Approaching Sarah Schulman’s writing as a terminally online queer person in 2021 is a little fraught. The Tumblr-age social justice purity culture thinking deemed her last work, Conflict is Not Abuse as “the bad book” (I’m citing a tweet from media Twitter responding to a photo of Bari Weiss in front of her bookshelf for a 2019 NY Mag article where Schulman’s book is visible if you squint at the bottom row) because Schulman had the audacity to suggest that being uncomfortable is neither the same as being triggered nor necessarily the fault of the other party in an interaction. The book has become a cue in queer dating intros, suggesting that the person in question either believes Schulman’s work is vital and fundamental to understanding the self in the time of “cancel culture” or that the person in question is ethically stringent relationally, cutting people off for being toxic easily and never looking back. It’s become a token indicating one’s capacity for self-reflection. Polarized cultural shorthand with this book now suggests that if you hate the book, you’re rejecting the possibility that our culture has shaped you to handle conflict a certain way that might not be proportional to harm caused. If you love it, you’re callous and unwilling to consider yourself at fault if you’ve caused harm.

This contextual fog is not Schulman’s doing, really. She’s quite clear in the intro to that text about what she’s doing, that the book is an exploration, not a treatise. Authorial intent be what it may, she has put in the effort at the start to clearly frame what she’s attempting to communicate (and what she’s not) in every work of hers that I’ve read so far. And her new release, Let The Record Show—which I believe will be her biggest legacy as a writer, activist, and historian—is no exception. Schulman begins and ends her 700 page opus with a tight framing of her relation to this topic and what she is bringing to her telling of the work of ACT UP NY from 1987-1993. 

The full title underscores the tight framing Schulman is using: A Political History of ACT UP NY 1987-1993 is the subtitle, and it’s doing a lot of wonderful work. This is a political narrative, this is a work of historical documentation that is organized around trying to answer the questions of “what worked and why?” in regard to the innovative and explosive work of the activists focused on the needs of PWAs (people with AIDS). This is no bloodless academic study, this is a former activist documenting the movement she feels has defined her life and work. The chapters are often ended with eulogies for her various interview subjects who have since died. It is a history written by an invested member of the community, recentering the narrative on the actual community in which she lived and worked. She is actively pushing back on the cis-centric, whitewashed framing that has become fairly dominant in media representations of the work of ACT UP the further away we get from the epicenter of the epidemic. This myopic remembering has gotten worse and worse as the key players are less and less often alive to correct how their stories are retold. Schulman refuses to velvet her handling of the misrepresentations she takes issue with: POSE, How to Survive a Plague, and United in Anger are often and tartly namechecked with critiques that are both fair, but based in Schulman’s frustrations with how her own research—which was used for all of these other works—has been mishandled by outsiders (she and Jim Hubbard had to sell the archival footage that much of this book is built on as a database in order to finish funding their oral history project research).

As a result of this tone and framing, the book feels immersive in ways that are often unavailable to other historical works that try to perform objectivity or maintain a chronological narrative structure. Schulman roughly carries the story forward in chronological order, but her organizational structure is mostly thematic and explanatory, describing the shifts in tactical approaches to the movement as needs of PWAs and public awareness of AIDS evolved, and carefully elucidating what did and did not work, and why. 

Many other reviewers have commented that Let the Record Show feels like a primer for best practices in contemporary activism, and I don’t disagree. I feel like it’s not simply a primer, however. It’s a gift to my generation, offering wisdom about where we come from that could save us from wasted time trying to reinvent the wheel without context. 

If I have any criticism of this book, it is one of scope that is probably unfair to level at a text that is already so massive: I wish that Schulman had shown more of how the ACT UP movement built on the work of the Civil Rights movement, and integrated the successes of the Black organizers into their strategies and actions. The ACT UP zaps would not have existed without the counter sit-ins and the marches and the various acts of civil disobedience that have become the foundational tools relied upon by protestors today. 

As someone who sometimes straddles the line between writer and activist myself, I’ve worked since 2011 in documenting and raising awareness of the abuse of children in Christian institutions and the ways that the conservative homeschool movement has protected and enabled that abuse. While reading Schulman’s account, I found myself drawing connections between the scenes Schulman describes and moments of success and growing pains I’ve experienced firsthand with groups like Homeschoolers Anonymous and the ex-Quiverfull and exvangelical movements, and in my role as a board member for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. What do you do when your issue is one that the world at large pretends doesn’t exist, when the population in question is allowed very little rights or human dignity by the powers that be, when autonomy and life are at stake but few outsiders are able to understand this thanks to their own pre-existing prejudices and complicity in the oppression of those endangered? Schulman doesn’t answer these questions because they are impossible to answer, but she does document how effectively or not the various strategies of ACT UP NY worked toward these goals and for that I am deeply grateful. Knowing where you come from is a vital part of being able to move forward, and this book is a precious gift for this purpose.