Conflict is Not Abuse with Sarah Schulman

Even if you are unfamiliar with today's guest, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman, there’s a very good chance that you have been influenced by her work. Her ideas and approach to activism have become woven into our collective awareness in a way that makes people of so many different experiences and perspectives sit up and pay attention. In a world that is increasingly either/or, Schulman’s nuance and emphasis on concrete effectiveness and the need to look at situations within their context instead of as caricatures drawn to reinforce dominant narratives make her a perfect guest for Both/And. In our conversation, we explore how her book, Conflict is Not Abuse can inform our approach to our prevention practices, our interpersonal dealings, and our efforts to confront systemic harm. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! 

Sarah Schulman teaches Creative Writing (Nonfiction and Fiction) with an emphasis on manuscript development. She is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian.

Sarah is a native New Yorker, born in 1958, who started as a journalist in the grassroots lesbian, gay and feminist press in 1979. That year she became active in the Reproductive Rights Movement, working for abortion rights and against sterilization abuse. Her first plays were produced as part of the Downtown Arts Scene of the 1980's, and her first novel was published in 1984.

In 1986 Sarah and her longtime collaborator Jim Hubbard started MIX:The Queer Experimental Film and Video Festival which lasted for 33 years. She has been a collaborator on many experimental films, including screenwriter or co-screenwriter for 4 features: The Owls (dir. Cheryl Dunye), Mommy Is Coming (dir. Cheryl Dunye), Jason and Shirley (dir. Stephen Winter) and United In Anger: A History of ACT UP (dir. Jim Hubbard.) Her films have shown in Theatrical Distribution and  at The Berlin Film Festival, Hot Docs, Bamfest, The Museum of Modern Art, Outfest, and on the Criterian Collection.

She was a member of ACT UP, New York from 1987 to 1992, and a co-founder of the Lesbian Avengers. Today she serves on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace and is co-director of The ACT UP Oral History Project. 

She is the author of 21 books, including novels in multiple genres: historical fiction, literary fiction, experimental work, detective novels, speculative fiction. Sarah’s work as a journalist, activist, and novelist is extensively discussed in “Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels” (Routledge 2024), a research monograph juxtaposing the works about the AIDS epidemic.

In 2002, Sarah became an "Uptown" playwright with the world premiere of her play CARSON McCULLERS (dir. Marion McClinton) followed by MANIC FLIGHT REACTION (w/ Deirdre O'Connell), both at Playwrights Horizons. Her play THE BURNING DECK (w/ Diane Venora) was performed at the La Jolla Playhouse, her adaptation of IB Singer's ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY (w/ Morgan Spector) premiered at the Wilma Theater and THE LADY HAMLET opened at The Provincetown Theater (dir. by David Drake, W/ Jennifer Van Dyck.) Her plays have been developed at The Goodman Theater, The Cleveland Playhouse, The Berkshire Theater Festival, The Vineyard, The Roundabout, and many other theaters.

LINKS:

Conflict is not Abuse Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

United in Anger A history of ACT-UP

ACT-UP Oral History Project

Let the Record Show A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity 

People in Trouble 

How to Survive the End of the World episode with Sarah Schulman 

Building Resilient Organizations

Both/And is a project of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs.     www.nmcsap.org  
Need support? Call, text, or chat the NM Sexual Assault Helpline at 1-844-NMSAHLP | 1-844-667-2457 | www.nmsahelp.org

Intro music: "Can't Get Enough Sunlight" written and recorded by Michelle Chamuel http://michellechamuel.com/
Logo: Alex Ross-Reed
Produced by: Jess Clark
Edited By: Dacia Clay at Pillow Fort Studios
https://www.pillowfortpodcasts.com

