Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Early life and education
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 in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Literary career
Schulman published her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, in 1984, which was followed by Girls, Visions and Everything in 1986 — which is considered important among lesbian subcultures.
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 appeared in 1992. The novelist Edmund White reviewed her next novel, Rat Bohemia (1995), for the New York Times, and it was named one of the 100 best LGBT books by The Publishing Triangle.
Subsequent novels include Shimmer (1998), The Child (2007), and The Mere Future (2009). The Cosmopolitans (2016) 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 President Donald 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 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 2016 book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and won a Judy Grahn Award by the Publishing Triangle.
Schulman was named one of Publishers Weeklys 60 Most Underrated Writers.
In 2018, the second edition of her 1994 collection My American History: Lesbian and 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 New York (ACT UP, New York 1987–1993) was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021, and was a finalist for both the 2019 and 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Works-In-Progress and for the 2022 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. It won a special award from the Publishing Triangle, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, and was awarded a prize by the National Organization of LGBT Journalists. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. Cleveland Review of Books said it combines "acute political and social analysis with in-depth portraits of human beings."
Activism
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 to 1978. From 1979 to 1982, Schulman was a member of the 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 from 1987 to 1992, attending actions at the FDA, NIH, Stop the Church, and was arrested when ACT UP occupied Grand Central Station protesting the First Gulf War.