Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

One of O, the Oprah Magazine's 32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021, one of Vogue's 9 LGBTQ+ Books We're Looking Forward to This Spring, one of and Cosmopolitan's LGBTQ+ Books to Add to Your Reading List in 2021, one of The Observer's Spring Books You Don't Want to Miss, and one of Bloomberg's 14 Books to Put on Your Reading List This Spring

I understand but can't quite accept that this book is about 700 pages long -- not when I tore through it in a day; still now, while fact-checking this review, I can scarcely skim it without being swallowed back into the testimonies . . . Let the Record Show doesn't seek to memorialize history but to ransack it, to seize what we might need . . . This is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician's bible. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

A masterpiece tome: part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms . . . Medical inequity continues not only with Covid but also with H.I.V./AIDS still, and it will repeat until we manage to learn from the past -- about survival, and about the fight. Here is a primer, a compendium of what one group learned and struggled with and accomplished. Here is a book to start a mighty shelf. --Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review

An in-depth and fully realized account . . . a text that offers younger queer activists a rare study of their own history. --Emma Specter, Vogue

A stunning achievement . . . The expanse and generosity given in Let the Record Show -- the integrity of giving people a platform to tell their own story and to showing the messiness and complexity of the truth -- reflects the commitment not only of Schulman but of the hundreds of people in the ACT UP movement. --Marcie Bianco, The Advocate

Monumental . . . Schulman doesn't replace one set of heroes with another; rather, she destroys the idea of singular heroes at all. This is a political choice that creates a more honest representation of ACT UP . . . The most salient thread we can draw from Let the Record Show is an understanding of how mass movements can succeed and fail, all at the same time, depending on which part of the 'mass' you're in. --Hugh Ryan, Boston Review

A necessarily expansive and bombastic corrective of modern history . . . Let the Record Show is as righteous and revelatory as its subject matter. --Hillary Kelly, Vulture

Let the Record Show is a corrective intervention in AIDS historiography, attempting to revise the popular understanding of ACT UP to make it both more democratic and more accurate . . . [Let the Record Show] paints a picture of activists not as martyrs, but as real people, living out the full spectrums of their emotional lives while also trying to meet the demands of history. --Moira Donegan, Bookforum

Schulman paints an honest portrait of the complexities of coalitional politics, adding nuance and depth to an often-flattened period of history. The result is both an engrossing tribute to the past and a crucial handbook for activists who hope to leave their own lasting mark on the future. --Daniel Spielberger, them.

From the human perspective, it's simply satisfying to consume Schulman's fulsome demonstration that ACT UP was not the work of heroic straights or the clean-cut and mostly white men whose names are now synonymous with the group, such as Larry Kramer, but in fact always relied on the many people of color, incarcerated people, women, and drug users who devoted their labor . . . this work of adapted oral history is a mixture of creative froth and leaden grief . . . Gradually, Schulman corrects a view on history that's been distorted by the profit motive. --Jo Livingstone, The New Republic

A resounding rebuttal to exclusionary versions of AIDS history . . . Not merely a matter of representation, Schulman's recontextualization serves as an intervention in the political analysis of ACT UP. --Joshua Gutterman Tranen, The Baffler

Sarah Schulman's vital survey of a terrifying time reminds us that queer people have long known a thing or two about living through a devastating plague. --Keely Weiss, Harper's Bazaar

Schulman approaches her political history with a novelist's understanding of the complexities of character, action, and consequence . . . Let the Record Show preserves the spirit of ACT UP's single statement of unity and purpose . . . [Schulman] is one of our most formidable contemporary intellectuals and an essential recorder of queer and activist histories. --Kelly Roberts, Hazlitt

[Schulman's] work has taught me how to have a point of view, how to have a radical political analysis that is matter-of-fact, and how to make big arguments that are specific in scope . . . Schulman gives us a framework for cultural and political change outside of consolidated corporate cultural and political power. --Alicia Kennedy, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

[Schulman] movingly evokes what the group meant personally in the lives of thousands who refused to be "bystanders" in the face of the AIDS catastrophe . . . her goal in highlighting the group's unprecedented grassroots achievements as well as its weaknesses is part of a larger mission to inform social change efforts today, whether on healthcare access or transgender rights, systemic racism or police reform. --Paul Schindler, Gay City News

Every page is not only riveting but necessary . . . At once a choral work and a practical guide, as well as a clear-eyed political history and indictment of who failed the AIDS crisis and why. It is a must-read. --Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

A deeply generous platform for nearly every ACT UP member's personal story, motives, and recollections to be told in one place, adding up to an enthralling mosaic of biography, collaboration, and, often, conflict. --Tim Murphy, TheBody

The arc and sweep of this volume mimic the best kind of fiction . . . Record leaves us with some striking moments highlighting the many who died. --Henry Giardina, Into

A masterful work twenty years in the making . . . Schulman holds a unique position to chronicle this critical history and connect it with our own chaotic moment. --Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

