Sarah Schulman has always had to fight for her ideas. Sometimes this meant literally taking to the streets during her years working with the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the late ’80s and early ’90s. More recently, it meant a years-long search for a publisher willing to work with her.
“I couldn’t get this book published for 10 years,” Schulman told Teen Vogue referring to her book The Gentrification of the Mind, which itself recently marked 10 years since it was first published. “It finally came out,” she continued, “and this book has had an incredible life. People are reading it, it’s selling more now than it did when it was first published in 2012, and it’s being cited all over the place.”
Like her work with ACT UP, The Gentrification of the Mind can be seen as an act of protest against the erasure of the AIDS crisis and the people who fought to end it. It can also be seen as an act of defiance against the downstream effects that Schulman links to this act of forgetting: a wave of gentrification that homogenized New York City, mainstream gay politics focused on marriage and assimilation, and a literary scene swallowed up by MFA programs. Reading it today, many of the claims carry new weight: The importance of authentic queer stories seems readily apparent in a moment when the right is fighting to remove these texts from libraries and shut down drag story hours.
Teen Vogue caught up with Schulman to discuss the impact of this book, how queer voices are silenced, and the state of gentrification today.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
*Teen Vogue: T*he Gentrification of the Mind came out 10 years ago. What has changed since then?
Sarah Schulman: When I finished my book, New York was at early-stage gentrification, so we were seeing interracial neighborhoods and cross-class neighborhoods being gentrified by private businesses that were aimed at the gentrification class, the people who grew up in the suburbs and were reentering the city.
That is really not what gentrification is anymore because those people were driven out of their businesses and replaced by chains. So there are a lot of banks, a lot of CVSs, Dunkin' Donuts, these types of places, and then there are things that look like mom-and-pop stores, but they’re actually also chains.
Now, how does that affect the culture? Well, it’s complex because everything is changing and it’s very hard to know where we are right now. We have a young generation that’s very pro-union and has been involved successfully in challenging some franchises. They’re not like the young people I was writing about, who were completely bought off by certain promises. The system is dysfunctional now.
And how does this affect queer people? It really depends on where you live right now. You can be a totally assimilated, into-the-power-structure gay. You can be a completely marginalized queer person who’s part of other marginalized communities, like immigrants… It’s not homogenous.
TV: One of the issues the book points to is the challenge of queer intergenerational connection. Could you say more about that?
SS: It’s complex because my generation comes from illegality, no representation, and a mass death experience. Our realities are not those things now. Of course, we have an emotional memory of those things and that affects how we understand things. Younger people haven’t experienced those things. But they may.
I was just talking with somebody the other day about this. Today, you can be a lesbian woman of color who has an MFA from a very prestigious school, who can write a coming-of-age novel and get the best agent in New York, get published by the best publisher, and get top-of-the-line awards from the industry, and a few years ago that was not possible. But what’s weird is that there’s no look back at all the other works that paved the way for that moment that were discredited or marginalized. If people looked back and said, “Wow, now we see that this work is great. Why don’t we go back to all the people who were doing this before, who we treated like garbage, and reevaluate them,” then they would be in trouble. Because the people who they did reward, all those now-irrelevant white men who dominated American literature for so many years, they would have to be repositioned. And then what does that say about gatekeepers?
So, they kind of pretend like none of that ever happened, and this thing just came up because the apparatus is so kind and inclusive. That is kind of a crisis of meaning, even though it hasn’t been articulated.
TV: What should young queer people who are interested in connecting with that history be looking for?
SS: Younger people need to read the history of their literature. People need to know where they came from and why their moment is possible. That it’s not simply because they’re good or great. Overpraise is a strange poison. It separates you from your own history and who built your context for you. So, whoever is getting success, and getting access, and getting money on that level, they need to look back.
TV: You have a lot to say about MFA programs in Gentrification.
