The Early Days of ACT-UP, and Its Lessons for Today’s Activists
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2021
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
Sarah Schulman is a novelist and playwright as well as a well-known activist and documentarian. She was an early member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and, for twenty years, she and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard have run the ACT UP Oral History Project, interviewing surviving members of the group. Out of that work comes a new history of ACT UP in its early days, “Let the Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York, 1987-93.” Schulman talks with David Remnick about the group’s successes, its lessons for young activists, and also its greatest failing. “We were able to defeat H.I.V.,” she said. “But we couldn’t defeat capitalism. And we still don’t have a workable health-care system in this country.”
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| 1:10.9 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden on today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks to the writer and |
| 1:17.5 | activist Sarah Shulman about her new book, Let the Record Show, a political history of Act Up, New York. |
| 1:25.5 | They discussed how Act Up changed the perception of queer people in media and the course |
| 1:31.1 | of the American AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s. |
| 1:37.4 | Sarah Shulman is a writer, the author of 10 or more novels. |
| 1:40.9 | But she's better known as an activist. |
| 1:43.4 | She fought for reproductive rights and gay rights, |
| 1:45.5 | and she was a member of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. For 20 years, Sarah |
| 1:51.9 | Schulman has run the Act Up Oral History Project, along with Jim Hubbard, and they've interviewed |
| 1:56.6 | surviving members of the group. And out of that work, she's written a history of ACT-Up in its early |
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