Transcript

Speaker Welcome to both and a sexual violence prevention podcast. I'm Jess Clark, director of prevention for the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs. And your host, even if you don't know today's guest novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and Aids historian Sarah Schulman. There's a very good chance that you're familiar with her work. Her ideas and approach to activism have become woven into our collective awareness in a way that makes people of so many different experiences and perspectives sit up and pay attention in a world that is increasingly either or. Schulman's nuance and emphasis on concrete effectiveness, and the need to look at situations within their context instead of as caricatures drawn to reinforce dominant narratives make her a perfect guest for both. And in our conversation, we explore how her book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, can inform our approach to prevention practices, our interpersonal dealings and our efforts to confront systemic harm. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Sarah Schulman, thank you so much for coming on. Both, and I have followed your work for many years. And when I had the thought, I wonder if she would come on the podcast. I thought, there's no way. And so I emailed you and you said yes very quickly. And it was one of the the bigger surprises of this year for me. So thank you so much for spending the time. Oh, thanks for asking me. Before we get into the book, I want to take just a moment to talk about how your work is all connected. You're a novelist, a playwright, a journalist, a professor, and all of that work exists within this context of a life spent doing work on the ground for social change around HIV, Aids, Palestine, queer rights. I'm really curious, how did those experiences doing that work on the ground lead you to the place of needing to write? Conflict is not abuse. You know, I wrote a book earlier called Ties That Bind Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and that was the very first book on familial homophobia. In fact, I had to coin the phrase familial homophobia because everyone just called it it. And that book took me almost ten years to get published. So it appeared way, way after it was written. But I had a revelation writing that, um, which was that the homophobic family blames the queer person for the problem. But actually the problem is the homophobia of the family. So this insight that groups have negative bonds that make them feel superior, That was an innovative thought for me. And that is in a sense, the basis of conflict is not abuse, which was published many years later but was written many, many years later because of the gap and which also conflict was not is not abuse was also almost impossible to publish. It was turned down by every publisher in the United States, including the feminist press, all the university presses, the leftist presses, and I finally had to publish it. After years of frustration with Arsenal pulp Press, which is a queer press in Vancouver, Canada. And I thought, okay, this book is dead. Like, no one will ever see this. And then it became my best selling book. So it was, you know, these ideas have been very hard to get into the world. And yet once they get into the world, they seem to really be very easily legible. And at this point, we sold like seventy thousand copies. It's been translated into five languages. It's a book that has really spoken to people, and it's one of those examples of the industry being so far behind that they can't tolerate, you know, truly original ideas. I have a couple of thoughts. One is that that conflict is not abuse, and we will not cancel us and Loretta Ross's work that you wrote it, but it took a while for it to be published. But the idea that we have have become communities and social spaces and what have you, where divergent thought is, is something to be suppressed and something that we, we can't have any space for. We finally started to move away from that idea a little bit. And it's interesting to see your work living in in the same world as Loretta Ross and Adrienne Maree Brown and all of these abolitionist writers as well. Because the book wasn't written, it didn't, at least from my perspective when I read it, it didn't come across immediately as like, this is an anti, this is an abolitionist framework, but it is and exists alongside those in a way that I think gives further meaning to books like we Will Not Cancel Us and the work of Miriam Makeba and all of those pieces. Well, I didn't think of it that way when I wrote it. I mean, I had barely heard of cancel culture, and I think I mentioned it once in the whole book, but what I didn't know was that this was a huge concern for people much younger than myself. Mhm. And interestingly, Arsenal pulp, because they're Canadian, they get money from the Canadian government to tour their authors, whereas small presses in the US don't have that. So they toured me with the book and by the. I started in Montreal. By the time I got to the West Coast, I was having hundreds and hundreds of people in the audience, most of whom were in their twenties and 30s because of their concern about cancel culture. For me, it was primarily a book about Palestine and the idea of the bad group and how clicks, families, religious formations. All of these groups that offer meaning can also be constructed through negative bonds. And if we examine it, starting with the individual and moving towards the geopolitical, we can understand why it's been so hard for people to stand up for Palestine. That's not how it was read, Because a lot of people actually never read the whole book. They read the first chapter, which was available for free through Amazon, so they didn't understand. They thought it was about intimate relationships. And it was. People thought it was like a self-help book for leftists, but if they read the whole book, they would have seen that it ends in Palestine because I am a novelist. And so I used the entire book to unfold an idea like, my books have a durational life, and you need to read the whole thing to find out what they're about. So there was a lot of sort of incomplete discourse around the book, but that's what happens. You put it out there and people are going to pick what. What works for them and what creates meaning. Right. I'm curious, though, about the interpersonal to systemic piece. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. When you were talking about families and homophobia within families, that having conversations that are meaningful with folks has to start with the personal. My number gets thrown around Santa Fe a lot as parents of trans children go talk to this person. And usually it's just a place for them. And I'm happy to be this person, a place for them to hear that their child can have a good life and that it's possible to, to live a good, happy life as a trans person. And so much of that is dependent on the support that they get, often from their family system and within their city and county. What have you. And the most dominant narrative that I hear from these parents is that they're grieving the loss of their insert son or daughter here, and that grief is so put on that young person as you have done this thing to me, you are. Your existence is causing me pain and harm because it is challenging. Uh, all this stuff about me and my favorite reframe for those adults has been. Your grief is absolutely real and valid, and your grief has nothing to do with your child. You're grieving the expectations that you had for your child. And what is parenting if it is not a constant grieving of the expectations we have for ourselves and our children over little and big things. But I think about how that grief then gets put within an echo chamber of other parents who are experiencing that same grief, and instead of looking inward and how they can move through it, they start to externalize it. And we end up with all of these deeply anti-trans movements and parents rights movements and things like that. And one thing that conflict is not abuse did for me is starting with that individual and then getting to the systemic pieces and talking about Palestine, and that when we can understand how we are individually reacting to interpersonal conflict, it can help us understand how we move through larger scale global political conflict and what roles we play in that space. It sounds like that was something you did purposefully. Is, is that what you're saying, that you started with the individual and then grew it? I'm very much a product of my time, and I was born in the middle of the twentieth century. Nineteen fifty eight in New York City. So I'm very influenced by the causal structuralism of like psychoanalysis. And because, as you know, many refugees, psychoanalysts came to New York after World War Two. That's why so many New Yorkers have been in therapy. Right. And of course, this is an old Freud concept that the civilization is made up of the same impulses that individuals hold. And that has always felt correct to me. So I was trying to show is that what we play out personally? The idea that if someone opposes us and we feel bad because we can't tolerate opposition, we act as though they are hurting us, attacking us, or abusing us. But that may not be the case. And yet we've built all kinds of loyalty systems around groups agreeing that people are being hurt, attacked and abused because they're being opposed. Mhm. So I thought that if I could start out by showing how that functions in the most immediate. And then I could build and build and build until we get to these very large examples of, for example, people with Aids. I did a lot of reporting on HIV criminalization in Canada and Palestinians. You end up with large groups of people who are endangered being falsely presented as dangerous. and trans people fit that description as well. Because of these same dynamics. Yeah. And it's such a human dynamic. I see the world through parenting because it is so much of my world. As we were saying before we got on, I'm parenting a quarter of a dozen children. Of course, it's how I'm going to see everything, but it's such a human instinct to react to any challenge to power with, you are hurting me. This happens with my kids all the time. Is bit ago. I was driving in the car and four year old that I'm parenting was very angry because I had put him in the car and because we had somewhere to go, and he was having a really big response to that and screaming and yelling. And he took off one of his shoes and he threw it at me, and I kept driving and he said, give me my shoe back. And I said, no, but you know, I'm not going to give you your ammunition back so that you can throw it back at me. And he started screaming. You took my shoe and then took his other shoe and threw it at me and started saying, you took both my shoes and you're never giving them back to me, and you're hurting me. And I was going, wow, okay, that is one way to see this. But it's amazing how that dynamic, that very childish dynamic plays out over and over throughout our lives. Right? But of course, the challenge is my of my book is for you to discover that about yourself, not about your child. Yes. Yes, exactly. But being able to see it in my kid goes, wow, how do we do this in our lives? On that note, one of the themes that really hit me from the book is that so much of our the misappropriation of terms like abuse and violence, and how our response to conflict comes from supremacies thinking and past traumatic experiences. Um, at one point you say my thesis is that at many levels of human interaction, there's the opportunity to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger and in turn, to escalate rather than resolve. Can you talk a little bit about how the internal experience of conflating discomfort for threats becomes externalized in both interpersonal