Program Description: Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. Join her as she reads excerpts from her 20th book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993.
She will be joined in conversation with veteran activist and journalist, Jay Blotcher. Jay was ACT UP New York’s media committee chair, publicizing many demonstrations.
Date/Time: Saturday, November 6, 6:00-7:30pm
Location: First Presbyterian Church, 369 Warren St. in Hudson, NY
Registration: This event is free and open to the public. Pre-registration is not required.
This program is presented in collaboration with OutHudson and Spotty Dog Books & Ale.
Twenty years in the making, Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism.
In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them.
Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today’s activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration—and long-overdue reassessment—of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.