Episode 5 – Let the Record Show: An Interview with Sarah Schulman

 

This is audio QT, the podcast of QT voices, the online magazine of the LGBTQ studies program at the university of Texas at Austin.

This is karma Chavez, host of audio QT. And I wanted to take a minute to tell you that today’s episode is actually a replay of an interview that I recorded on w O R T F M in Madison, Wisconsin on a program called a public affair. It was such a fun and lively interview. I decided to ask if we could replay it.

I hope you want. It is September 28th, 2021. I’m your host karma Chavez in for carousel Baird. Uh, thanks again to Rochelle for inviting me to be back. It’s been almost 35 years since in the midst of a different pandemic, a still ongoing pandemic that a group of gays and lesbians and people living with aids in New York came together in March, 1987 in a gathering that would become one of the most important social movements of the 20th.

So. That night in March birth, what would become the aids coalition to unleash power or act up over the course of several years, act up, grew to include a ragtag group of hundreds of people in New York hosting direct actions that brought out thousands. Meanwhile, more than a hundred active chapters emerged in cities around the globe, including places like San Francisco, LA Paris, Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin.

Backed up chapters are attributed with numerous successes as they challenged pharmaceutical companies, the government and the church for their active neglect of people living with aids. In a recent, nearly 700 page tome author in aids historian, Sarah Schulman, not only documents the early history of act up New York before its infamous split in 1992, but she also contextualizes the inspirations for act ups work and the lessons that remain incredibly pertinent today, let the records.

Uh, political history of act up New York, 1987 through 1993, published in may by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux has been described as a must read for anyone once insights into aids, activism as vital democratic truth-telling and not Reverend definitive history. This is a tacticians by. Sarah Schulman is a distinguished professor of the humanities at the city university of New York college of Staten island.

She is one of the most well-known lesbian authors in the United States and one of the most well-known authors period. But I like to emphasize the lesbian part. Okay. And she’s written dozens of Doppels plays and works of non-fiction including American library association, Stonewall book, award winners after Dolores and stage struck theater aids and the marketing of gay America and other well-received work such as empathy ties that bind familial homophobia and its consequences in the near future.

She published two books in 2002. A memoir called the gentrification of the mind witness to a lost imagination and Israel, Palestine, and the queer international. She’s also been nominated for Lambda literary awards, two dozen times, as well as been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and several New York foundation for the arts fellowship.

The honor work as a teacher and author, she’s been a fierce activist for lesbian writers and against the sexism and homophobia that permeate the literary world. She’s also a member of act up New York and co-founder with Jim Hubbard of the act up oral history project to document the history of the important movement that project forms part of the basis for the book we’ll discuss today.

Let the record show Sarah Schulman. Welcome to a public affair. Thank you so much for having me. Uh, I’m so excited to have you back. It’s been since 2013, the last time you joined me. So I’m excited to get into this new book. So Sarah, you described yourself as a rank and file member of act up New York during its early years.

And you say, it’s not that you were a leader, but you were very present at a lot of, uh, actions. Uh, so how did you end up in a. So I think it all really starts in the late seventies. Um, at that time there was a very wide range of kind of underground gay and feminist newspapers all across the country. And in other countries, every city in America had a feminist newspaper and a game newspaper, and sometimes a left wing newspaper as well.

And I was one of the journalists who were creating that world. We all worked for free. We weren’t. Trained, but we knew that women and queer people were not represented in the media. And so I was working for like a newspaper called woman news, which was a straight and gay feminist newspaper in New York gay community news, which was a lesbian and gay socialist paper out of Boston and the New York native, which was the gay male newspaper of New York.

And the issue that I was covering at the time was that there was no gay rights bill in new York’s. So I would go to city hall and ed Koch was the mayor and it’d be press conferences and I’d be like mayor Kotch, Sarah Schulman for the New York native. When are we getting a gay rights bill? And suddenly there was aids, you know, um, actually aids had, it probably has probably existed for a hundred years, but we now know that it was in the United States, probably in the 1940s and certainly in New York in the sixties and seventies.

But the first public discussion of it was July. 1981 and the New York times and the famous headline, 41 homosexuals with rare cancer in Sam. So I started covering aids at that point and I covered pediatric aids, which was huge in New York city. A lot of people were born HIV positive. Um, women being excluded from experimental drug trials, homeless people with aids, the closing of the bath houses, all of these keys stories.

