The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

by Sarah Schulman

In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, LGBT, Memoir, Politics, New York

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2012

About the author

Sarah Schulman is a longtime AIDS and queer activist, and a cofounder of the MIX Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She is a playwright and the author of seventeen books, including the novels The Mere Future, Shimmer, Rat Bohemia, After Delores, and People in Trouble, as well as nonfiction works such as The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. She is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

Reviews

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are times during this book when I wanted to throttle Schulman - some of her political analysis is facile and even knee-jerk, and she endows swathes of the population with a host of characteristics that she condemns as "gentrified", by which she sometimes means just traits that she doesn't like.

But there were also times when I felt like standing up in my train seat and cheering her on, because this book is saying in its cacophonous, slightly obnoxious way many true and heartbreaking things that I have thought, wondered about or tried to avoid thinking. About the gentrification of New York, which I am both a part of and horrified by. (Although I could take her romanticization of
"her" East Village to task on an any number of levels, there is also much that is true and moving in what she writes. I am several years younger than Schulman, but still managed to bear witness to the transformation of the EV from gritty stinky dangerous urban landscape that was largely Latino but still with traces of early 20th century immigrations to a post-frat yuppie playground. And although she writes, in 2010, that she hopes the credit crisis has brought the gentrification of New York to a halt, I am part of - and saddened witness to - the absolute gentrification and mallification of more and more of Brooklyn with every passing week. The neighborhood I live in, where 15 years ago, everyone knew each other, men spoke Sicilian and Pugliese dialects on street corners outside social clubs and the best cannoli, pizza, mozzarella, sausage and panelle in the city could all be found in a few block stroll, welcomed its first Lulu Lemon a few weeks ago. And yes, I know I'm the target audience for the Lulu Lemon).

Schulman's sprawling yet slender book is "also" about the enormous trauma of losing a generation of gay men and others to AIDS, and about how that trauma is largely undiscussed and unacknowledged. (As a very young woman in New York in the early 90s, I used to deliver meals to dying men, horribly disfigured, men who to a man were at least a decade younger than I am now. At first, it irked me that they weren't more grateful for our charitable efforts. Then I realized how angry most of them were - and how they had every right to be so, abandoned, more or less, as they were.) The decade that separates me from Schulman means that my friends didn't die or (mostly) get infected, but I did once tease an older gay friend and colleague about surrounding himself with handsome men many years his junior. He, a consummate lawyer who never loses his cool, looked at me almost saddened by my ignorance, "Elaine, all my friends are dead." Schulman's book is that knife-like statement writ large and angry. She is a survivor, she is saying, and so are all of us, and our culture, and attention must be paid.

She also says stuff I think but daren't speak about often. About how the most transgressive of movements has become about marriage, that most conservative of institutions. And about the way that AIDS is a part of that. I don't agree with all of her analysis by any means. But I'm glad she's talking about it. Just as I'm glad that she's talking about women - and what the current self-inflicted cult of motherhood does to feminist anger and energy, and our hope that society could actually be different for women, and glad she's talking about the deep inequities in our society and the fundamentally meretricious story that is told people about the power of education to change those inequities. (The book touches on a lot of things!)

There's so much in this book. Not all of it is easy, especially since I can guess what Schulman would make of me (a few mutual friends float through this book - I wonder actually, if I've ever met her, but suspect she'd dismiss my straight/cis/white/uber-privileged self as so much cannon fodder - even though I'd love to have a conversation/ argument with her), and not all of it is right. But it's been a while since I have read a book that made me think, react so much - rolling my eyes one page, saluting her the next. And it only takes a few hours to read. Recommended - but not simple.

[Mattilda]

I've been waiting for this book for years, and take a look at this incredible paragraph:

"The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of 20 years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don't matter with deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person's life is more important than another's. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person's death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.”

