Rummaging through Rat Bohemia, People in Trouble, and Forgetting Dolores, I am wondering how to confront or forget Sarah Schulman’s magisterial, if also monumental, heavy-weight, literally door-stopping Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Whew! Who can forget those years of what I once termed (in earlier writing on this crisis and epoch) euphoric fear. Schulman’s novels prophesied it.
Schulman’s capolavoro gathers in just under 200 interviews over the past twenty years, every one evoking “what happened back then” when AIDS swept New York City, and more silently across the Plains from Coast to Coast, bringing together men and women already living on the fringes as well as at the center. The fringe/the center? Yes, the rich and the poor. White gay guys just getting by, mostly, people of color on the edge. Women almost forgotten.
Myths? Illness like AIDS is a rich white man’s disease? Thanks to Schulman’s intrepid reportage. Gone.
As Schulman documents, women and people of color were also always edging in. Forcing Chicago, for example, to let women into AIDS services after ACT UP shut down the Loop.
Then, there were those of us – some having left New York and others long in LA, SF, and in between (and back and forth) – re-homosexualizing (to use an odd queer term) AIDS fights with the establishment of Queer Nation as both an idea and a force. Some embracing with ambivalence that term underscoring AIDS was really Gay, as Schulman documents such battles over illness and identity, and feminist reminders that women could also have AIDS as opposed to claims that AIDS was just a gay male disease.
No need to mention hundreds of names here. The voluminous index of topics and interviews reveal, if you flip about, all the crises and even the hypocrisy and betrayal amidst companionship and camaraderie that defined personal and institutional relations, especially over the fight of AZT. Not to mention alternative therapies like “bitter melon enemas.” Why not give it a try?
You want personalities? Look up Maxine Wolfe. Go from there. David Wojnarowicz. The list is endless. ACT UP was a locus of weekly ego output and listening humility. Each soul played a part in the heroic action and gutsy hubris.
Read this book and yell and cry, not least for Schulman’s courage in putting this all together over many years while having herself faced a serious personal illness, overlapping with the AIDS story she tells, some fallen comrades even pictured in photos of their open-funeral caskets.
This is a big book in more ways than one, asking me – at least – how do I confront death? Defiance? Resignation? Anger? Acceptance?
Or wonder.
xxx
4th of July
Independence Day In 1935, amidst the Fascist rise in Europe, Sinclair Lewis, half-facetiously, wrote It Can’t Happen Here. We all know what then happened, there. But what can happen here, now?
And by the way: It did happen here. See: Steven Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles.
Why that Catastrophe/Holocaust there and then? Not now/Here? Is Fascism locked into just one past place or time? I’m an historian of Modern Europe and am loath to splurge forward from the past into the present.
But, here goes. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them explain how — as Hannah Arendt put it in The Banality of Evil, bad things become normal.
We go about our business and the next day our neighbor is gone. Who knew? She was just hanging out the wash or on her way to Trader Joe’s.
Oh, and the gardener is missing, hasn’t shown up. So what? He’s probably stuck in traffic on the 405. Or maybe got shot by a scared guy, robbed at a gas station, running around crazy with guns people are buying of fear.
Nowhere to go; nowhere to hide: tents on edge of Veterans Hospital along San Vicente? So what? People take care of themselves. The “state” and its “services” collapsing? Big Deal.
Once upon-a-time teenage uncles were sent off to “just wars” against Nazis in racist, anti-semitic states ostensibly committed to coming home to a fake multi-racial social safety net fooling the thousands,, returning as heroes who wished no glory, just peace of mind, having killed those bastards, some of whom were distant German and Italian cousins.
Some returned to become “family men” with lots of kids who were siblings and cousins in the Great American Society of the 50s/60s and beyond, growing up to be who we all benefitted from, housing to college. GI Bill of Rights and beyond like nothing before or since.
Others were quasi-closeted out gay men relieved of their secret by the battlefield brotherhood of war, as Alan Berube has shown in Coming Out Under Fire.
Some of us were later Conscientious Objectors to Vietnam, and the rest is history into Central America and beyond where the migration over puentos cannot be stopped. Still, there are no heroes, just witnesses.