacarpals at this point, it’s because I’ve been biting my nails in suspense.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:07.598)
And then how did you come to be working in entertainment journalism?

David Reddish (01:13.291)
I, well, I mean that’s a very long story, but the short version is such that I was a child actor, I grew up and acting was not fun anymore, so I thought I will be a screenwriter, and I moved to Hollywood and found out that writer strikes make it very, hard for untested writers to sell scripts, so I said, well, F this, I’ll just go write a book.

So I did, and everyone thought I was crazy, but it was a successful novel, so I wrote another, which then was nominated for some major awards. And so while I kept writing my books, I then was getting offers to first be a freelance entertainment journalist because I was someone that knew the business and could write, but then became an entertain – like a full -blown entertainment journalist and entertainment staff editor, and I have been doing that ever since alongside the novel writing.

J.P. Der Boghossian (02:02.306)
and that novel was.

David Reddish (02:04.443)
The Passion of Sergius Imbacus, or the Sex, Drugs, and Superheroes Trilogy, Sex, Drugs, and Superheroes, Conquest of the Planet of the Geeks, and The Wrath of Comic -Con. All available at fine retailers.

J.P. Der Boghossian (02:19.232)
I it. Love it. Do you have plans maybe to get back into screenwriting?

David Reddish (02:23.531)
if, you know, the author, the author’s there. One thing Joe and I talked about when we were working on Witch Corps was we wanted it to evolve into some kind of, if not a series, then a film. And so I would be really excited to contribute if that happens, certainly. in terms of my, my novels, I don’t know, you know, I go kind of back and forth on this. For a long time, my standing rule was if you want the rights, I come with them and I get a first crack at the script. But now…

I’m sort of like, maybe they’re too ingrained, like in their current format in my head. Can I distance myself and change enough? So I don’t know. I would love to screenwrite again. I think it would be really, really fun. And it’s far easier, by the way, than writing a novel. It moves much, much faster. At least if you’re me, it does. But for the moment, I’m focusing on prose and journalism.

that seems to be a little bit more consistent, which is to say not consistent at all, but more consistent comparatively than the screenwrit

J.P. Der Boghossian (03:24.632)
So in terms of recent work that you’ve written about that you would recommend to our audiences, what might that be?

David Reddish (03:31.735)
Well, my most recent novel came out in March 2024. That’s called The Wrath of Comic -Con, which I believe you and I have discussed before, talking about Comic -Con and the geek subculture, and it’s a sci -fi adventure. And then I should also mention it’s the 10th anniversary of my novel, The Passion of Sergius and Bacchus, so I’ve also kind of been making the rounds talking about that and talking about how it changed my life and where that came from, which is very relevant to what you and I are going to talk about today, incidentally.

J.P. Der Boghossian (03:39.16)
Yes.

David Reddish (04:00.503)
So that would be another great one, especially for people who are interested in something that might be similar to the book play script we are talking about today.

J.P. Der Boghossian (04:10.35)
Wonderful, thank you. So for a lot of folks, the book and in this instance, the play that has some life -saving features for them is providing answers for something that’s going on in their life. So what do you think the question was that Angels in America was providing answers to? Let’s just kind of focus on what that question was.

David Reddish (04:36.351)
I think the question in my mind is, where do I belong? I read Angels in America for the first time, I think about three weeks before my 19th birthday.

I was going away to college and I was going to take an acting class and I had been told in advance you need a monologue. And so I went to my local Barnes and Noble and was in the drama section and the play was just there on the shelf and I remembered I was a theater kid, like I say, so I used to read the Chicago papers and just be so enthralled and enraptured by what shows and what tours were coming to town. Chicago has a great theater scene. And I remember being 11 or 12 years old and seeing an ad for the original Broadway cast was doing

Perestroika part two of angels in America and I thought that’s so weird that a play has a part one and a part two like you have to pay the 50 bucks twice to see the entire Thing and what if I haven’t seen part one and like reading in the in the notes in the ad it said well They’ll do part one like certain days But you have to sit through like the full six to eight hour performance, and I’m thinking my gosh like how does that work? How do those actors do that for six to eight hours like God bless them?

And the icon of the play, the angel wings, the colored wings, sort of always stood out in my mind. I knew it was about gay themes from the subtitle of Gay Fantasia on national themes. Of course, at 11, 12 -year -old, I had no idea what that meant. My touchstone for the word fantasia was like the never -ending story or like the Disney movie Fantasia, which is boring as hell, by the way, that movie. So I was like, what’s a gay fantasia on national themes? Like, what the hell does this mean?

J.P. Der Boghossian (06:06.478)
Hahaha

David Reddish (06:14.763)
And I think over the years I had some perception that it was about AIDS, was about gay people, that it was about America, obviously, and that there were some kind of metaphysical religious overtone to all of it. So, as I’m standing there, you know, three weeks before my 19th birthday, three weeks before college, I said, well, maybe now’s the time. So I bought part one. I could have bought them both in really nice box set, but I thought, maybe I’m not gonna get to part two. What if part one sucks? Like, what if I have to go read something else instead?

So I took it home and that night sat down on the couch and read through the entire thing in one sitting, which is very, very rare. I’ve never done that with a script before or since. don’t think, I think the only other novel where I’ve done that was Precious, the book by Sapphire, where I just tore through it because it was just so powerful. And then I looked at the clock and realized Barnes and Noble was closed and crap, I have to go back first thing in the morning to get part two, because I got to see what happens.

J.P. Der Boghossian (06:59.79)
Mmm, mm -hmm.

David Reddish (07:11.455)
And so I think I was there when they opened and I’m like, I need part two of Perestroika. And then took it home and read it and tore through that and was so moved and had never read anything quite so encompassing. know, Angels in America is literally about everything. It’s about everything, everything. And somehow manages to go deep on just about anything you can imagine. And so I just sat there blown away by this piece that showed me what writing

could do, first of all. But in terms of the question, which is how we get on this, what was it answering? I’m old enough to remember the time. This is interesting, JP, because I was on a panel at Comic -Con a few years ago, and somebody asked me, well, what was the first time you saw gay people on TV or LGBT people represented on TV? And no one had ever, I’d never thought about it. No one had ever asked me before. And so I just said, well, gay men dying of AIDS on the news.

Because that was the only, for the first 10 or 15 years of my life, that was the only real representation we had. You didn’t see trans people anywhere, you very seldom saw lesbians anywhere, and that was usually in the context of gay people are dying of AIDS because it’s what God wants. And that was, that was, that was not even subtext, that was the text of right -wing politicians of the time, of preachers at the time, religious leaders at the time.

J.P. Der Boghossian (08:28.93)
Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (08:33.571)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (08:40.427)
And so in reading Angels in America, not only did it give me a sense of the community that I was about to join and a history that had been withheld from everybody because it wasn’t something anyone was allowed to talk about at all. I remember reading another book around this time that was about, God, am I gonna do this? It was about first gay sexual encounters. I was very new, it made sense to me to read this at the time. But there was a whole…

J.P. Der Boghossian (09:05.4)
Yeah.