By the time I joined act. In March of, uh, 1987, well, active was founded in March of 87. I joined in July, but by that time I’d already been covering aids for about five years. So I came in to act up with my own perspective already. Yeah. And I think I can remember when I was doing research for my book, uh, not even actually knowing that history.

I knew you as a sort of writer of books and all of a sudden fighting your byline and the native and, and realizing how integral you’ve always been, uh, which I know well now. And so you’ve been writing about these things now. For decades. Um, and so I guess why this book now did COVID create any urgency or is it just that, you know, you were done?

No, not at all. So just to build it up a little bit. So I was in act up until about 92. Um, a 93 act of famously had a split in 92, but still exists to this day, but it was very much diminished in 96 was the introduction of the protease inhibitors, which are the good drugs were finally people who were positive could live a normal life.

99 is like the internet revolution and act up was a pre-internet movement. We did not have email. We did not have YouTube. We did not have any of that. So when everybody went online, our material was not digitized and there was a period when we just disappeared. I mean, you could Google act up and there’d be nothing now in 2001, which was then called the 20th anniversary of aids, but actually was only the 20th anniversary of recognizing it.

I was listening to the radio and they were saying, um, well at first America had trouble with people with aids, but then they came around and you know, that is not true. And I thought, oh no, this is going to be one of these false normalizing, benevolent, dominant cultural stories that we have so much of Hubbard.

And I decided to start the act up oral history project in 2001. And then over the next 18 years, we interviewed 188 people. You can see their interviews@actuporalhistory.org, which is our website that has had 14 million hits by the way. And so we just fanned this raw data and we put everything up and we imagined that somebody out there would analyze it and write history.

That’s what we thought academics did, but no one did. And we knew what was in there. We knew it was incredible information. It was fascinating, but, uh, it just didn’t really grab anybody’s attention. And then this kind of false historical visitation of act up started to appear. The first news I had of it was I’d written an article for the New York times.

I said act up and the white gay male editor corrected it to Larry Kramer’s act up. And I thought, oh no, this is a nightmare. And then this film came out that I’m not going to say the title of, but which basically attributed the whole paradigm shift of five white individuals, you know, in the John Wayne model of the white heroic individual.

And, and Jim and I were just like this. Not only a disaster because it’s inaccurate, but it’s also impossible. Five people cannot do this. You know, the, these kinds of changes only take place because of coalitions and because of community, um, critical mass that is created. And so we started looking for someone who would write this book and we couldn’t find anybody.

And the misrepresentation was starting to get really embedded. And so I just had to do it. It was like a crisis and I had to do it. So I just sat down and I re-read all the interviews and I. I didn’t actually know all that story. I mean, I knew a lot about how you created the oral history project, and I guess I’m equally as shocked.

So I did draw on just a handful of the interviews, but I wasn’t trying to write this history of act up New York. Um, and it is, it’s telling right about what histories are are worth talking about and which ones aren’t. And then sometimes you have to step in and do it yourself, which actually is a lesson from act up.

Right that no one else is going to do it. And so, so it’s on you to do it. Um, and so this, uh, your book is based in part then on these nearly 200 interviews. And I guess first I want to know, are you, are you all done conducting interviews for the act up oral history project? We ran out of money a few years ago and we stopped, but my book covers 140 people.

I couldn’t get everybody. But that’s like 125 more than had already been given credit. You know? So, I mean, ultimately now that it’s been out and people like it and all of that, I have to say the most satisfying thing about this is giving credit to people who did the work that has just been, people have told me that like someone will come up to them at their office and say, I didn’t know you were a hero.

I didn’t know you did this. And the truth is this is it’s communities who create change and you can always pick out a few hands. Of leaders and name them, but that’s not how it works. So that’s been very satisfying. Well, one of the things I love about the book is the way that voices are given there, do so many people that most people I’m going to guess I’ve never heard of.

Um, and they’re alongside folks that people have heard of like Larry Kramer, uh, maybe like Mark Harrington, Maxine Wolf, some of these other, uh, leaders that have, have gained a kind of renowned perhaps. Um, and so. I love that approach. And I guess kind of re returning a little bit to the sources for the book.

