Writing Activist Histories

Sarah Schulman's "Let the Record Show"

My last post in July took inspiration from Sarah Schulman’s new book on AIDS activism, Let the Record Show: A Political History ACT UP New York, following her example of writing activist histories that focus on collaboration among many people rather than a handful of public figures. In today’s post I go back to that book to think a bit more about what it tells us about the relationship between writing and activism.

A few months ago, I heard Schulman give a talk about Let the Record Show. Someone asked her about the process of writing it. Her reply surprised me: she approaches writing the history of activism the way she approaches her novels.

Schulman may have meant many things by this. She surely did not mean that she makes it up as she goes along, or that history is just like fiction. I heard her to mean that she brings her skills as a novelist – attention to descriptive detail, storytelling, character development – to her nonfiction writing. As an activist and writer (but not of fiction), I kept Schulman’s words in mind as I read Let the Record Show, intrigued to learn more about how a novelist uses interviews to construct a history of a grassroots movement – one in which she herself had been actively involved.

Themes of radical politics and queer life weave throughout Schulman’s writing. And there’s a lot of it. She’s published novels and plays as well as nonfiction. As a young journalist she covered the start of the AIDS pandemic in New York City in the early 80s and participated in the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) from its founding in 1987. She was around as the movement grew and achieved amazing victories for people with AIDS with its famously creative direct actions in the late 80s, went through an acrimonious split in the early 90s, and entered the public imagination, by the turn of the millennium presented in increasingly sanitised and simplified ways by a mainstream media addicted to tales that turn on the box-office themes of romance, tragedy and heroism.

Let the Record Show is an attempt to set the record straight.

Yet this is no ego-centred endeavour to tell the writer’s side of the story. Schulman hardly features at all as a historical figure in the book. This is a collective history told through the words of the different individuals involved, as recorded in a series of oral history interviews collected over a twenty-year period. At several points I yearned to know more about her own roles in ACT UP, who she was close to, who she fell out (and possibly in love) with – the book has its fair share of sex and drama (it’s the story of a queer community, after all!). But such personal titbits would be distractions, could invite accusations of bias. Schulman makes no pretence to lofty historical objectivity (ACT UP emerged in an oppressive, homophobic, racist, sexist, economically unequal universe and Schulman was and remains squarely on the side of those struggling against these forces). But her role is to observe and interpret what she saw and has heard others recount. Besides, keeping herself on the side-lines provides an element of mystery throughout the book. I found myself wondering when the author might next pop up in the story, like keeping an eye out for a Hitchcock cameo in one of his movies.

Let the Record Show tells the history of a “successfully transformative struggle” through a myriad of issues and actions (from Puerto Ricans and women with AIDS to die-ins and church occupations) in the words of individual activists – the “dynamic, interlocking parts of a bigger picture”. For Schulman, every person with AIDS, every AIDS activist, is important, and everyone involved in the struggle to “transform the AIDS paradigm” deserves to be represented. Like characters in a novel, these are complex people living complex lives. Some appear several times, but even those who feature briefly are introduced and presented as complete characters with histories before and beyond ACT UP. Representing ACT UP as a grassroots movement made up of hundreds of people is not only an antidote to AIDS histories that prioritise well-known leaders, but also an inspiration for people in the present. In this sense, the book is unapologetically didactic:

The primary purpose of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and of this book, 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. 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.

As I read these words I was reminded of those of another queer New York writer, Samuel Delany, who insists that the “polemical passion” of his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is “forward-looking, not nostalgic, however respectful it is of a past we may find useful for grounding future possibilities”. Returning briefly to a previous post on writing time and activist time, I wonder whether one thing that defines activist writing is precisely this commitment to honouring the past by making it useful for the future.

Schulman’s Introduction to Let the Record Show, titled “How Change is Made”, sets out a series of lessons to be learned from ACT UP’s successes and failures. I found myself nodding vigorously, occasionally screwing up my face and shaking my head, while madly scribbling notes in the margins of these pages. These lessons are far too many to analyse here, but I strongly recommend that anyone involved in collective movements for change read these pages, and discuss them with fellow activists. Whether you consider yourself a writer or not, take the time to make notes about the actions, victories, flops and conflicts in the work you’re involved in now. The cliché about repeating the mistakes we fail to learn from is nowhere clearer than in grassroots movements.

As someone who used to research and teach history for a living, I was intrigued by Schulman’s theory of how change happens. Borrowing from the second-wave US feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, Schulman suggests that we understand historical change in terms of “great leaps” that occur about every forty years. These transformations cannot be forced because they depend on the zeitgeist. The decades between these moments of upheaval are not periods of inaction, but are characterised by less publicly visible activity that lays the groundwork so that when the “zeitgeist moment” (e.g., the AIDS crisis) comes, a mass movement can emerge and carry the momentum forward. This theory is necessarily simplistic, probably US specific and would need fleshing out to be applied more generally. But it provides important scaffolding for reflection on the transgenerational nature of ACT UP:

That ACT UP was a combination of old-time activists with developed analyses and strategic experience, and newly politicized first-time activists with enormous energy for change and openhearted creativity, was central to its success, even if this dynamic was complex, difficult, and sometimes rancorous. Drive and commitment, invention and felicity, a focus on campaigns, and being effective are the components of movements that change the world.

Who, then, were these old and new timers who came together to “shift the AIDS paradigm” in a brief but incredibly intense period between 1987 and 1993? In the book’s preface, Schulman recognises that “most people do not participate in making change”. So who does, and what motivates them? She asks this question early on, and I flipped the pages quickly, as if reading one of Schulman’s detective novels, to find out – not, whodunnit, but why they dunnit. The writer takes some time to build the suspense. But when the answer comes it feels anticlimactic. After conducting countless interviews with former ACT UP members and trying to find some common denominators in their experiences and backgrounds, the story of how one particular woman joined ACT UP provides the answer:

I suddenly realized that what all the ACT UPers had in common was not experiential. That there was no common concrete factor in their lived lives. Rather, it was characterlogical. These were people who were unable to sit out a historic cataclysm. They were driven, by nature, by practice, or by some combination thereof, to defend people in trouble through standing with them. What ACT UPers had in common was that, regardless of demographic, they were a very specific type of person, necessary to historical paradigm shifts. In case of emergency, they were not bystanders.

I’m disappointed because this answer seems both glaringly obvious and frustratingly vague. The idea of character vs. experience is complicated by some of realities of AIDS activism and Schulman’s other observations: many people involved in ACT UP were very ill after developing AIDS; they were literally fighting for their lives. Schulman also recognises that ACT UP built on a range of grassroots traditions in the twentieth-century US – gay liberation, feminism, civil rights and Black liberation, student movements. She cites the Black civil disobedience campaigns of the 1950s and ‘60s as particularly influential for her generation. Schulman herself had been involved in the women’s reproductive rights movement, and this strongly influenced her participation in ACT UP.

At first I thought there was a tension, even a contradiction, between Schulman’s assertion that change is made by small vanguard groups at key moments in history and her insistence on writing a movement history that accounts for all individuals involved. But the more I thought about it, the more I went back to the writing itself, to the urgency of penning activist histories that are usable for the present (a moment so full of cataclysms it is hard to know where to begin) and future. Our characters, in real life as in novels, develop and change. They are shaped by the worlds we live in and by the stories we tell about the world.

As Schulman writes on the opening page of Let the Record Show:

Historicising ACT UP as an organizational nexus of a larger culture of resistance by people with AIDS (PWAs) invites all of us, in the present, to imagine ourselves as potentially effective activists and supporters no matter who we are.

This is why we need activist writers to write activist histories.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.