David Reddish (09:07.879)
subsection called Before Stonewall, but it never said what Stonewall was. I’m like, well, what the hell is Stonewall? Like Stone, Stone, did the Berlin Wall, or are we calling that Stonewall? Well, the dates don’t line up. I didn’t know what any of it meant. So to read Angels in America, it gave me a little bit of a greater sense about that and some of the different facets of the community and certainly different political dynamics that I was going to be dealing with for the rest of my life.

J.P. Der Boghossian (09:13.163)
wow.

Hahaha

David Reddish (09:35.199)
not just as a queer person, but as an American, the sort of dynamics that we are still wrestling with to this day. And I’m sure we’re gonna get into that in a minute, so I don’t wanna spoil it. But the question that was answered to me was, this is a piece of your history, and this is what you have to be prepared for when you really do this. And I did come out publicly on my 19th birthday, so, yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (10:01.122)
Wow. Okay, well, so let me ask the question proper. So David, what is the queer book in this instance play that saved your life?

David Reddish (10:04.992)
Okay.

David Reddish (10:11.071)
It’s Angels in America. Because it taught me a certain value of life, taught me certain,

It gave me a little bit more direction. gave me an understanding of the LGBT community that I could not find, certainly at that time, anywhere else. Even on the internet. We were dealing with bulletin boards at the time. Like there was, there was zilch, okay? It was like just nothing. And Ellen had come out of the closet, but no one was allowed to talk about that anymore. Her show was canceled and that was not, that and the death of Matthew Shepard, the death of Brandon and Tina, which had been, I think just a year or two prior.

J.P. Der Boghossian (10:30.584)
Hahaha

J.P. Der Boghossian (10:40.994)
Right?

David Reddish (10:48.971)
Those were not conversations that were historical. They were, this is a crisis and isn’t it so sad that this happened to these people and why is it happening? And I remember seeing Kate Bornstein in an interview around that time saying, this has happened many times before and it’s going to happen again and again and again and again because nobody is talking about the real problem, which is homophobia and transphobia ingrained in our society and the fact that our leaders have no problem.

throwing it out there. My teachers growing up, they had no problem throwing it out there. Making fun of gay people, making fun of girly boys, obviously all these things that we’ve sort of come to talk about. That was there and it was okay. That’s the thing that I want to emphasize, particularly to younger people. It wasn’t just that this existed. It was okay for them to say, being gay is bad. If you are gay, you will get AIDS, freshman biology, just saying.

J.P. Der Boghossian (11:21.73)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (11:45.779)
If you are gay, you are going to get AIDS because that is what God wants. know, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Fowlwell, Billy Graham, all these preachers that made fortunes on the misfortunes of LGBT people. And then the representation that had started to trickle in was Philadelphia. It was about a gay man that dies of AIDS. And Philadelphia is a terrific movie. has what, know, Tom Hanks at that time.

J.P. Der Boghossian (11:46.818)
Wow.

J.P. Der Boghossian (12:09.677)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (12:13.057)
deserves all the praise in the world for doing a very brave thing, playing a gay man, dying of AIDS. This is a heterosexual leading man. Nobody had done that. You know, very, very rarely had that been done before. Certainly not in a studio film, but AIDS gay. the two were coupled. In the popular consciousness, one of the first questions my folks asked me when I came out was, don’t have AIDS, do you? Or what are you doing to make sure you don’t get AIDS?

J.P. Der Boghossian (12:31.981)
Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (12:39.959)
Wow.

David Reddish (12:41.271)
because that was how scared they were of it. And my mom had a gay friend from high school and he had a car accident and had emailed me about it. And I said, you know, he’s in the hospital. And she said, thank God, I thought you were gonna say he had AIDS. My mom’s not a bad person. This was what she knew at the time because she didn’t know anything about LGBT history. You know, this is someone that grew up in a town of 2 ,000 people and just was not.

J.P. Der Boghossian (12:57.304)
Hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (13:02.466)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (13:10.495)
exposed at the time. People didn’t know. And Angels in America, I think, started to open the floodgates in both popular culture, and it certainly did in my mind in terms of there’s a lot more we have to talk about here, and it’s not always going to be comfortable, but it’s what we have to do.

J.P. Der Boghossian (13:13.038)
Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (13:29.582)
So there may be folks who haven’t either read the play, seen it live, seen the HBO adaptation. how would you, how do you summarize Angel’s in America in 90 seconds? Go.

David Reddish (13:46.935)
sweet lord. Okay, so it is about a group of people living in New York City in 1985. Predominantly a gay couple, Prior and Lewis. Prior is a Protestant wealthy guy, Lewis is Jewish. And it’s about a heterosexual couple, Harper and Joe, that are Mormons. Joe is a very high profile, high powered conservative lawyer.

But he’s also in the closet. He’s starting to understand that he is gay as well. And both Harper, Joe’s wife, and Pryor start having visions of angels. And they are having messages that the end is near. Pryor is dying of AIDS, we learn in the first time we meet him. And Harper is a drug addict, which is something no one really talks about in the context of this play, but I think it’s very important, and I guess we’ll get to that in a second.

Harper is a drug addict, she begins having these visions also. And it means something big is coming, and it’s going to change everything. And so it’s about this group of characters that are sort of facing that change.

J.P. Der Boghossian (15:01.43)
Is there, as you recall reading it that first time, is there a particular either scene or line or that stuck out the most for you?

David Reddish (15:11.543)
yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s so much, and it’s funny because I went back and reread it about a week ago in preparation for this because I don’t think I’d read it in about 20 years. I read it again in college and like that was it. And I’d seen the movie several times. The movie’s an extraordinary adaptation of it. It’s absolutely fantastic. But the play is still its own animal and it still has scenes that were cut out for the movie. The line, I remember very…

distinctly the line that struck me I think the most when I was reading it was there’s a woman called Hannah, Joe, the conservative Mormon lawyer that’s in the closet. This is his Mormon mother who’s also very conservative. She is sort of consoling Harper at one point trying to get her to quit using drugs and to pull herself together as Joe is now leaving her for a man. And Hannah says,

It’s hard at first to accept how disappointing life is. And at 18, 19, reading that was just about the most depressing. It’s shattering in its clarity. Just the, yeah, you have, for someone who was on the verge of now I’m about to be a grownup, now it’s gonna be for me, now I can go out and do whatever I want and I can live my life the way I wanna live it and I can come out of the closet because I figured out I was gay at that point.

J.P. Der Boghossian (16:19.694)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (16:35.371)
I can come out and I can be myself and I can have a boyfriend and I can do whatever and I can grow up. I’m a grown up. And then reading this, it was like, crap, what’s about to happen? And it was an anthem to the sort of optimism that I was living through at that time, both personally and socioculturally. The late 90s was the end of history. was everyone’s gonna be a liberal democracy and there won’t be any more.