Sarah Schulman deserves an award for that paragraph alone.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

not three stars like "it was okay", three stars like "love-hate". I really want people to read this so we can talk about it, it's pretty short, come on

really into her fundamental thesis that it's productive to compare the erasure of marginalised (in this case, queer) histories to the erasure of marginalised neighbourhoods through gentrification — often literally, as in the case of the process of gentrification in new york being sped up by the aids-related deaths of queers in rent-controlled apartments. really into everything she says about history, historical erasure, the generation gap between young and old queers, the traumatic weight of AIDS deaths, the insidious professionalisation of the arts and consequent erasure of queer voices.

really not into the (commonly made) mistake throughout the book where she equates gentrification with homogenisation — gentrification is more often justified politically as a form of "integration", like bringing rich people or white people into predominantly poor or PoC neighbourhoods. it's very reliant on the idea of "mix", on urbanism as "mix", on selling the idea of living in a diverse bohemia. rich white gentrifiers generally don't just want to live in suburbia with smaller bathrooms, they want to consume multi-ethnic bohemia, the problem is that they do, it is consumed, eaten. like she's totally right that gentrification has more to do with capitalism and government policy than with artists. but artists in NYC in particular had a crucial and well-documented role in its gentrification. they didn't control it, they didn't cause it. but they were used for it.

really really not into her unforgivably silly and misogynist anti-child screed that blames lesbians who have children for like the individualisation and rightward trend of queer movement today because like they make schulman responsible for helping organising childcare which is demobilising and it's not like they have the energy to mobilise politically for childcare assistance which would be okay. what the fuck? fuck you.

[Oriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an incredibly fascinating, incredibly frustrating, incredibly heartbreaking, and incredibly enraging book.

So much of it is deeply moving, a howling cry from the trenches lamenting the endless horror of the AIDS crisis and the myriad ways an entire segment of our society was failed, over and over, by every single one of the powers that be. Schulman has clearly been through the shit, fighting for her life and the lives of all the queer artists around her who were dying, dying, dying.

But the problems with this book are vast. It's wide-ranging and poorly balanced and often, honestly, insane. Her political and sociological analyses are sometimes staggering but at other times just utterly incomprehensible.

But some of it is so intense! Here she is talking about some of her long-gone friends: "I mean there were two competing aesthetics as the time: the people who favored candlelight vigils with the release of white balloons, and the kind of people who published a zine called Diseased Pariah News."

or

"I remember when David threw a 'dying party' in his Chelsea condo. He invited his closest friends and had us standing around eating and drinking while we watched him, emaciated, lying on the living room couch, dying in front of us."

or her truly devastating discussion of the way AIDS hastened the gentrification of entire neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, because as these men died, fast fast fast one after the other, whole apartment buildings full of dead and dying men with no legal benefactor to inherit their leases, the landlords booted any remaining significant others, cursorily "renovated," then doubled or tripled the rents to usher in a new moneyed demographic. Crushing.

But then, elsewhere, she says things like, "gay people are the new Jews" and "9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS" and "we decided to gentrify the truth about sex in order to save lives." What what what? In fact, she uses the words "gentrify" and "gentrification" so often, and in so many bewilderingly different permutations, that you start to wonder if this is a concept that ever held a fixed meaning, for her or for you or for anyone, or if it's actually just a nonsense string of syllables onto which pretty much any idea can be projected.

This is a pretty short book, but it has very little structure and very little focus. There are pages and pages of interviews she has done elsewhere pasted in. There are big sections in bulleted lists that are really just paragraphs broken up in a confusing way. There's a whole transcription from a time she testified in court. In order to prove that lesbians don't win literary awards, she has a table listing the men and women who have won each of six different prizes over a decade just in order to write "none" in the women's column over and over and over. There's like an entire chapter that just confusingly names people she knew who died, and who they knew and a thing or two about some art they made.

Schulman rants and raves and loses her own thread often. Much of the time she sounds like a "get off my lawn!" old person, believing that no art or artists or creativity can exist that did not exist when she was young and vibrant, that today's gays don't get it or care to, that today's creatives are infantilized and privileged, that nothing is as good as it once was, oh woe oh woe oh woe.

She hates MFA programs and the education system in general (even though she is a professor); she hates publishing and thinks the whole industry is anti-lesbian, and that anyone who gets published is kowtowing to the mainstream and sacrificing their own creativity (which just makes it seem like sour grapes that her books are not put out by mainstream presses or that she, as a queer woman, has not won more awards).

I don't know, man. I really wish that instead of trying to write a sociological study, she had just written a memoir. I do want to read more about all the wonderful people she knew and loved and worked and made art with, who died so young, so suddenly, a whole generation lost, my god such an unfathomable tragedy. I want to hear her stories, because she's obviously got tons, and they are obviously so important. But I don't want to hear her theories, because, by and large, they are not fully formed, or not clearly described, or, sometimes, just totally bats. Which makes everything out of her mouth/pen totally suspect and ruins all the deeply necessary things I know she has to say.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always thought of Sarah Schulman as a hero for her work as an AIDS activist and Gay Libber, so I had high expectations for this book. I was not disappointed.