and systemic ways? Right. I think this is one of the really good insights in the book, because it's a kind of book that has like literally hundreds of ideas, and some of them are kind of wonky, some of them are good. And you and you're supposed to read it not to say yes, yes, yes, but to say yes. No, I don't know. Wait a minute, I don't agree. Oh, that looks good. You know, it's supposed to be an interactive reading experience, right? And, you know, I, it started with reading a book by Sarah Ahmed. Um, I think it's called The Pursuit of Happiness, where she says the only way you can never be uncomfortable is if everyone else is suppressed. But if you're in a healthy environment, you'll be uncomfortable all the time because the difference will be legible. So people who are raised that they should never feel uncomfortable become enraged if you ask them to question themselves. Mhm. They feel that what you are doing is horrible. It's criminal. It should never take place, and that they have the right to do anything to stop you from asking. Asking them to question themselves. And that's where other people come in. And I'm a big fan of third party intervention, which is a concept I introduced in the book on familial homophobia and then resurfaced in Conflict Is Not Abuse. There's a false concept of loyalty among cliques, families, racial groups, religious groups that we show our loyalty by helping each other hurt people who make us uncomfortable. I'm often asked to hurt people. People will often say to me, why? Why did you invite her? Why are you working with that person? You know, they want me to shun people. And we all have this. It's considered loyalty to hurt other people. But I think that real friendship and real love is helping people be self-critical and giving them support to negotiate. And I would like to redefine friendship to have to include those elements. So if, for example, if somebody said, you know, I think the reason that things ended so badly with that person is because I really escalated, then we would say, well, then you deserve it because we're in a, in a moment where you have to be clean, clean, pure, one hundred percent pure victim to be eligible for compassion. The bar is so high. But if we said anyone who asks for help should get it, and everyone should be eligible for compassion. Then if somebody said, you know, I think I contributed to escalating that problem, then we throw our arms around them and hug them and kiss them and thank them for being so self-aware, you see? And then we add, and when people say, why, why did you invite that person? You shouldn't speak to them and said, we say, how can I help the two of you communicate? You say something. Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? And, and I think that line sums up so well why we so rarely enter that space and say, how can I help you to communicate? Because it's so much cleaner in our minds to have that that enemy than the conversation be able to look at ourselves. There's more status. Yeah. Being a quote abused. Yeah. And that's why I had to provide definitions of conflict and of abuse. And I use a definition that I learned from a social worker named Katherine Hodes, who says that abuse is power over. It means no matter what you do, it's not going to change it. Yeah, these people control the argument and they're going to get you and you could be nice. You could be mean, you could be complicit. You could be whatever. They're going to hurt you. Your actions have no impact. That's abuse. Conflict is power. Struggle and conflict can be more painful than abuse. But conflict means that you have the ability to impact the situation. Doesn't mean it's your fault. And we conflate those two things. And it's terrifying, though, to realize that we have the ability to impact a situation. Is, for me at least, has always been really scary because when we become so convinced of our own lack of power in the world based on whoever we might be. The idea that I get to say is, is scary because it means I have to do something. I have an active role to play. Well, yeah, because being a being a victim of conflict means you can abdicate responsibility. Yeah, very much so. I'm going to ask a couple of questions around the connection between what we do in prevention space and your book, because we have these really common activities and frames for our work that I think are really challenged by your book and really helpful ways. So one of those pieces, and this is going to go with, with the definition of conflict that you present, and then a different definition. So in prevention spaces, we talk a good bit about the monster myth, uh, how creating creepy men in the van, caricatures of people who perpetrate violence and use terms like evil or sick or monster, how it both keeps us from recognizing harm in others. Because if it's the creepy man in the van, if it's the other, then no, my friend could never cause harm. This is someone I like and respect and who is beloved in my community, and it keeps us from recognizing harm in ourselves. Because I'm not a monster. I'm not bad. I'm a good person. I'm a good friend. There's no way I could ever cause harm or I'm a victim. There's no way I could ever also perpetrate harm. So this is a concept we talk about a lot. And when violence happens in our communities, I think about this a lot in queer communities is when violence happens in a community that has already been harmed in such significant ways because of the monster myth, we end up with the choice of either pretending that the violence didn't happen so that we can stay in relationship with that person without any kind of without engaging in any kind of conflict or accountability, or our choices to dispose of that person through shunning or engaging the criminal legal system. Adrian Marie Brown and we will not cancel us. She calls generative conflict, actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, where we have significant political differences