Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman illuminates the differences between Conflict and Abuse in this revelatory book that addresses the contemporary culture of scapegoating.

Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Conflict Is Not Abuse

In this memoir of the AIDS years (1981-1996) in New York, CUNY Professor of English Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the queer culture, cheap rents, and virbrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight, replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, sharing vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation's imagination and the consequences of that loss.--From publisher description.

Witness to a Lost Imagination

The Gentrification of the Mind

Twenty years in the making, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington, DC, and started needle exchange programs in New York; they took over Grand Central Terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled—and beat—The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them. Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today’s activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration—and long-overdue reassessment—of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.

A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993

Let the Record Show

A New York City love triangle forms the center of a literary universe peopled by a Guardian Angels-like vigilante group, a Chinatown cowgirl, and ex-leather queen, a real-estate mogul, and, at the center, Kate, Peter, and Molly, as they confront love in t

People in Trouble

The tough colorful lesbian culture of Manhattan's Lower East Side finds a go-go dancer, a well-read hairdresser, a trigger-happy cashier, dangerous actress, and a Priscilla Presley impersonator brought together in this story of murder and loss of love

After Delores

Tells the story of a female rat exterminator from New York City whose friend, a gay writer infected with HIV, struggles for survival in the face of his family's rejection of him. 15,000 first printing. Tour.

Rat Bohemia

Although acceptance of difference is on the rise in America, it’s the rare gay or lesbian person who has not been demeaned because of his or her sexual orientation, and this experience usually starts at home, among family members. Whether they are excluded from family love and approval, expected to accept second-class status for life, ignored by mainstream arts and entertainment, or abandoned when intervention would make all the difference, gay people are routinely subjected to forms of psychological and physical abuse unknown to many straight Americans. “Familial homophobia,” as prizewinning writer and professor Sarah Schulman calls it, is a phenomenon that until now has not had a name but that is very much a part of life for the LGBT community. In the same way that Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will transformed our understanding of rape by moving the stigma from the victim to the perpetrator, Schulman’s Ties That Bind calls on us to recognize familial homophobia. She invites us to understand it not as a personal problem but a widespread cultural crisis. She challenges us to take up our responsibilities to intervene without violating families, community, and the state. With devastating examples, Schulman clarifies how abusive treatment of homosexuals at home enables abusive treatment of homosexuals in other relationships as well as in society at large. Ambitious, original, and deeply important, Schulman’s book draws on her own experiences, her research, and her activism to probe this complex issue—still very much with us at the start of the twenty-first century—and to articulate a vision for a more accepting world.

Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences

Ties that Bind

Two unlikely friends, cast out of their own families, search for understanding in 1950s Bohemian New York City.

The Cosmopolitans

Empathy (Little Sister's Classics)

Stagestruck: theater, AIDS, and the marketing of gay America.

Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America

Stagestruck

At once a memoir, a call to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and an argument for queer solidarity across borders, this book tells the story of how novelist and activist Sarah Schulman's became aware of how issues of the Israeli occupation of Palestine were tied to her own gay and lesbian politics.

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International

Sarah Schulman’s writing is bold, provocative, and refreshingly unrepentant. First published in 1994, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years combines critical commentary with a rich and varied collection of news articles, letters, interviews, and reports in which the author traces the development of lesbian and gay politics in the U.S. In her coverage of many tireless campaigns of activism and resistance, Sarah Schulman documents a powerful political history that most people – gay or straight – never knew happened. In her Preface to this second edition, Urvashi Vaid argues for the continued relevance of Schulman’s writing to activism in the 21st century, particularly in light of the resurgence of the right in American politics. Also included is a selection of articles by Sarah Schulman for Womanews, in their original print format, with illustrations by Alison Bechdel. The book closes with an interview with the author, conducted by Steven Thrasher, especially for this new edition. It explores AIDS and homophobia during the Reagan/Bush administrations and at the dawn of the Trump era. My American History is a collection that gives voice to both the personal and political struggles of feminist and lesbian and gay communities in the 1980s. It is an important historical record that will enlighten and inform activists, as well as academics of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, in the 21st century.

Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years

My American History

This unique and engaging collection of essays examines the political issues and moments of triumph and tragedy of the progressive movements of the day--the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the rise of the Right, the attacks on abortion, the sex wars in the feminist movement, the AIDS pandemic, censorship and the NEA, and the new lesbian activism.

Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years

Anna, an office temp, and Doc, a psychiatrist, sort through their lives in modern New York City.

Empathy

Manhattan, 1948. From the garlic-scented walkups of Little Italy to the Times Square Automat to the plush booths of the Stork Club, three New Yorkers strive to make their mark on the city under the growing shadow of the Red Scare.

Shimmer

In After Delores, the unnamed narrator is a no-nonsense coffee shop waitress in New York's bohemian Lower East Side nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her for another woman. Over the course of the next few days she goes on the prowl, looking for love, only to find herself immersed in a tangled web of seduction, deceit and murder. Along the way she meets a diverse array of characters, from hot femme Priscilla, go-go dancer Punkette and bewitching and brutal actress Charlotte.

Ties That Bind

Comic send-up of radical lesbian feminist mores in the

The Sophie Horowitz Story

This reissued novel takes readers on a "wry and playful" (Out!) tour of lesbian sex, politics, and art in New York City. The city's sizzling -- especially at the Kitsch-Inn, where the girls are mounting an all-female production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

A Novel

Girls, Visions and Everything

A former police detective's addictions jeopardize a murder case in this iconic queer writer's return to pulp fiction.

Sarah Schulman

About

Books

Join the club