Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

by Sarah Schulman

Overview

Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary LGBTQ Nonfiction Award and the 2022 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award. Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbriath Award for Nonfiction, the Gotham Book Prize, and the ALA Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award. A 2021 New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize.

One of NPR, New York, and The Guardian's Best Books of 2021, one of Buzzfeed's Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2021, one of Electric Literature's Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2021, one of NBC's 10 Most Notable LGBTQ Books of 2021, and one of Gay Times' Best LGBTQ Books of 2021.

"This is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician’s bible." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

Twenty years in the making, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism

In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington, DC, and started needle exchange programs in New York; they took over Grand Central Terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled—and beat—The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them.

Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today’s activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration—and long-overdue reassessment—of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374185138
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	736
Sales rank:	697,601
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 2.30(d)

About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Table of Contents

Note to Readers xi

Preface xiii

Book 1 Political Foundations

Part I Change and Power

Introduction: How Change Is Made 5

1 Mechanisms of Power: Puerto Ricans in ACT UP 35

2 The First Treatment Activists 59

Part II The Dynamics of Effective Action

3 Choosing the Right Target: Seize Control of the FDA 99

4 Collective Leadership: Stop the Church 136

Part III Paths of Leadership

5 Inspiration and Influence: Larry Kramer, Maxine Wolfe, Mark Harrington 169

6 Treatment and Data #2: Citizen Scientists 198

7 Changing the Definition: Women Don't Get AIDS, We just Die from It 227

Part IV Radical Resistance and Acceptance

8 Mother and Son: The Death of Ray Navarro, the Vision of Patricia Navarro 273

9 Harm Reduction as a Value, an Ideal, a Way of Life and Death: ACT UP's Campaign for Needle Exchange 281

Book 2 Art in the Service of Change

Part V Art Making as Creation and Expression of Community

10 The Artistic Life of Resistance 317

11 Strategic Images: Photography, Video, and Film 373

Book 3 Creating the World You Need to Survive

Part VI Activism Coheres Values and Creates Counterculture

12 Getting and Creating Media 413

13 Community Research Initiative, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, and the Battle over AZT 423

14 ACT UP and the Haitian Underground Railroad 432

15 Lawyers for the People 444

16 The Culture and Subculture of Civil Disobedience 457

Part VII Money, Poverty, and the Material Reality of AIDS

17 Insurance Equals Access, and Without Access There Is No Treatment 473

18 How the ACT UP Housing Committee Became Housing Works, Housing for Homeless People with AIDS 482

19 YELL: The Evolution of Queer Youth Politics 505

20 Funding ACT UP's Campaigns 512

Book 4 Desperation

Part VIII Division

21 Storm the NIH Action at the National Institutes of Health, Washington, D.C., May 21, 1990 535

22 The Dinner: December 1, 1990 545

23 Day of Desperation: January 23, 1991 551

24 Are Women "Vectors of Infection," or People with AIDS? Clinical Trial 076, April 1991 562

25 AIDS Hysteria: The Case of Derek Link 575

26 The Split: January 1992 580

Part IX Living and Dying the Mass Death Experience

27 Treatment and Data #3 593

28 Ashes Action: October 5, 1992 604

29 Political Funerals 611

Conclusion: The Myth of Resilience and the Enduring Relationship of AIDS 633

A Personal Conclusion 641

Appendix 1 ACT UP and the FBI 647

Appendix 2 Tell It to ACT UP 651

ACT UP New York Time Line 661

ACT UP Oral History Interviews 669

Acknowledgments 675

Index 677

Editorial Reviews

02/08/2021

Novelist and AIDS activist Schulman (Maggie Terry) recounts the successes and failures of the New York chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in this fine-grained history. Drawing on interviews with 188 members of ACT UP New York, Schulman showcases the diverse array of people who worked to raise awareness about AIDS, and notes their simultaneous involvement in related issues including homelessness, gender inequity in medicine, and needle exchange programs. She also explains how ACT UP New York leveraged an “inside/outside” strategy in which some members worked collaboratively with politicians and health officials while others created dramatic acts of protest, such as the 1989 infiltration of the New York Stock Exchange, when seven activists handcuffed themselves to a banister in a VIP balcony and threw fake hundred-dollar bills onto the trading room floor to pressure a pharmaceutical company to lower the $10,000-per-year price tag of the AIDS medication AZT. Readers less familiar with ACT UP may wish for a clearer explanation of its organizational structure and more narrative cohesion than Schulman provides. Still, her firsthand perspective and copious details provide a valuable testament to the courage and dedication of many unheralded activists. (May)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/01/2021

