Rat Bohemia Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by Sarah Schulman:

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART TWO - 1984

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  PART THREE - KILLER IN LOVE

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  PART FOUR - RATS, LICE, AND HISTORY

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  APPENDIX

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE for RAT BOHEMIA

  Intense and wonderfully written. —Eric Bogosian

  More persuasively than any other contemporary novelist, Sarah Schulman traces the ways in which the disenfranchisement that begins as a political evil pervades every aspect of life, from the metaphysical and spiritual to the most intimate moments of two people in bed together. She does this in luminous, witty, sometimes shattering prose, socially and politically serious and engaged... Hers is an astounding accomplishment... with a rage a beauty that will break your heart. —Tony Kushner

  A necessary, incendiary book- horrifying, funny- and full of real news about American life. —Mark Doty

  Dazzlingly successful. —LA Weekly

  Fresh imagery and original ideas.... Fiction with a purpose. —San Francisco Chronicle

  Unmistakenly authentic and deeply moving. —New York Post

  Not so much a novel as a queer phantasmagoria: dreamy afternoons in Tompkins Square Park at demonstrations or memorial ceremonies, Lesbian Avenger meetings, big juicy sex and food to match. And, behind it all, an aching nostalgia for the counterculture. If you haven’t met Schulman’s troubled people before, you will want to take them home with you. —The Observer

  Schulman’s offbeat heroine is Rita Mae Weems, a savvy, sassy rodent exterminator for the New York City Dept. of Health. Her wry tale of struggling in the Big Apple is both decadent and dead-on, told with street-level accuracy and sardonic style. As she prowls the streets with her best friend Killer, Weems keeps her eyes wide open… Through Weems, Killer and David, their HIV-positive pal, author Schulman exposes the ways gay men and lesbians lead their lives in the shadow of AIDS. —Washington Post

  Rat Bohemia is a manifesto for people who, after years in the shadows, are demanding acknowledgment from their families as well as mainstream society. Schulman, who lives in New York, knows her characters well, and has them interact with such people lost to AIDS as poet Assotto Saint, activist Bob Rafsky and artist David Wojnarowicz; this makes her book read less like fiction than a urgent dispatch from real life.

  —Boston Globe

  Also by Sarah Schulman:

  NOVELS

  The Mere Future (forthcoming)

  The Child

  Shimmer

  Empathy

  People in Trouble

  After Delores

  Girls, Visions, and Everything

  The Sophie Horowitz Story

  NONFICTION

  Stagestruck: Theatre, AIDS, and the Marketing

  of Gay America

  My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life

  During the Reagan/Bush Years

  PLAYS

  Carson McCullers

  Manic Flight Reaction

  Enemies, A Love Story

  Mercy

  Introduction

  Rat Obedience

  Last night, I had dinner with my friend, Elissa Perry, in the East Village. Afterwards, we walked around the neighborhood; it was seventy degrees, strange for October. We were sitting on some steps on East First Street, talking and watching folks pass by, when suddenly the street was overrun with rats.

  “Rat Bohemia,” Elissa said.

  “Rat Conformity,” I said.

  I had just been revisiting Rat Bohemia to prepare for this reissue from Arsenal Pulp Press. Reading it for the first time since it was published in 1995, I was overcome by a paralytic grief. My sadness was not about returning to the mass death experience that defined my youth in the epicenter of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s; I have been facing that pretty consistently in my work with Jim Hub-bard on the ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory. org), which we started in 2001. To date, Jim and I have interviewed eighty-two surviving members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and we are now developing a feature film, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, which combines these interviews with the thousands of hours of archival footage that Jim rescued in his role as a film and video preservationist.

  So the terrible loss that was triggered by re-reading my novel was not about the unnecessary deaths of friends and colleagues. Instead, it was a deep, painful emptiness at the loss of Bohemia itself. The rats remain, but Bohemia is gone.

  Now, as New York City becomes a gated community—where many of the high- earning, suburban-born residents are willing to trade freedom for security—the loss of urban values is the cultural and emotional manifestation of the economic consequences of gentrification. New York City is a more obedient, homogenous, and complicit place to live now than it was when Rat Bohemia was written. And the loss is profound. If marginalized people cannot afford to live in Manhattan, then Manhattan is subsequently removed from the global map as a place for new art ideas, new modes of rebellion, and new social imaginings. In a cultural arena where there is very little public space for new ideas, prohibiting the creation of mixed (racially, sexually, and intellectually) low-income communities means eliminating the incubation venue for broad visions of freedom.