I know of nobody else who's so carefully analyzed the horrific consequences of gentrification and excessive social stratification on both culture and the individual human psyche. (Hint: people with gentrified minds tend to become boring conformists and/or social climbing snobs who identify with the ruling class, don't know understand how privilege works, and don't know how to organize politically.) She gives a clear, concise history of the gentrification process from an economic and urban planning point of view, but also anchors it in concrete examples that bring it to life in all its ugliness. She does this while simultaneously recounting the history of AIDS and AIDS activism that was occurring at the same time. Can you say erudite?

A large part of the book is given over to a beautiful evocation of queer Bohemia as it existed before AIDS and gentrification. Schulman not only describes the social life of the era, but pays homage to a host of individual geniuses and trailblazers lost to the plague. There is no way to read this section without being awed and moved.

My one quibble with the book is that it's shot through with political assertions that, if one doesn't share all of Schulman's political beliefs (and I don't), may strike one as dubious. Fortunately, she makes these assertions openly, clearly, concisely, and passionately - which makes for lively reading. Unfortunately, she tends to have a rather low opinion of those who hold opposing viewpoints so every time I disagreed with something I imagined her muttering at me, "What can you expect from a privileged, white, male assimilationist?" (That may just be my post-traumatic-stress-disorder reaction from growing up around dogmatic Marxists.)

On a final note, Schulman talks a lot about her personal life as a queer novelist, activist, and teacher, analyzing these roles from a socio-political perspective of ruthless objectivity. Like Joan Didion only perhaps even more-so. She is clearly an admirable human being, devoted to both her ideals and the flawed human beings around her those ideals are meant to uplift.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is definitely flawed and initially I spent quite a bit of time arguing with it. Fortunately, though, I quickly realized that Schulman was talking about things that I had literally zero firsthand experience with, and the thing to do was to STFU and listen. Everyone should read this book, but you should especially read it if you consider yourself a progressive and assume that you and Schulman are already in agreement about everything. There's a lot to think about here.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do I rate this book? Do I take away because I disagree with the author on many points, even if I understand and respect her anger and perspective? Do I give it 5 stars because it gave me so much to think (and talk) about? I have such conflicted feelings about this book. There are so many important messages, but there are just as many problematic messages. Perhaps more.

The strength and the weakness of this book is often how self-centered it is. The passion that drives Schulman's conviction also drives many knee-jerk statements. She fails to discuss art and counter culture outside her own sphere, meanwhile making sweeping statements about the state of art in the 1990s and on. The period she describes as the beginning of this mental/cultural gentrification coincides with the time I was growing up and finding amazing resources for being a young radical.
She laments the lack of uncomfortable art following the AIDS crisis, but this is exactly the time of Riot Grrrl, a strong and powerful 'uncomfortable' art movement addressing feminist and queer issues. Boundaries were being pushed, just not in her scene. Her discussion of parenting is one of the most insulting things I have ever read on the topic and is little better than an argument telling women to stay barefoot and pregnant. The lack of discussion of race is striking. So much of this book exists in a vacuum, without really acknowledging it. But as a memoir of sorts, is it necessary? This is one of the many things I kept coming back to: every time I had a differing point of view from Schulman, I also had to think about how much of that is reflected in our different experiences, and how much that perspective influences how valid her (or my) points are.

But there were absolutely wonderful things about this book, particularly in the way it addresses being an activist. Schulman addresses the need to convey the costs of activism, to dispel any image of activism being for people who have nothing to lose. Instead, you can lose important things (for example, a homophobic family) but it is worth the cause, and the progress. She also addresses the need and importance of accepting being uncomfortable: with ourselves, and in interacting with others.

Overall, I found the writing lacking clear direction and too inaccessible. I am a highly educated person with a fair amount of counter culture history and theory under my belt, and I often struggled. That being said, I would definitely like to read this book again, and perhaps in a book club where I could discuss it with others.