A monumental achievement, the culmination of decades of work, and almost unbelievable in its scope and scale. Its construction is also a lesson in community storytelling; from long profiles of former members and extended transcripts of their interviews, to detailed insights into the day-to-day workings of the group, Let the Record Show honors the humanity of those involved to an extent that no other history of AIDS has achieved. --Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

Remarkable . . . One is left with an overwhelming sense of gratitude--not only for the incredible amount of labor that it took to remember, collect, preserve, narrate, and interpret the events of this book, but for the world-changing activism from which we have all benefitted in such incalculable ways. --Nino Testa, Women's Review of Books

These portraits, together with the historical context offered throughout, prove the lasting influence of ACT UP and have a lot to teach readers about activism today. . .This engaging, accessible book will find a wide audience among readers interested in activism from the ground up. It will also be a foundational document for historians for generations to come. A must-read. --Library Journal (starred review)

A significant boots-on-the-ground account . . . Readers are right there with activists, hearing their stories from them but also others who knew them . . . Vital, democratic truth-telling. --Kirkus (starred review)

Schulman presents ACT UP not as a heroic, sanitized institution made up of exclusively white gay men, but as what it actually was: an organization that managed to improve the lives of people living with HIV and AIDS despite its own racism and sexism. By doing this, Schulman creates a much more nuanced--and accurate--portrait of the AIDS crisis, highlighting the ways the disease impacted women and people of color.--Booklist

[A] fine-grained history . . . [Schulman's] firsthand perspective and copious details provide a valuable testament to the courage and dedication of many unheralded activists. --Publishers Weekly

Sarah Schulman has written more than an authoritative history of ACT UP NY here-- it is a masterpiece of historical research and intellectual analysis that creates many windows into both a vanished world and the one that emerged from it, the one we live in now. I can't think of a book like this--it is an almost entirely new model, uniquely possible as the result of Schulman's life's work. As one of our only genuinely intellectual iconoclasts, she returns to us with this story of a movement that changed the world at least once, now a part of the work to change that world again. Any reader will be changed, I think, by the stories here--radicalized and renewed, which to me is something better than just hope. --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Characteristically forthright, Sarah Schulman gives us the most comprehensive history of the ACT UP movement in New York to date through a wide range of interviews, a trenchant commentary, and a sustained testament to collaborative action and its history. From this extraordinary history told with the multiple voices of participants, Schulman makes clear that the history of HIV and AIDS in this country has been marred by popular narratives and bouts of grandstanding that largely failed to acknowledge the thousands of lives still lost annually from AIDS, the schisms that opened up serious issues of power within the movement, and the specific ways that people of color and poor people remained unserved by the scientific advances widely celebrated. This book lets us know that neither our sorrow nor our rage is finished, and that the work of acknowledgement of all who struggled and suffered remains our task. --Judith Butler

In the style of the late great Howard Zinn, Sarah Schulmam has written an epic, moving and important People's History of the Act up Movement, filled with powerful storytelling and invaluable lessons in the do's and don't of organizing. We owe a great deal to Schulman for the depth and years of her research, for her commitment to telling a story that lifts and honors a group rather than highlighting only a few individuals, and for her willingness to tell the whole truth with serious rigor and love.--V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues

Sarah Schulman's remarkable book Let the Record Show offers a thorough and corrective retelling of the history of ACT-UP, introducing a diverse cast of characters that has been largely erased from what passes as the official HIV/AIDS narrative. She brings extraordinary reporting, finely calibrated detail and her own lived experience to a book that is at once a love letter to the movement that refused to back down as it forced an epidemic to its knees and a road map for a new generation of activists grappling with social change. --Linda Villarosa, contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine

With heart, anger and rigor, Sarah Schulman shows us how AIDS has shaped our political world by letting the people of ACT UP tell us what they did in their own words. Let The Record Show is more than a single book; it's an encyclopedia, an oral history, and a map. Indeed, as the most marginalized people are again at risk during yet another viral pandemic, Schulman (and the voices she foregrounds so lovingly) gives us an activist guide for communally creating a better world. It is a masterpiece--the book on AIDS history I wish had been available for me to read years ago. --Steven Thrasher, Daniel H. Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and author of The Viral Underclass

Sarah Schulman has achieved the near impossible in this riveting and powerful book. She writes with the knowledge and experience of a passionate insider as she lays out a detailed and deep history of ACT UP. Yet she has a sharp eye for the bigger picture, offering a broad analysis, bringing in diverse, fascinating, and illuminating perspectives. Not until this book has an author captured how ACT UP was grounded in both the feminist and civil rights movements, nor how the group spawned new movements and inspired a new generation of queer activism while dramatically influencing the course of the AIDS epidemic and making a mark on American culture. The writing is crisp and compassionate. The stories are vivid -- heroic, painful, breathtaking and joyous. Sarah Schulman has produced a definitive and monumental work. --Michelangelo Signorile, author of It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia and Winning True Equality