SS: Well, they're clearly destructive to the literature at large because of the selection process, streamlining, debt incursion, and mostly collective influences for an art form that depends on individually acquired influences and aesthetics. And you can tell by reading. You get the really interesting writers who have stories to tell that are exciting. And often, their books are formulaic because they went through a certain kind of MFA program. But unfortunately, today, if you're not in that system, and you're not rich and connected, you can't get in, which is tragic.
Having an MFA is not only essential for getting into the apparatus, but it is required for employment. I just started a job at Northwestern. I'm in an MFA/MA dual-degree program where every student is fully funded for three years and every student gets a $35,000-a-year stipend. And I'm trying to understand how to work with this consciously, so it isn't a repetition of the standing dilemmas.
TV: You write in the book about still steering talented students toward these programs for the sake of access. But what do you say to young people who are similarly skeptical and would rather make art outside of those institutions?
SS: The class divisions in our country make these institutions of access part of the problem. And yet they exist. So, we are caught between trying to build paths to expression that are not controlled by corporations, while at the same time trying to gain access to resources for people whose stories and perspectives and formal inventions are being excluded. It is a dirty business because exclusively bypassing the machine just leaves it to the people with whom it is the most comfortable.
TV: In Gentrification and in your latest book, Let the Record Show, you point out that there’s been no national reckoning with the grief from the AIDS crisis and it kind of feels like we’re heading toward something similar with the COVID pandemic. Do you see this happening again?
SS: It's really different. A lot of the gay men who died of AIDS were people who were thrown out of their families, who were thrown out of their small towns, and who were dependent on other queer people to take care of them because society didn't care what happened to them. And in many ways, their deaths have been forgotten because people wanted to forget them.
Both of these cataclysms reveal racial and economic inequality at the heart of our society and massive mismanagement by the government and media. Both have left large numbers of forgotten and nameless dead. And both have been the source of outlandish conspiracy theories. But the main difference is that COVID at its peak was a collective public experience and AIDS at its epicenter was a private nightmare. Our goal was to force AIDS into public discourse. They both impact people invisibly now. In the case of AIDS, it is the underclass and people with no health care who die of AIDS in America. And with COVID, [the impact is on] people who are immunocompromised, have ongoing, Long COVID, and other social conditions that make resistance and survival impossible.
TV: If you had an anti-gentrification platform, dealing with the material, cultural, and psychological implications of gentrification, what’s on that list?
SS: Well, we need huge numbers of affordable housing units. That’s the absolute top thing because people can’t go forward in their lives if they don’t have a home. It’s just basic. We need to tax rich people. We can’t do anything until we tax rich people. We have to go back to the pre-Reagan tax percentages, at least. And then with that money, we need free public transportation. The difference between public education and private education is detrimental to this country and we need a bridge between these elite bubbles and this crazy chaos of public education. We don’t have a public sphere that’s functional.
So transport, housing, education, and health care. All of these things need to be publicly funded priorities. And commercial rent control. And people should be fined for vacancies and they should be fined for buying to flip rather than buying to live. We need to restructure the rewards system, so it benefits the public sphere and not the private sector. All those things are completely doable. It’s just about political will.
TV: And could you explain how those things connect to the long-term impacts of gentrification?
SS: Gentrification is a replacement process that produces homogenization, and the contrary is difference. What makes urban life great is when cities have difference. And this is what produces new ideas for the world, new art ideas, new political ideas. So, if we can break down this elite apparatus of selection and go back to creating a public sphere that actually serves the population, we will get art that reflects more difference and people won’t be forced into these homogeneous zones of overpraise and commodification where we currently are.
TV: Anything you want to add before we go?
SS: Let me just say when you have an idea that’s ahead, they think it’s wrong because there’s confusion between familiarity and quality. So, if it’s familiar they think it’s good because entertainment tells us what we already know and art expands what we know. I finally got this book to the University of California Press, and then it was held up for a number of years because one of the reviewers objected to a chapter on Palestine that I ultimately had to take out. And that became its own book, which is called Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. So it’s like, the gatekeepers are there to stop the new ideas. So if you really believe in your work and you think you’ve got a new idea, you have to fight for it.
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