The Gentrification of the Mind Read online

  ALSO BY SARAH SCHULMAN

  NOVELS

  The Mere Future (2009)

  The Child (2007)

  Shimmer (1998)

  Rat Bohemia (1995)

  Empathy (1992)

  People in Trouble (1990)

  After Delores (1988)

  Girls, Visions, and Everything (1986)

  The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984)

  NONFICTION

  Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009)

  Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998)

  My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (1994)

  PLAYS

  Mercy (published 2009)

  Enemies, a Love Story (adapted from I.B. Singer, Wilma Theater, 2007)

  Manic Fight Reaction (Playwrights Horizons, 2005)

  Carson McCullers (Playwrights Horizons, 2002; published 2006)

  MOVIES

  The Owls; Mommy Is Coming (directed by Cheryl Dunye, screenplays by Cheryl Dunye and Sarah Schulman)

  United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (directed by Jim Hubbard, coproduced by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman)

  The Gentrification of the Mind

  Witness to a Lost Imagination

  Sarah Schulman

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  Berkeley Los Angeles London

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schulman, Sarah, 1958–

  The gentrification of the mind : witness to a lost imagination/Sarah Schulman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-520-26477-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. AIDS (Disease)—Social aspects. 2. AIDS (Disease)—United States. 3. Gentrification—United States. 4. Urban renewal—United States. 5. Urbanization—United States. I. Title.

  RA644.A25S363 2012

  362.196′9792–dc23

  2011018311

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

  To Jim Hubbard

  Thank you for being accountable, keeping your promises, and being willing to face and deal with problems regardless of their complexity.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Making Record from Memory

  PART I. UNDERSTANDING THE PAST

  1. The Dynamics of Death and Replacement

  2. The Gentrification of AIDS

  3. Realizing That They're Gone

  PART II. THE CONSEQUENCES OF LOSS

  4. The Gentrification of Creation

  5. The Gentrification of Gay Politics

  6. The Gentrification of Our Literature

  Conclusion: Degentrification—The Pleasure of Being Uncomfortable

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was written with support from The Virginia Colony for the Creative Arts, Ledig House, and The Norman Mailer Writers Colony.

  Thanks to my friends from the neighborhood, especially those of you on Ninth Street who have trod this path with me these many years. Special thanks to Dudley Saunders for reading and to Jack Waters, Peter Cramer, Bina Sharif, Kathy Danger, and the other survivors of AIDS and gentrification with whom I share this city.

  INTRODUCTION

  Making Record from Memory

  The first step in liquidating a people…is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

  Milan Kundera

  It's 2001. I am in Los Angeles trying to break into film or television. It's been a tough day. I had a “meeting” with a film producer/agent/manager that was not encouraging. In New York, people have meetings because they have something to accomplish together. They need to sit down and work out the details, or else they are hoping to find a place in each other's lives: as lovers, collaborators, friends. But LA is different. People have meetings so that, if one of them should ever become famous in the future, the other will have “met” them. I know this because my friend Dudley, transplanted from the East Village to West Hollywood, lent me his copy of the Hollywood primer Hello, He Lied by Linda Obst so that I can be prepared for these strange rituals of nothingness.

  “So, what novelist are your novels most like?” she asks.

  I'm stymied. This is not a question that novelists ask ourselves, since the goal is to have something intimate and specific about our voices. Think, Sarah, quick. My mind is spinning. Think of someone she may have heard of.

  “Uhm. Philip Roth?”

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm not familiar with him.”

  Later I'm driving home in my white rental car, knowing I should have said “John Grisham.” I hate myself. I'm an idiot. No matter how much I dumb down, it is never dumb enough. I flip through the radio stations, determined to learn the latest hits and become more in tune with the pop culture I'm trying to penetrate but bored to tears, end up settling on NPR. Bizarrely, this very day is the twentieth anniversary of AIDS. Decontextualized by palm trees, I listen. The announcer is discussing events that I know intimately, organically, that have seared the emotional foundation of my adult life. And yet there is a strangely mellow tone to the story. It's been slightly banalized, homogenized.

  This is the first time I've heard AIDS being historicized, and there is something clean-cut about this telling, something wrong. Something…gentrified.

  “At first America had trouble with People with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

  I almost crash the car.

