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pennym_'s review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.5
i appreciated what this little book had to say. the connection between gentrification and the aftermath of the aids epidemic was brilliant, and much of what the author has to say about american politics and queer culture is cogent and still relevant even ten years post-publication. although i dont agree with everything she has to say, i have to give the author credit for bringing up so many topics and connections i hadnt thought about before.
i did struggle a bit with keeping engaged. this is a bit of an awkward blend between academic analysis and personal memoir. the analysis was great, and i appreciated the inclusion of personal stories, but i think more work needed to be done to have the two apspects blend more seamlessly. id love to read more on this topic from other perspectives.
i did struggle a bit with keeping engaged. this is a bit of an awkward blend between academic analysis and personal memoir. the analysis was great, and i appreciated the inclusion of personal stories, but i think more work needed to be done to have the two apspects blend more seamlessly. id love to read more on this topic from other perspectives.
emloueez's review against another edition
3.0
Oh, man. This was a frustrating read, for a lot of reasons.
First, I agree with Schulman’s thesis about using gentrification language to explain the phenomenon of white-washing semi-recent queer history. But Schulman chooses to identify gentrification as mostly a phenomenon of individual behavior rather than comprehensively understanding gentrification as the effect of multiple stakeholders, including politicians and real estate developers. In short, it seems like she views gentrification as just whoever moved into the East Village after she and her cool artist friends.
This is just not an academically rigorous text. And, look, Schulman says at the start that she views this as more of a memoir. And that’s all fine and good except she’s a college professor. She has a duty to back up her claims. Most of what evidence she offers is anecdotal. Again, fine for a just memoir, but not fine for someone claiming to identify larger sociopolitical patterns.
Yet when she writes that “9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS” I stopped dead in my tracks. Because, damn, she’s right on the money. I still think this is a worthy read for anyone interested in better understanding the AIDS crisis, but I think it comes up short of being a great read.
First, I agree with Schulman’s thesis about using gentrification language to explain the phenomenon of white-washing semi-recent queer history. But Schulman chooses to identify gentrification as mostly a phenomenon of individual behavior rather than comprehensively understanding gentrification as the effect of multiple stakeholders, including politicians and real estate developers. In short, it seems like she views gentrification as just whoever moved into the East Village after she and her cool artist friends.
This is just not an academically rigorous text. And, look, Schulman says at the start that she views this as more of a memoir. And that’s all fine and good except she’s a college professor. She has a duty to back up her claims. Most of what evidence she offers is anecdotal. Again, fine for a just memoir, but not fine for someone claiming to identify larger sociopolitical patterns.
Yet when she writes that “9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS” I stopped dead in my tracks. Because, damn, she’s right on the money. I still think this is a worthy read for anyone interested in better understanding the AIDS crisis, but I think it comes up short of being a great read.
auroraeve's review
sad
fast-paced
4.5
Although a "quick" read in terms of pages, the content does require more time for reflection and mourning. It is a fierce tribute to those lost and the near callous obfuscation of the neglect and ostracization that caused their deaths.
charlesbilby's review
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
Some useful insights and reflections, at times somewhat old person yells at clouds - why do artists want to earn money these days - but the stuff on the gentrification of queer culture was excellent
crabbycrabby's review against another edition
5.0
This is excellent. I got such a strong sense of Schulman as a person when reading it. Confronting in many ways to read, as I'm another young queer person paying an overpriced rent in a heavily gentrified city, with a detachment from my own history. I read this with an awareness of that, and feel I've learned a lot. Want to read more of her work!
sabsey's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but the people who make change are not the people who benefit from it.”
No rating for this one because how could I possibly give a numerical rating to this?
A study of the AIDS crisis and gay culture during the 80's and 90's in NYC, this is part memoir, part sociological study, based on the philosophical investigation of what it means to be culturally gentrified and to be a living memory of historical revisionism.
“Looking back at the gay dead, locked in their youth, their youth is now locked in the past. Eighties haircuts, ACT UP demonstrations, tentative first novels from defunct presses. Memories fade. Men are increasingly reduced to specific moments played over again and many are moments of dissipation.”