So these nearly 200 interviews make up the basis 140 some which actually ended up, which is, which is remarkable. And I think if anyone, and I know some people have slacked you off for. Th th the nature of using these interviews. And I guess I’m of the mindset that, that that’s impressive. Um, what you’ve done there, and you also draw on your own recollections as a participant in act up.

And then, uh, this is the part I just want to ask you a little bit about you. You dig into some research based on what you’re aware of at the time. Of the earlier movements that were influences on act up. And this is actually not a story that I’ve really seen told. And so I wonder if you could talk a bit about that, those influences that make up this other database?

No, no political movement is discreet. Every political movement is a consequence of what’s come before. And the game movement is also an often falsely thought of as having just grown up out of itself. Because gay people’s earlier political participation say we’re often in the club. And so there’s not a continuity there also because the left did not want queer people.

I mean, the, the communist party kicked out gay people. Um, Bayard Rustin was famously sidelined by the civil rights movement. The women’s movement had a number of lesbian purges, which have not really been theorized yet. Um, so the gay movement wasn’t autonomous movement by default because nobody else wanted us, but there were significant political influence.

And I think in a weird way, it starts in the childhood of the members. Most of the people in act up were born in the forties, fifties, and sixties. And at that time there was no concept of a gay child that did not exist. So we weren’t like, oh, well, we’re going to grow up and move to San Francisco. You know, we weren’t thinking that way.

But we did see black resistance on television. We did see black people using civil disobedience, black people using direct action to sit in at segregated lunch counters. We saw black people standing up to the police and my generation really internalize this because when I started studying. I went back and read Martin Luther King’s 1964 article letter from Birmingham jail, where he famously, lays out his theory of direct action.

And it is identical to what act up did, even though we never mentioned this or we never read it. So clearly we had very much internalized these influences. And then there were the people who had literally been another movement. So most of the younger men, white men had not ever been politically active before.

Some of the older men had been in gay liberation. There were a number of Latino activists who had come from Latin America. And this is the time of the fascist dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. And they were political. They had political history is also from the Mexico city, uh, 1968 students. Among the gay women in act up in some of the straight women had come from the reproductive rights movement, like myself, and had a lot of.

Uh, history thinking about multi issue politics, especially those of us who were influenced by the movement against sterilization abuse. We were very concerned about the question of consent and women of color, and this plays out later in. And then there were people who came from the women’s peace movement who brought the concepts of non-violent civil disobedience training directly to act up.

And then the people who came from the feminist health movement, who brought the idea of the, of the, of patient-centered politics, which was act that’s politics. You know, people with aids. So there was direct influence. And in my book, I named the people and what ideas they brought and how they brought them.

Um, cause people always say, oh, move movements influence, but they don’t tell you how. And act up had this series of teachings because it was not a top down organization and their rank and file were highly sophisticated to their issues and highly educated because of a system of constantly having teach-ins where everyone could be brought up to snuff.

And, you know, we did not have official spokespeople. Any person could be a spokesperson, so people had to be very informed. So, um, that’s sort of how these influences were. Well, and I, I’m glad you mentioned the way that you tie it directly to individual people, because I thought that was one of the biggest strengths of the book throughout is you could really see how, uh, you know, the ideas come in to action.

Sarah Schulman. One of the things that, uh, you say in this book is that this isn’t a book that wants to like look back on aids history with nostalgia. And I think people are hopefully getting that, but really, uh, you quote one to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past so they can do more effective organizing in the present.

So I think you’ve already alluded to some of this, but I’m want to give you some space to talk about what some of those key lessons are that are relevant for this. Well after it was a remarkably successful movement, um, it did not cure aids and it certainly did not overcome capitalism. In the six years that I cover my book, 87 to 93 act up really forced pharma and the government to change the way they research medications in a way that really address the needs of people with aids, act up force the FDA to make experimental drugs available to people.

Even if those drugs had not been approved. Act up force the CDC in a four year campaign to change the definition of a it’s so that women could qualify for benefits and experimental drug trials act up confronted the Catholic church at a time when the Catholic church was more powerful. The Cardinal’s more powerful than the mayor of New York, and they were trying to obstruct condom distribution in the schools.