J.P. Der Boghossian (16:45.422)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (17:04.074)
world chaos, won’t be any more terrorism, the internet is going to save us all, it’s going to be free flow of information, our consciousness is going to evolve, and everything’s going to be okay. And that’s not what happened. And so that line was prescient in its time, it’s only been born out to be, you know, even more, I guess, deep and correct and observational. The other, I guess, line that stood out to me at the time,

J.P. Der Boghossian (17:16.248)
Mm -mm.

David Reddish (17:33.355)
that I began to appreciate. At the time, I remember thinking, my gosh, I can’t believe someone’s actually saying this. I can’t believe anyone’s actually writing this. Two, four years later, George W. Bush is calling for a ban on same -sex marriage, a constitutional amendment, and queer people have become demonized in a sort of second phase. Suddenly, we’re not the people spreading AIDS. We’re just degenerate groomers who are sick, and how dare we want to flaunt our relationships with marriage.

J.P. Der Boghossian (17:47.79)
Mm

David Reddish (18:02.827)
Belize, who is a drag queen, multi -ethnic drag queen, nurse, and Pryor’s best friend, has a line at one point that says, I hate this country, Lewis. I hate this country because it’s nothing but a bunch of big stories and big ideas and myths and none of it’s true. And whoever wrote the national anthem, it’s no coincidence that he put the note for the word free, he put it on a note so high that no one could ever hit it.

It’s an illusion. That was deliberate. And that cut so deeply for me with such bitterness in a way that I had not seen the United States criticized by another American before. And then you jump to five years later and it’s like, I get it. I get it. There are moments where it’s really easy to say, I hate all of this and it’s all so awful. But I think part of the point of Angels in America is that

J.P. Der Boghossian (18:49.612)
Mm

David Reddish (19:00.951)
It is shattering the American myth. It doesn’t make America bad. It doesn’t make America evil. It makes it complicated. And the problem arrives when we try to boil everything down to these simple myths, idealized visions, idealized, you know, stories. And this is something we’re still grappling with in our society. You saw it in 2020 with the racial justice anti -police protests.

J.P. Der Boghossian (19:27.511)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (19:27.863)
and the taking down of the Confederate flag and suddenly people want to change the school name because Woodrow Wilson didn’t like black people, we can’t have Woodrow Wilson on monuments anymore. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, we have to take down his monuments. There’s suddenly this whole reevaluation and deconstruction of the American myth that is happening because we like those myths and because they keep oversimplifying everything and when they oversimplify things they erase very important elements.

And so that speech was Tony Kushner, the playwright, that I think was him dealing with the same kind of rage that I have had to deal with my entire adult life for the past 25 years, you know?

J.P. Der Boghossian (20:11.458)
We are of the same generation, it sounds like, in terms of coming of age.

I was first introduced to Angels in, I was going to a theater academy and the third years were putting on, when I say third years, was like, you know, there was only three years and the third year was the production. was the epitome of where you wanted to get to. And they put on Angels in America and I had not heard of it, which was, you know, bad theater education and just bad, you know, gay education, all this stuff. I…

David Reddish (20:24.801)
Okay.

David Reddish (20:30.548)
Okay.

J.P. Der Boghossian (20:48.62)
Sat. Transfixed.

I didn’t understand because I was working the box office. So I snuck, didn’t sneak in, I came in late after everybody. So I had to sit in the balcony and I did not understand what had just happened. I overly identified with Joe because he was in the closet and I was feeling that I had to be in the closet because he was in the closet for his job. And I thought as an actor, I couldn’t come out.

David Reddish (21:12.58)
interesting.

J.P. Der Boghossian (21:21.528)
So I was deeply in the closet, right? So was different reasons, but ultimately for career goals. And I was, when I was seeing prior storyline, that was the storyline that was ingrained in me growing up. I’m like, that is the end game, right there. And Louis, I was just so effing angry with for most of the play, but it was, I mean, for me,

David Reddish (21:25.535)
Yeah. Yeah.

David Reddish (21:43.413)
Yeah, yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (21:52.854)
interacting with it the first time on stage, even in a theater academy, you know, production.

Just

changed everything and it changed in such a way that I actually had to bury it for a while because there were so many truths happening and being thrown at me that I could, they were so undeniable but I was so not necessarily ready for it because of, you know, I’m like, I am this, you know, little gay bee technically but I’m hiding and I’m in the closet and I’m gonna be an actor and I would love to do this play but could I even do this play because if I do then I’m coming out, you know what I mean? There were all these, but the things that were happening, those lines that you just said.

David Reddish (22:09.057)
Wow.

Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (22:34.638)
I was like, yeah, I can remember the feeling that was being triggered for me when watching it that first time. I do actually have a question leading up into all of my personal experiences here, which is, so you had read it and then did you see it then immediately after in Chicago?

David Reddish (22:40.289)
Yeah.

David Reddish (22:45.353)
Okay, great, great, great.

David Reddish (22:53.239)
I did not see it until… I’ve never seen it on stage. Frankly, ever. I’ve only ever seen the movie, and I know the most recent revival with Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane that got rave reviews. You can find clips of it on YouTube, but the entire production is 20 bucks to rent, like, on the National Theatre Online streaming service. I will get there eventually when I’m more gainfully employed than I am right now.

J.P. Der Boghossian (22:57.064)
really?

J.P. Der Boghossian (23:14.413)
Right.

J.P. Der Boghossian (23:20.003)
haha

David Reddish (23:21.143)
Because when I saw Nathan Lane, this is a great Seig because when I saw Nathan Lane was going to play Roy Cohn I thought my gosh, that’s loony casting except it’s kind of brilliant because no one understands How good Nathan Lane really is? He’s always been typecast in kind of movies and TV series if you see him in some of his lesser -known Films or if you see him on stage you understand how powerful an actor he really really is

J.P. Der Boghossian (23:33.518)
Mm

J.P. Der Boghossian (23:37.198)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (23:49.789)
And so to see him take on Roy Cohn, my gosh. Absolutely spectacular. I will rent it eventually. no, like my first experience seeing it actually performed was the film with Al Pacino as Roy Cohn and Meryl Streep, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, and that brilliant, brilliant cast of actors. And it had every bit the power and monesty be damned.

J.P. Der Boghossian (24:07.158)
Mm

David Reddish (24:17.163)
When I read it, I said, there is only one director who could ever make this work as a movie and it’s Mike Nichols. On my life, I said, Mike Nichols is the only person who will ever be able to do this because he’s the best director of actors and he understands the adaptation from stage to screen better than anybody else I’ve ever seen. So it was a godsend that Tony Kushner got him to do it, that they had those actors and that they made this brilliant, brilliant adaptation out of it.

J.P. Der Boghossian (24:22.927)
wow.

