Feb 9, 2025
Prayer, Love, Unity, Respect: in this topical episode of popular 90s/y2k era TV drama TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, angel-in-training Gloria goes to a rave and actually does ecstasy with the human teen boy she’s supposed to be protecting. Raves were a huge point of anxiety in pop culture in the y2k era. Although their colorful futurism and utopian optimism inspired a generation of media and fashion, people also had safety concerns about the newfound popularity of club drugs like ecstasy, leading to a large-scale moral panic. In the U.S. in 2003, then-Senator Joe Biden co-sponsored the RAVE Act (Reducing American’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy) aimed at bringing harsh legal punishment not just to drug dealers but also party promotors. It’s no wonder then that the writers of TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL felt they had to get the angels to mission to ravers directly: rave media is great fodder for exploitation, titillating with radical imagery only to deliver an anti-fun message. In HEAVEN’S PORTAL, angels Tess, Monica, Andrew, and Gloria meet a teen named Nick who is upset with his parents’ separation and has taken to smoking weed and looking at websites about techno. When he gets info about rave 40 miles away, he drives there with the gullible Gloria, who was only crated by God recently and knows little about the world. Immediately, friendly ravers in silly costumes hand them pills to try. What happens when an angel takes ecstasy? Does the world end? We invite our good friend Woodrow White, an artist and scholar of rave-themed media, to return to the show to debate moral dilemmas about raves, pleasure, and sin.
Follow Woodrow on Instagram: https://instagram.com/woodrow_white/
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