Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993: A Conversation with Sarah Schulman (VIDEO)
In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it tookon the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. For over two decades, Sarah Schulman has worked to document and preserve this history, through the ACT UP Oral History Project, the documentary United in Anger, and most recently her book Let the Record Show (forthcoming from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux this May)—a major exploration and reassessment of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture, based on over two hundred interviews. Please join us for a conversation with Schulman about the history of HIV/AIDS activism, the urgency of public history, and the lessons of ACT UP and the ACT UP Oral History Project for activists and scholars today, moderated by Stephen Vider, director of the Cornell Public History Initiative. Watch the recording below.
Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT ExperimentalFilm and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Sponsored by the Cornell Public History Initiative, the Department of History, and LGBT Studies, with the support of Engaged Cornell.