J.P. Der Boghossian (24:32.983)
Mm

J.P. Der Boghossian (24:42.188)
I can still hear the theme, the oboe theme. I don’t know why I find it so comforting, but sometimes I will just play it in the background on YouTube or whatever, because there’s just something about it that that, I don’t know. But I think that that was, that adaptation, so that came just a few years after you read it then. Because I think the adaptation came out in like,

David Reddish (24:44.437)
Yeah, the Thomas Newman, yeah.

David Reddish (24:52.822)
Yeah.

David Reddish (25:04.567)
Yeah, it did about four or five years later. 2003, 2004, something like that.

J.P. Der Boghossian (25:08.896)
So.

Am I hearing that this play played a role in your coming out process?

David Reddish (25:17.811)
incidentally it did. I’d kind of figured out by that point that I was going to come out when I got to college and it just so happened that my first full day of college is my 19th birthday. On the 19th, my golden birthday, and so it just seemed like the planets were lying. It was the divine, you know, serendipity. But when I, well right, and when I got into the theater program, when I took my acting class, no one else had read it.

J.P. Der Boghossian (25:28.515)
Mm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (25:37.102)
for this play particularly.

J.P. Der Boghossian (25:43.822)
Mmm.

David Reddish (25:44.223)
And I kept saying, you’ve gotta read this. You know, I told the other gay boys, you’ve gotta read this. I told the guys who happen to be closet cases, you’ve gotta read this. And people would read it and say, my gosh, I see what you mean. Like this is, the dialogue, Tony Custer’s dialogue, I would give my mind, body, soul, just about anything to write with that level of poetry. I mean, it’s poetic.

and lyrical his words, but they’re so real. They sound like a conversation you’re overhearing in a diner or on the street somewhere, just people sort of talking through life. my, I don’t know how you do that. I don’t know how you do that. I’ve tried to do it, you know, with everything I’ve written ever since. Good gosh. my Lord. It’s amazing. Yeah, so it played a role in my coming out in that it was…

J.P. Der Boghossian (26:23.01)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (26:36.735)
a crutch, guess. was, okay, I know Angels in America is part of queer history, now I have to start looking around to find the other pieces.

J.P. Der Boghossian (26:45.688)
What did that look like?

David Reddish (26:47.285)
The search you mean?

J.P. Der Boghossian (26:48.718)
Well, guess I’m curious about what opened up for you after reading it. Because you have this, I mean that line that you stated like, ooh, life is going to be tough here as a queer person. So what was opening up for you?

David Reddish (27:00.159)
I mean, it prepped me to sort of live that way insofar as any line could really ever prep anyone. I mean, you read something like how disappointing life is or that America is nothing but a bunch of big stories and ideas. And I don’t think you really understand how true that is until you’ve lived a while, until you are a voting adult in our society and having lived through different election cycles and whatnot.

Both of those lines always resonated with me. think, you know, the bigger effect that the play had was I want to be, you know, first as an actor I wanted to be good enough that I could one day play Pryor because I thought he was the key male role at that time. I always wanted to play Pryor. I thought, you know, because I’m a very waspy guy myself, you know, somewhat flamboyant. I think…

J.P. Der Boghossian (27:47.192)
That’s the role you wanted to play, interesting.

David Reddish (27:59.861)
I think I identified the most with Prior, certainly when I read it the first time, or I thought that if someone had to cast me, that would probably be the part they cast me in. What’s interesting is in rereading it, and I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, in rereading it, I had a very different reaction to the characters. I think I would still probably be cast as Prior if someone was dumb enough to actually let me try and act through this thing, but…

But I think some of the dynamics play differently now over the test of time. Creatively, what it did for me as a writer, I have been chasing Tony Kushner my entire life, my entire career. I swear this is true. Every time I sit down to start something, every time I sit down to write something that I’m in the middle of, it’s chasing Tony Kushner. It’s I wanna be that good. I wanna be that probing. I wanna be that deep. I want to…

shatter people in the way I was shattered reading this. it’s, I mean, it’s another, this is another, power thing that, that really resonated with me. It resonates more with me over time. It resonated with me at, you know, 1819. Certainly again, when I saw the, the mini series, because the performance is so powerful. And again, now there’s a scene where Harper, Joe’s wife is, she’s stoned on Valium.

and she’s in a Mormon visitor’s center watching some awful animatronic mannequin show on stage. And the Mormon wife comes to life. The Mormon wife who says nothing during the entire show comes to life and starts talking to her. And Harper says, well, how do we change? And the Mormon wife explains, well, God takes a rusty nail and slices you open and reaches in and.

starts tearing your guts out and oozing everywhere and you’re squirming and you’re in excruciating pain and trying to get away and he’s holding you down and you can’t breathe and the pain is so overwhelming and when he has all your guts ripped out and torn to shreds he stuffs them all back in and walks away and you have to sew it up together you know, but by yourself you sew it up by yourself sew yourself back together that’s what I’m trying to say and that’s how we change and I mean that’s literally visceral in that you’re talking about tearing someone’s viscera out of their body

J.P. Der Boghossian (30:14.903)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (30:17.953)
But that is what happens when you undergo a fundamental change. That’s really what it’s like. Change is not something that’s usually very comfortable. It’s something that just feels like it is eating you alive, and in a sense it is. And when the scar tissue heals, when you’re all sewn up again, you’ve changed. You’re different.

J.P. Der Boghossian (30:31.224)
Mm -mm.

David Reddish (30:46.229)
That was certainly true for me when I went through my first breakups. That was true for me when I went through, you know, my first big social setbacks or career setbacks. It’s still true for me now. That’s what I want to do in everything I write is make people think about something in a different way, in a way they never had before and in a way that will hopefully make more sense over time.

J.P. Der Boghossian (31:17.752)
Talk to me about the idea then of America and being an American and also wanting to chase Tony, but what came out of reading Angels in America and your understanding of yourself within these stories.

David Reddish (31:30.487)
Well, those are two really different questions. Frankly. Well, first, what came out of it for me personally, the first screenplay I ever wrote, and I don’t know that it was any good, it was called Embellishment, and it was about the President of the United States is found to be having an affair with a man. He’s outed. And I really was chasing Tony in the sense that I wanted to do a piece about queer people, but also about the larger

J.P. Der Boghossian (31:32.45)
Ha!

J.P. Der Boghossian (31:47.63)
Hmm.

David Reddish (32:00.119)
Washington animal and the American political system and American values and and challenge ourselves to sort of Look past the big stories and the American mythos and see well What is the complicated reality because the truth the deepest truth that I think Tony gets at that anyone could ever got at America is not good or bad America is complicated. It is not

simple enough to say, yeah, George Washington said, I can never tell a lie and I chopped down the cherry tree, it’s me itself. It’s not enough to say that, the Constitution was only supposed to work for white men, because that’s not true either, frankly. It was complicated. The Constitution was meant to work for rich people, regardless of race or gender, which, yeah, disproportionately favored white men.

