Sarah Schulman

Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian.

She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

Schulman was born on July 28, 1958, in New York City.

She attended Hunter College High School, and attended the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1978 but did not graduate.

She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Later, she was active in the Women's Union while a student at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1978.

From 1979 to 1982, Schulman was a member of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and participated in an early direct action protest in which she and five others (called the Women's Liberation Zap Action Brigade) disrupted an anti-abortion hearing in Congress.

Schulman published her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, in 1984, which was followed by Girls, Visions and Everything in 1986 — which is considered important among lesbian subcultures.

Let the Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York (ACT UP, New York 1987–1993) was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021, and was a finalist for both the 2019 and 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Works-In-Progress and for the 2022 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

It won a special award from the Publishing Triangle, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, and was awarded a prize by the National Organization of LGBT Journalists.

It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2021.

Cleveland Review of Books said it combines "acute political and social analysis with in-depth portraits of human beings."

Schulman's activism began in her childhood when she protested the Vietnam War with her mother.

She was an active member of ACT UP from 1987 to 1992, attending actions at the FDA, NIH, Stop the Church, and was arrested when ACT UP occupied Grand Central Station protesting the First Gulf War.

In 1987, Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard co-founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now called MIX NYC.

Schulman's third novel, After Delores, received a positive review in The New York Times, was translated into eight languages, and was awarded an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award in 1989.

People In Trouble appeared in 1990, Empathy appeared in 1992.

In 1992, Schulman and five other women co-founded the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action organization.

On her 1992 book tour for Empathy, Schulman visited gay bookstores in the South to start chapters.

The organization's high points included founding the first Dyke March during the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, and sending groups of young organizers to Maine and Idaho to assist local fights against anti-gay ballot initiatives.

The novelist Edmund White reviewed her next novel, Rat Bohemia (1995), for the New York Times, and it was named one of the 100 best LGBT books by The Publishing Triangle.

Subsequent novels include Shimmer (1998), The Child (2007), and The Mere Future (2009).

Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998), which won the Stonewall Book Award, argues that significant plot elements of the successful 1996 musical Rent were lifted from her 1990 novel, People in Trouble.

The heterosexual plot of Rent is based on the opera La Bohème, while the gay plot is similar to Schulman's novel.

Schulman never sued, but analyzed in Stagestruck the way the musical depicted AIDS and gay people, in contrast to work made by those communities that same year.

Since 2001, Schulman and Jim Hubbard have been creating the ACT UP Oral History Project, interviewing 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years.

In 2009, The New Press published Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

In 2009, Schulman declined an invitation to Tel Aviv University in support of Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

They produced a feature documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2010.

Harvard purchased the archive for their collection, while maintaining free access, and the funds were used to produce United in Anger.

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International was published by Duke University Press in 2012, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

In September 2013, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, was published by the University of California Press.

Slate called The Gentrification of the Mind one of the 10 "Best Most Unknown Books" and GalleyCat called it one of the "Best Unrecognized Books" of the year.

It was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

The Cosmopolitans (2016) was named one of the best American novels of 2016 by Publishers Weekly.

Her 2016 book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and won a Judy Grahn Award by the Publishing Triangle.

In 2016, Schulman was named one of Publishers Weekly's 60 Most Underrated Writers.

In 2018, she published Maggie Terry, a return to and comment on the lesbian detective novel, addressing the emotions of life under President Donald Trump.

In 2018, the second edition of her 1994 collection My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years was issued including new material by Urvashi Vaid, Stephen Thrasher, and Alison Bechdel.