Few activist organizations of the late 20th century have had the impact of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Novelist and playwright Schulman was herself intimately involved in the group, and has written a deeply personal account of its heady years. ACT UP's New York chapter is the mother chapter of 148 groups worldwide; Schulman says it was the site of incredible creativity, research, and leadership. She states that she is not a trained historian, but her skilled use of oral histories, combined with solid research into earlier social movements, provide a complete history of ACT UP, from its founding in 1987 to the present day. The writing is given a personal touch with the inclusion of profiles and oral histories of notable people, such as chemist Iris Long and HIV/AIDS researcher Mark Harrington. These portraits, together with the historical context offered throughout, prove the lasting influence of ACT UP and have a lot to teach readers about activism today. Schulman reminds us that ACT UP still exists because the HIV/AIDS crisis is not over. VERDICT This engaging, accessible book will find a wide audience among readers interested in activism from the ground up. It will also be a foundational document for historians for generations to come. A must-read.—David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

Library Journal

★ 2021-01-30
The veteran author, screenwriter, and activist delivers a significant boots-on-the-ground account of the New York City chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

Though divisive, ACT UP’s in-your-face activism unquestionably improved life for subsequent generations of people with AIDS. Many of the volunteers saw themselves as warriors, some fighting for their lives by forcing governmental health institutes to care about them and stop delaying treatments. Founded in 1987 by novelist and playwright Larry Kramer, the New York chapter served as the “mothership” of what eventually became 148 chapters worldwide. The organization’s strategy of confrontation was inspired by Kramer’s insistence on political agitation born of necessity. Days before ACT UP was formed he notoriously told a crowd, “In five years, half of you will be dead!” ACT UP’s “boldest act of broad leadership” was the Stop the Church campaign, waged on Dec. 10, 1989, with WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization). In a “raw display of power,” activists interrupted a Catholic service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, garnering heaps of both positive and negative media coverage. “Nothing could have been more counter to assimilationist or respectability politics than Stop the Church,” writes Schulman, who was a rank-and-file ACT UP volunteer. A longtime historian of LGBTQ+ activism, the author takes to task other histories of AIDS, including David France’s documentary film How To Survive a Plague (2012), which focuses on the “heroic white male.” Schulman clearly demonstrates that ACT UP was founded in part to engender a relentlessly democratic and inclusive force of activism. That ideology explains the heft of this book, which isn’t written as traditional history but as a mashup of events witnessed by Schulman and oral history that’s truly all-encompassing. Readers are right there with activists, hearing their stories from them but also others who knew them. “Drive and commitment, invention and felicity, a focus on campaigns, and being effective are the components of movements that change the world,” writes Schulman, an assertion born out in the stories told here.

Vital, democratic truth-telling.

Kirkus Reviews

"I understand but can’t quite accept that this book is about 700 pages long — not when I tore through it in a day; still now, while fact-checking this review, I can scarcely skim it without being swallowed back into the testimonies . . . Let the Record Show doesn’t seek to memorialize history but to ransack it, to seize what we might need . . . This is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician’s bible." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"An outstanding chronicle . . . an expansive portrait of the people, principles, and campaigns that made ACT UP the most formidable political organization to emerge from the AIDS crisis . . . Schulman writes as a witness to and a survivor of a catastrophe, clear-eyed and committed to remembering the dead . . . Let the Record Show serves as both history and handbook of how a small coalition can achieve fundamental political change . . . an invigorating work." —Dagmawi Woubshet, The Atlantic

"A masterpiece tome: part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms . . . Medical inequity continues not only with Covid but also with H.I.V./AIDS still, and it will repeat until we manage to learn from the past — about survival, and about the fight. Here is a primer, a compendium of what one group learned and struggled with and accomplished. Here is a book to start a mighty shelf." —Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review

"An in-depth and fully realized account . . . a text that offers younger queer activists a rare study of their own history." —Emma Specter, Vogue

"Let the Record Show is invaluable as both an archive and a blueprint for contemporary organizers of all stripes." — Sascha Cohen, NPR

"Let the Record Show is profoundly moving, as most [AIDS histories] are, but also does the important work of reasserting the place of women and people of colour in the history of Act Up." —Megan Nolan, The Guardian

"In a time when activism is more necessary than ever and politicians continue to make false claims about the AIDS epidemic, let Schulman, in her distinctively gripping voice, tell you how it really went down." —David Vogel, Buzzfeed

"A stunning achievement . . . The expanse and generosity given in Let the Record Show — the integrity of giving people a platform to tell their own story and to showing the messiness and complexity of the truth — reflects the commitment not only of Schulman but of the hundreds of people in the ACT UP movement." —Marcie Bianco, The Advocate