[6655321 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted this to be better and there are parts of it that are so right on that i was pacing about nodding in support and then Schulman just crashes into a wall of blind support for the fucking worst ideas, nostalgia or some of the most blindly hagiographic discussions of New York City (a city which she credits with an almost absurd aura of culture mixing ignoring that white gay men who sereoconverted in the mid 1980s were sometimes part of art scenes that were displacing non-white non-middle class people (or worse were slumlords keeping people in abominable conditions)) which cuts to the heart of Gentrification as Schulman defines it. For Schulman gentrification is the smoothing out of urban or psychic space and favoring facile and simplistic accounts and while she does a lot to look at how GLBT organizing has become a NGO dominated suit&tie&whitepicketfence thing she also just seems to never get out of New York City (here is a hint: there are super politically active queer people, like a fucking lot of them, and they just aren't located in an art scene that has always been dominated by money Sarah, as a mentor of mine put in his copy of Larry Kramer's writing about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s "get the fuck out... and meet real people"). Which is where this is frustrating, Schulman doesn't have a particularly radical read on what GLBT people should be doing, she's right that the ongoing aftermath and devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS is being tidied up but she presents a smoothed over picture of what the struggle was about (which is more than one thing and has severe differences by community) to talk about art again (which i'll be honest i think the political efficiency of art is massively overstated). Anyway, there are some really, really, really good segments in this bookended by some of the worst writing this side of everydayfeminism which is, honestly, disheartening.

[Sam]

Ok, this is going to be a weird “review” because I just want to share what I’m thinking about- so last week I read Megan Rapinoe’s “One Life” memoir on a whim, and this book by Sarah Schulman- another white lesbian, albeit a couple decades older- is the WILDEST counterpoint! So Rapinoe’s book is like the quintessential white neoliberal gay memoir- while she criticizes particular manifestations of racism and sexism (Colin Kaepernick’s blacklisting, unequal pay for women athletes), there is no critique of capitalism and very little contextualization of the social problems she critiques. She is pro-philanthropy and pro-making women athletes as exorbitantly rich as male athletes (without really questioning the legitimacy of these systems to begin with). She also describes being gay as something she accepted about herself with no struggle whatsoever, which is wonderful, but again, there is no analysis of the social/historical context that made her safe “coming out” possible.

Schulman, on the other hand, critiques the younger generation of queers’ lack of imagination for radical possibilities, which she attributes in part to the increased gentrification/homogenization of our environments, the erasure of queer history and AIDS history, and the absence of nearly an entire generation of older gays due to AIDS. She takes aim at gay assimilationism, the watering down of gay advocacy and media, institutional gatekeeping in the arts world, and the tunnel vision of the pro-marriage movement, to name a few things. I found some of her analysis incredibly exciting, and some of it, I disagreed with- but I love that this book exists and is as provocative as it is. It was also published in 2010, a notoriously bleak period for counterculture and social movements, and I’m curious what her commentary might look like in 2022, in the wake of the George Floyd/Breonna Taylor uprisings and increased intersectionality/queering of social movements becoming more visible.

The questions that emerge for me while holding Rapinoe and Schulman in imagined conversation are: What responsibilities do today’s queers have to those who came before us? What are our goals as queer people? Now that assimilation is increasingly possible for those of us who are white, middle class, and with a “palatable” gender presentation and nuclear family structure, what do we lose by assimilating? How do we keep the radical queer imagination alive in the face of the gentrification of our cities, the challenges of surviving as artists without institutional pedigrees, the threat of complacency in assimilation (for some), and the distraction— of our bureaucratic or service-providing jobs—from real grassroots organizing?

This book is sort of a collage of memoir, cultural analysis, interviews, and tributes to queer artists known to Schulman who died of AIDS and are at risk of being forgotten. There is a bitterness and saltiness in this book that is justified. There is also some definite “get off my lawn” energy toward the younger generation, which is hard not to bristle at, since I doubt Schulman has spent much time in the kinds of vibrant queer spaces that are thriving underground in the 2020s. I’m still really glad she wrote this and want to talk about it with folks.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really easy for me to read books that I find comfortable. Books that make me happy, or soothe me, or amuse me. But I know that the books that upset me, or make me uncomfortable, or leave me awake in the middle of the night are frequently the ones that I really need to read.

I've been someone who has celebrated gentrified GLBTQ victories, and not even realized the ways in which they can be problematic. I'm a middle class cisgendered white girl who sometimes can't even see the structures of my own privilege.