  Many people have written books and had public and private conversations trying to understand how gentrification came to be the primary organizing principle of life in New York City, and in many cities in the Western world. Factually, we know that when the city hit a financial rock bottom in 1974, it stopped building low-income housing and started offering corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks to luxury developers; now, thirty-five years later, a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan costs $1 million, at least. But few, if any
, of these New York “experts” bothered to examine the relationship between gentrification and AIDS, both materially and spiritually, and their battle for the city’s soul.

  At least 75,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS, which is about twenty percent of the entire number of Americans who have died from it. Compare this to the 3,000 who perished at the World Trade Center. Where is our memorial? Our federal aid to survivors and damaged communities? Our Congressional investigation?

  My communities—the community of innovative artists, and the community of gay people willing to take action for social change (two distinctly different groups, for the most part), located in Manhattan’s East and West Village in the 1980s and 90s—had such high death rates that the infrastructures and cultural ways of these groups were basically destroyed. Much of the social value and organization of the gay artist/activist world prior to AIDS is now forgotten. And survivors have been traumatized in ways that are yet to be articulated, although late-age sero-conversion and methamphetamine abuse are two observable consequences.

  It is clear, although unstated, that the high mortality rate from AIDS in my neighborhood was a determining factor in the rapid gentrification of the Village, both East and West. Thousands of apartments literally were emptied. In the early years of the crisis, surviving partners or roommates were not allowed to inherit leases that had been in the name of the person who died, so once the leaseholder was no longer alive, those who shared their homes with them were often evicted. This was true in public housing as well as private rentals. Secondly, the typical gay person who lived in this kind of environment was often a refugee from an unsupportive family. In a study of surviving members of ACT UP New York, we found that it was typical for people to die in their own homes, or in those of their friends. Rarely did family intervene, and as has been demonstrated repeatedly, those who do not have the support of family generally have less access to money. Thirdly, and most importantly, those afflicted by AIDS were risk-takers living in an oppositional subculture who paid the financial price for being out of the closet and community-oriented, and for pioneering new art ideas. Indeed, many significant figures in the history of AIDS—like film theorist/activist Vito Russo, for example—died without health insurance. For that reason, many of the gay people who died of AIDS did not own their apartments, but rather relied on the cheap rents that made the East Village a welcoming homeland; their deaths increased the number of rental apartments available in such large numbers that the demographic of the neighborhood was rapidly transformed.

  As a result, their apartments went at market rates, thereby speeding up the gentrification process and turning the East Village from an interracial enclave of immigrants and artists into a destination location for wealthy diners and shoppers in less than a decade. And it transformed the more monied West Village from a long-term gay neighborhood into one dominated by double-income heterosexuals, and then in turn by celebrities, as new gay arrivals shifted to Chelsea. Today, the West Village is predominantly a straight neighborhood, and the gay property owners who remain there are elitist to the point that they have a famously antagonistic relationship with the young black gay men and lesbians who have socialized on the streets and piers of the West Village since World War II. Their gay predecessors, who died of AIDS, socialized on those same streets and piers in one of the most well-known public sex communities in American history. With their disappearance, gay life in the West Village is expected to take place indoors, and thus out of sight, by people who are white and upper-class.

  Strangely, this relationship—between a high mortality rate caused by governmental and familial neglect, and the material process of gentrification—is rarely acknowledged. Instead, gentrification is blamed on the gay people who lived, not on those who caused their deaths. There is a dominant story about gay white men coming into poor ethnic neighborhoods and serving as economic “shock troops,” buying up and rehabbing property, bringing in elite businesses, and thereby driving out indigenous communities, causing homelessness and cultural erasure.

  While the racism of gay white men and their willingness to displace poor communities in order to create their own enclaves is a historical fact, gentrification was a deliberate policy decision made by the coalition made up of New York City planners and real estate interests. That the creation of economically independent gay communities was seen as the “cause” of gentrification is an illusion. This theory implies that poor ethnic people were not gay and did not have their own gay communities. It pits “gays” as white and upper-class, against ethnic and racial minorities who are by implication “straight,” which of course is false and misleading. However, what I think it does show is that heterosexual dominance within every community does not aid or facilitate gay visibility or autonomy. So that it is only gay people who were able to access enough money to separate, in some way, from their communities of origin, who were able to create visibly gay-friendly housing and commerce, and achieve political power in a city driven by real estate development.