And by. Uh, disrupting mass at St. Patrick’s cathedral in December, 1989. Act up stop the Catholic church from doing this act up may needle exchange legal in New York city and act up also removed HIV is a preexisting condition for a private insurance, making hundreds of thousands of people eligible for insurance, but even, I think most importantly, active transform the way that people with aids and queer people felt about themselves and how we were seen by.

So these are very significant victories. Now it’s very, very hard to get access to activist information. It’s very hard to learn what actually went on in a movement because the mainstream media doesn’t represent it accurately. So I tried to distill some of the key tactics that act abused so that it could be of interest.

You know, information is good as my. And people can think about it. So the first of all, um, act up was not a consensus based movement. There did not have to be agreement for things to go forward. There was a one-line statement of unit. Direct action to end the aids crisis. And that was direct action as opposed to social service provision.

So if you were doing direct action to end the aids crisis, basically you could do it. Now. There was a lot of disagreement in act up, but if you had an idea that you wanted to do. And I didn’t think it was a good idea. We would argue about it because this is pre gentrification, New York culture. This is Jewish and, you know, Italian, Puerto Rican culture.

So people were very out there with what their opinions were unconfrontational and that was fine. But in the end, I would not try to stop you from doing what you wanted to do. I just wouldn’t do it if I didn’t agree with it. And I would go and find the people who wanted to do what I wanted to do, and we would do.

And this kind of radical democracy allowed for a simultaneity of response where act up was running so many different campaigns on so many different levels and so many social middle year with so many different aesthetics and approaches because it facilitated people being where they’re at and acting from the place that they were at instead of trying to force them to agree.

And this is when you have big 10 politics where people are different and you know, and self facilitating them going forward. My view of history is that movements that try to force people into one common analysis or one United strategy fail. I think they always fail. I don’t think there’s an exception to that.

So this kind of radical democracy and big 10 politics is something we can learn a lot. Another thing we can learn from act up is that it was a predominantly white gay male organization, but there were women and people of color in the organization and they never stopped the action to call out sexism or sexist language or, uh, to try to do consciousness raising on racism.

What they very wisely did instead is sad. Develop their own agendas, Marshall, the ample resources of the movement for their constituents. So for example, act active had an art auction that raised $650,000. Now the women’s campaign to get the CDC definition changed. They had we’re working with HIV positive women and the women needed to be able to travel to testify at hearings, to stay in hotels.

All th we did not have to fundraise that money. The women’s committee could go to the fundraising and just get them. And pay for it. Similarly with the Latino caucus, when they realized that, uh, people with aids in Puerto Rico had no support structure, they got money from the fundraising committee to go to Puerto Rico and start act Puerto Rico.

And this is the wisest way I think of advancing. A minority in these kinds of situations, because the truth is you could spend your whole life trying to change one person and fail. And it just it’s, it speaks to this kind of giving up of control. You know, I remember, uh, At an active meeting, a guy in the front of the room saying, we need someone to write a letter to a commissioner.

And so this guy was like, I’ll do it. And that was it. We trusted him to write it and send it, you know, we would not reread the letter and say, you need a comment here. Or none of that, there was a real lack of control because we just need things to move forward. And we had to get rid of this bureaucratic frame.

Um, so interesting. I’m this comes to the third point and there was almost a no theory. Uh, we were action-oriented and one of the important leaders, Maxine Wolf would say that when you go action, first, your theory will emerge because you have to make decisions. And in order to make those decisions, you cohere your values.

So it’s action first and then theory follows. But when you have. Empty a theory that is not actually applied. You can end up very polarized and in profound disagreement, but nothing is at stake. You know? So there were, there were people, a few people who were theoretical. There were people who had gone through the Whitney program.

There were people like Douglas cramp who wrote theory, but the movement did not debate theory. And that was very, very bad. Another thing was that they did not pick symbolic objects for protests. You know, historically the left would go to the white house, to the Capitol, to the white house, to the Capitol.

Cause these are symbolic act up, went to the exact institutions and people who are actually opposed to. So we went to the FDA and Rockville, Maryland, or we went to the health commissioner, you know, um, and it was the specificity of that was really, really constructive. Well, returning to the thing that you’re saying about, uh, how, you know, women of color or people of color and women works calling out the sexism and racism, they were marshaling resources and it, and it reminds me, I think of your argument in your book.