and where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggles in ourselves and communities, which I think works really well alongside definition you provide and conflict is not abuse. So I'm really curious, what role do you think conflict generative conflict has to play in interrupting that false binary of either ignoring harm in the people that we love and care about or disposing them? Well, I mean, the first thing is to recognize that the reaction has to do with the person's history. Mhm. And there's no objective standard. So for example, in the book I wrote about, um, Columbia University, there was a lot at the time that I wrote the book. There was a lot of conflict among the student body about sexual abuse. And when people studied it at the school, because we were like, why is there so much sexual abuse at Columbia University? They found out is that there's a small number of people who actually are perpetrators who actually enjoy breaking other people's will. And then there's a large group of people who exist in a gray area where they don't really understand how you get from point A to point B in a sexual relationship. They, um, have internalized a lot of public image that isn't accurate. You know, so all of that kind of thing. And the way people reacted to gray zone depended entirely on who they were before. So two people could have the exact same sexual experience. One person could feel that it had damaged them for the rest of their lives, and another person could feel like, oh, well, that's the way it goes. Mhm. It's not because the experience itself held the value. It's because they had different histories and they were surrounded by different kinds of people. And that's what they brought to that common experience. So to make rules, like every time someone says X or you must always do Y, doesn't make any sense because people are going to respond to those situations differently based on who they are. When we were making in New Mexico laws around affirmative consent at the university level, some of the pushback was they wanted us to really clearly define what the response had to be from universities. And we said, there's no way to do that because it is so dynamic. And because when we say this term trauma informed, it can't be clearly defined because one, the understanding of what that means is going to shift as as the world changes, but also because that depends on the person. And so if we're really wanting to be survivor centered, we, we can't dictate things. So. Right. We can't with such specificity. I was talking about this in England and you know, these rules about if someone's drunk, they can never consent. Yeah. And someone in the audience said, well, then no English people would ever have sex. Okay. But like, back to the Columbia thing. This was so interesting. So a number of students were demanding that a student be expelled because they had done something that was seen as breaking a community standard. But the problem is, if you expel this guy from Columbia, you're just putting them out into the world of women who don't go to Columbia. You're removing him from all the all the opportunities that are created by the elite community of a university, and you're not solving the problem. We have a huge problem in the culture about male with male offenders. It in so many on so many levels, at so many ages, at every social strata. And these types of closed worlds, like private universities, are great places to try to find ways to approach that. So this idea of removing somebody from the elite space where they can just continue their harm to people who have no accountability system, was just it didn't make any sense to me anyway. I mean, it's the same argument for abolition and, and for prison abolition is, is taking folks away from unveiled society does not remove, uh, that person's ability to cause harm. It just puts it in a very particular context, right? Because there are people like a family member is murdered and they want the murderer to be executed. And then there's other people who want to build relationships with that murderer. And that's not because the crime, it's because of the person. Yeah, very much so. We did an episode here with, uh, the Ahimsa Collective, who they do all manner of restorative justice work. And the interview I did was with someone who had been through a restorative process as the survivor and the person who facilitated that process for them. And it was fascinating understanding, like, why did you choose this process? What led you to this moment? And it had everything to do with their culture and values and that I am deeply relational. And so my response to being assaulted has to be relational. And that might be wildly different for someone who hasn't been brought up with or isn't connected with that part of themselves. Yeah, I did a lot of research into restorative justice processes, and I was going to write a chapter about it, but I decided not to. But I found that in a lot, a lot of times they don't work. And, you know, I found places where the demands of the community were ridiculous. They went on and on forever. You could never get. It's like if you serve your time, it's over. This would never end. And that's what makes the process with ahimsa so different is they say this is not about punishment at all. And if even if you are acting outside of the criminal legal system, if your framework is still one of punishment, it is not going to be restorative and it's not going to be relational. And so the way they move through it is it is about that relationship, and it's about each person having a journey that is not about here's a set of rules that you have to follow in my life. Um, which I thought was really fascinating and a very different take from restorative justice than I had seen previously, which was nice to see in conflict is not abuse. Do you have a chapter about the expansion of how we define violence, and how that expansion has distorted our understanding