BOOK REVIEW
Democracy, Politics, and Privilege in the War on AIDS
Sarah Schulman tells the ACT UP stories of thousands who would not be bystanders
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
The question immediately
raised by Sarah Schulman’s
monumental new
book, “Let the Record
Show: A Political History of ACT UP
New York, 1987-1993,” is how she
sustained the intellectual stamina
to build a sprawling collection
of nearly 200 individual oral histories
and then lend coherence to
what those activists’ experiences
tell us about the fi ght against AIDS
— and efforts, more generally, to
make change in our society.
A distinguished professor in the
English Department at CUNY’s
College of Staten Island, Schulman
is a prolifi c creator. The author of
11 novels, six nonfi ction books,
seven plays, and two screenplays,
she was also the co-founder, with
Jim Hubbard, of MIX: The New
York Lesbian and Gay Experimental
Film Festival and the co-producer
of Hubbard’s 2012 documentary
“United in Anger: A History of
ACT UP.”
The 188 oral histories that Schulman
draws from in “Let the Record
Show” — all available online — are
the product of her collaboration
with Hubbard on the ACT UP Oral
History Project, a labor that lasted
from 2001 until she was fi nishing
up her book in 2018.
One of the foundational insights
of good HIV reporting is that there
is no single AIDS epidemic — certainly
not globally or across the
United States, but not even in New
York City or in Manhattan, Brooklyn,
or the Bronx, for that matter.
Schulman’s account makes abundantly
clear that there was also no
single ACT UP — either objectively
or, crucially, in the subjective experiences
of the diverse thousands
who variously became civil
disobedience activists, treatment
and health policy experts, media
spokespeople, public art agitators,
and legal defenders.
Schulman’s primary aim is a political
analysis informed by the direct
testimonies of many dozens of
the ACT UPers she interviewed, but
in the process she also movingly
Sarah Schulman.
evokes what the group meant personally
in the lives of thousands who
refused to be “bystanders” in the face
of the AIDS catastrophe. Moisés Agosto
Rosario, a gay man who came
to the city from Puerto Rico, said, “If
it wouldn’t be for ACT UP, it would
have taken me a long time to fi nd a
family of friends in New York.” For
half a dozen gay white treatment activists,
as recounted by David Barr,
there was a weekly dinner rotating
among their apartments for seven
years that assured each of them,
“We’ll all be with each other as we
get sick and die.” Sharon Tramutola,
a bisexual woman drawn to ACT
UP when a friend got sick, recalled,
“There were people that socialized in
ACT UP who would never, ever, in a
million years, if it wasn’t that situation,
even talk to each other on the
street.”
There were also the countless
activists lost to AIDS over the
years that Schulman chronicles, a
“landscape of disappearance and
apparition… I am trying to recapture
here.”
Politically, Schulman has never
shrunk from voicing strong, often
controversial perspectives. In the
book’s early pages, she takes direct
aim at accounts of the epidemic
she fi nds fundamentally false
or misleading: from Tony Kushner’s
“Angels in America” to David
DREW STEVENS/ COURTESY OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
France’s “How to Survive a Plague”
and Andrew Sullivan’s infamously
premature 1996 Times Magazine
cover story “When Plagues End.”
But her analysis of ACT UP’s
politics is “not a game of call-out”
— not simply because she painstakingly
presents a wide array of
opposing and often detail-confl icting
perspectives, but also because
her goal in highlighting the group’s
unprecedented grassroots achievements
as well as its weaknesses is
part of a larger mission to inform
social change efforts today, whether
on healthcare access or transgender
rights, systemic racism or
police reform.
ACT UP, she acknowledges,
was made up largely of white gay
men — but it came to include, as
well, many women, largely though
not exclusively lesbians, people of
color, injection drug users, and
poor folks shut out of the healthcare
system. That diversity was a
source of strength — for example,
the perspective longtime feminists
brought from the reproductive
rights and women’s health movements
regarding the “patient-centered
politics” I long mistakenly
credited ACT UP as originating.
But the different backgrounds
people brought into ACT UP and
the correspondingly divergent reasons
they arrived also sowed seeds
of division — based on race, socioeconomic
status, gender, and the
inevitable disparities in privilege
and access to power.
The word privilege is often wielded
today as an accusation, but
that’s not a pejorative frame Schulman
fi nds useful to her analysis.
The rage that led white gay men to
respond to Larry Kramer’s famous
call to arms at the LGBTQ Community
Center in March 1987, in her
telling and the accounts of many
of her interviewees, was not based
solely on the government’s neglect
and discrimination but also on the
shock of their powerlessness as
white men accustomed to fi nding
ways to wield infl uence.
That white male privilege had its
political advantages for ACT UP.
Looking back nearly 35 years from
2021, Schulman notes, it might be
easy to forget the virtual lock on
infl uence that white men in the US
then played in government, corporate
leadership, the criminal justice
system, and the media. Peter
Staley, a leader in the Treatment
and Data Committee (T&D), might
have had a fl air for eye-grabbing
civil disobedience — whether letting
off a smoke bomb at the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA)
headquarters or dropping an enormous
condom over the home of Republican
arch-homophobe Jesse
Helms — but when he put on a suit
from his days as a Wall Street bond
trader and drew on his education
at Oberlin College and the London
School of Economics he became
someone government and pharmaceutical
industry offi cials felt they
could talk to.
Drawing on lessons borrowed
from the Civil Rights Movement of
the 1950s and ‘60s — when Black
college students sat in at the lunch
counters where they were denied
service — venues like the FDA were
perfect targets: ones that were not
“generic,” but rather “actual. It had
to be the exact building where the
problem was being housed.”
That October 1988 action was
an example of what Schulman de-
➤ SCHULMAN, continued on p.35
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