J.P. Der Boghossian (32:31.97)
haha

David Reddish (32:52.535)
But people of color could also vote in certain states. Women could vote in certain states, you know, throughout the history of the United States. We don’t talk about these things because we have really crappy history programs in our country and because everything has to be super condensed just to get through, you know, two semesters or whatever, you know, 250 years and two semesters. So I always want to chase Tony with that. The idea of America itself, though, it’s interesting to me in reading the play.

J.P. Der Boghossian (33:01.837)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (33:21.143)
in 2024. Everything about AIDS and about the couples and like their domestic woes, all of that still hurts, it still resonates. But what struck me as even more powerful this time out was the discourse on America itself. And this is basically represented by two characters in the play. One is Belize, the the multiracial drag queen that I mentioned before who’s a nurse. And the other is Roy Cohn.

J.P. Der Boghossian (33:43.745)
Mm

David Reddish (33:47.363)
Roy Cohn, of course, was a real person. He rose to fame during the Rosenberg trials, and it’s since been revealed that he was conferring with the judge outside of the courtroom and encouraged death and was faking evidence and manipulating witnesses and basically botched the trial. Whatever one thinks of the Rosenbergs and their guilt, the trial was screwed up, and they did get a raw deal on that level. He later rose to even more prominence as the assistant to Joe McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin.

J.P. Der Boghossian (33:47.47)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (34:16.96)
who started what we call the Red Scare, where he was outing hidden communists, outing communists, and because they’re trying to destroy our country, and he destroyed a lot of lives. He destroyed a lot of actors and writers and directors in Hollywood, a lot of politicians. And another element of this that’s only recently sort of come to light and started to be discussed was that he was also targeting gay people with what we call the Pink Scare or the Lavender Scare, where, you know, he was outing homosexuals and they were having their careers.

J.P. Der Boghossian (34:19.31)
Mm

J.P. Der Boghossian (34:39.214)
Mm

David Reddish (34:46.389)
destroyed and what’s amazing about all of this by all accounts McCarthy was a dumb dumb person who was terrible a terrible alcoholic and who was supposedly gay himself, but we do know for sure Rikon was Jewish and gay and he was destroying people for being gay point one and And this is another sort of element that gets lost for being Jewish because the popular consciousness associated communism with Judaism

J.P. Der Boghossian (35:01.719)
Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (35:11.554)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (35:16.147)
at that time. mean, the Nazis, part of the reason the Nazis found somebody’s sympathizers in the United States was that they were so ardently anti -communist. They referred to communism as a Judeo -Bolshevik plot, as in, is Jews that are creating this. They are the ones who are secretly responsible. It’s an old variation, a new variation on the old protocol of the elders of Zion that there’s this secret Jewish cabal that’s running the world, that’s making everybody miserable, that’s only favoring Jewish people.

J.P. Der Boghossian (35:41.858)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (35:44.791)
It was just a new kind of riff on that but that carried over into the 1950s and so many many people who were Jewish and gay had their careers destroyed by these two men and Roy Cohn throughout his career he died in the mid 80s. Flaunted his homosexuality. He would take you know hot guys with him to parties and they would shake the hands of presidents and ambassadors and political leaders but he would always deny even to the men he was sleeping with that he was gay. He always you know he was

openly Jewish but always sort of downplayed that and wanted to associate himself with good Christian Protestant people. So to have him as a character in Angels in America, Tony Kushner based a lot of what Roy says and does on the real Roy, you know, things that are part of public record. But, you know, he’s also dying of AIDS. The real Roy Cohn did die of AIDS as well. And to…

J.P. Der Boghossian (36:19.48)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (36:37.329)
Listen to his denial of no, I’m not gay. No, I’m not dying of AIDS because that means you know that only happens to other people I’m too rich. I’m too powerful. I’m too important. That doesn’t happen to important people he is when he says things like that and When when he’s behaving in that kind of way, he’s reinforcing the myth of America which is this idea of If you are conform, you know, it’s the land of opportunity for certain people

J.P. Der Boghossian (36:57.954)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (37:06.055)
And there’s a pecking order that is silently preserved and that is manipulated and that is designed to screw certain people out of opportunity in favor of other people who are maybe not as smart, not as talented, but who were born into the right families or who have the right amount of money or what have you, right? You juxtapose that, Roy’s attitudes about America and just how hateful a person he is. He’s completely selfish.

J.P. Der Boghossian (37:32.834)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (37:35.555)
just, feels no guilt about anything that he is doing or has done, and one of the major themes of the play, all these characters, except for Roy Cohn, are racked with guilt of one kind or another. The guilt that I’ve wasted my life and I’m going to die, the guilt that I’m living in a sham marriage, the guilt that I’ve left my sick partner, the guilt that I’ve raised a gay child, the guilt that I haven’t been a good friend to people. Everybody in this play is racked by guilt, except for Roy.

who has no sense of shame, no sense of guilt, but is kind of the most miserable person you’re going to meet. And you compare that with Belize, who is the anti -Roy, right? He is not posing as being a white man. He’s a multi -ethnic person. He’s a flamboyant, open, gay person who is also a drag queen. He doesn’t ever make any effort to hide that to the point where he gets harassed at work, he gets harassed down the street by other people for being so flamboyant and so feminine and what have you.

And he chose to be a nurse. And I think it’s so interesting because being a nurse is an altruistic profession. I never get the sense reading the play or even interacting with most of the nurses that I know that they went into that because they thought they were going to get rich or famous because of it, or they thought they were going to be powerful because of it. They went into that profession because it gave them a sense of purpose and a sense that they could do good things for a lot of people. And so you look at these two poles, bellies on the one.

J.P. Der Boghossian (38:46.669)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (39:00.311)
and Roy on the other. And America is the gulf in between. It is some people trying to do the right thing and who want to believe that America can be this great and beautiful beacon to the rest of the world. And it is people who want people to believe that as a sham so they can then cheat at the game and change the rules and exploit everyone and everything they were coming to contact with.

It’s interesting to me to look at that now in our current political context. Roy Cohn was the mentor of Donald Trump. That’s also not a big secret. Donald Trump has admitted to that many, many times. There have been several excellent films that have come out about this. Ivy Miracle, who is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, incidentally, made an excellent documentary called Bully Coward Victim, Story of Roy Cohn.

J.P. Der Boghossian (39:37.133)
See you.

