In some ways, one of the more telling means differentiating her book from France’s-and a means, therefore, of understanding Schulman’s gamble and achievement-lies in one of the particular approbations to which France’s text was treated. It may not even delight certain corners of the queer press. Schulman’s book almost certainly won’t be treated to the same mainstream fanfare. On the surface, then, both books are about the twinning of grassroots activism and citizen science.īut that’s where the similarity ends.

Like his film, France’s book scooped up accolades in the LGBTQ and mainstream press alike, winning the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, alongside being dubbed-by Jeff Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle-“the definitive book on AIDS activism.” All of the central personages in France’s account-bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci, researchers and physicians like Mathilde Krim and Joseph Sonnabend, and the ACT UP-NY activists themselves: Larry Kramer, Michael Callen, Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, Jim Eigo, Bob Rafsky, and others-feature in Schulman’s book too. The film went on to show at Sundance to massive accolades and ultimately be nominated for a litany of awards including an Oscar.įour years later, France would repackage the same material in a book of the same title to similar fanfare. Esquire called it the best documentary of 2012. France’s film, too, covers the formation and dissolution of ACT UP-New York. One thinks, for instance, of the wildly popular 2012 video documentary How to Survive a Plaguedirected by David France, a journalist who has covered LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS issues for decades. ACT UP has been treated widely in scholarship, journalism, and documentary. On the one hand, Let the Record Show is hardly the first of such books. From these excerpted and carefully arranged interviews, the book weaves a story of the flagship, New York chapter of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the seminal AIDS activist organization operative as a unified entity from 1987 to 1993.

Her capacious tome is a compilation of hundreds of oral interviews conducted alongside her longtime creative partner, Jim Hubbard. It is a tone that readers of Schulman’s past works have come to expect and cherish. Her joyous anger reflects a testimonial impulse. Its anger, however, manifests on the page as exuberance. Sarah Schulman’s history of AIDS activism, Let the Record Show, is an angry book.

Let the record show book