Conflict is not abuse. In the sense that, uh, people weren’t, uh, imagining some of the places that there were conflict of sounds like, and you’re telling, uh, as needing to diffuse the whole thing as needing to be a bigger problem than it actually was. I don’t know if, if, uh, that sort of experience of witnessing that in act up informed your thinking in conflict does not.

Maybe it did. I wasn’t actually conscious of it at the time. Fair enough. Well, I think writing is always thematic, right? Whether we, whether we know it or not. So I thank you again for laying out those lessons. I think it’s so valuable for people to think about, um, what they can take and to know it in such a firsthand way.

I wanted to. Shift gears a little bit. And, um, some of the folks that we’ve mentioned, and I, I wanted to ask you about them. Uh, and so you put three people in conversation in one of your chapters and those three people are Larry Kramer and Mark Harrington and Maxine Wolf. Why are those three people together in that chapter?

And maybe tell us a little bit about who they are and who they were. Yeah. So Larry Kramer is the person who’s usually credited as being the quote leader of act up, which couldn’t be further from the truth. But Larry gave a talk at the, at the gay center and the audience at that talk became the people who started acting.

But he did not start it. And he was not the leader. He was never, he was too dysfunctional to be a leader in a sense, like he would, he, at one point he wanted us to elect him president of act up, but we didn’t have a president and he got mad and quit and then he would come back three months later. I mean, he was constantly having temper tantrums that he didn’t get enough attention and all of that kind of stuff.

But he was from the ruling class. And what’s interesting about him. And there were a few other people in act up from the ruling class, Peter Staley’s another one, they were exceptions. Most people, most white gay men who had money and power did not put themselves on the line for anything, even if they had aids and they did not use their connections for the community.

And these men did. And that made them exception. But it also made them very palatable to the white male media. And you have to remember that in the eighties, the media was almost entirely white and male. The government was almost entirely white and male. The private sector was almost entirely white and male as a white lesbian.

There was no one in power who looked like me, even at the. So the points of identification, you know, Larry had gone to Yale with a head of Bristol-Myers pharmaceutical. These types of, they were identifiable to the ruling elite and they were exceptions to their class and they become important people. I think, for those reasons to understand the phenomena of that sector, Maxine and mark are different.

They were really recognized by the floor as the, I think the people who are the most respected and the most listened to, and they were also were very polarizing figures. Um, they’re both difficult people. They can both be brutal. Uh, you know, and people love them and people hated them. And the people who love them love them a lot.

And the people hated the native in a lot. And, um, a lot of people in act up did not know each other’s last name. About when I interviewed people, everybody knew Mark Harrington and Maxine Wolf. And what’s interesting was as their stories unfolded, not just their own testimony, but other people, they used a lot of the same tactics.

They had people over to their house. They would give people books to read. They would hang out with people and talk about ideas. You know, they really were people who opened doors for people intellectually and emotionally and created community, but they had almost opposing. Maxine came from the left. She was a working class person.

She was Jewish. She was a mother. She had come out, uh, later in life and she had a history in the reproductive rights movement. She believed in organizing the unorganized and she had a lot of creative ideas about politics. Mark had gone to Harvard. He had no political experience. He became involved when he was personally implicated.

And as one person I quote says, uh, aids from Maxine was a movement and aids from our Carrington was a puzzle. He didn’t really relate to it politically. And she saw it very much as a political entity and they ended up going in very different ways. Now, a lot of people blame the split on both of them. But actually, I think my reporting shows that they were not the most difficult personalities in either of their camps and they ended up getting blamed for things because they were the symbols of these two.

Um, poles, but I just thought it was important for people to see what real leadership was like and act up versus media appointed leadership. So, uh, Sarah, one of the things I really do appreciate is the way you do deal with these leaders who get celebrated or maligned or. Leaders all at once, but, uh, putting them in conversation with one another to, to offer a more complicated view of what act up was and what ACA became.

Um, and so maybe we can turn our attention a little bit to that split for folks who aren’t aware of what happened. And so, um, you know, what, what happened? What, what caused a split in afterwards? It’s a very long story, which is part of the reason why the book is so long because of. There were problems you could see from the beginning.