David Reddish (39:53.001)
Excellent documentary. And then my friend Matt Turnhour made Where’s My Roy Cohn, which is about the life of Roy Cohn and his relationship with Donald Trump. And both of them are fabulous, fabulous films that give insight into the real person. At one point, Roy, in the play, starts threatening somebody, saying, you don’t know what I know, I don’t know. He’s threatening to blackmail somebody, basically. And he’s saying, you don’t know what I know, I don’t know what I know. Half the time I just make shit up and it turns out to be true. Now,

J.P. Der Boghossian (40:00.216)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (40:22.443)
Does that sound like anyone that you can think of in our current political landscape? You know, we’re living in Roy Coons America in many ways. And I think Kushner saw that coming and tried to sort of warn everybody that, okay, he might die, but the real virus that he has created is infecting us and we’ve got to find a way to treat that.

J.P. Der Boghossian (40:24.108)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (40:46.862)
And then you add in Ethel, the character of Ethel.

David Reddish (40:50.485)
And then you add in Ethel, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg who haunts Roy throughout the play. Another, know, one of the great, and I get goosebumps thinking about it. Another brilliant, brilliant line that struck me. wasn’t the first, I don’t think it was the first time I read it. I knew about the Rosenbergs. I knew sort of tangentially about Roy Cohn from studying them in school. And I knew that there were so many problems with that trial and so much question as to the guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

But it was later when I reread the play, Ethel has this speech to Roy about how one night a year, anniversary of her execution, there is a star that glows acid green in the sky. And it is the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s hate. Because this innocent woman was executed. She was murdered. She had two little kids. And by the way,

J.P. Der Boghossian (41:41.816)
Mm.

David Reddish (41:48.945)
The government has since opened the files. There was no evidence, and in fact there was evidence to the contrary that was buried, that she had anything to do with smuggling secrets to the Soviet Union. Atomic secrets. The Rosenbergs were accused of smuggling the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. That is not true, and in fact her own brother was the one that did what she was accused of doing and lied about it because they were hoping that, I don’t know, that Julius would name other spies.

and as a means of maybe trying to save her or Roy Cohn. This is another point I want to get to in a second. Roy Cohn talks a lot about clarity. In Roy Cohn’s mind, anyone that was a communist or had left -leaning sympathies was a traitor to the United States and deserved to die. So he had no guilt about executing this woman because she was married to a communist. The other thing I think to say about that is…

J.P. Der Boghossian (42:21.614)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (42:44.231)
One of the themes of the play is this sense of morality, of changing morality or moral greyscale. Roy talks a lot about the idea of moral clarity, about how in his day, morality was easy because it was us versus them. It was black, it was white, it was freedom versus communism. And you again contrast that with Belize who has a much more nuanced and complicated vision of the world.

J.P. Der Boghossian (43:09.112)
Mm

David Reddish (43:13.639)
And that’s the truth, that is the time that really began in the 1980s, the 70s and the 80s is when this sort of began and it continues now, this transformative moment, not just in American history, but in the history of a human evolution. We had these senses in the past of it is good versus evil. Religion is right, secularism is wrong. God is good, the devil is bad, communism is the great Satan.

democracy, namely, know, super hyper conservative religious democracy, which is by the way, not what America stands for, but but okay, that that is somehow good versus the evil Satan of communism, right? And what prior undergoes in the play, he’s having literal visions of angels, and he starts to understand, no, it’s it’s all such a mess. There is no moral clarity. I have to decide I have to ask much

harder questions to find the moral truth in a situation or the difference between what is right and wrong in a certain situation. And when he actually physically goes to heaven after fighting an angel that keeps saying, no, you have to give them this message so you can save the world, it’s a new religious message. And his mission is sort of meant to parallel that of Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism. When Pryor actually gets to heaven, it’s in ruins after

heaven quakes, know, there’s been a great earthquake, and he finds out God abandoned heaven, like at the turn of the 20th century. And Prior has this whole speech about, if God is seriously going to abandon us, that is paternal, like, that’s paternal abandonment. You should sue him. Like, why would you seek the approval and the comfort of someone who clearly does not approve and someone who clearly will not offer comfort to his greatest creation?

J.P. Der Boghossian (45:09.73)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (45:11.163)
And think Kushner’s message in that is we have to find objective moral truths outside of these sort of philosophical systems that maybe have governed us in the past. Outside of traditional religion, outside of the American myth, outside of the racial and gender and sexual roles that we’ve all been taught to live with, the pecking order that Roy Cohn talks about. We have to find a way to work together.

and we have to find deeper truths. I don’t know that that means Kushner’s an atheist. I don’t think that makes him anti -religion or anti -Christian. I still consider myself a Christian, but also the way things are framed in the play, have to admit, prior is kinda right. And by the way, there’s a scene that’s left out of the movie that’s in the play where God does come back and Roy Cohn is going to represent him at trial. And I think that’s meant to be a satirical scene. It’s maybe the hardest scene in the play to…

stomach, which is why they cut it out. But it gets to, again, the deeper idea that the play is about this incredible fundamental change and the breaking up of past orders. And the only way to survive this is to adapt.

J.P. Der Boghossian (46:30.294)
I I want to leave it right there. was brilliant. That was brilliant, David. That was fantastic.

David Reddish (46:32.657)
Okay

J.P. Der Boghossian (46:41.346)
Thank you for this conversation. I’m going to want to go and both read and watch this all over again through the lens of this conversation.

David Reddish (46:43.361)
Thank you.

David Reddish (46:54.107)
Please there’s one more thing if I can there’s one more thing. I would like to sort of of mention about Roy Specifically that I think is so relevant to the state of queer life today Roy is in the closet Roy denies that he’s gay But he very clearly is trying to seduce the character of Joe throughout the play and has obviously had sex with many many many men in his life I Think Roy’s kind of kinky

J.P. Der Boghossian (46:55.662)
Yeah.

David Reddish (47:23.081)
I don’t know what your impression is, having seen the play, having read it. I think on some level that is Roy’s kink. I get off on pretending to be straight and then having sex with men. And I don’t know what your experience is being JP or what kind of guys you’ve met in the course of your life or seen there on the grinder in Wisconsin. There are still so many men that I know who…

The idea of being straight acting or straight presenting or masculine presenting is somehow a kink and it’s designed to turn themselves on, it’s designed to turn other men on and not just that but a contempt for other maybe more effeminate men or masculine women and people who don’t fulfill typical gender sort of roles.

or have, you know, typical masculine interests. like, why do you want to be around a choreographer? Like, I want to be with a guy that plays sports and drinks beer and calls his friends, bruh, you know, like, I still know people like that to this day who I cannot figure out why in 2024, when you have marriage equality, when you have greater visibility than ever, when, you know, one guy, you know, who is married to a very, very lovely man, they make a good living.

J.P. Der Boghossian (48:28.259)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (48:32.684)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (48:47.093)
why he still gets off on this idea of, yeah, I’m straight acting. I hang out with guys that are straight. They just hook up with guys and that’s so.

