Sarah Schulman

Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at College of Staten Island (CSI) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award.

Schulman was born on July 28, 1958 in New York City. She attended Hunter College High School, and attended the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1978 but did not graduate. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Empire State College.

Schulman published her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story in 1984, which was followed by Girls, Visions and Everything in 1986 - a cult classic that has never gone out of print.

Schulman's third novel, After Delores, received a positive review in the New York Times, was translated into eight languages, and was awarded an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award in 1989.Empathy, a highly experimental work, appeared in 1992.Her novel Rat Bohemia (1995) received a full page rave review in the New York Times from Edmund White, and was named one of the 100 best LGBT books by the Publishing Triangle.

Subsequent novels included Shimmer, The Child, and the Mere Future.The Cosmopolitans was named one of the best American novels of 2016 by Publishers Weekly.In 2018 she published Maggie Terry, a return to and comment on the lesbian detective novel, addressing the emotions of life under Trump.

Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998), which won the Stonewall Book Award, argues that significant plot elements of the successful 1996 musical Rent were lifted from her 1990 novel, People in Trouble. The heterosexual plot of Rent is based on the opera La Bohème, while the gay plot is similar to the plot of Schulman's novel.Schulman never sued, but analyzed in Stagestruck the way the musical depicted AIDS and gay people, in contrast to work made by those communities that same year.

In 2009, The New Press published Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In September 2013, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, was published by the University of California Press. Slate called The Gentrification of the Mind one of the 10 Best Most Unknown Books and GalleyCat called it one of the Best Unrecognized Books of the year. It was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Israel/Palestine and the Queer International was published by Duke University Press in 2012, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary award. Her 2018 Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair was published by the Canadian Arsenal Pulp Press, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, won a Publishing Triangle Award, and was widely discussed and read.

Schulman was named one of Publisher Weekly's 60 Most Underrated Writers.

In 2018, the Second edition of her 1994 collection MY AMERICAN HISTORY: Lesbian/Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years was issued including new material by Urvashi Vaid, Stephen Thrasher, and Alison Bechdel.

Let The Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) will be published by FSG in 2021, and was a finalist for the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for Nonfiction Works-In-Progress.

Schulman's activism began in her childhood when she protested the Vietnam War with her mother. Later, Schulman was active in the Women's Union while a student at the University of Chicago from 1976–1978. From 1979–1982, Schulman was a member of The Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and participated in an early direct action protest in which she and five others (called The Women's Liberation Zap Action Brigade) disrupted an anti-abortion hearing in Congress. She was an active member of ACT UP, The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power from 1987–1992, attending actions at the FDA, NIH, Stop The Church, and was arrested once when ACT UP occupied Grand Central Station protesting the First Gulf War.

In 1987, Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard co-founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now called MIX and in its thirtieth.

In 1992, Schulman and five other women co-founded Lesbian Avengers, a direct action organization. On her 1992 book tour for Empathy, Schulman visited gay bookstores in the South to start chapters. The organization's high points included founding The Dyke March, and sending groups of young organizers to Maine and Idaho to assist local fights against anti-gay ballot initiatives.

Since 2001, Schulman and Jim Hubbard have been creating the ACT UP Oral History Project, interviewing 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years. They produced a feature documentary, [ Gallery in the fall of 2010. Harvard purchased the archive for their collection, while maintaining free access, and the funds were used to produce United in Anger.

In 2009, Schulman declined an invitation to Tel Aviv University in support of Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. She is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and is faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine at the College of Staten Island.

Schulman was US Coordinator of the campaign to free Tarek Loubani and John Greyson from prison in Cairo. Working with Tim McCaskell, Stephen Andrews, Justin Podur, Cecilia Greyson, Mohammed Loubani, Naomi Klein and Dan Malloy in Canada, Matias Viegener in Los Angeles and Ian Iqbal Rashid in Britain, and with thousands of volunteers around the world, the campaign was able to rescue the Canadian prisoners in 50 days, an extraordinarily rapid release time for international political prisoners.

In 2016, Schulman was faculty for Lambda Literary Foundation Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices at University of Southern California. She selected artist Nahshon Dion Anderson and Clayton Delery along with nine other LGBT writers for a one-week intensive immersion course in nonfiction. For two years Sarah then mentored Nahshon Anderson providing critical feedback on her 300-page memoir Shooting Range.And in 2018, Schulman curated First Mondays at Performance Space where transgender writers Torrey Dorra, Jeanne Thornton and Nahshon read excerpts of their literature to publishing professionals .