"Monumental . . . Schulman doesn’t replace one set of heroes with another; rather, she destroys the idea of singular heroes at all. This is a political choice that creates a more honest representation of ACT UP . . . The most salient thread we can draw from Let the Record Show is an understanding of how mass movements can succeed and fail, all at the same time, depending on which part of the 'mass' you’re in." —Hugh Ryan, Boston Review

"A necessarily expansive and bombastic corrective of modern history . . . Let the Record Show is as righteous and revelatory as its subject matter." —Hillary Kelly, Vulture

"Let the Record Show is a corrective intervention in AIDS historiography, attempting to revise the popular understanding of ACT UP to make it both more democratic and more accurate . . . [Let the Record Show] paints a picture of activists not as martyrs, but as real people, living out the full spectrums of their emotional lives while also trying to meet the demands of history." —Moira Donegan, Bookforum

"Schulman paints an honest portrait of the complexities of coalitional politics, adding nuance and depth to an often-flattened period of history. The result is both an engrossing tribute to the past and a crucial handbook for activists who hope to leave their own lasting mark on the future." —Daniel Spielberger, them.

"Remarkable . . . [Schulman's] book is made up of testimony, exposition and analysis, not blended but artfully layered . . . [a] rich and amazing book." —Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books

"From the human perspective, it’s simply satisfying to consume Schulman’s fulsome demonstration that ACT UP was not the work of heroic straights or the clean-cut and mostly white men whose names are now synonymous with the group, such as Larry Kramer, but in fact always relied on the many people of color, incarcerated people, women, and drug users who devoted their labor." —Jo Livingstone, The New Republic

"The remarkable, timely capstone to [Schulman's] decades-long labor of documenting the improbable miracle that was and is ACT UP . . . Without polemic or resentment, the book is explicit in its corrective intent . . . a powerful document of a harrowing and enduring tragedy, and of the relentless determination to act up, fight back, and fight AIDS." —FT, 4Columns

"A resounding rebuttal to exclusionary versions of AIDS history . . . Not merely a matter of representation, Schulman’s recontextualization serves as an intervention in the political analysis of ACT UP." —Joshua Gutterman Tranen, The Baffler

"Sarah Schulman’s vital survey of a terrifying time reminds us that queer people have long known a thing or two about living through a devastating plague." —Keely Weiss, Harper's Bazaar

" Schulman approaches her political history with a novelist’s understanding of the complexities of character, action, and consequence . . . Let the Record Show preserves the spirit of ACT UP’s single statement of unity and purpose . . . [Schulman] is one of our most formidable contemporary intellectuals and an essential recorder of queer and activist histories." —Kelly Roberts, Hazlitt

"The way I feel about Sarah Schulman’s book LET THE RECORD SHOW mirrors how I felt the first time I read THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS by Isabel Wilkerson: deeply grateful for the author’s work, stunned at the pervasive erasure we endure AND desperate to put a copy in everyone’s hands." —Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives

"Even though Let the Record Show is somewhere close to 800 pages, you’ll read it urgently. The fight for the public’s attention still feels alive in the way Schulman writes. This is a book that looks backwards and forwards at once." —Emily Shapiro, Lambda Literary

"Meticulously, thoughtfully, and lovingly compiled . . . Let the Record Show feels like the peak of [Schulman's] achievement, a standard for how this history should be presented . . . Let the Record Show is a sprawling encyclopedia on art and action, humming with so much vitality that the book practically breathes.." —Conor Williams, Art in America

"[Let the Record Show] comes to us when we most need it. It offers an archive of silenced voices; a record of bravery and struggle; and even perhaps a handbook for grassroots organizing and protest in a time of racial and medical injustice. Unconsciously conditioned, as we are, to the narrative as much as the political comforts of survival—that is, of closure—Let the Record Show may well be the book that we don’t want, but that we very much need." —Travis Alexander, PopMatters

"A history of AIDS activism that is both more inclusive and complicated than previously told . . . [Schulman's] project is therefore as much an addition to the historical record as it is a necessary ethical revision." —Natalie Adler, Lux Magazine

"Iconic and epic are such hackneyed words, that I blush to write them. But there’s no other way to describe Sarah Schulman’s new book . . . a mesmerizing history." —Kathi Wolfe, Washington Blade

"[Schulman] movingly evokes what the group meant personally in the lives of thousands who refused to be “bystanders” in the face of the AIDS catastrophe . . . her goal in highlighting the group’s unprecedented grassroots achievements as well as its weaknesses is part of a larger mission to inform social change efforts today, whether on healthcare access or transgender rights, systemic racism or police reform." —Paul Schindler, Gay City News

