Sarah Miriam Schulman (born 1958 in New York City) is an American
novelist, historian and playwright. An early chronicler of the AIDS
crisis, she wrote on AIDS and social issues, publishing in The Village
Voice in the early 1980s,[citation needed] and writing the first piece
on AIDS and the homeless, which appeared in The Nation  She is openly a
lesbian.

This is the fiftieth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Author
and playwright Sarah Schulman is concerned with constructing a lesbian
identity around and against the multicultural identities of New York
City.
Schulman was born into a second-generation immigrant European
Jewish family in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, on July 28, 1958. She
still lives in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, which forms a backdrop
to all of her writing.

A
lifelong political activist, Schulman has been involved in a number of
strategic social movements, including Abortion Rights, ACT-UP, and most
recently, the Lesbian Avengers. She is the cofounder of the Lesbian and
Gay Experimental Film Festival and is a prodigious contributor to the
mainstream and progressive press, including The New York Times, The
Guardian, Interview, The Face, Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine, Village
Voice, The Advocate, Cineaste, and Jump-Cut.

Schulman's
writing blends narrative experimentation with political critique. She
constructs lesbian identity around the landscape of the modern, taking
New York as the archetypal literary site. Changing, fluid, complex, and
fragmented, the lesbian fights for a space juxtaposed with, and
superimposed on, other cultural identities, such as Jewish, working
class, or black. These "ethnocentricities" then force the reader, by a
process of narrative investigation, to question the construction of
identity itself.

The Sophie
Horowitz Story (1984), Schulman's first novel, reveals a cornucopia of
literary and political conventions skewered by a sharp satiric wit.
Sophie is an early feminist sleuth-reporter parodying the Search for
Woman, which has so preoccupied previous dicks. Tracing her feminist
mentors proves both a hopeless and revelatory task, for in the novel
icons fall from their pedestals, and the message clearly berates the
tendency of subcultures to put their trust in heroes.

The
hero of Girls, Visions and Everything (1986) is New York, "the most
beautiful woman [she] had ever known." This city is mapped out with
emotional happenings, and as Lila Futuransky, female flâneuse, walks the
streets, these locations stand for symbols of connection, an antithesis
to Reagan's America. Modeling herself on the Jack Kerouac of On the
Road, Lila is similarly self-exploratory on her adventure, but hers is
based on a female erotic aesthetic.

After
Delores (1988), by contrast, is an excruciatingly painful narrative of
loss, of being left by your lover for another woman.
Sally R. Munt
       
Activism

Schulman
was active in the University Feminist Organization while a student at
the University of Chicago from 1976-1978. From 1979-1982, Schulman was a
member of CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against
Sterilization Abuse), and participated in a notorious act of early
direct action, where she and five others (called The Women's Liberation
Zap Action Brigade) disrupted an anti-abortion hearing in Congress that
was being broadcast on live TV.

In
1987, Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard founded "The New York Lesbian
and Gay Experimental Film Festival", now called MIX and in its
twenty-fourth year.

Also in 1987,
Schulman joined ACT UP, and was an active member for five years. She
participated in many small and key actions including "Seize Control of
the FDA", "Stop The Church", "Storm The NIH" and participated in the
founding of Housing Works. She was arrested during "The Day of
Desperation" when ACT UP occupied Grand Central Station protesting the
First Gulf War "Money for AIDS, Not for War."

In
1992, Schulman and five others co-founded the Lesbian Avengers, a
direct action organization.[9] On her 1992 book tour for Empathy,
Schulman visited gay bookstores in the South to start chapters. The
organization's high points included sending groups of young organizers
to Maine and Idaho to assist local fights against anti-gay ballot
initiatives that were being funded by national right wing
organizations.They also organized the first "Dyke March" which is now an
international tradition.

From the
late 1980s through the early 1990s, Schulman was a principle organizer
for the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization's efforts to march in the New
York Saint Patrick's Day Parade. She was arrested five times, but never
convicted. The organization collapsed, and to this day, Irish Gays and
Lesbians are not allowed to march in the parade under their own banner.

Since
2001, Sarah and Jim Hubbard have been creating the ACT UP Oral History
Project and are now producing a feature documentary, "United In Anger:
The History of ACT UP"

In
recognition of her contributions to her communities, Schulman was made a
Revson Fellow for the Future of New York City at Columbia University
and received a Stonewall Award, for Contributions Improving the Lives of
Lesbians and Gays in the United StatesIn 2009 Schulman was awarded the
Kessler Prize for sustained contribution to LGBT Studies, given by
CLAGS: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University
Graduate Center. Previous awardees include Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich
and Monique Wittig. In 2009 she was also appointed to the Advisory
Council of the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights and
Social Movements.

In 2010, Schulman
declined an invitation to Tel Aviv University in recognition of the
requests of Israeli and Palestinian academics to support
"boycott/divestment/sanctions" and instead went on a solidarity visit.
She spoke in alternative venues in Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Haifa, and was
able to talk to Israeli and Palestinian LGBT audiences who oppose the
occupation.

Teaching

Schulman
is a Professor of English at The City University of New York, College
of Staten Island and a Fellow at The New York Institute for the
Humanities at NYU.

Published works

Novels
The Mere Future (2009)
The Child (2007)
Shimmer (1998)
Rat Bohemia (1995) - traduzido para o português (Boêmia dos Ratos)
Empathy (1992)
People in Trouble (1990)
After Delores (1988)
Girls, Visions and Everything (1986)
The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984)
Collected Early Novels of Sarah Schulman (1998)
Nonfiction
Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009)
Stagetruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998)
My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years (1994)
Plays
Enemies, A Love Story (adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer) (2007)
Manic Flight Reaction (2005)
Carson McCullers (2002) (publicado por Playscritpts Inc., 2006)