This wasn't a perfect book, especially the moments in which I found the author perhaps too self-congratulatory (but better that than false modesty, especially considering the ways in which women are socialized to be humble). And I'll admit that I started to get irritated at the overuse of the world "gentrification" (I realize it was the theme of the book, but there are really only so many times something needs to be hammered home, especially in a book that is less than 200 pages).

But this book is about the loss of an entire generation of people, and how that loss is not discussed, analyzed, or addressed, and how frequently it is ignored, whitewashed, and re-told in more palatable form.

I only wish I could push a lot of people to read it.

[Jessica Silk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with others who said this is an important book. Two parts I would like to share/save for myself:

"It's never going to change," a wealthy, white, male, MFA-trained playwright told me about the exclusion of women playwrights from the American theater. "And if you try, people will say you are difficult."
On the other hand, Audre Lorde--Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet--told me, "That you can't fight City Hall, is a rumor being spread by City Hall."

"Be we currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make us and others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as part of life, as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility."

[Merritt K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one gut punch after another -- even if you think you know what happened in the plague era of American AIDS history, you truly don't know how much you've lost until you read this kind of reflection. Absolutely essential to anyone seeking to understand contemporary queer culture and how we got here.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredibly important. Read it.

[غبار · Rating 1 out of 5]

super ambivalent about this – some sharp observations about the assimilationist politics of cis gay white men & a valuable testimony from someone who survived the AIDS crisis, but i hated the I Am A Tortured Artist Take It Or Leave It strain, further thickened in the smug voice of the Misunderstood Older Person With Insider Knowledge & First-Hand Experiences, especially when it was used to legitimise her dissing of younger queers. that kind of woe-is-I attitude feels toxic, limiting and dangerous to me – like, we get it, stop infecting us with your fatalism & nostalgia just because you're not in touch with the current artistic and sociopolitical landscape. "gentrification" is used with progressive looseness until it strays so far from the original context/thesis as to be rendered practically meaningless.

i also don't think she proposes any particularly radical alternatives, & could not bring myself to care a jot for her opinions of others' art and, by extension in this book, their value as people. for example, she writes of stan, a friend who died of AIDS, that he "wanted to be a great writer", but "as an artist he had – as one colleague put it – 'an ear of lead'. Yet, his death and loss is just as horrible, even though he never wrote a great book and possibly never would have." why does schulman think that we need a reminder that someone's death was STILL horrible despite his lack of accomplishment unless she herself, having judged the worth of others by their achievements, needed it too?

[Jason Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Schulman's book discusses the connection between the gentrification of cities and the gentrification of ideas. In the process of actual gentrification one population is not merely displaced or replaced by another, but a homogenized population is substituted for a diverse one. The gentrification of ideas undergoes a similar process. Diverse ideas are replaced by homogenized ones that reflect dominant attitudes and perceptions held by the powerful -- in effect 'alienating people from a concrete process of social change.' The latter type of gentrification, emerges out of the physical gentrification that takes place in cities.

The gentrification of cities is set in the context of the AIDs epidemic, which according to Sarah Schulman, served as a catalyst for the gentrification process that was already taking place. The gentrification of ideas, while discussed in a broad context, is mostly applied to the gay community and its transformation from a very radical community to one that is mainstream, homogenized, and privatized. Her use of personal narratives demonstrates how gentrified minds naturally/logically emerge from gentrified cities and the profound consequences of both these replacement processes on the gay community, as well as the community at large.

I'll let the book speak for itself. Here are some of the best quotes.


"First I need to define my terms. To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomena: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighbourhood of cities and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of culture and relationship and this has profound consequences for the future lives of cities."

[Conor Ahern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part history, part memoir, part poetic meditation on what it means to live certain principles in a combative world, this book takes the AIDS epidemic and its aftermath as its subject, honoring those lost and pondering the vacuum their absence has left behind. Sarah Schulman is an academic and a writer who was involved with the endlessly creative and transgressive ACT UP group in the 1980s, and she is unsparing in her critique of the sanitized, jejune New York we've inherited from those who perished in the chaos and despair of the plague decades prior.

Schulman as much reminds as admonishes, telling us of all the warm souls and incandescent minds the world lost out on because of our sanctimony, or judgment, or indifference. Reading this, I was reminded of tales that my Jewish friends will tell of their grandmothers' non-sequitur lamentations over the loss of not just life but potential in the European Holocaust, something that we in younger generations can accept only because we have never inhabited a world where such horror was unthinkable. Such an incomprehensible, unconscionable loss.

