His mother caught him sitting on the toilet with his pants down. On the edge of the bathtub, directly in front of him was a photograph of a naked girl with her pubic hair showing.
Everything looked as though he were about to masturbate.
Mother thought masturbation was simply dreadful, and she let him know it as she confiscated the picture.
“Isn’t it a kind of arrogance to believe that anything can be exempt from the deeply tangled and patterned networks of reality?”
On the roof of her apartment building on East Ninth Street in Manhattan, 1986. Courtesy of Sarah Schulman.
In 1979, Sarah Schulman moved into a sixth-floor walk-up on East Ninth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, a few blocks away from where her family lived at the time of her birth in 1958. In that sunny, compact tenement apartment, with a desk tucked into a corner behind the kitchen, a Chinese money tree filling the living room window, and a bookcase with a shelf dedicated to Carson McCullers, she has steadily cultivated a body of work distinctive for its formal experimentation and political commitment, its edge and range, and its roots in the communities to which she has belonged. Schulman grew up going to Vietnam War protests and worked extensively on abortion rights in her twenties, later becoming a member of ACT UP and a founder of the direct-action group the Lesbian Avengers. We met for the first time shortly after she published Let the Record Show (2021), her lauded mammoth oral history of ACT UP and AIDS activism.
The editors have chosen to classify this interview as an Art of Nonfiction. It could easily have been labeled Art of Fiction or even Art of Theater. From her cult lesbian noir novel After Delores (1989) to her fifties New York period piece The Cosmopolitans (2016) to her AIDS novel People in Trouble (1990)—which, she recounts in Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998), was the uncredited source material for Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent—Schulman’s eleven books of fiction often follow isolates and outlaws. Her nonfiction, on the other hand, anatomizes families, activist groups, and neighborhoods—revealing our tendencies toward exclusion and shaming and our potential for transformative collaboration.
During our earlier meetings, she was writing her latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (2025), which takes the movement for Palestinian liberation as its central concern, bringing together ideas and strategies from across her nonfiction. In Ties That Bind (2009), her manifesto against the homophobic family, Schulman calls on the bystander, within and outside the family, to make change. “An intervention shows perpetrators that someone cares about their victim, about how she is treated and what becomes of her,” she writes. Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012) traces an argument for Jewish solidarity with Palestine through an account of her own reckoning with Zionism, while Conflict Is Not Abuse (2016) uses the case study—from an analysis of a personal experience of flirting to reporting on HIV criminalization in Canada—to demonstrate the relationship between state violence and false narratives of victimhood. The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) is a novelist’s polemic—full of observations on the shrinking political and cultural consciousness in the city where she has spent her life, and on the aftereffects of AIDS. It’s hard to experience New York City in the same way after reading it.
In person, Schulman is gallant and ironic; she had a way of taking my questions and lightly unraveling their premises before indulging me anyway. She was mystified, even bored, by questions of craft. Our conversations returned perhaps most often to what, for her, has been most challenging, and painful—the struggle to find consistent support for her novels and plays, and her experiences of people’s reluctance to engage with art about lesbian life. We talked six times over the course of almost four years, most often in her apartment, where she would serve me oranges and licorice. She was busy throughout—writing op-eds protesting the slaughter in Gaza, working on three novels, seeing her play The Lady Hamlet (2022) produced in Provincetown, hosting a reading series at Performance Space in the East Village, and organizing with Jewish Voice for Peace, where she sits on the national advisory board. After twenty-five years at the College of Staten Island, in 2022 she joined the creative writing program at Northwestern, where her girlfriend, the historian Leslie M. Harris, also teaches—and ahead of our last meeting this past December, she surprised me with a new address in the East Village. She had sold her archive to Harvard, and, with the proceeds, bought an apartment with a long-wished-for elevator. As of February, she was still in the process of moving in. “It’s the hugest accomplishment of my life,” she said, “because I earned it with my pen.”
INTERVIEWER
Your novels and your nonfiction share an interest in the group—how it forms, defines itself, polices itself, and changes, and how one changes within it. Do you remember when you started paying attention to that entity?
SARAH SCHULMAN
I have no idea. I mean, I grew up in New York City. I don’t think I was ever in a space that wasn’t collective. My whole life has taken place in community, in the gay community. Community saved my life. It’s the official structures, family and all that, that have been my problem.
INTERVIEWER
What were your first attempts at writing about the group?
SCHULMAN
After I dropped out of the University of Chicago in 1979, a girl I’d met there told me about a new women’s newspaper called WomaNews. I joined as a reporter—that’s when I started writing for publication. Immediately I was describing a community to itself. People would like the things I was writing, and argue with me, and it’s been like that ever since. I’m primarily a novelist, and my first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984), was entirely about community. About a community newspaper, in fact.
INTERVIEWER
Is that engagement with your readers what drew you to journalism?
SCHULMAN
It wasn’t really journalism—it was describing to invisible people, who didn’t matter, the nuances of their own wishes and actions. Then they’d tell you what they thought about what you’d written. I’ve seen so many famous writers whose readers don’t care about them at all, whereas the people I write for are still so involved. Even now I read things, negative and positive, about Conflict Is Not Abuse on Twitter or X, whatever, almost every week. These readers care so much about how terrible they feel it is! And I think, Well, I’m lucky.
INTERVIEWER
But the reportage collected in My American History (1994)—and, for that matter, your work on HIV criminalization in Conflict Is Not Abuse—seems like very real journalism. How did you find your stories?
SCHULMAN
Right, I was a girl reporter, like in some forties movie. I’d gotten interested in the reproductive rights movement in 1979, after having an experience with an illegal abortion network in Europe, helping a friend of a friend who was trying to get an abortion in France. After the Hyde Amendment was upheld by the Supreme Court, I went to a community meeting at the church on West Fourth Street in the Village, to hear the attorney who’d argued against it, Rhonda Copelon, present her analysis. There, people were talking about forming a group that was focused broadly on reproductive rights, instead of single-issue on abortion. That became CARASA, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. There were older women who had been in the New Left, in post–Communist Party groups and formations, in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], in groups adjacent to the Weathermen, as well as individual feminists. I soaked up their stories like crazy—I also put them into The Sophie Horowitz Story. Later, CARASA was in a coalition with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and there was a meeting at Saint Ann’s Church in the South Bronx, which is where I heard that Antonio Silva, the guy who was in charge of sterilization abuse in Puerto Rico, had been appointed director of OB-GYN at Lincoln Hospital. I broke that story, and then it was picked up by Joe Conason in the Village Voice. He didn’t credit me, but that’s okay.
I was still on the beat for a few papers when AIDS was first reported in 1981. Of course, the mainstream media wasn’t covering it, so we had to do everything. I wrote for the Village Voice about women being excluded from experimental drug trials—that information I got from going to ACT UP. From being in the feminist women’s health movement, I’d been trained to look at things from the patients’ perspective, and I got into a fight with an editor at the Voice, Richard Goldstein, about a piece I wrote about pediatric AIDS—mothers were being emotionally coerced to put their newborns into a double-blind study. I thought, looking at it from the perspective of people with AIDS, that no one should get the placebo—that the control group should be the standard of care—but Goldstein took the view of science and of wanting clean data. So I published that one in the New York Native. I wrote about the bathhouse closings for the Native, too, despite never having been to a bathhouse, obviously. They didn’t let women into bathhouses.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me about the ACT UP Oral History Project. When did you realize that you wanted to document the way that movement was organized?
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