And it gets put on events that happened much later. But the truth is that when, when there were no treatments, people with aids were in the same boat, pretty much they were going to die. If you were a rock, Hudson and filthy rich, and we’re friends with Nancy Reagan, you still were going to die. A terrible death and aids was a terrible death.

The word aids is like an umbrella term like cancer, but it’s actually different in each person. It means that your immune system is disappearing. And so you develop these what are called opportunistic infections like dementia, or you can’t process nutrition or the nerves in your legs swell, and people would go blind.

And this is what people went through. Now, one of the things that I show in my book is that the different constituencies inside the coalition, that was that. Had different social positions and they developed different playbooks based on their access to power. So for example, the, the more ruling class people that I was describing earlier, we have stories of the meeting with pharma in their offices, and there would be catered lunches and this kind of.

The women who are trying to fight for women with HIV, it took them two years before they could even get a meeting with Fowchee, you know, and they got it by like screaming at people and breaking into offices and all of this kind of really messy stuff, because they had to have a different playbook than these elite men, because they couldn’t get hurt.

And, you know, the men didn’t help them. There’s a tall chapter on that in the book called the dinner where they’re in the same organization. But the men who have access are not helping the women’s issues get on the table. Then you have like the drug users, the former and active IB drug users who were trying to get needle exchange turned around and they were the messiest group in act up.

I mean, two people died of overdoses. One guy stole $10,000 from the organization. And the way that they got ahead was, and this was at a time when Ivy drug users were not even allowed. Mental drug trials. Cause they were, you know, an entire class of people were written off. They decided to illegally exchange needles in order to get arrested in order to have a trial in which they tried to invite a necessity defense.

That is a very high risk strategy and they want. But they could have lost. So what you see as these different groups of people with very different levels of access that don’t translate in the same organization having to use different strategy. And I think that the beginning of the end was when act up, started to get victories and treatments became available.

Because people who had a private doctors and people who had private insurance could access experimental treatments in ways that other people could. I mean, in my opening chapter on Puerto Rican son act up, I have this incredible story. Of Maurissa Gusto who comes from Puerto Rico and he’s an act up. And at first he situates himself in the Latino caucus.

Um, and, and for him act up was the Latino caucus at a certain point, but his T-cells are dropping he’s on AZT, which really didn’t work. And he’s realized is that he has to bite the bullet and go to the treatment and data committee or, you know, to find out about treatment. So he walks in and everyone’s white and he’s sitting in the back row, you know, And he’s going back week after week.

And one day he realizes nobody here is taking act, you know, and this was in the same organization. They were all on these experimental treatment. So the difference of access within the same organization was so profound. I mean, Katrina Haslip, who was a historically very important activist, a black, straight woman who was incarcerated at Bedford Hills, who found out she was HIV positive while she was in prison.

And was, you know, one of the leaders of the movement of women with HIV. She died because she didn’t qualify for benefits and she couldn’t get home care and she kept following. You know, this is the range of difference. So that’s really, I think where the roots of the split are. And from those differences come all kinds of totally different ways of doing politics.

You know, like it was revealed through my interviews, something I didn’t know before. Some of the guys in act up were like puppet masters, you know, they would come up with strategies that they wanted and then they would pick the cute lovable young guys that everyone loved and have them bring the proposal to the floor, which is fine.

I mean, it’s politics, you know, and, but it does create a kind of. Paranoia, I think among people that’s, something’s going on that they don’t know what it is. Or there was a famous case of Derek link. And I have a whole chapter on this who claimed he was positive, but he was actually negative because he felt emotionally that it was inevitable that he would become positive.

So when there was a split, he started screaming, HIV negatives out of our way. And he made it look like it was a split between negatives and positives, but he was hiding his own negativity. So, you know, there’s, there’s all of this thing about people acting out and very complex emotions. And, but I think that the problem really boils down to access that it was uneven access.

Yeah. I mean, I think. That is precisely what you’re reporting reveals and that access was divided, particularly along lines of race and class and gender. Um, and whether one was using drugs, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and so. Thinking about that. One of the other things that I wanted to ask you about, because maybe a kind of, uh, uh, another split that wasn’t a split, but I think is a symptom of the issue is with the development of housing works.