"A deeply generous platform for nearly every ACT UP member’s personal story, motives, and recollections to be told in one place, adding up to an enthralling mosaic of biography, collaboration, and, often, conflict." —Tim Murphy, TheBody

"A masterful work twenty years in the making . . . Schulman holds a unique position to chronicle this critical history and connect it with our own chaotic moment." —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

"A monumental achievement, the culmination of decades of work, and almost unbelievable in its scope and scale." —Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

"Let the Record Show is simultaneously memoir and oral history, bringing to life the AIDS crisis in all of its horrifying, painful complexity . . . Her commentaries enrich and enliven this documentary history of what another activist described as “'the last of the great new social movements of the 20th century.'” —Cathy Corman, The Provincetown Independent

"Remarkable . . . One is left with an overwhelming sense of gratitude—not only for the incredible amount of labor that it took to remember, collect, preserve, narrate, and interpret the events of this book, but for the world-changing activism from which we have all benefitted in such incalculable ways." —Nino Testa, Women's Review of Books

"These portraits, together with the historical context offered throughout, prove the lasting influence of ACT UP and have a lot to teach readers about activism today. . .This engaging, accessible book will find a wide audience among readers interested in activism from the ground up. It will also be a foundational document for historians for generations to come. A must-read." —Library Journal (starred review)

"A significant boots-on-the-ground account . . . Readers are right there with activists, hearing their stories from them but also others who knew them . . . Vital, democratic truth-telling." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Schulman presents ACT UP not as a heroic, sanitized institution made up of exclusively white gay men, but as what it actually was: an organization that managed to improve the lives of people living with HIV and AIDS despite its own racism and sexism."—Booklist

"[A] fine-grained history . . . [Schulman's] firsthand perspective and copious details provide a valuable testament to the courage and dedication of many unheralded activists." —Publishers Weekly

"Sarah Schulman has written more than an authoritative history of ACT UP NY here— it is a masterpiece of historical research and intellectual analysis that creates many windows into both a vanished world and the one that emerged from it, the one we live in now. I can't think of a book like this—it is an almost entirely new model, uniquely possible as the result of Schulman's life's work. As one of our only genuinely intellectual iconoclasts, she returns to us with this story of a movement that changed the world at least once, now a part of the work to change that world again. Any reader will be changed, I think, by the stories here—radicalized and renewed, which to me is something better than just hope." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"Characteristically forthright, Sarah Schulman gives us the most comprehensive history of the ACT UP movement in New York to date through a wide range of interviews, a trenchant commentary, and a sustained testament to collaborative action and its history. From this extraordinary history told with the multiple voices of participants, Schulman makes clear that the history of HIV and AIDS in this country has been marred by popular narratives and bouts of grandstanding that largely failed to acknowledge the thousands of lives still lost annually from AIDS, the schisms that opened up serious issues of power within the movement, and the specific ways that people of color and poor people remained unserved by the scientific advances widely celebrated. This book lets us know that neither our sorrow nor our rage is finished, and that the work of acknowledgement of all who struggled and suffered remains our task." —Judith Butler

From the Publisher

Narrator Rosalyn Coleman Williams delivers this oral history of New York City’s ACT UP movement without theatricality. Author Sarah Schulman helped to collect transcripts from the original members, which were recorded in various formats as they recounted how they performed in-your-face protests that revealed gross inequities in law, medicine, and politics in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as AIDS ravaged multiple demographics. Interviewees include women of color, the formerly incarcerated, Latinx, white working-class activists, and those more well known, like Larry Kramer. Schulman delivers her preface in an engaging voice before Williams, setting a steady pace, takes up the interwoven quotations and narrative frames Schulman has crafted. Her pacing begins to flag toward the end, but by then we’re hooked. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2021 - AudioFile

Narrator Rosalyn Coleman Williams delivers this oral history of New York City’s ACT UP movement without theatricality. Author Sarah Schulman helped to collect transcripts from the original members, which were recorded in various formats as they recounted how they performed in-your-face protests that revealed gross inequities in law, medicine, and politics in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as AIDS ravaged multiple demographics. Interviewees include women of color, the formerly incarcerated, Latinx, white working-class activists, and those more well known, like Larry Kramer. Schulman delivers her preface in an engaging voice before Williams, setting a steady pace, takes up the interwoven quotations and narrative frames Schulman has crafted. Her pacing begins to flag toward the end, but by then we’re hooked. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2021 - AudioFile