Everyone should read this book. Schulman could have just written a maudlin AIDS dirge, but while she honors AIDS' victims, she also challenges us to embrace and cultivate weirdness, difference, adversity, and discomfort. If there's one lesson to take from this book, it's that queerness is about breaking the paradigm, not working to fit within it. And in this unfortunate political moment where anthems are held in higher esteem than the lives of people of color, urban wealth inequality has reached cartoonish heights, and the child survivors of gun massacres are criticized for not sufficiently respecting the politicians who have failed them, I think the following is important to keep in mind:

[W]e currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make us and others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as a part of life,
as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility.

[RP · Rating 5 out of 5]

BRILLIANT! ENRAGING! I want to quote the entire book. It's hard to talk about it. Really, you should just read it and let Schulman speak directly to you. If you are interested at all in supremacy, in erasure of history and culture. Queer folks especially should read Schulman and this book in particular, especially now when articles are coming out arguing that young queer people do not need to care about their history, the history of the people who created the opportunity for them to come out. This is an example of gentrification of the mind, of queer minds. Let us remember the people who have gone before us and seek out their art. For me, the chapter on queer literature filled me with rage and sadness. But, it is also exhilarating and empowering to read something so clear about its point of view.

[Charles Rice-Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Urgent, wonderful and a must-read. With Gentrification of the Mind Sarah Schulman continues to be a contemporary voice for our society and culture that builds on our past and offers options for a vibrant future. This book will open your mind. I've read it three times which is as many times as I've her previous book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia. She continues to raise the bar for writers and delivers a powerful experience to readers.

[Ashlyn Bohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've been looking for a book like this for a long time, so thank you to whoever marked this as read or want to read (suz?) a few months ago which brought gentrification of the mind and other works by sarah schulman to my attention. the collective amnesia of AIDS and its domino effects by the gay community has steered us so far away from everything our ancestors fought for.... it's real heavy stuff. this is like the 2nd or third book i've read this year that discussed what the village in NYC was like before gentrification and it hurts so bad to think about everything we lost with that... what was once a refuge for freaks and artists and homosexuals is now only accessible to the <1%

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sarah Schulman is everywhere I turn as a reader!!!! Her 2012 book, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, is a memorial to the queer New Yorkers involved in AIDS activism in the 80s and 90s, and a requiem for the 21st-century city that has all but abandoned these people, their political values, and their forms of community building.

This book is an attempt to speak across generations of queer people, in order to express how the AIDS epidemic ravaged many parts of New York, namely the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Schulman seems to believe this to be a hopeless, but still worthwhile, endeavor. I understand her point—that queer people born in the 90s will never fully imagine the scale of loss that queer people a generation or two before us encountered. However, I agree that it’s important for us to at least try to understand, because these losses and the many systems that enabled them have set the course for our lives.

Schulman lays out a unique generational divide in this book: she argues that queer people of my generation are MORE conservative (both in lifestyle and ideology) than queer people of her generation. I think a major disclaimer here is that Schulman is comparing the *out* queer people of her generation to all queer people of my generation, which is a wildly different sample size. As her interview with Andrew Sullivan illustrates, there were many closeted queer people in her generation who were not “part of the community”, but certainly held more conservative views than either my peers or Schulman’s. Either way though, Schulman’s view is an important one to consider: that in several ways, “kids these days” have a different level of political commitment than the queer community Schulman came up in—in part because my generation has embraced the paths towards queer respectability that are more available to us in 2026.

None of this will be unfamiliar to people who have read arguments like Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. However, in this case, we certainly have a tough messenger. Prospective readers should keep in mind that Sarah Schulman is one of the worst people ever, so even her valid criticisms of the young people in her life come with a bunch of unnecessary vitriol. This lady would criticize a newborn baby if she could, and honestly whenever I read her work, I come away with a huge reminder to be kinder to myself and others.

The header is a bit misleading
I came into this expecting a book that felt more grounded in place—I thought I’d learn way more about the East Village than I did. When Schulman takes up the literal definition of gentrification, it’s mostly scattered tourist musings and Jane Jacobs fangirling. Definitely not the most original or novel, but as someone involved in preservation work, I will always pay attention to arguments about the imperative of preserving PEOPLE, and not just buildings.

