In response, perhaps, to the AIDS crisis and the increasing visibility of gay people, an epidemic of antigay violence swept Texas in the late eighties and nineties, often to public indifference.
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President Bill Clinton had declared June 1999 the nation’s first “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month,” and TV sitcoms like Ellen and Will & Grace were bringing openly gay characters into millions of living rooms.īut change often incites backlash. “This is the kind of thing I should be doing,” he told himself.Īt the time, the world was changing. No modern play had resonated with him on so many levels. (At around seven and a half hours, it was so long that it was split into two parts.) A number of critics hailed the play, written by Tony Kushner, as the most significant theatrical work in a generation.Ĭaldwell was considering about a dozen other scripts for the fall semester production, but over the next three weeks, he couldn’t shake Angels from his mind. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 and the Tony Award for Best Play in both 19. Caldwell chaired the theater department, and he produced student plays that came and went each semester with little fanfare: Our Town. He’d taught for more than two decades at Kilgore College, a two-year school best known for its high-kicking drill team, the Rangerettes. And then he put it aside.Ĭaldwell, who has pale blue eyes and a bald head ringed by snowy white hair-he may be the only East Texan ever described by the New York Times as “elegant”-was 56 years old at the time. He held the script in his hands for a while. He reached the last line and sat back in his recliner, which overlooked the backyard garden of his Longview home. Raymond Caldwell finished reading the play that would nearly ruin his life on an early August night in 1999.