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Seven years in seven hundred pages
Mar. 21st, 2022 07:37 pmI expressed a desire to read another really big long book, and some comrades recommended Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993.
This book is 700 pages long, and consists largely of excerpts from interviews with former ACT UP activists. It also contains plenty of Schulman’s analysis about what lessons can be drawn from the org’s seven years of activity. Because it’s Sarah Schulman, whomst is a pedantic asshole, some of the editorializing is a bit weird, much of it is very insightful, and all of it is laid out extremely precisely (the preciseness is why Schulman is rapidly becoming one of my favorite pedantic assholes). Many of the interviews also contain the interviewee’s analysis of what lessons people should take from ACT UP, so you get an interesting range of opinions. The various interviewees’ takeaways do not always match up. It would be boring if they did.
A couple things stick out to me. One is that while ACT UP was very functional in some ways, it was dysfunctional in other ways, and these can’t always be separated out really neatly–a lot of the ways the org structured itself and made decisions and even the work it produced involved significant tradeoffs. Another takeaway is that, while the org drew on a wide variety of activist traditions, much of what it was doing was also quite new at the time, and its newness is part of what let it work–for a current org, just doing what ACT UP was doing isn’t going to be sufficient, because it’s been done already and it’s been being done for thirty years and your targets aren’t going to be caught unprepared anymore. Emblematic of both these issues is the famous SILENCE=DEATH poster, which was eye-catching and ad-like and a direct result of having a lot of financially stable white men in industries like advertising involved. This graphic did a huge amount to draw attention to the AIDS crisis and build ACT UP’s “brand,” which allowed them to be more effective. But the role of “brand-building” in activism these days is, shall we say, a mixed bag (I have many opinions on this).
Another thing that stuck out at me was that there were a lot of really extra personalities and people being mean to each other. To a certain degree it sounds like people just needed to suck up that there are lots of weirdos in politics and you’re not going to be friends with everyone and heated disagreements will happen, but there were clearly other times when being an enormous asshole did cause problems, to put it mildly. Some of this was likely also inevitable with a group made up mostly of angry, traumatized, desperate people, but some of it was clearly unnecessary, like the publication of ACT UP’s own hideous pre-Twitter newsletter column slash burn book, “Tell it to ACT UP.” Several issues of TITA are reproduced at the end of the book and it’s both weirdly heartening but also distressing how much activists have not changed. Schulman discusses the all-encompassing nature of life as an ACT UP core organizer–the folks who attended multiple meetings a week, for whom it became where they spent all their free time and who they spent all their free time with–and the ways in which this eventually did end up making people “go crazy” and burn out.
I feel like I ought to have a lot, lot more to say here, but (like what else I’ve read by Schulman) it really resists any kind of summing up. The benefit is in the wealth of details and getting to dig into the nitty-gritty of how more-or-less normal people from a variety of backgrounds ended up throwing themselves into an intense, and intensely generative, culture of full-time frenzied work in the face of mass death. I’d really be interested in discussing this especially with other folks in BDSA, which has a similar network-of-little-committees, do-ocratic internal culture (with a Coordinating Committee instead of a Steering Committee; I think ACT UP might be who we stole that idea from) about the success and failure modes of such structure.
This book is 700 pages long, and consists largely of excerpts from interviews with former ACT UP activists. It also contains plenty of Schulman’s analysis about what lessons can be drawn from the org’s seven years of activity. Because it’s Sarah Schulman, whomst is a pedantic asshole, some of the editorializing is a bit weird, much of it is very insightful, and all of it is laid out extremely precisely (the preciseness is why Schulman is rapidly becoming one of my favorite pedantic assholes). Many of the interviews also contain the interviewee’s analysis of what lessons people should take from ACT UP, so you get an interesting range of opinions. The various interviewees’ takeaways do not always match up. It would be boring if they did.
A couple things stick out to me. One is that while ACT UP was very functional in some ways, it was dysfunctional in other ways, and these can’t always be separated out really neatly–a lot of the ways the org structured itself and made decisions and even the work it produced involved significant tradeoffs. Another takeaway is that, while the org drew on a wide variety of activist traditions, much of what it was doing was also quite new at the time, and its newness is part of what let it work–for a current org, just doing what ACT UP was doing isn’t going to be sufficient, because it’s been done already and it’s been being done for thirty years and your targets aren’t going to be caught unprepared anymore. Emblematic of both these issues is the famous SILENCE=DEATH poster, which was eye-catching and ad-like and a direct result of having a lot of financially stable white men in industries like advertising involved. This graphic did a huge amount to draw attention to the AIDS crisis and build ACT UP’s “brand,” which allowed them to be more effective. But the role of “brand-building” in activism these days is, shall we say, a mixed bag (I have many opinions on this).
Another thing that stuck out at me was that there were a lot of really extra personalities and people being mean to each other. To a certain degree it sounds like people just needed to suck up that there are lots of weirdos in politics and you’re not going to be friends with everyone and heated disagreements will happen, but there were clearly other times when being an enormous asshole did cause problems, to put it mildly. Some of this was likely also inevitable with a group made up mostly of angry, traumatized, desperate people, but some of it was clearly unnecessary, like the publication of ACT UP’s own hideous pre-Twitter newsletter column slash burn book, “Tell it to ACT UP.” Several issues of TITA are reproduced at the end of the book and it’s both weirdly heartening but also distressing how much activists have not changed. Schulman discusses the all-encompassing nature of life as an ACT UP core organizer–the folks who attended multiple meetings a week, for whom it became where they spent all their free time and who they spent all their free time with–and the ways in which this eventually did end up making people “go crazy” and burn out.
I feel like I ought to have a lot, lot more to say here, but (like what else I’ve read by Schulman) it really resists any kind of summing up. The benefit is in the wealth of details and getting to dig into the nitty-gritty of how more-or-less normal people from a variety of backgrounds ended up throwing themselves into an intense, and intensely generative, culture of full-time frenzied work in the face of mass death. I’d really be interested in discussing this especially with other folks in BDSA, which has a similar network-of-little-committees, do-ocratic internal culture (with a Coordinating Committee instead of a Steering Committee; I think ACT UP might be who we stole that idea from) about the success and failure modes of such structure.