Politics, Pathology, Suicide, and Social Fates: Tony Kushner’s <i>The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many older characters in recent plays become, or think they will become, “demented.” Being old – the oldest person in the dramatis personae – is suddenly glued to cognitive weakness. The cultural message now spreading throughout our frightened world is this: if a person this old has this future as a fate, considering suicide is almost obligatory. This destiny is one of the not-so-subtle messages emanating from a group of such plays, and from the one that this essay focuses on, Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. How is it possible that a visionary who rallied so courageously on behalf of people with HIV/AIDS in the early 1990s fails to find a way of defending a character (and by extension, people) with mild cognitive impairment (MCI)? Kushner’s dramatic choices – especially his protagonist Gus’s noble political despair – might have made superfluous the choice of Alzheimer’s to drive his mourning-play. The real illness of this character is neither Alzheimer’s nor a death drive but the impotence of radical activism, individual and collective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".