Sarah Schulman, The Art of Nonfiction No. 14

On the roof of her apartment building on East Ninth Street in Manhattan, 1986. Courtesy of Sarah Schulman.

In 1979, Sarah Schulman moved into a sixth-floor walk-up on East Ninth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, a few blocks away from where her family lived at the time of her birth in 1958. In that sunny, compact tenement apartment, with a desk tucked into a corner behind the kitchen, a Chinese money tree filling the living room window, and a bookcase with a shelf dedicated to Carson McCullers, she has steadily cultivated a body of work distinctive for its formal experimentation and political commitment, its edge and range, and its roots in the communities to which she has belonged. Schulman grew up going to Vietnam War protests and worked extensively on abortion rights in her twenties, later becoming a member of ACT UP and a founder of the direct-action group the Lesbian Avengers. We met for the first time shortly after she published Let the Record Show (2021), her lauded mammoth oral history of ACT UP and AIDS activism.

The editors have chosen to classify this interview as an Art of Nonfiction. It could easily have been labeled Art of Fiction or even Art of  Theater. From her cult lesbian noir novel After Delores (1989) to her fifties New York period piece The Cosmopolitans (2016) to her AIDS novel  People in Trouble (1990)⁠—which, she recounts in Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998), was the uncredited source material for Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent⁠—Schulman’s eleven books of fiction often follow isolates and outlaws. Her nonfiction, on the other hand, anatomizes families, activist groups, and neighborhoods⁠—revealing our tendencies toward exclusion and shaming and our potential for transformative collaboration.