# Sarah Schulman Born July 28, 1958 in New York City. American novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, and historian whose body of work — spanning fiction, AIDS-history, queer-political theory, and Israel/Palestine criticism — makes her one of the **most generatively cross-genre American queer intellectuals of the past 40 years**. Schulman has been continuously publishing and organizing in New York from the early 1980s to the present. ## Major Works **Fiction (selected):** - *The Sophie Horowitz Story* (1984), *Girls, Visions, and Everything* (1986), *People in Trouble* (1990), *Rat Bohemia* (1995) — the foundational quartet of her early lesbian-Manhattan novels, often cited as defining works of late-20th-century American lesbian fiction - *Maggie Terry* (2018), *The Cosmopolitans* (2016) — later novels continuing her exploration of New York queer life across generations **Nonfiction (selected):** - ***Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993*** (2021) — Schulman's magnum-opus history of [[ACT UP]] NYC, drawn from her two-decade *ACT UP Oral History Project* with Jim Hubbard. The book is now widely considered the definitive history of the AIDS-era direct-action movement - ***Conflict Is Not Abuse*** (2016) — controversial and influential treatment of how interpersonal-conflict language gets weaponized politically; widely-read in contemporary queer organizing contexts - ***Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination*** (2012) — the AIDS crisis as a moment of mass cultural and political erasure, with the post-AIDS Manhattan gentrification wave as the consequence - ***Israel/Palestine and the Queer International*** (2012) — her foundational treatment of "pinkwashing" as Israeli state strategy ## Organizational Work Schulman has been a co-founder or co-organizer of multiple major institutions of queer cultural and political life: - **ACT UP New York** — a founding member and longtime organizer (1987-1992) - **Lesbian Avengers** (1992) — co-founder - **MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival** (1987) — co-founder with Jim Hubbard - **ACT UP Oral History Project** (2002) — co-founder with Hubbard; conducted ~190 interviews with ACT UP members; the archive is the primary source for *Let the Record Show* ## Place in the Vault Schulman occupies a distinctive position in the contemporary American queer intellectual landscape: she is one of the few figures whose work spans **canonical fiction**, **archival history**, **political theory**, and **continuous organizational involvement** across four decades. Her *Let the Record Show* in particular is now the definitive AIDS-era history, and her conceptual work on interpersonal conflict, gentrification-as-cultural-loss, and pinkwashing has been influential well beyond LGBTQ-specific contexts. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[ACT UP]] - [[Lesbian Avengers]] - [[AIDS Crisis]]