In 2017, she joined the advisory board of Claudia Rankine's Racial Imaginary Institute.

From 1979-1994 she had 15 plays produced in the context of the avant garde "Downtown Arts Movement" based in New York City's East Village. Venues included The University of the Streets, PS 122, La Mama, King Tut Wah-Wah Hut, The Pyramid Club, 8BC, Franklin Furnace, The Kitchen, Ela Troyano and Uzi Parness' Club Chandelier, Here, the Performing Garage, and others. Schulman was admitted into the Sundance Theater Lab in 2001 with the play Carson McCullers. The workshop starred Angelina Phillips and Bill Camp and was directed by Craig Lucas. The play had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2002, directed by Marion McClinton and starring Jenny Bacon. Carson McCullers has been published by Playscripts Inc. This was followed by a commission from South Coast Repertory for which she wrote two plays: Made in Korea, based on the memoirs of Mi Ok Bruining, and Mercy. Both plays were presented in several readings and workshops.

In 2005, Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, produced Manic Flight Reaction. Director Trip Cullman developed the work at New York Stage and Film, and it opened at Playwrights that winter, starring Deirdre O'Connell with Molly Price, Jessica Collins, Austin Lysy, Michael Esper and Angel Desai.

Schulman secured the rights to write an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story, which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2007, directed by Jiri Ziska. It later had a New York reading at New York Theater Workshop, directed by Jo Bonney.

In 2018 her play Between Covers was included in New Works at The Goodman Theater in Chicago, her play ROE Versus WADE had a reading at New York Theater Workshop and she was commissioned by BMG and the Manchester Factory to write the book for The Snow Queen, a theatrical work highlighting the music of Marianne Faithfull.

In fall 2009, Schulman and Cheryl Dunye wrote the screenplay for Dunye's film The Owls, starring Guinevere Turner, Lisa Gornick, Cheryl Dunye, and V.S. Brodie. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in January 2010. She and Dunye then wrote an X-rated film Mommy Is Coming, which was produced in Germany by Jürgen Brüning and selected for the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival.

She is co-producer with Jim Hubbard of his feature-length documentary UNITED IN ANGER: A History of ACT UP which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art on the opening night of Documentary Fortnight. The film's international premiere was in Ramallah, Palestine.

Schulman played filmmaker Shirley Clarke to Jack Waters' Jason Holliday in Stephen Winter's response to Clarke's 1967 Portrait of Jason, Jason and Shirley which premiered at BAMcinemaFest in June 2015 and played for a week at The Museum of Modern Art in October, 2015.

Novels

• Maggie Terry (2018)
• The Cosmopolitans (2016)
• The Mere Future (2009)
• The Child (2007)
• Shimmer (1998)
• Collected Early Novels of Sarah Schulman (1998)
• Rat Bohemia (1995) - translated into Portuguese (Boêmia dos Ratos)
• Empathy (1992)
• People in Trouble (1990)
• After Delores (1988)
• Girls, Visions and Everything (1986)
• The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984)

Nonfiction

• Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair (2016)
• Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012)
• The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012)
• Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009)
• Stagetruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998)
• My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years (1994) second edition (2018)
• Let The Record Show: ACT UP and The Enduring Experience of AIDS (2021) Farrar, Strauss, Giroux

Plays

• Published:
  • Mercy (2009) published in a shared volume with Robert Gluck by Belladonna
  • Carson McCullers (2003) (published by Playscritpts Inc., 2006)
• Produced:
  • Enemies, A Love Story (adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer) (Wilma Theater, 2007)
  • Carson McCullers (Playwrights Horizons, 2005)
  • Manic Flight Reaction (Playwrights Horizons, 2005)

Films

• Jason and Shirley (directed by Steven Winter, 2015)
• United In Anger: A History of ACT UP (co-producer, directed by Jim Hubbard, 2012)
• Mommy Is Coming (directed by Cheryl Dunye, 2011)
• The Owls (directed by Cheryl Dunye, 2009)

• Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwrighting, 2001
• Fulbright for Judaic Studies
• 2 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Fiction
• a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting
• a Kessler Prize for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies [2]
• a Revson Fellowship
• a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University
• 9 residencies at the MacDowell Colony
• 5 residencies at Yaddo
• Two-time honoree for the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards
• a Brown Foundation/Houston Arts Museum Fellowship at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes
• a Fellowship at The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
• 2 Publishing Triangle Awards (Fiction and Nonfiction)
• 2018 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement