Hanging with Sarah Schulman at MoRUS

Gay Liberation Front veteran Bob Kohler gave me her email back in 2000 when I was starting to conduct interviews for our book From ACT UP to the WTO. 

I had never met her before but Sarah got right back to me, agreeing to sit for an interview in 2001, which would later go in the anthology.  Her interview on the story of links between the reproductive rights movement, ACT UP, and the Lesbian Avengers would be a highlight of the book.  This narrative traced a story of activism from the great social movements of our time – Women’s and Gay Liberation, Anti-War and the AIDS – through a single trajectory of activism.  

In the years to follow, I’d run into Schulman at events, such as the Gay Community News Thirtieth Anniversary Event at the Center, where we talked about David Feinberg or reading her stories about the East Village, AIDS activism, lesbians, and the uses of oral history.  When I moved back to New York, she helped with advise about teaching at CUNY. 

 Riding home from an AIDS civil disobedience in Washington, I read People in Trouble, her homage to the early days of ACT UP, reflecting on how much the world had changed and so had our activism.

When my friend Eric Rofes arrived in town he wanted to go to Veselka, a scene in one of Sarah’s novels.  So we did. 

Other years, we talked about oral history over emails. 

And even met up for drinks where we talked about the Carson McCluers, the heavy drinking writer from my mother’s home town of Columbus GA.  My godfather, from Columbus corresponded with her for a while, about the family. 

Carson McCluers

My  Dad and I read Girls, Visions and Everything, her novel about life in the East Village.  The story highlights themes of gentrification which would later find their way into her seminal work: the Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.  

“First they destroy our culture then they collect our artifacts,” explained Schulman last Tuesday, speaking of the Fales collections at NYU. “Kindov like the Native Americans…”

Watching the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space grow over the last year, I have wanted to get Schulman, and others with queerer stories to come speak about her life here.  And finally she agreed.

Her talk was scheduled for October the 8^th at 7:30 at MoRUS.  I would moderate, but only after completing my evening class, losing the questions on the way over, watching my tape player die, and trying to make it to the Lower East Side from Brooklyn in fifteen minutes on my bike, which actually worked. In between lights I scratched questions on a piece of paper, zooming over the Manhattan bridge through the Bowery to the Village. 

Themes of the event would very but overall, I planned to ask: Does social change come from institutions or from grass roots movements? And what of the legacies of AIDS, housing, and gardens activism in New York’s East Village? Did the city create these changes or did activists? And what is the legacy of these struggles? Will the efforts of regular people be lost to the gentrification of the imagination or can regular New Yorkers create their own history and institutions?  I revised and revised the questions for the event as I rode to the event.  Schulman had asked that I not send the questions before the event so we could keep it a surprise.

Arriving at MoRUS on Ave C, the space was teeming with people.

Talk at MoRUS. Photo by MoRUS

Sarah said lets get started so we did.

One of the volunteers, Grace Dowd, introduced us. 

WE ARE A NON-PROFIT, ALL-VOLUNTEER-STAFFED MUSEUM DEDICATED TO PRESERVING, CELEBRATING AND PROMOTING THE RADICAL HISTORY OF GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM IN THE EAST VILLAGE.  GOOD EVENING AND WELCOME TO MORUS.

COMMUNITY GARDENS, RECYCLING AND BIKE RIDING ARE ALL EXAMPLES OF SUSTAINABLE, SOCIAL CHANGES THAT RESULTED FROM EAST VILLAGE ACTIVISM.  WE ARE PROUD TO OFFER EXHIBITS, WALKING TOURS AND PROGRAMS TO EDUCATE THE PUBLIC ABOUT THE EVENTS, PLACES AND PEOPLE THAT SHAPE THE DISTINCT CHARACTER OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE.

PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SIGN OUR EMAIL LIST TO RECEIVE UPDATES ON OUR EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES, AND WE ALWAYS WELCOME NEW VOLUNTEERS.  ALSO FEEL FREE TO MAKE A DONATION; YOUR GENEROSITY HELPS US BRING EVENTS LIKE THIS TO THIS COMMUNITY.

TONIGHT WE ARE HONORED TO PRESENT,  “ON THE EAST VILLAGE, STREET ACTIVISM AND THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND,” A DISCUSSION BETWEEN BEN SHEPARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HUMAN SERVICE AT NEW YORK SCHOOL OF TECHNOLOGY AND SARAH SCHULMAN, THE AUTHOR OF 16 BOOKS -- MOST RECENTLY, “THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: WITNESS TO A LOST IMAGINATION,"  WHICH WE HAVE AVAILABLE FOR SALE TONIGHT.

A DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, COLLEGE OF STATEN ISLAND, AND A MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY BOARD OF JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE, SARAH IS ALSO CO-PRODUCER WITH JIM HUBBARD OF THE DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM, “UNITED IN ANGER: A HISTORY OF ACT UP,”   WHICH WILL BE SCREENED IN MOSCOW AT THE END OF THIS MONTH.  PLEASE JOIN ME IN WELCOMING  BEN SHEPARD AND SARAH SCHULMAN.

I starting by thanking Schulman for all her support with my book projects, oral histories over the years.  Tell us about your life here and how the neighborhood has changed.  What was the first activism you saw here… and how did it impact the neighborhood and the city?

Schulman recalled her decades living in the East Village, the stories, the radical history.  And its current impacts.  This was once one of the radical neighborhoods in America.  Today bit of that remain, noted Schulman, who was born on 10th Street in 1958 and now lives on 9th Street.  

All reification is forgetting Herbert Marcuse famously wrote in the Aesthetic Dimension.  So we talked about how her activism is remembered.   Schulman recalled her impetus to create the ACT UP oral history project.  “By 2001, ACT UP had been all but forgotten,” she explained.  So she hoped would help a new generation recall the work of the seminal group, as well as build on it. 

“Much of the activist perspective on this history is being whitewashed away,” argued Bill ‘Times Up!’, echoing your point from the Gentrification of the Mind. Changes don't just happen, people make them happen. AIDS drugs were not released because the US government became nice. AIDS activists forced them to do the right thing. Similarly, gardens are not preserved because the city likes them. They are here because people fought for them.

“There is a scene in my novel Girls, Visions and Everything about the original garden plot on 7^th and B, which was round.  But then Green Thumb came in and said it had to be square,” explained Schulman.  She went on to tell a story about Adam Purple and the people’s phone  book.  “It only takes a few people to create real change.  We only need a critical mass.”

Adam Purple and his garden of eden. 

Hitting the core of the evening’s conversation, as Schulman described the ways some of her older neighbors talked to each other.  The newer residents had stopped saying hello, she lamented. "What has changed here
is that people don't look you in the eye and people don't talk to you," she explained.
  These were not the folks putting out supplies, or distributing free food after Sandy, or organizing squats or defending gardens. This was done by people who had been here, who planned to stay in the East Village.   Yet, communities need people to say hello.  They need people to greet each other, to connect.  A new activism might seek to cultivate such awareness, Schulman suggested.

Thinking about gentrification, I recalled Matt Bernstein Sycamore story about coming back to town to and visiting Stuyvescent Park where his favorite writer David Wanajovic used to go and finding the space where he used to cruise locked up.  Yet it wasn’t just the space that was locked up, so were the dreams of connection which had once existed there.  “ Now the gates are always locked, after polite hours when everything used to start. No one even walks around the perimeter, searching. Maybe it's not as blatant as a gleaming white tower on Rivington, but gazing in sometimes it's hard just to remember, the way gentrification even robs you of imagination.”

Schulman followed noting that some people say that today, now that gay men have grinder they do not know how to cruise anymore. But there is more to that, urbanity is based on a mix of people, not a privatized model of living, which separates people and ideas.  With gentrification, people do not look you in the eye.  And something of that mix is lost.

And what happens when the creative minds, the best minds are disappearing as result of the carnage?  I chimed in. “We’ve lost the brightest most creative minds to this thing,” you explained to me in our interview back in 2001 for From ACT UP to the WTO.  “People that had risky personalities were more likely to die than people who didn’t,” explained Schulman.. “And those people who had risky personalities were the ones who [invented] new ideas that [moved] the whole world forward.” 

So, lets talk about the impact of AIDS for a minute, Schulman continued.  80,000 people have died of AIDS in New York City.   3,000 people died at 9/11.  And they read their names every year.  Yet, there is no monument for those lost to AIDS.  The AIDS memorial quilt is in a vault somewhere.   When these folks died, their apartments opened up at $3000 a month, furthering the gentrification of New York’s neighborhoods.  Newer residents moved in, with less ties.  And an ideology of individualism transformed urban space.

Trees as witness to lost lost history and lots of riots throughout the years.
Photos by Famousankles and Loren Bliss.

From Wigstalk to 1988 riots, if the majestic trees  in Tompkins Square Park could talk, I often what would they tell us?  What might they recall, I asked.

Schulman nodded recalling the July 16, 1993 Funeral Procession  for Jon Greenberg, starting in Tompkins Square Park and meandering out into the streets of the Lower East Side.  “I don’t want angry political funeral,” he explained shortly before his death.  “I just want people to burn me in the street and eat my flesh.”  From the memorial day riot of police riot of 1967 to the 1988 riots there, the Tompkins Square Park trees have been the eye witnesses to history.

Images of  Jon Greenberg's funeral march.

The legacies of aids activism have recently found themselves in several museums.  Yet, its rightful place is in the streets.   In the face of the institutionalization of AIDS activism, we talked about Schulman’s theory of effective activism.

For Schulman, great things can be done with only a small number of people.   In my experience, the periods when activism has been most effective here have been when there were both reform minded groups and visionaries working along side each other, she explained.  They usually hate each other.  But they both get a lot done alongside each other.  Occupy and Unions, Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activist Alliance, etc.

Finishing, I noted the other day you wrote on facebook: “I remain as convinced as I have ever been, that punishment is wrong. The best thing for human beings is to face the source of problems and work together to resolve them. The role of friends is to support positive change i.e. the confrontation with the self required for resolution of conflict.”  What did you mean by that? 

“Punishment is an excuse not to listen” Schulman explained. “What is it going to accomplish?”

Opening to the q and a, the usual assortment of village characters poured in with commentaries, rants and questions.  I stopped being able to catch the conversation in between Schulman’s biting commentary.

“You can’t stop people from expressing themselves sexually,” she chimed in.  “Sexual repression does not work.”

“We’ve hung a lot of ideas around the idea of gentrification,” asked a young woman.  “Does it lose its meaning when we ask so much?”

“That’s a great question, Schulman concluded noting she differentiates between periods of gentrification.” 

 And so session came to an end.  I thanked her noting I had wanted her to come from the first day they opened the museum.  Squatters and ACT UP worked together at one point. There are so many stories which need to be told, so many more queer stories we need to bring here, I explained.  Schulman agreed, offering a few names.    We took a few photos and Schulman was off.    

Top Schulman and this author.
Middle MoRUS founder Laurie Mittelmann, Schulman and Shepard
Bottom

 Sheila Jamison, Laurie Mittelmann, Sarah, Benjamin, Asya Gribov, and Tim Doody

Later that night, she’d post on facebook: "Tonight gave a talk at The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, 155 Avenue C - a great crowd, nice vibe and the kind Benjamin Heim Shepard as my cohort. We talked about taking Tompkins Square Park back from the rate, Adam Purple and the People's Phone book, The original round plot at the garden on 7th and B, the Yiddish theater, changing your self-concept, fundamentalist churches in the East Village that feed people, the problem with punishment, calling the police, and why yuppies don't say hello. Krizzly Man and other friends new and old."

Hanging chatting at MoRUS after the talk.
Top Mittelmann, Cashman, Doody, and Pugh. Bottom,
Bill Weinberg, editor of Avant Gardening, and Eric Laursen, author of the People's Pension.

In the meantime, a few of us went out into the East Village night for a drink after the session.   Kate’s and  Life Café are gone, along with the bar at  Odessa.  So we went to the Odessa dinner to  talk about cops politics and gardens,  anarchism and alex comfort, and review the session. 

“She is cool in a hot situation,” noted one friend, referring to Schulman’s talk at the Center the previous year when they attempted to ban Palestine activists from speaking. 

Out for drinks with friends, Laursen and Tim Doody, old buddies from the RNC now almost ten years ago.
Bottom Doody and Dave Pugh. 

We talked for hours, recalling where all this story of the East Village has taken us, arrests at Esperanza garden, what brought us here, and  how have the battles changed over the years.

I hope MoRUS can have more East Village conversations.  If you’d like to take part, or know others who would like to, let me know.  And let’s start talking and keep the conversation going.

Thank you for all you’ve done to help us remember and build on radical history Sarah Schulman.  Thank you MoRUS for helping give it a place for us to remember, talk about it and even build on it.