Review: Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show
Reviewed by James Barney
The AIDS crisis peaked in New York City from 1987 to 1993. In those six years, thousands of HIV-positive men and women died of opportunistic infections from weakened immune systems. While the disease has become linked to gay white men in the public imagination, women, people of color, and intravenous drug users made up the majority of people with AIDS (“PWAs”) in New York City. Anger over the slow response by government and drug companies, as well as lack of the public’s disinterest, prompted many advocates to form groups that sought to raise awareness and promote research into effective treatments for HIV-related conditions. The playwright Sarah Schulman, one such activist and historian, focuses her attention on the largest group, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (“ACT UP”), and its activities during this period.
Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993
By Sarah Schulman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
736 pages
Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993 provides an insider’s view of the crisis. The book is both a labor of love and the product of thousands of hours of work: nearly 200 interviews, and extensive archival research. In the tome, she weaves personal experience and large cuts of interviews that are now in ACT UP’s Oral History Project, which she and her colleague Jim Hubbard conducted from 2001 to 2018. It is admittedly a heart-breaking read. ACT UP used aggressive and controversial tactics born out of anger, desperation, death, dying, and suffering of thousands of men and women from different backgrounds. By incorporating the authentic and unfiltered voices of the activists, she captures the anger, heartbreak, and desperation of the group composed of PWAs and their allies like Schulman, who fought against the indifference of wider society.
Schulman takes issue with and effectively debunks several narratives associated with the crisis that have found their way into mainstream popular culture, including the trope of the “helpless AIDS victim” and the prominence of gay white men in depictions of activism. She insists that people living with AIDS were more than just “victims,” and that ACT UP, composed of thousands of men and women, did not have a single leader. Women and people of color played central roles in the organization. Shulman makes a compelling case that media created a distorted picture of the group by focusing on high-profile and controversial demonstrations and a handful of white gay males, ignoring the diversity of both the group’s activities and composition. In contrast, she paints a more complicated portrait detailing how the group, composed of thousands of activists from all corners of New York City’s society, effectively utilized various methods. These methods included high-profile public demonstrations to raise awareness of the crisis, behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts to influence government officials and drug companies, and the use of art and political propaganda to influence the public discourse about AIDS. The group also provided social services to PWAs, like a needle exchange program, access to drugs, comfort of the sick and dying, and of course a social network for the city’s most marginalized communities.
While the book contains a timeline of events and ACT UP activities in the appendix, Schulman organizes Let The Record Show in a non-chronological manner, dividing her work into four thematic “books.” These focus on the origins and nature of the organization, the use of art to effectuate change, the group’s advocacy related to drug testing and treatments, and political acts of desperation in the early 1990s. The last “book” includes the group’s Storming the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the public funerals during the group’s later years, as well as an examination of its eventual schism in 1993.
Schulman does her best work when she describes the origins and nature of the group and how the group’s methods and worldview were, in part, influenced by racial feminism as well as the reproductive rights movement. By her account, the group sought at its core to draw attention to the AIDS crisis and provide PWAs with access to experimental treatments and drugs. Schulman details how ACT UP’s advocacy derived from the notion that PWAs should have complete autonomy over their bodies, a belief shared with many in the reproductive rights movement. Schulman also persuasively analyzes the influence of women and people of color, including black and Hispanic New Yorkers, often ignored by the mainstream narrative of the group. She thus paints a more complex picture of the group’s composition and ideology than that commonly presented by mass media. She also effectively argues that the group’s activism benefited women with AIDS because the group got the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change its definition, which helped thousands get access to much-needed treatment.
In the last chapters of the book, Schulman details a growing divide between the grassroots branch of the group, which favored high-profile demonstrations, and the smaller cadre of activists that wanted to professionalize the organization by focusing on lobbying government and drug-makers behind the scenes. While the two wings grew further apart in the early 1990s, playing a role in ACT UP’s schism in 1993, in Schulman’s view the group’s earlier successes derived from its ability to combine both approaches and embrace diversity. While Schulman ends her narrative in 1993, the group also did not vanish. Instead, it split into several organizations, diverting this energy into various approaches to continue the fight.
The book is a must-read for anyone who wants insight into AIDS activism in New York City. But it is not without flaws. Schulman, at times, lacks the objectivity of an outsider. She provides a first-hand account of the heartfelt emotions of an activist who witnessed the death and dying of comrades and friends and was deeply involved in the fight to shed light on a disease that impacted parts of the city population many New Yorkers ignored. However, sometimes an outside perspective is needed to assess a group’s accomplishments. For example, Schulman spends little time evaluating the effectiveness of some of ACT UP’s most provocative actions, like the Stop the Church demonstration in December 1989, where thousands of AIDS activists protested outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and several protesters disrupted a mass. Arguably the group’s lack of coherency and provocativeness did more harm than good at times, at least in the short term. Its actions alienated many in the broader society, making it difficult for sympathetic politicians like Mayor David Dinkins (1990-93) to respond to the group’s politically unpopular demands. Schulman, who supported a grassroots approach and is a harsh critic of the drug companies, may also downplay the fact that the drug companies had a monetary incentive to find treatments for HIV-related diseases. This factor, rather than activism, played a significant role in the eventual medical breakthroughs of the 1990s. Finally, at times Schulman paints a simplistic view of broader society, dismissing it out-of-hand as homophobic, fearful, and apathetic. This may provide readers with ACT UP’s perspective, and it probably was the case that mainstream views on AIDS / HIV were driven by these emotions, in part. But to understand the effectiveness of ACT UP’s activism, one must explore the group’s relationship with broader society, and this type of more nuanced analysis is at times absent from this work.
Nonetheless, Let the Record Show provides the reader with an invaluable insider’s perspective into the movement, plus a treasure-trove of primary sources, for more research on the subject Future historians will surely mine this book and the ACT UP Oral History Project interviews as necessary starting points to explore the collection of affinity and splinter groups mentioned herein. Moreover, the book’s interviews provide the reader with insight into an era that shaped the modern LGBT experience in many ways. Many AIDS activists (like Larry Kramer, one of the founders of ACT UP who survived the plague) are passing away. This book serves as both a celebration of their struggle as well as a reminder of the precariousness of the community during those years. For these reasons, and many more, the book is undoubtedly to emerge as one of the seminal texts on AIDS activism and the history of the LGBT community in New York City during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
James Barney is a Professor of Legal Studies at American Public University System as well as a PhD candidate in history at The University of Memphis, where he is writing his dissertation on the politics of New York City during the Dinkins era.