of violence in a way that encourages and even, and I think especially rewards us to over respond to interpersonal conflict with the same tools that we would typically reserve for physical or sexual violence. So in prevention world, we've had this activity we've done for a very long time, and I would love your thoughts. It's called the spectrum of violence. You may be familiar with it, but it's an activity where we ask participants to name what they would identify as forms of violence, and they place them on a line from least to most harmful. And on the side of the least is always jokes and most is always genocide. And the point of the activity is to help people understand how large, deeply impactful acts of violence against an individual or a group, how they're supported and justified through things like jokes that are designed to dehumanize people, and then it's designed to activate them into bystander intervention before it gets to the physical side. And, and I read, I read this book many years ago and then came back to it recently and thought, gosh, we are not contextualizing this activity well at all. Because when we put jokes under the same umbrella as rape or murder, and more importantly, when we put people who make harmful jokes under the same umbrella as people who are committing rape or murder, I want to know, how do you think that impacts our ability to address harm? Period? Well, that's a real problem. On the other hand, and this is something that's very hard to grapple with. Mhm. In order for genocide to be acceptable, there has to be a cultural layer that's placed before the acts occur. Exactly. Which is the point of the activity? Yes. Yeah. Um but saying thing, I mean, I'm one of the because of my generation, I'm one of these no censorship people. And I realize I'm out of I'm out of date. But I do, I do know that some speech can pave the way for, for genocide. Mhm. But I don't I'm not in favor of repressing speech because I've never seen that that's been successful. How do you think an activity like that could shift to better account for being able to be in generative conflict with each other? Who's really good at this is Katherine Hodes, and you should definitely interview her. That's excellent. I have her name down from reading the book multiple times. Yeah, because I learned a lot of this from her. I took her workshop and she does a lot of things where she shows you that in some situations, violence is not the worst thing that can happen. Mhm. Or she also shows you like Sometimes an act of violence occurs that is not systemic. For all kinds of reasons, and we now seize on it. Oh, this is I think I put this in the book, actually, that there was a couple and one person was always baiting the other one constantly. And it was so uncomfortable to be around them. And finally, one night in the middle of the night, the one who was being baited threw something at the batter and it hit them. And then they became the abuser. Mhm. You know, so it's hard to have really strict rules about what equals what. I just think we have to look at everything really specifically and in its own context with that activity specifically, I think about how in I don't even know if it's appropriate to call it cancel culture anymore, whatever we're going to call it, saying the wrong, the quote unquote wrong thing is seen on the level with committing an act of violence and is so often called violence, that word is violent. That thing you said was violent. I think a lot about my grandma, who before she died, was was in her late eighties, and she didn't have any of the right terms for anything having to do with trans folks at all. She was a very traditional woman who liked things the way she liked them. Hair done every couple of weeks at the same salon in the exact same way. She was a very predictable woman, and I didn't know what to expect of her when I came out. It was very scary. And then when I came out, this woman just said, well, okay, grandson. And I said, okay, nothing else. And she said no, and just moved on with her life. And then did all of these little things throughout her life to show me that she saw me as I am. She would before my aunt sent the birthday card, the aunt who I'd not seen in twenty years and would never see again before she sent my birth card, a birthday card with my five dollars. Every year, she would cross out my birth name and write Mr. Jess Clark on there and she would go online. The woman who I don't I don't know how she even did it, but she would go online and argue with people deeply defending me, uh, when they would call me out in the newspaper. And when she did those things, she didn't have all the right terms at all. She had never had a trans one hundred one or googled, how do I support my transgender grandson? But her core was seeing people as they are and reflecting it back to them in every way that she had the ability to do so. And I think about how some of her language would have been deemed transphobic, or how some of her approaches to things would have been seen as harmful. But but that wasn't as her trans grandson, that wasn't my experience of her at all. And right now, we're in a very different time now because we're in a time where people are being deported, arrested and fired because of their social media. Yes. So who's ever still living in the world of micromanaging other people's vocabularies? Mhm. They must be immune to all of that. It's wild. And I imagine it's because in that world where people are being fired because of their social media and deported and all of these pieces that it feels so scary. And we have so we feel like we have so little power in the world right now that where we can exert power, we do, which is often in community where we feel like we can micromanage people's language. I don't know what the answer is to that. You wrote this in in twenty sixteen, where it came out in twenty sixteen. Um, a lot has changed in the world since then. Have you changed