The Absolute Necessity of Direct Action: On Sarah Schulman's "Let the Record Show"

Sarah Schulman | Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2021 | 736 Pages

As politicians across the country willfully let people succumb to a deadly virus and do their best to rig the political system, this might be a good time to think about the nature of direct political action. What can citizens accomplish together when government fails? Under what conditions can they force change? What works, and what doesn’t? What are the dangers and pitfalls of radical, direct democracy? 

Perhaps the most impressive direct action campaign since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was ACT UP, the 1980s grassroots movement that challenged the medical and political establishments to an unprecedented degree on behalf of those suffering from HIV. Many books and essays have been written about AIDS, some by scholars, some by journalists, but none as complete or compelling as this new work by Sarah Schulman, a highly accomplished activist and writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Here she accomplishes something almost miraculous, combining acute political and social analysis with in-depth portraits of human beings—people who suffered, organized, and died, together with people who did not directly experience suffering but saw it and refused to accept it. 

The stories here are riveting and the analysis deft, and there are lessons to be learned, including the absolute necessity of direct action when government fails. It is a story in which, as Schulman says, the most unlikely people in the direst of circumstances—a despised social group fighting a deadly disease—were able nonetheless to create both solidarity and real change by challenging mainstream institutions from the Catholic Church to the CDC. At the same time, it is a story in which the realities of class, gender, and race are never far below the surface. 

Perhaps the most stunning conclusion Schulman reaches is that, while it was possible, in some ways, for some people, to beat HIV, it proved impossible to beat the profit motive and capital structures embedded in the healthcare system. That fatal flaw, of course, remains, and yet again, people are dying as a result. 

One of the impressive features of the book is the manner in which Schulman alternates between straight-forward narrative or biography and political analysis. We read a heart-rending story of a mother fighting for her son and then a sophisticated discussion of the ways in which theory emerges from action (rather than vice versa, as many scholars would maintain) and activism clarifies values (again, many scholars would argue the opposite). The famous ACT UP assault on New York’s Catholic Cardinal O’Connor leads into a discussion of inside versus outside approaches to protest and the nature of leadership, as well as the ironic ways in which radical and assimilationist agendas potentiate each other. More deeply and accurately than many scholarly tomes, the book analyzes the nature of community and political consciousness. 

The narrative here is not always seamless, and some readers may object to the intrusion of extensive biographical detail of ACT UP members, often set off in boxes. The text might perhaps have benefited from a bit of judicious editing. But in the accumulation of detail and personal stories, Schulman is making a point about the simplest and most basic fact of politics—it can be a life and death struggle of real people—flesh and blood, individual human beings, who sometimes need to fight. Their struggles matter. And every story has something to teach us if we pay attention.

Schulman came to participate in ACT UP after a long personal history in the feminist and lesbian movements, and of particular value here is her foregrounding the struggle of women with HIV to gain visibility and attention. Similarly, she pays close attention to people of color, challenging the fairly widely accepted but mistaken notion that AIDS was largely a disease of white, gay men. 

What the book does not do, however, is go beyond its focus on New York City. This is both a flaw and a strength. It was New York’s ACT UP that organized the first and most important episodes of nationally visible protest, later copied by groups around the country and the world. And, as a narrative, it is the accumulation of personal detail, necessarily local, that is the work’s great strength. 

Just as we suffered the cosmic joke of COVID arriving while Donald Trump occupied the White House, those impacted by the AIDS crisis suffered the grave misfortune of that crisis beginning while Ronald Reagan had just won the presidency. It was his administration’s determination to pander to the evangelical base of the Republican party and ignore what was happening that led to the realization that AIDS was not merely a health crisis but a political one; the resulting anger fueled the movement. And it was in their shared anger that, as one participant put it, “people became courageous awfully quickly,” and, as a result, found themselves “drawing on resources they had inside them… that they never dreamed they had.”

That is how political movements, and revolutions, begin. 

Schulman quotes Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written in 1963, on the necessary tactical steps of protest: Collection of the facts to determine whether injustice exists; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. “Even though it was never expressly stated, and even though we did not realize it,” she writes, ACT UP followed these steps. For LGBT children of any race born in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s, “with no public recognition of our realities, growing up in hostile communities and families,” she correctly observes, “images of Black resistance” had “searing power.” 

There’s a reason the world remembers Rosa Parks. There could not be an LGBT writer more different from Schulman than Andrew Sullivan, a Catholic conservative, but Schulman is making the same point as Sullivan when he wrote that it is courage that gets noticed, and courage that changes the world. 

Members of ACT UP quickly realized that they needed to jettison “an infantilized relationship to those in power, begging them to solve problems,” and instead “used their acquired and innate expertise to design reasonable, doable, and winnable solutions.” ACT UP’s self-purification included “emotional and political bonding… and the putting in place of highly organized support systems… to ensure that no one would get lost in the system; and teach-ins created a highly informed rank and file.” Perhaps most important, ACT UP learned quickly to “speak through the media, not to the media.”

The resulting tactics, which included non-violent disruption, were shocking to some but highly effective. Government policies and medical practices changed as a result, but too late for many in the early years of the epidemic. If one compares the length of time it took for the development of a COVID vaccine to the length of time it took to develop and deliver effective treatments for HIV—which still has no vaccine—we can see clearly that medicine, despite protestations to the contrary, is not separate from social mores and prejudice. ACT UP could accomplish only so much.

It would have accomplished more if it hadn’t been riven by internal divisions in the early Nineties, a part of the story Schulman does not avoid, and here too there are lessons to be learned. By that time, the dead piled up, and different constituencies had different agendas—women, those wanting to concentrate on treatments, those wanting to concentrate on street action—and subgroups could not find common ground or compromise. Schulman perceptively points out that the difference was perceived as being between those wanting to work inside systems of power versus those wanting to challenge them, but that it is perhaps more accurate to say that the split was between those who were allowed into the establishment and those who were not. 

And, inevitably, constant death took its toll. Schulman quotes one of her subjects who said AIDS “dug a hole in people’s psyches.” And those were the lucky ones, who survived.

The book concludes with Schulman’s own current struggle the serious health issues, caused not by HIV but by genetic mutation, and the struggles with the healthcare system she has endured as a result, including unconscionable expense—a reality faced still by many, whether their woes are caused by HIV, COVID, or something else. 

This is a brave, necessary book, at once an act of politics and an act of faith—faith that we can learn from our disasters, despite all evidence to the contrary.