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A review by 2666enjoyer
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT Up New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman
5.0
There’s an image of ACT UP that you have in your head right now (assuming, of course, you haven’t read Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 or generally researched the organization in any way, shape, or form). It’s probably wrong, given that you fit that very specific set of circumstances. You may have heard about some of their actions - Stop the Church, the takeover of Grand Central terminal, the Day of Desperation. You may even know about some key names, like Larry Kramer, Maxine Wolfe, Roy Navarro. In that case, you’ve fallen victim to one of the most insidious issues in our culture industry: the tendency to summarize a movement through its names and effects, rather than a more delicate, holistic, process-based understanding. Let the Record Show is more than a list of facts or a timeline - it operates under a dialectical logic that allows ACT UP to exist in its entirety within the pages of the text.
More than anything, Let the Record Show is multifaceted. Given that Sarah Schulman was an active member of ACT UP, there’s a worry that her internality will be overpowering - acting like a strainer that captures key moments that were relevant to her, but letting outside events and perspectives fall by the wayside. This is not the case. It’s clear that Schulman takes steps to present a nuanced view of the mechanics of ACT UP, most notably through the format that she tends to take when dissecting an action: there’s very little unlabelled contextualization given, with the vast majority of the book taking place under a heading of someone’s name. Schulman counters notions of an amalgamated objectivity with a clear and distinct subjectivity, where various perspectives on a single action are allowed to coexist, even and especially when they don’t match up. This is similar to the Hegelian dialectic - by exposing internal contradictions in reasoning, rather than painting over them, we are allowed to do the second-order synthesis ourselves, giving us more freedom to come to our own conclusions about the efficacy and morality of various actions. I say second-order synthesis because Schulman has already done the archival work here, delving into ACT UP’s oral history project in order to find the most relevant perspectives on each issue.
The strongest critique of Schulman’s subjectivity centers this process of first-order synthesis of information, as it does in any historical work meant for mass consumption. Even in this massive tome of a book (640 pages of text, plus thirty or so pages of images and appendices), Schulman has had to make massive cuts to the archival material, which is primarily sourced from the oral history project that she created with Jim Hubbard. This project consists of 188 interviews of members of ACT UP, all an hour or two long, which gives Schulman about 300 hours of interviews to work with: compare this to the final text, which is 27 hours long when read by Rosalyn Coleman Williams for the audiobook. A paring-down has clearly taken place, but that does not inherently imply a misrepresentation of the facts. In fact, by using a publicly-available, digitized archive and clearly marking which interviews sections are being taken from, Schulman has made Let the Record Show exist in harmony with the archives, rather than act as though they can be substituted for one another. For example, Appendix 2 (Tell it to ACT UP, Bill Dobbs’ weekly newsletter featuring anonymous comments from other ACT UPers) features archival material that supplements the oral history project, but is wholly independent from it. Essentially, Let the Record Show acts as a guide to the ACT UP oral history project, giving readers a deeper understanding of how these interviews relate to each other and giving them a more streamlined entry point to the somewhat overwhelming (yet carefully and thoughtfully tagged and organized!) mass of interviews. This tracks, given that Schulman is the driving force behind both.
Schulman is not free from bias when organizing Let the Record Show - she overuses the first-person at times, and given the double-layered ouroboros of sourcing (the same person is conducting the interviews and choosing the most relevant parts), it’s easy to see how Let the Record Show can begin to take on a tinge of a memoir or a self-portrait. But… what’s the alternative? Who else is stepping up to give a nuanced accounting of the events that led to the formation and dissolution of ACT UP? Anyone with the commitment to undertake such a vast project will necessarily have some investment in its history, some stake in the way the story is told. Schulman does us the kindness of explicitly stating and embracing the fact that she is biased, but even the title of the book itself states it plainly: this text is a political history. This can be read two ways - that the text is studying the politics of ACT UP (which it does quite well), but also that it is a politicized history, a history whose expression and explanation is political.
Let the Record Show cannot be divorced from the context in which it was produced - it can never be taken as merely a study of a particular social group or event. It is not ‘timeless’, nor is it ‘inspirational’. It relates clearly and directly to the social dynamics of the modern day. There’s a reason that Schulman takes the time to dissect and study the ways by which ACT UP’s most effective actions came about - not in order to rate ACT UP’s total effectiveness as an organization, but to offer key insights into process that can be scavenged by people looking to make real change. Let the Record Show appeared in the wake of great social change - published in 2021, it rode the waves of social activism and organization spurred on by the pandemic, police brutality, and global injustice. It is a toolbox by which these new movements can seek to understand the achievements and failures of the past: Schulman repeatedly nods at asynchronous, horizontal organization as a key component of actually effective activism for this very reason. A deep study of ACT UP is not necessary for those wishing to organize and create change, but it will certainly save them much trial and error - and what more can one ask for?