This will surprise no one who knows the author’s reputation, but I also found Schulman to be a bit hypocritical and dishonest about the process of gentrification on the Lower East Side. She seems genuinely unaware of her own role in the first wave, instead taking up the claim that her group of white people was NOT gentrifying a predominantly Dominican/Puerto Rican area, because her group of white people was all starving artists who had queer public sex and went to protests. It’s a curious lack of criticism for someone who can point out the flaws in every other thing under the sun. After all, my time living in DURHAM NORTH CAROLINA has made it abundantly clear that queer white people are not exempt from patterns and legacies of settler colonialism, just because they aren’t rich. Just like I am not exempt from these same patterns in my own residential choices!!! None of us exist apart from systems of domination, and this book is worse off due to Schulman’s denial of her hand in the demise of a place she loved.

So much was lost
Ginormous blind spots aside, Schulman still has an important story to tell, about how mass death from AIDS opened the apartments and neighborhoods in lower Manhattan to expedite processes of gentrification. She dwells on her ultimate point for too long, but it’s such a good one: that the “gentrification of the mind” suffered by queer people is related to our internalized trauma from the AIDS epidemic, which taught us that our “unruly lifestyles” were the cause of our misfortune. And so we strive to prove that we can be typical in our behavior and relations, even to this day, thus exacerbating our loss of imagination in every arena of life!

Schulman particularly harps on how this lost imagination has impacted queer politics and literature in the 2000s/2010s, and I think her points are relevant for the 2020s as well. Her remarks made me think about this video of Fran Lebowitz, which discusses the loss of art connoisseurs following the AIDS epidemic, and how this is connected to the lowered standards for modern art. Fran’s argument is that the audience is just as influential in cultural production as the artist, and in some ways, without an audience of high standards, the art will continue to suffer.

Sarah Schulman believes that not only has queer art suffered with the loss of its most dedicated audience members, but also that it has suffered due to the continuing professionalism of the art world, which she knowingly ties back to gentrification. Part of why many artists feel forced onto the MFA or teaching track, is because of rising costs of living—very few poets and playwrights can afford to live in the East Village in 2026. For all her flaws, I think Schulman is at her best when discussing the state of modern literature, and particularly lesbian literature. She hits all relevant points, from how professionalism has resulted in a narrowing window of influences for modern writers, to how the censorship of queer literature stems from the fact that to this day,

I also greatly agree with her other point, about how few celebrated queer artists today have a clear political stance in their work. For instance, Schulman particularly bemoans the fact that she has encountered very few higher-ups in the theater industry who care about the values of a play. I think this is tied to a line of criticism taken up in my review of Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon, but make no mistake—it applies to many other books! Nowadays, many of the most celebrated gay novelists have a level of apathy that I cannot stomach, and every day I think about the better queer authors that might be out there, if only they were given the opportunity to succeed!!! But once again, Schulman has better words on this:

Now that gay presses and bookstores have been gentrified out of existence, first by chain stores like Barnes and Nobles, which are now being outsold by Amazon.com, gay literature is at the mercy of the mainstream. Many of the male writers with primary gay content who are rewarded and accepted by the mainstream create characters that are inadvertently palatable to heterosexual liberals. We all love David Sedaris, but he doesn't write explicitly about his Master. Other, smarmier, highly rewarded works show gay men who are alone, betray each other, commit suicide, who have demure and coded sex. (144)

Fortunately, the arts chapter does end on an encouraging note, about how artists may need to have their day jobs, but can still create informal classes and groups to help them study and practice art in ways that are more fulfilling than the professional ones. I don’t consider myself an artist, but I do still consider myself a planner. In the planning world, I share Schulman’s enthusiasm about finding opportunities to practice the things I do appreciate about my field alongside people whose values I share. In Schulman’s time and ours, this sort of “third way” remains an important endeavor politically, artistically, and even socially/emotionally!

Final Thoughts
Overall, I’m glad I read this! It’s helped close a few of the gaps in my knowledge about queer political history. While Sarah Schulman has a permanent log in her own eye, this doesn’t mean she’s wrong about the specks in our eyes! I will be continuing to work through her points about the homonormativity of many 21st-century lesbians, and how this sort of Faustian bargain hasn’t worked out all that well for us. I will end with a few different quotes from her, all of which help drive home this book’s relevance to many different issues we’re dealing with in 2026.