I have no way to explain this except extreme childhood abuse and kink. And maybe those two are related. I’m not a sex psychiatrist. I don’t know. But I see it, you know, like there was a guy that used to hit me up for years and years and years would say, I have to be in the closet because of my job. It’s okay. You know, maybe that’s true. But who was having all kinds of wild…

J.P. Der Boghossian (49:19.022)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (49:23.639)
kinky sex and drinking and drugging and doing, you know, having these wild parties and just wanting me to come over and take part in all of this. And I would always say no because I have no interest in somebody who’s gonna live this way. And when he was doing cocaine and drinking heavily at 4 .30 on a Thursday afternoon, I knew he was in bad shape. So I said, get help and I’m out. So.

J.P. Der Boghossian (49:43.256)
Ooh.

J.P. Der Boghossian (49:47.21)
Yeah, I don’t think that kink and sexual abuse or emotional or any type of abuse is linked any more so than any type of sex. I think that…

David Reddish (49:56.161)
Okay.

J.P. Der Boghossian (50:03.416)
Kink offers us though an opportunity to really examine the…

J.P. Der Boghossian (50:12.046)
full spectrum richness of sexuality and how it presents and what actually, you know, gets people turned on or, ready to go. I think that I was just talking to the host of Lost Spaces, Kay Anderson, and runs a really fun newsletter and was trying to process an identity that’s not gay. It’s G zero Y.

David Reddish (50:21.228)
Yeah.

David Reddish (50:28.555)
Okay.

J.P. Der Boghossian (50:41.592)
which is exactly what you’re talking about. I know, I don’t get it, but it’s a zero, which is to say that it’s very much what you just described, of identifying as straight, but doing all sorts of things with guys except for anal sex and not identifying as gay and not feeling represented within things like pride or LGBTQ movies or the community. it’s interesting, I think that there may be,

David Reddish (50:42.123)
Goi? Goi, okay.

David Reddish (51:06.71)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (51:11.002)
There are folks that have kinks of wanting to be financially dominated, where they work with either sex workers or partners where they’re like, I want you to take all my credit cards and dominate me that way. And that they find to be how they engage and how they’re able to get erotically charged. I think that…

David Reddish (51:21.891)
yeah!

J.P. Der Boghossian (51:34.572)
We have been so –

J.P. Der Boghossian (51:41.268)
on the lookout, and I think there’s a generational thing here happening with the idea of coming out. We have been so on the lookout, right? Like our generation, and particularly the generation before us, saw coming out as a political and healthy strategy. Like once you have come out, you’re gonna be a healthier person. Once you come out, you’re gonna also have a healthier community and advance the community as a whole. Now, I think because…

David Reddish (51:56.171)
Yes.

J.P. Der Boghossian (52:05.3)
It’s really interesting watching coming out narratives and even the deconstruction of the idea of coming out with Gen Z or Alpha or the kids today. The kids today, right? Because for them, it’s already been so normalized. You know what I mean? That they’re like, why do I need to come out? I just am. Which is this completely different, like we’ve sort of achieved what we were hoping for.

David Reddish (52:12.895)
Yeah, whatever we are, yeah, those kids today, yeah.

David Reddish (52:30.454)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (52:32.226)
But now we have to sit there, I still feel like folks of our generation, the exers and the early millennials are kind of like, well, but you still have to come out because it’s been ingrained in us. so I think that there is this, I wish that, and there was a really great anthology that came out a few years ago, it was just called Kink, and a lot of great queer writers in there talking about what it can offer us. And I think that that is a very interesting.

David Reddish (52:37.526)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (53:02.965)
you know, are we looking at this as a folks that are doing that as self -hatred? Or is it literally just a way of, you know, another way of expressing their sexuality that is neither good nor bad? It’s just, it’s that. And I think that there’s so little investigation of that because we have been so in the movement, if you will, this idea of you have to come out. That’s the only way of

David Reddish (53:19.935)
I mean…

J.P. Der Boghossian (53:31.754)
achieving health in yourself and being a fully realized, authentic, resourced queer person in the 21st century.

David Reddish (53:33.162)
Yeah.

David Reddish (53:41.259)
Yeah. that’s interesting. I don’t know… I mean, I don’t want to sound like I’m kink -shaming at all, because that’s not true. I was just making the observation that think someone like Roy gets off on… that he gets off on the idea that he pretends to be straight, and I’m straight, I just have sex with men. That’s actually a line from the play. I… you know, I’m not gonna shame anyone… I understand kinks and fetishism and everything, and I’m not gonna shame…

J.P. Der Boghossian (53:57.678)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (54:09.931)
You know, what’s the cliche? I’m not going to yuck anyone’s yum because even if I don’t, you know, I don’t understand. You’ve never heard that. my gosh. Yeah. I will not yuck someone else’s yum when it comes to sex. But I don’t understand water sports or scat or, or, or corpophilia or footplay or anything like that. If you’re into that good for you. But I also don’t quite.

J.P. Der Boghossian (54:13.504)
I haven’t heard that. I haven’t.

J.P. Der Boghossian (54:27.214)
Mm

David Reddish (54:38.665)
Understand or condone the idea of I’m I’m going to pretend to be straight so I can feel like I’m better than you Because I’m fitting the mold of traditional masculinity or something and then we’ll have sex with as many men as possible I think Some guys get off on I guess the thrill of that. It’s its own anti exhibitionism. I don’t know why you know, I it would take a more

a more educated mind than my own, someone who’s very well -versed in kink, sex, and the psychology of fetishism, to explain that, I think. But it’s very interesting, and it’s always kind of disgusted me, Particularly when I was younger, and I used to encounter it a lot more from guys that would say, you’re the fucking problem. No one cares about gay people. Just keep it quiet. Just don’t. Why do you have to flaunt it? And of course, you still hear that now.

J.P. Der Boghossian (55:30.382)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (55:35.487)
from certain right -wing people. remember hearing Pap Buchanan, scion of liberalism that he is, I remember hearing Pap Buchanan talk about, know, we’ve had plenty of, you know, gay Republican politicians. We knew who they were. They were just smart enough not to talk about it. Why do they have to drag it into the public sphere? Why is it a, why do you deserve some, you know, why does someone deserve the plotting? Why do you praise people who want to flaunt this everywhere and, you know, the Buddha judges of the world that he, you know.

He and Chastain are married and they have kids and they’re gay and they’re proud and and and and why do we need to know about that? And it’s like, well, there are two things happening here, right? One is that you’re showing your complete contempt to disgust for queer people, which I guess on a personal level, you’re kind of entitled to. But but you’re also showing the double standard. It’s the Roy Cohn syndrome of it’s fine as long as we don’t have to acknowledge the beast in the room.

J.P. Der Boghossian (56:06.904)
Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (56:12.748)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (56:32.575)
I also find that, you know, I think the sort of antidote, antithesis to this is the people that criticize someone like Pete Buttigieg and Chastain Buttigieg for being too heteronormative. Because Chastain took his name when they got married and they’re, you know, they’re monogamous and they’re raising two kids together. And I know many queer men and women who would say, no, that’s not the way we’re supposed to be. We’re supposed to be polyamorous and fucking everyone and we shouldn’t be raising children and…

J.P. Der Boghossian (56:44.109)
Mm -hmm.