And I think this is a, an important story. Maybe a lot of people don’t know it. So I wonder if you could talk about how housing works comes to be. It’s a very interesting story. Um, the people who are involved in housing works and creating the housing committee of act up we’re very diverse. And some of them were from very wealthy backgrounds.

One guy was a diamond trader. Another guy was a gentrifier. He was buying up buildings and rehabbing them in poor neighborhoods and selling them to rich people. But they had a come to Jesus moment. When the both of them, their lovers died of aids and they became aware of poor people with aids and that what the situation was, and they got involved in housing.

Then there’s a story of Charles King, who was a Baptist minister who had a very tortured background and his lover, Keith Kyler, a black gay man with a severe drug problem. Um, you know, who was. It was housing was fragile. And so these people, and then, um, other, some women and they are very wealthy and interesting woman named Betty Williams, who came from like the country club scene of Connecticut.

I mean, it’s a weird group, but they started housing works and they started trying to. Uh, the city to pay for housing for homeless people with aids. And the thing is act up was not a social service organization. It was a direct action group. So once your committee is starting to raise money and needs a 5 0 1 C3 and is trying to provide services, you’re not really enact up anymore.

And so they spun off and started their own organization and still exist to this day. And they still are serving people who need help. Well, and I think we’d be remiss not to also talk about this in the context of housing to the, what you refer to as the sort of Haitian underground railroad, uh, where act up was participating in supporting, um, HIV or alleged HIV positive patients, who they were HIV positive.

I mean, this was something that I had never heard of being an act up. I found out about it by conducting interview. But, you know, there was a myth that Haitians had brought HIV to the United States, and this is the racist imperialist Smith that we always have, right. That we’re innocent and somebody else is giving it to us.

Now we realize that sex tourism to Haiti was probably how aids got there. Uh, but when Aristide president Aristide, who was democratically elected, when he was overthrown in a military coup there was a mass Exodus from here. And people who arrived in the United States were tested and many of them tested positive for HIV.

Now, a lot of these people had never even seen a doctor. They didn’t know that they were HIV positive, but the us government, which of course does not want black immigrants. And we see this right now, uh, at the Texas border with, with Haitians, right. They incarcerated these people in Guantanamo where we now hold Muslim political prisoners.

So there was a whole, you know, the center for constitutional rights was involved. There was a big lawsuit finally, after a number of years, the courts for. Um, the government to let people out of Guantanamo, but they needed to have housing. So the act of housing committee was involved in getting housing for Haitians so they could leave Guantanamo and they were running around trying to get any kind of housing they yet.

And sometimes they even lied to the government and pretended they had housing when they didn’t have it just so people could get out. It’s quite an amazing story that I really was unaware. Yeah, there’s that great line in Betty Williams, the sort of country club, woman, a Quaker from Connecticut that you mentioned earlier, it’s in some ways hard to imagine as an active member, but there’s that great line in her interview where she says, you know, and we just took a deep breath and we lied.

Um, And, uh, you know, you can see the conflict she’s feeling in that, but it also, if I’m remembering correctly, um, from that interview, you know, there wasn’t a ton of interest from a lot of people in our act up in relation to that. Many issues. I mean, even needle exchange itself was very controversial at the time.

You know, we had a black mayor, David Dinkins and the black community was very ambivalent about needle exchange. The concept of harm reduction had not really come into the culture yet. And the, the prevalent idea about how to deal with drug addiction was abstinent. So the idea of having needle exchange was very unpopular.

And a lot of people in act up did not want it, but because of this radical democracy structure, people who did support, it were able to go do it. And the people who didn’t support it just simply didn’t do it. So Sarah, we do only have here about seven or eight minutes left to the show. Um, but I want to turn attention to the way that you ended the book.

And so as people, one of the nice things about reading this book is you could make it a choose your own adventure. Should you want to, uh, you don’t have to have read the chapter that comes before necessarily. Um, but the organization is very purposeful in where do you end? The, the book, particularly the last three chapters.

Uh, you talked about the 1992 ashes action. You talked about the matter of political funerals and then you profile someone I’ve not heard of before. Um, CSR Carrasco. So why do you end the book the way that you do? What I did not want to do was the fake happy ending. Oh, it’s 1996 and it’s a protease inhibitors and people are dancing in the streets cause that’s not what happened.

