Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)
At its height in North America, the AIDS epidemic only captured straight society’s attention to the extent that queer activists forced them to look. The bulk of straight culture was content to file the disease away as something that only happened to queer people, a plague infecting deviants that had no real bearing outside the racial and sexual margins. (One infamous description of AIDS victims was the “four H’s”: homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and heroin users.) AIDS activists, most prominently those in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), assumed the challenge of making themselves unignorable, with theatrical demonstrations but also with steady, quotidian agitation.
As early as 1996, when retroviral treatments became available to a handful of wealthier patients, straight Americans—and even some prominent gay men, like Andrew Sullivan—were ready to call an end to the pandemic. But for author and ACT UP veteran Sarah Schulman, the pandemic never receded. As she narrates in her new book Let the Record Show, the memory of AIDS and its victims is something she and other survivors have lived with ever since.
As a member of ACT UP, Schulman fought not just for breakthrough AIDS treatments but for the expansion of healthcare generally, in an attempt to wrest the caregiving apparatus from the stranglehold of overreaching for-profit companies. All victories toward this end so far have been partial at best. In a haunting personal reflection at the end of the book, Schulman describes the harrowing process of seeking medical treatment for a genetic disease—the indignities of surrendering one’s body to an expensive and imprecise clinical superstructure. Her doctors are trying to get her red blood cell counts down, but they have been aiming for a standard that was set for cis men, not cis women: an oversight that means she still has three more points to go. She at least has experience with the monster she’s battling: “Thanks to my time in ACT UP, I know how to read trials, understand medical journal articles, and ask questions.”
Seeking relief, she visits her acupuncturist, Jeffrey VanDyke, who in the 1980s worked with AIDS patients who could only hope for the alleviation of their symptoms. There was no hope for them then, no avenue along which to imagine their recovery. Together, Schulman and Van Dyke remember the dead. “We are probably the only people in the world talking about them that day,” she writes. “Some have been dead for thirty years or more. It helps relieve the pressure, this intimate acknowledgment.”1
This kind of personal, granular detail animates Let the Record Show, which is rooted in 17 years of interviews with nearly 200 members of ACT UP New York. The book spotlights the memories of the people who were there on the ground, fighting for treatment and caring for the dying. The book understands political struggle as deriving from a complex network of confused, terrified, and brave people.
Schulman’s intentions are clear: she wants the book to serve as a corrective to the past 20 years of corporate sanitization of AIDS and the activism it provoked—all-star charity singles, blood-red iPods, limited-edition Gap T-shirts, all of which cast AIDS not as an ongoing crisis in the United States with living survivors of its devastation, but as a plague at a far enough remove that it can be assuaged with a few dollars shaved off the price of a consumer product. This wave of corporate AIDS fantasy has even pilfered ACT UP pins to promote prestige television.
Schulman writes that her goal “is not to look back with nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past so that they can do more effective organizing in the present.” The book does not seal off this era of activism; it does not frame the story as having ended. It bores open a channel from the recent past to the living present, extending an invitation for readers to enliven their own striving with the memory of change forced through seemingly impenetrable barriers of power. The text is a salve for learned helplessness, proof that people can work in tandem numerously enough to save each other, even when their fight is charred by conflict, failure, and bottomless grief. As Schulman writes, “We wanted to show, clearly, what we had witnessed in ACT UP: that people from all walks of life, working together, can change the world.”2
At the heart of Schulman’s analysis is a reflection on the incredible ordinariness of ACT UP’s membership. While plenty of people entered the movement when their lives were on the line, fighting for a cure and the recognition of a basic right to keep living, plenty others joined just because they had witnessed injustice and felt compelled to respond. Describing the ACT UP Oral History project that underpins this book, Schulman said that she and Jim Hubbard, her longtime collaborator, wanted to “learn and come to understand what it was specifically that made this small group of individuals rise to the challenge of history. Why them and not others?”3
For those who died fighting for treatment, the “why” is obvious. Rarely are social movements so galvanized by the fundamental, immediate question of life and death, a sisyphean struggle that still could not save the lives of many of ACT UP’s most dedicated members. But in providing rich thumbnail portraits of each person introduced in the book, Schulman cuts against the romanticization that has historically attached itself to ACT UP, most notably to the general membership meetings that became sites for flirting and intrigue. There were, after all, gay people who joined ACT UP in part for the social communion and cruising opportunities it offered. Also among them moved feminist activists who saw overlap in ACT UP’s fight for survival with their own struggles for healthcare and bodily autonomy, as well as straight cis people willing to stand alongside their gay friends and family members. “ACT UP gave a home to people who were sick, people who were not yet sick, and to their friends and people who cared for them,” says activist Jim Eigo. One particularly moving chapter spotlights interviews with Patricia Navarro, mother of artist Ray Navarro and, according to Schulman, “perhaps the only parent of a person with AIDS who stood completely and firmly as an active member of ACT UP.”4
However joyous and dishy a movement led by radical queers may have sometimes been, Schulman does not scrub away the baseline sense of queerphobia and death subtending each movement turn. Let the Record Show can be a necessarily painful read as it enumerates the indifference and cruelty of the larger world. As much as ACT UP’s membership cared about the fight to save their friends and loved ones, most of the country did not much care whether they lived or died.
And Schulman is careful not to compartmentalize these forces in retrospective. Despite the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ people today, queerphobic backlash continues to rear its ugly head, most recently against trans people in a series of draconian state-level bills attempting to prohibit medical care and school sports participation among trans and gender-divergent children.
Schulman documents the failures of ACT UP alongside its triumphs, unflinching in her record of what failed, what opportunities were squandered, what may have been lost. She notes how some visible figures in ACT UP used the work to leverage their own artistic careers, or to garner favor with higher-ups in medicine and government without extending that access to the rest of the group. Fault lines gradually emerged within the organization, which finally split in 1992. The in-fighting documented by Schulman foreshadows many of the clashes within contemporary activist movements.
Declaring a premature end to AIDS was a way of foreclosing the radical potentials unleashed by ACT UP. By the early 1990s, members of ACT UP were turning their attention to universal health care and making it a key movement demand. But at the same time, new drug treatments allowed political and media figures to downplay the impact of AIDS, and thereby the relevance of ACT UP, whose unfinished work then stalled. This is an especially important history to understand as we emerge from another deadly pandemic. What dysfunctions and injustices did COVID-19 expose, which declaring the pandemic’s end may hinder any attempt to address?
With Let the Record Show, Schulman offers the paths that she and her co-conspirators have walked before, the steps that landed and the ones that faltered, in hope that those who bear witness to the work might study the map and keep moving. We’ll need the same kind of impossible determination modeled by ACT UP if we are going to create a survivable world. The way is wide open.
ACT UP demonstration at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., 1990 (Wikimedia Commons).
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