  But more importantly, the deliberate implementation of pro-gentrification policies by the City was itself invisible to the average New Yorker, whereas the presence of openly gay men rehabbing neighborhoods was extremely visible. If the City’s policy had been to build a lot of quality low-income housing, help indigenous communities rehab their own neighborhoods instead of being evicted, and create supportive environments for gay people in every community, then the context for the movement of gay white men into low-income neighborhoods would have had a dramatically difference outcome. Of course, this doesn’t take away from the class arrogance and racism that has always existed within the broad culture of white males, gay and straight. Nor does it erase the movement of black gays and lesbians to Fort Greene, and the settlement of lesbians of all races to Park Slope—both of them Brooklyn neighborhoods that later became dominated by white heterosexual buyers, once gentrification itself was epidemic.

  I know as a New Yorker, and as the grandchild of immigrants, that usually after a war, refugees leave their home in a cloud of death. But re-reading Rat Bohemia helps me to realize that in the war against AIDS and one of its consequences—gentrification—I stayed put and my home left me.

  —Sarah Schulman, October 2007

  To Jacqueline Anne Braun

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  The world’s largest rats are the capybaras, the web-footed denizens of the Amazon. Their hair bristles when they get angry and they are extremely hostile to humans. Even ones they know over a long period of time. There was a special series on capybaras in the Kuala Lumpur newspaper. My friend David sent it to me when he was on vacation because he knows how much I care about rats. The articles basically discussed the pros and cons of raising the animals for food.

  Bandicoots, which is what giant rats are called in India, are not eaten. Originally they lived in the country but got too fat to climb the stalks of wheat. So, they traded places with the smaller city brand which then migrated to the country and wiped out the crops that the fat ones couldn’t reach.

  David is HIV-positive but he still had 600 T-cells when he went to China so we didn’t have to worry that much. Once over there he went to Guangzhou and wrote to me about a rat-control campaign where the city published special recipes trying to get the residents to eat those rodents up.

  He said he saw red lacquered ones, basted with honey and soy, hanging by their tails in the market. But, just like their American counterparts, all Chinese rats are not equal. So, people generally complained about eating sewer rats which they considered only one step removed from eating sewage.

  One night David slept out on the street in Chengdu and a rat bit him on the fingernail. He was relieved that it didn’t get his blood, but surprised the animal chose nail instead of flesh. This was later explained to him by a madman he met on the streets of Guangzhou.

  “Rats,” said the madman. “They need to grind down their teeth or they die of starvation. So, they bite hard things. Preferably wo
od, bones, even people.”

  A few years ago the mayor of New York decided to cut back on rat extermination. He also cut back on streetlights. As a result, night increasingly meant these dark outlines of buildings surrounded by the scampering of eighteen-inch varmints. Ten million of them at least.

  My best friend Killer and I spent a lot of nights that summer just walking around because we didn’t have any money. I was saving up to move out of New York and Killer hadn’t had a job in two years. She came over every night to eat and then we’d take a walk. She’d forgotten how to even look for a job. She’d forgotten how to sound employable on the telephone. One day I glanced over her shoulder at the Help Wanted pages of the New York Times, only it wasn’t what you’d call pages. It was more like half a column.

  One Saturday afternoon we saw a kid get shot in front of The Unique Clothing Store Going-Out-Of-Business Sale and the next day we watched a guy go crazy and throw glass bottles at people for twenty minutes. I’ve always wanted to shoot rats.

  Killer and I are hardcore New Yorkers. But, when we were kids, the only homeless person you’d ever see would be a wino on the Bowery or an occasional bag lady. You never saw anyone sleeping on a subway unless they were coming home from the night shift. The streets were not covered with urine then. That was considered impolite. There have always been rats, though. I remember as a teenager watching them run around on the subway tracks while I was waiting for the Seven train to get me the hell out of Jackson Heights. But mostly, when I was a kid, rats were something that bit babies in a mythical faraway ghetto. You never saw them hanging out in the middle-class sections of Queens.