We know there was a long period of time when there were no new drugs in the pipeline. A lot of people in act up died. A lot of the leadership died and at one, three people from one affinity group died within 10 weeks of each other and they all wanted political funerals and it was a very kind of gruesome grueling time for people.

And, um, I really wanted to leave the readers with that. To understand what it was like. Um, and by the time protease inhibitors came around, most of us weren’t there anymore. So there was not like a collective sigh of relief. We all just kind of left or moved on with this weight of all the suffering that we had either experienced or witnessed.

And I wanted to share that. But I liked ending with CSR. So the book has three Latino, uh, oriented chapters, the opening chapters on Puerto Rican’s in New York. There’s a middle chapter on Patricia and reign, Navarro, mother and son, Patricia Navarro was a working class Chicana from. California, who was the only parent who really was active in act up, um, and their relationship.

And then I end with CSR. So CESA Carrasco became a psychiatric social worker and he has, I think, very good. Uh, thoughts about what it meant to have gone through this whole experience, especially for men who were HIV positive, who did survive aids. And he talks about this myth of resilience, the idea that if you are still alive, you have survived, but then actually that generation has suffered horribly.

I mean, those guys have had a really rough time was Chris’ crystal meth addiction. People from act up with zero converting late in life. There’s a lot of incredible loneliness and depression. It’s a group of people who are not understand. And who are, whose experiences are not recognized. And I wanted to kind of end with that, you know, because it’s very easy to claim victory.

Things are so much better now for people with aids, um, or there’s an, there’s an opportunity for them to be better. The, the medications exist and they didn’t exist before, but these were the general, this was the generation that made those changes. They went through the pain of this. We were all very young and we watched people, very young people, you know, disintegrate.

And it was a uniquely horrifying experience that we share. And I wanted to kind of reflect on that and leave the reader with the message of that. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s in her forties. And she said, you know, I always knew that people older than me gay people older than me had gone through something terrible, but I never really understood what it was until I read the.

And that made me feel so much better, you know, that articulate the very, very specific experiences that we had. I just thought it was a powerful way to end the book. I felt like a kind of someone in the same situation. So queer person in my, I guess it forties, um, who even researches this, but, um, It was pointed in it, it did such important work, um, and so much so that I actually hate asking the annoying question.

I’m going to ask you now, but I, I feel obligated to ask it even if it annoys you, um, which is about COVID because COVID is not aids. Um, but. Your book is future oriented and we are living through another pandemic. Uh, are there lessons from act up that can help us with our present moment of COVID 19? And we have just about a minute.

That’s hard to say, you know, there are, there are profound similarities. So every time there’s a cataclysm, it exposes racism and it reveals economic inequality. And this is a repeat of aids in that regard. Also globally, we get medications and then poor countries can’t afford them. And that’s where we are right now with the vaccine.

Americans are so crazy and stupid that they’re refusing a vaccine that other people in the world are desperate to have and because of intellectual property, right. They can’t get them. So that’s a repeat what’s different is that COVID is a publicly acknowledged collective experience. And aids was like our private nightmare and our fight was to get it into the public, you know, that’s what that was all about.

Um, so, so those are the differences and similarities that I see. And I think the other thing I was just thinking about as you were talking, is there there’s. Because it’s so dispersed in a way there’s less the demand for, um, collective action. I think in, in a way that I don’t know if that resonates with you at all.

Well, there’s this many, many people in this country right now who desperately want profound, structural change. And we have a lot of movements that are going on at the same time. And it’s scary, you know, we’re in a very frightening time. So I think. The best thing we can take away from act up is you don’t have to agree with people about everything.

You need a principle of unity that really just shows what values you do share. And you have to be flexible in standing shoulder to shoulder with people who don’t think the same way that you do. And that’s what that’s where we need to be going in life. Well, that is a perfect place for us to wrap up our conversation.

Uh, Sarah Schulman. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you again. Uh, our guest today was Sarah Schulman author of the new book. Let the records show a political history of act up New York, 19 87, 19 93. Uh, absolutely encourage everyone to get the. Surprisingly, you could read it very quickly.

Despite 700 pages long. It really is wonderful reading and it’s stuff. That’s never been out there before. .