your thoughts on anything? Have. Have any of these concepts shifted for you? So I wrote a six hundred page history of Act Up New York called Let the Record Show that, um, was a display of how people can be extremely different and have completely different understandings of things and yet be enormously effective. Mhm. And then last April, I published a book called The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, which cohered really concretely how, what effective movements do that works? Mhm. And I did like a thirty one city US book tour talking with people about this, about basically how to be effective, which has been really interesting. And now I'm back to novels. So, you know, I mean, things have only deteriorated socially, but I do think the desire to be effective is much larger than the desire to be theoretically superior. Yeah. In the moment. Yeah. Theoretically superior. Theoretically pure. Which is is so harmful to our movements as a whole. Are you familiar with Maurice Mitchell from Working Families Party? Oh, yeah. My partner's sister is very involved in that. Yeah, he's brilliant and wrote this wonderful piece called Building Resilient Communities or I'm sorry, Building Resilient Movements, where he lays out all of these common themes within organizing nonprofit spaces that hold us back from progress and power building and all of those pieces from like maximalism and, you know, pure ideology. Uh, one piece that I thought of when, when rereading conflict is not abuse is he lays out what he calls unanchored care, uh, which is assuming that our mental, physical and spiritual health are the responsibility of the organizations or the collective spaces that we take part in, and for me, it connected to the supremacist thinking and the the trauma response and how when we are coming into movement spaces to heal ourselves or to, to create personal meaning without being equally or more committed to, to the cause at hand, uh, how we end up holding ourselves and that movement back. Well, that's why like now when I, and I just did like a two, I just did a tour of the UK and a tour of France. So it's been very interesting talking about this stuff all over the place, not just in fascist America and socialist New York. The the only thing to strive for in the moment is being effective. I really think I agree, and the way to do that is to have a demand that is reasonable and winnable. Maybe not tomorrow, but within the frame of things and then working with a group of people who are interested in the same project and trying to build infrastructure towards that demand. Yeah. And when I say group of people, I don't mean an organization. I mean like five people. Yeah. And that's, you know, because we're in a time when every community in the world, if you include climate, are under attack by the oligarchs. So we need to be focused on what is winnable. Yeah. What do you think is winnable? Well, I think that asking universities to divest from Israel is ultimately winnable, because they've already done it with South Africa and in some cases with fossil fuels, and they institutionally know how to do it. So even though in the current moment when the Zionist minority has an outsized hold on what's happening at universities, it's not achievable tomorrow. But building infrastructure towards that goal I think is extremely reasonable. I think we need so many more of those very good concrete examples. We were doing some policy work here in New Mexico and and working with survivors and, and, and talking with folks who have been harmed. And it was amazing how many concrete, really winnable policy solutions folks were coming up with who are not people who are working, who are deeply working in anti-sexual violence movements. There are folks who are in community who have been harmed and who were impacted in some way that could be solved by policy. And it, for me, has really shifted from, we have to solve it all to how we actually have a few things we can do that will impact people deeply tomorrow. Well, if we can get them done. I love my mayor in New York so much. He. In five months he has filled one hundred thousand potholes. You know what I mean? I mean, he's created fifty soccer fields in front of public schools. He is fixing parks in poor areas. He is opening a low cost supermarket in a food desert. You saw that today. Childcare for free childcare. I mean, this guy is unreal and everything he's focused on is concrete. Mhm. You know, it's a great, great model. It's not starting a a subcommittee of a subcommittee, an exploratory subcommittee. It's just, hey, let's just do some things right. He's he's amassed a great crew of people who have very concrete assignments that they're, you know, and they are fulfilling them. In talking about your new book, you, you went on, uh, Ottoman, Adrien Marie Brown's podcast to talk about the new book. And, and in it, you were talking about debating with people who deeply disagree with you. Yes. And I loved I got so much from that moment. And you said, uh, you're not there to change their mind. What you're there to do is create a theatre of ideas. That phrase theatre of ideas has stuck with me so much. You're there to create a theatre of ideas for the audience that you can expose their positions, you can break down what the real issues are, and the people in the audience have more information for when they leave. I'm curious about how this approach, and all of the issues that you've been working on has served you in bringing people along. Well, how did you let go of the need to change people's minds? It doesn't work. I mean, I learned it in a bunch of rights movement because, you know, abortion became legal when I was in high school. And then I was and then after Roe v Wade, we had free abortion on demand until nineteen seventy nine, when the Hyde Amendment was passed. So there actually have only been six years of abortion rights in this country. And since then it's been a series of gift