More than anything, Let the Record Show is multifaceted. Given that Sarah Schulman was an active member of ACT UP, there’s a worry that her internality will be overpowering - acting like a strainer that captures key moments that were relevant to her, but letting outside events and perspectives fall by the wayside. This is not the case. It’s clear that Schulman takes steps to present a nuanced view of the mechanics of ACT UP, most notably through the format that she tends to take when dissecting an action: there’s very little unlabelled contextualization given, with the vast majority of the book taking place under a heading of someone’s name. Schulman counters notions of an amalgamated objectivity with a clear and distinct subjectivity, where various perspectives on a single action are allowed to coexist, even and especially when they don’t match up. This is similar to the Hegelian dialectic - by exposing internal contradictions in reasoning, rather than painting over them, we are allowed to do the second-order synthesis ourselves, giving us more freedom to come to our own conclusions about the efficacy and morality of various actions. I say second-order synthesis because Schulman has already done the archival work here, delving into ACT UP’s oral history project in order to find the most relevant perspectives on each issue.
The strongest critique of Schulman’s subjectivity centers this process of first-order synthesis of information, as it does in any historical work meant for mass consumption. Even in this massive tome of a book (640 pages of text, plus thirty or so pages of images and appendices), Schulman has had to make massive cuts to the archival material, which is primarily sourced from the oral history project that she created with Jim Hubbard. This project consists of 188 interviews of members of ACT UP, all an hour or two long, which gives Schulman about 300 hours of interviews to work with: compare this to the final text, which is 27 hours long when read by Rosalyn Coleman Williams for the audiobook. A paring-down has clearly taken place, but that does not inherently imply a misrepresentation of the facts. In fact, by using a publicly-available, digitized archive and clearly marking which interviews sections are being taken from, Schulman has made Let the Record Show exist in harmony with the archives, rather than act as though they can be substituted for one another. For example, Appendix 2 (Tell it to ACT UP, Bill Dobbs’ weekly newsletter featuring anonymous comments from other ACT UPers) features archival material that supplements the oral history project, but is wholly independent from it. Essentially, Let the Record Show acts as a guide to the ACT UP oral history project, giving readers a deeper understanding of how these interviews relate to each other and giving them a more streamlined entry point to the somewhat overwhelming (yet carefully and thoughtfully tagged and organized!) mass of interviews. This tracks, given that Schulman is the driving force behind both.
Schulman is not free from bias when organizing Let the Record Show - she overuses the first-person at times, and given the double-layered ouroboros of sourcing (the same person is conducting the interviews and choosing the most relevant parts), it’s easy to see how Let the Record Show can begin to take on a tinge of a memoir or a self-portrait. But… what’s the alternative? Who else is stepping up to give a nuanced accounting of the events that led to the formation and dissolution of ACT UP? Anyone with the commitment to undertake such a vast project will necessarily have some investment in its history, some stake in the way the story is told. Schulman does us the kindness of explicitly stating and embracing the fact that she is biased, but even the title of the book itself states it plainly: this text is a political history. This can be read two ways - that the text is studying the politics of ACT UP (which it does quite well), but also that it is a politicized history, a history whose expression and explanation is political.
Let the Record Show cannot be divorced from the context in which it was produced - it can never be taken as merely a study of a particular social group or event. It is not ‘timeless’, nor is it ‘inspirational’. It relates clearly and directly to the social dynamics of the modern day. There’s a reason that Schulman takes the time to dissect and study the ways by which ACT UP’s most effective actions came about - not in order to rate ACT UP’s total effectiveness as an organization, but to offer key insights into process that can be scavenged by people looking to make real change. Let the Record Show appeared in the wake of great social change - published in 2021, it rode the waves of social activism and organization spurred on by the pandemic, police brutality, and global injustice. It is a toolbox by which these new movements can seek to understand the achievements and failures of the past: Schulman repeatedly nods at asynchronous, horizontal organization as a key component of actually effective activism for this very reason. A deep study of ACT UP is not necessary for those wishing to organize and create change, but it will certainly save them much trial and error - and what more can one ask for?