David Reddish (57:00.149)
It’s like, okay, all of you go screw yourselves because… No. the point of this is be who you want. You know, do live how you want. And if you wanna be polyamorous ass up all the time, good for you. If you wanna be married with kids, good for you. Just don’t shame someone else for their

J.P. Der Boghossian (57:13.975)
You

J.P. Der Boghossian (57:20.046)
Well, I think that gets back to what you were talking about earlier and what this play challenges us to try to figure out, What is the myth of America? What is the change? think change is a thing. There’s a big theme in there of like, don’t change. Try to stop things. And you can absolutely see that right within the queer community of trying to figure out who we are and how do we have that freedom.

David Reddish (57:28.396)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (57:49.356)
without enabling folks the pap Buchanan’s of the world and the Roy Cones. I think it’s one thing to me where if he was somebody that wanted to go into his house and enact that fantasy, but then during the day he was just some whatever job, the fact that he was then doing what he was doing in a…

David Reddish (58:08.661)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (58:18.328)
which I would call evil sense. if your definition of evil is you understand that what you’re doing is cruel and you’re choosing to do it anyway, you know, that to me is sort of my definite personal definition of evil. That that’s where it just gets so the psychology of him. And then.

David Reddish (58:23.765)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (58:37.514)
I was torn in the play of like, how much do I want to get to know this motherfucker? Like, can we like, like, you know, where’s the exit stage left attacked by bear, you know, that great line of, you know, from Shakespeare and his play of, know, just where’s the bear that’s going to take him off, you know, stage because it is, there is this perverse notion of wanting to understand this brain.

David Reddish (58:42.327)
And he is a son of a bitch, right?

David Reddish (59:03.061)
Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (59:03.232)
of his and then also realizing, God, like how much do we want to actually begin to understand who he was and the evil that he was trying to propagate that does continue. I think you’re right. It does continue on with what we’re seeing today. And for folks that are, I get frustrated with folks who are liberal or Dems that are like, wow, we’ve just never experienced anything like this before.

Why is he like this? It’s him. He’s the one that’s being so divisive. And I just want to pull my eyeballs out and like, no, this is exactly the Republicanism that I grew up with. This is exactly the, these are all the conservatives on my road. You know, this is exactly how they thought and talked. you you think that you can understand his ramblings. I understand his ramblings so clearly.

David Reddish (59:35.787)
god.

David Reddish (59:43.35)
Yeah.

David Reddish (59:51.839)
It’s they’ve taken center stage

J.P. Der Boghossian (59:58.858)
You know, like when I’m watching MSNBC and they’re showing clips of him and they’re like, this doesn’t make any sense. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, this makes perfect sense. I understand because I grew up in this. And if you can’t figure out what this means, you’re never going to defeat them. But I think that’s what Angels does is it tries to help us, you know, understand that.

David Reddish (01:00:08.662)
Yeah.

David Reddish (01:00:18.391)
It does. And I think Kushner offers the key in the epilogue, which is it’s conversation. It’s when you meet the liberal people or the progressive people that say, well, there’s never been anything like this. I don’t understand. The key is that you talk about it. The last time we see the characters, they’re sitting by the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, and they’re talking about Israel, another master stroke that 30 years later still has all kinds of resonance. They’re talking about the West Bank.

Specifically, and is that land for the Palestinians? Is it land for the Israelis? Like, how do we divvy all this up? But ultimately, the key is what Pryor says. It’s more life. And I’ll admit, it did not occur to me until I read the play again this time, that essentially what he does to the angel that is trying to recruit him, which is what Jacob does to the angel in the Bible, he wrestles him and says,

I’m not taking your prophecy, I’m not taking your message, bless me and go away. Prior blesses us. More life. This is where the real work begins, is you now have to go out and find the right answer and you’re gonna do that by coming together and you’re gonna do that by listening and you’re going to do that by working together and by being friends. By being friends. And that’s, that’s, I think America at its best.

When America doesn’t fulfill the myth except when it does, we can all be friends here. And when we are all friends, that is when America really works for everybody. That’s when we become the city on a hill. That’s when we become the beacon of light that the rest of the world wants to follow. And in order to do that, we have to find ways to forgive one another. And that, for me personally, is where we are.

politically right now and that I think is the great reckoning that America will have to undergo if it wants to survive. We’ve got to find a way to forgive each other and we’ve got to find a way to be friends again.

David Reddish (01:02:24.959)
So there it is. Okay.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:02:25.346)
Tim, now that’s where we’re going to leave it. There’s your mic drop. Okay, by virtue of a last question, what is next in life for David?

David Reddish (01:02:34.679)
next in life. I don’t know. I have some pots on the boiler. I’m going to see which one reaches the rolling boil first, and hopefully we’ll have some very, very big things to celebrate and talk to you about. I have a new book outlined. I have not started.

Writing it yet because I feel like it needs one more subplot that I have to crack first So I’m on a book from the library, honestly, and then I’m gonna start it It’s it’s another sort of angels inspired story in that it’s about the Pharaoh Ankenaten I don’t remember if you and I discussed this before Ankenaten was the first monotheist in human history first documented monotheist and the first person in human history document to have started his own religion and

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:03:18.104)
Dang!

David Reddish (01:03:19.323)
It is heavily theorized that Ankenaten inspired Judaism. Whether or not he may be Moses himself, we don’t know. Or a follower of his was Moses, because Moses is an Egyptian name. And I mean, even in the Bible, it’s like, well, Moses grew up in Egyptian culture, and he was part of the palace and everything. I’m really familiarizing myself with the work of Jan Ossmann, who’s a German historian.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:03:35.127)
Yeah.

David Reddish (01:03:46.241)
who writes about the correlation between Akhenaten and Moses, how essentially these are two stories that are remembering the same thing. One is history and one is myth. And only when we sort of put the two of them together can we understand them both. And so the book that I’m working on, that I want to write, is the fusion of those two. It is a gay fantasia on myth and history, if you will. So that’s where I am right now.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:03:55.982)
Mm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:04:13.516)
Love that. Love that. And how do folks connect with you to get all the updates of when this is going to come out?

David Reddish (01:04:17.471)
You can find me at the gay Magneto, that’s all one word, yes, like Magneto from the X -Men, on Instagram, and you can find all my work on Muckrack. It’s a beautiful, beautiful aggregator site that will put together every article that’s ever been published by me. You can find all my novels on Amazon. You can just search my name, David Reddish, that’s Reddish with two Ds, just like the color.

And yeah, I would love to hear from your listeners. yeah, I love connecting with my readers.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:04:54.926)
Thank you very much, David. This has been fantastic. I’m going to click stop recording. Please don’t go anywhere.

David Reddish (01:04:56.619)
Thank you.