bags. So debating anti-abortion people about fetal life or whatever is pointless. But when need to talk with them in public. You can reveal for the audience that the real question is not who's right, but who decides. Mhm. And the same thing is true with Zionism. I'm not going to change any Zionists mind, but I can reveal very quickly for an audience that we're having a discussion about whether or not people should have different levels of rights based on their religions, which a lot of Americans are trained not to think that they should have. You know, now we have a Christian movement, but so, you know, that's where that that comes from in prevention spaces that has become one of our our go to phrases, you can't change. You're not there to change people's minds at all. And you never will. And if all of your work is aimed at that, you will feel really frustrated really quickly. And then there's the backfire effect. The harder you try to change someone's mind, oftentimes the deeper they they dig in. Well, you are there to get information to the public. Yes. Through the strategy of this conversation. Quote. Conversation? Yes. Yeah. And that when you're trying to make meet folks who are maybe on the fence or who have been trained to repeat certain narratives that are deeply against their, their actual values, then what your job is, is to help them understand how their actual values are aligned with your message. Because, you know, a very small group of people actually make change. Yes. And you don't need to persuade the majority. You just need to persuade the critical mass. Mhm. You know, even a group like Act-up or Aids activists at the most for like seven hundred people. But if you're effective, you can have look, they saved hundreds of millions of people's lives up until now with the US dismantling USAID and all of that. The whole trick is how effective are you? Yeah. For example, I have a collaborator we've been working together for since nineteen eighty six, however long ago that is. What is that, forty years. And we decided in two thousand and one that it was our responsibility to let the world know and understand what Act Up did. So over eighteen years, we interviewed one hundred and eighty eight surviving members of Act Up. We made all that material available for free online at Act Up oral history dot org. To date, we've had fourteen million visits to that site. Wow. We made a film called United in Anger A History of Act Up, which is available for free on Kanopy and YouTube. And I wrote a six hundred page book. Okay, so Jim recently turned seventy five and we were celebrating his birthday and he said, you know, we did our job. People now know what Act Up did and I'm retiring. And I was like, fine. So two people can do a lot, a lot. Yeah. Because many people now, thousands of people all over the world. And I just did the French tour of the French edition of Let the Record Show. People know about Act Up and they know about the strategies that worked. And that's two people. So a handful of people can do a lot. Yeah. But you have to keep your promises and you have to follow through. And you have to be you have to be effective. You have to be effective. Yeah. You have to wade through bureaucracy. You have to wade through all of those tasks that are not fun and don't feel visionary or revolutionary, but are the, the things that actually keep it going? Well, I think they're fun. But anyway, you like you like the bureaucracy. No, I don't do much. I'm terrible at bureaucracy. Part of getting the thing done and in the world is really fun for me. Of all the work that you've put out there, is there. There's what has resonated most with people. But what's what's the piece that you have felt most connected to or feel most proud of? The thing I love the most is the thing that's the hardest to get into the world, which is writing lesbian novels. There's huge antipathy towards novels or plays about lesbian adults, and the obstructions are unbelievable. So like, if I write a book about men like Act Up, suddenly I'm brilliant and I'm a great writer and I get all this respect, and then I come forward with a lesbian novel and it's like social death, you know, you're ghosted and all of that. And the, the, the issue is seeing men differently than they see themselves is completely unforgivable. Yeah. So that's, that's what's most important to me. And the most difficult. The people in trouble in rent is the perfect example of that. I wrote a whole book about it. Yes yes yes yes, yes. Um, but a book about with lesbians as the center or a play with lesbians as a center and then gets turned to men as the center straight men as the center of a queer movement that becomes, right, a worldwide hit. Uh, I have to say, as a millennial theater kid, uh, learning about the reality of rent. I felt personally betrayed, um, suspicious when the bad landlord was black. There's that. Yes. Jay Diggs is talented as he is. Uh, but it's what what led me to then read People in Trouble, which I then got to take that moment of feeling, but of betrayal into something else. Sarah Schulman, thank you so much for coming on both. And you are a gift to our world. And I am glad that that I have been able to grow up in a world with so many of your words and concepts out there and evolving that have evolved alongside our changing world. So thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Both and both and is a project of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs. And this episode was made possible by the New Mexico Department of Health, both and is produced by me, Jess Clark, and edited by the fabulous Dacia Clay at Pillow Fort Studios. Intro music was written by Michelle Chamuel and the logo designed by Alex Ross Reed. You can find links to the articles and papers we mentioned in the show notes. And as always, you can reach me with questions, comments, and even disagreements at jsc at nmc dot org. Thank you and I'm so looking forward to next time.