  Oh no, I think. Now this. Now after all this death and all this pain and all this unbearable truth about persecution, suffering, and the indifference of the protected, Now, they're going to pretend that naturally, normally things just happened to get better. That's the way we nice Americans naturally are. We come around when it's the right thing to do. We're so nice. Everything just happens the way it should.

  This? I realize the way one realizes that the oncoming train is unavoidable and I'm stuck on the track. This is going to be the official history of AIDS?

  I pull the car over, whip out my brand-new first cell phone, and call Jim Hubbard in New York. We have to do something, right now. In 1986 Jim and I cofounded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (now known as MIX, and approaching its twenty-fifth year). Building a community institution with someone is a very bonding experience, and I know that together we can find a way to change this distortion of AIDS history. Jim is on it immediately. We cannot let the committed battle of thou
sands of people, many to their deaths, be falsely naturalized into America “coming around.” No one with power in America “comes around.” They always have to be forced into positive change. But in this case, many of the people who forced them are dead. The ones who have survived are in a kind of hell of confusion and chaos that feels personal but is actually political, whether they have “moved on” and “are living their lives” or are confused, displaced, lost. We have responsibilities, after all, we the living.

  “Ok,” he says. And then it begins. The investigation.

  Cut ahead to October 2010. For the past nine years Jim and I have been codirecting the ACT UP Oral History Project. We have conducted 128 long form (two- to four-hour) interviews with surviving members of ACT UP, New York (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). And we have a waiting list of one hundred more to go. We have a website (www.actuporalhistory.org) where we post five minutes of streaming video of each interview and where viewers can download the entirety of each transcript for free. To date over eighty thousand people have downloaded these transcripts, many from Eastern Europe and Asia. We assume they are people with AIDS, in countries with no AIDS activist movement, who are looking for information. Jim has preserved two thousand hours of archival footage, which we have made available for free at the New York Public Library. Jim is now making a feature-length documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, which I am coproducing, and which will have its world premiere in 2012. I have been traveling the country showing excerpts of the film at colleges and universities, trying to get professors and graduate students to use the ACT UP Oral History Project in their research. Now, after almost a decade of intensive labor, the first books and dissertations using the interviews are starting to appear. Somehow, more personally important than all of the above is that Jim and I now have more cumulative information about ACT UP than anyone. After each interview we reconceptualize the project, we try to articulate a trajectory, we put together the pieces of what made the organization work and the consequences and impact of its actions on AIDS and on the world. We get ACT UP. And the more I understand what ACT UP was, the more I see what is missing from the contemporary discourse.

  In 2008, Helen Molesworth, the lesbian genius curator who—at the time—was at the Harvard Art Museum, called us out of the blue and asked to show our interviews at the university's Carpenter Center. She put together an exquisite program of talks, discussions, films, and visual work and created a viewing room, set up a bit like an ACT UP meeting. One enters and sees many monitors, with faces, all within view of each other, but also private, and on each monitor is a loop of our interviews. The viewer selects a face, someone they'd like to meet, and then sits down before the monitor, puts on the headphones and listens to that ACT UPer tell their story. The show was such a success that it traveled to the White Columns gallery in Manhattan. And this October night in question, in 2010, was the opening.

  It was an incredible night. Hundreds of people overflowing onto the sidewalk. It was a gathering of the remnants of the ACT UP tribe and people showed up in full force. But there also was a significant showing of a new element, lots of queer people in their twenties. Many were artists or students, who clearly had come to honor ACT UP. I stood back and looked from one group to the next. The ACT UPers, now in our fifties and sixties, had a ragged edge to us in some ways. And it was illuminating to see us gathered together in once place for the first time in so long. A lot of us had had real troubles, that was clear. Drug problems, problems of purpose, significant health problems—many of these guys had been on really rough medication combinations with horrible side effects. Many had significant facial wasting and their faces had sunken. Everyone had suffered profoundly from that magic combination of the mass death of their friends and the mass indifference of government, families, and society. We were laughing and smiling and hugging and flirting, as we always had with each other, but somehow it was being among each other that was the most normalizing. I looked at my friends from ACT UP and I saw people who were somehow both heroes and freaks, because they had achieved the impossible and paid the high price of alienation brought by knowledge, as heroes and freaks always do.