I don't quite think Schulman pulls off everything she's trying to achieve here - some of her arguments a bit bizarre, and her last few chapters seem a bit irrelevant to the rest of the novel.
Her theories are wide and varied and don't always seem relevant, and it's clear that at times, Schulman has some personal scores to settle that have clearly festered over time
However, I think overall Schulman has an impressive memory and an even more impressive conceptual and emotional approach to this topic, and I agreed with most of what she was getting at.
I also think it's important to remember that this is at its' core, after all, the story of a survivor, and someone who had to watch most of her friends die when she was in her 20's, and then watch again as the rest of the world turned its' back on the memory of those people.
I also think she had some salient points regarding the loss of intergenerational connection in lgbt+ and community spaces, and the deliberate and systematic erasure of marginalised voices.
"Herein lies the problem. We live with an idea of happiness that is based in other people's diminishment. But we do not address this because we hold an idea of happiness that precludes being uncomfortable.
Being uncomfortable is required in order to be accountable.
But we currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs."
There's clearly a lot of grief, love and anger in this book, and while I still couldn't get across everything she was arguing, I still think this is a valuable read and worthwhile if you have any interest in the legacy of AIDS & what that means (or doesn't) in contemporary queer culture.
No rating for this one because how could I possibly give a numerical rating to this?
A study of the AIDS crisis and gay culture during the 80's and 90's in NYC, this is part memoir, part sociological study, based on the philosophical investigation of what it means to be culturally gentrified and to be a living memory of historical revisionism.
“Looking back at the gay dead, locked in their youth, their youth is now locked in the past. Eighties haircuts, ACT UP demonstrations, tentative first novels from defunct presses. Memories fade. Men are increasingly reduced to specific moments played over again and many are moments of dissipation.”
I don't quite think Schulman pulls off everything she's trying to achieve here - some of her arguments a bit bizarre, and her last few chapters seem a bit irrelevant to the rest of the novel.
Her theories are wide and varied and don't always seem relevant, and it's clear that at times, Schulman has some personal scores to settle that have clearly festered over time
However, I think overall Schulman has an impressive memory and an even more impressive conceptual and emotional approach to this topic, and I agreed with most of what she was getting at.
I also think it's important to remember that this is at its' core, after all, the story of a survivor, and someone who had to watch most of her friends die when she was in her 20's, and then watch again as the rest of the world turned its' back on the memory of those people.
I also think she had some salient points regarding the loss of intergenerational connection in lgbt+ and community spaces, and the deliberate and systematic erasure of marginalised voices.
"Herein lies the problem. We live with an idea of happiness that is based in other people's diminishment. But we do not address this because we hold an idea of happiness that precludes being uncomfortable.
Being uncomfortable is required in order to be accountable.
But we currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs."
There's clearly a lot of grief, love and anger in this book, and while I still couldn't get across everything she was arguing, I still think this is a valuable read and worthwhile if you have any interest in the legacy of AIDS & what that means (or doesn't) in contemporary queer culture.
halschrieve's review against another edition
4.0
Schulman puts forward a work that is part memoir, part impressionistic history, and part theory. One of the best things about this work is how it contextualizes a lot of AIDS history and complicates the heroic narrative of groups like Act Up by demonstrating how complicated and fraught the interactions between different activists and writers has been. She prints exchanges with Edmund White and Larry Kramer which demonstrate how so much of this history is subjective and contested and dramatic. Schulman's strength is that she is deeply empathetic and deeply interested in the lives and ethics of other people, and she is very committed to making things legible to others so she can expand the conversations she has to include as many people as possible. She puts forward a model of understanding the gentrification of the LES as related to the high turnover of housing after the deaths of people with AIDS, which I think is a valuable thing to think about, though of course there are other reasons (policy, zoning) that led to the possibility of the hypergentrification of Manhattan. Schulman's main oversight, in my opinion, is failing to indict earlier generations of artists as participating in gentrification in a way that made the very dramatic later turnover of neighborhoods possible. She attempts a kind of project of talk therapy to gentrifiers (?) which I think in the end is a futile one, though it's fiercely optimistic about human ability to recognize each other and understand what has happened to us.