  Happy to be part of it, and standing at an admiring distance were the younger people. Also hanging out, talking, flirting, happy, excited, but the two worlds were not mixing. Before me I saw two distinctly different experiences, separated by the gulf of action fueled by suffering on one hand, and the threat of pacifying assimilation on the other. When the ACT UPers were in their twenties, they were dying. And the replacements for the dead, these young, were on the road to normalcy. The young had the choice to live quietly because of the bold fury of the old. In the rare cases when the old have done the right thing, this is as it should be. And somehow, the presence of the young showed that they understood this, that someone had done something right and yet these ones were curious, attracted, intrigued by the potential of living for more than LGBT domesticity as their fate. Maybe they too would like to change the world.

  Some weeks later I went out with six young queer artists to have a drink. One was just about to publish a book with a mainstream publisher and go on a book tour. One was preparing a show for a popular commercial venue. One was about to have a funded workshop for a piece he had written. They all seemed to be doing very well, having opportunities and fitting in to the cultural structure. When I asked one guy what he did for a living, he said “performance.” I now know that that is code for “inherited wealth” and does not mean he earns his living as go-go dancer at the Pyramid Club to pay his $150 rent, as it would have in 1979. None were waiters, hustlers, legal proofreaders. One worked for a fancy art magazine, another was the assistant to a famous artist. They were American aristocracy —good suburbs and good schools, clean-cut homosexuals —but somehow still attracted to justice. As the evening progressed they started to express a reasonable discomfort with the ACT UPers. It was obvious that there was a wall between the two groups, and I guess we all wanted to understand what that was. The younger people loved ACT UP. But in some fundamental way they couldn't relate to it. They didn't understand what we had experienced. They had never been that oppressed. They had never been that profoundly oppressed. And yet, they wanted to relate. They also had never been that inspired, that inventive or that effective. They were intelligent and thoughtful. They wanted to understand.

  “Why?” I asked. “What is it that you want to know?”

  “I wonder what it means about me.”

  I wasn't sure if that was a suburban narcissism in which one has to be able to “identify” in order to internalize value or if they were doing the hard work of reaching out to connect with their own history. I also wanted them to be able to relate. And while I understand that they have never known mass death of their world, one of my fears for younger gay people, especially artists, is that they don't see how rigidly the marginalization of point of view is enforced in our own shared contemporary moment. Unlike my generation, who were told we were despised, they are told that things are better than they are. And they have to go through the difficult process of learning to realistically evaluate from their own lived experience, instead of from what they are being told about themselves.

  “I came out in college in the Gay Student Union,” one guy said. “And I took a queer theory class.”

  “I see. And in your American history class, did they include AIDS or ACT UP as a fundamental part of U.S. history of the twentieth century?”

  “No.”

  I already knew that the answer was no. Jim and I had gone to the American Historical Association Conference to try to integrate ACT UP into core U.S. history curriculums. But the only people who came to our talk were other queers.

  “So, what do you think about that? Is it enough for queer things to be marginalized into one class?”

  “It never occurred to me. I didn't think about it.”

  As we continued to talk, more emerged. The woman's book did not have primary lesbian content. The art wor
ld she was situating herself in, excluded lesbian authors whose work did. Instinctively she had figured out that for professional advancement, this was the way to go. To her it was expected, and to me it was closeted. I detected that she felt strangely superior for getting the access one gets by avoiding lesbian content, even though her choices were not making anything better. And yet she was personally out with those people. Just not artistically. There was a contradiction here. How did one part of her life affect the other?

  As the conversation continued it was clear that these were divided people. As artists as well as queers, these people wanted to be able to think in radical ways, to have insights, to realize, to make work that was outside of social assumptions, to be radical people who could—like the weary ACT UPers—achieve justice in some fashion. They admired their predecessors who had created change through confrontation, alienation, and truth telling. But their professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious maneuvering of the queer content they did have so that it was depoliticized, personalized, and not about power.

  A month later I was talking to a young man whom I like very much.

  “You know,” he said. “I'm interested in making work about an artist who died of AIDS.”

  “Oh, who?” I asked.

  “I don't know yet. I've been looking at people who are unknown.”

  “Like who?”

  “Well, I'm interested in someone named Patrick Angus. And in another one named Mark Morrisroe.” He said these two names with a kind of contemporary upslide at the end. Like they were questions: Patrick Angus? Mark Morrisroe?

  “Those are both really well known artists,” I said, realizing that these two were among many who had not been properly historicized. “Mark Morrisroe has a catalogue raisonné.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Do you know any artists who died of AIDS who no one's ever heard of?”