Just as with straight people, these 1950s values of control and homogeneity will probably prove to be unbearable at some point and we will have a swing back in the other direction towards LGBT communal living, sexual revolutions, and collectivity. I hope I live long enough to see my prediction come to pass. (162)

the crash of the credit markets, the corporate bailout, institutionalized unemployment, the foreclosure epidemic, and prolonged war as the only way of employing poor people… (27)

There are holes in the cultural fabric, and no one seems to be in tight control. Even the horrifying lack of jobs means that the yuppie road that some were blindly, socially obliged to follow is no longer a realistic option for many who were once invited. This means having to piece together “a living” through an eclectic combination of one's abilities, dreams, relationships, visions, will, and skill. (28)

We don't actually know what is really going on with our economy: Is it a temporary disaster or a permanent one? We also don't know what is really going on with global relationships and human rights. (28)

[Bea · Rating 4 out of 5]

thanks so much to suz and ashlyn for reading this first and recommending it! i was scared to start reading this and remained scared through the first chapter (no matter what Schulman says, this reads very academically pretentious at times), but i'm so glad i stuck with it! so much was valuable here and i especially found her commentary on how queerness has shrunken to homogenize and become more palatable to a straight audience really interesting.

[Clare · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book as it seemed to be the book that we all need to read, queer and not queer, but the author failed at writing about a subject that needs to be written about.

She went off track so much, even dedicating an entire chapter to a woman artist who didn’t even pass away from AIDS , but happened to be alive during this time. It made no sense along with the other off track tangents.

Some of her comparisons and insights were so offensive I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t written out during editing.

She disrespected people who lost loved ones to AIDS, she ignored other communities that are displaced by gentrification and she writes out queer people who are not eccentric enough for her standards of what a queer person should be. Not everyone who died was an artist and not everyone is an artist !

She ended the book ranting about how gay men now are sexist, how people who are queer who want children are not part of the queer community and our youth being rude. Youth are always rude !

She’s clearly disconnected from the current queer community and wonders why she can’t seem to connect with young people to share her story of her experience during this crisis.

Disappointed to say the least. I hope someone else writes on this subject who does their research into gentrification and doesn’t let their own narrow minded agenda get in the way.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un testo imperfetto, con molti alti e bassi, ma che avanza la tesi (efficace e persuasiva) del legame fra lo scoppio e la diffusione dell'epidemia AIDS e la gentrificazione nelle grandi città americane, soprattutto NY. Analizzando la gentrificazione dell'arte, dei discorsi politici intorno all'omosessualità e della letteratura queer, Schulman rivendica senza inflessibilità le lotte fondamentali di organizzazioni come ACT UP e, nonostante una frequente auto-referenzialità, si percepisce quanto sia stato fondamentale il suo attivismo negli anni Ottanta e Novanta.
A rendere ancora più vivo il testo di Schulman ci sono tutte le figure della NY un po' punk e un po' beat dal secondo dopoguerra: Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Susan Sontag, Carole Schneeman ecc.

The Gentrification of the mind, anche se ha il titolo di un libro di self-help, fa per voi se siete persone interessate alla storia dell'AIDS a NY, alle controculture e alle forme di resistenza che si sono venute a creare e che ne hanno rivendicato la responsabilità della classe politica, e le forme di espressione di queste controculture.

[clouders · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a little too cocky the day that I shoplifted this book from a bookstore in an actively gentrifying neighborhood, and pulled + triggered the fire alarm of my small building in trying to get onto the roof. we used to all have roof access until a fire alarm was attached to the roof door handle overnight and left us sight-less. I figured, eh I'll call the door's bluff, I'll believe it when I hear it. I had already gotten away with one little mischief that day. well it went off for the next 48 hours.

this has nothing to do with this sharply insightful book I just finished reading while walking home from work in the dark. just a memory I'll forever attach to the lost imagination that is our roof

[Ammi Emergency · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books I've read in years. I read it in a day and have talked about its thesis every day since. So vital, so life giving, and exceptionally gorgeously written on a prose level too.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most important book I've ever read.

[Roman Gerodimos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is gripping, important, infuriating, unique. It must be read by as many people as possible, with urgency.
There are a lot of things here that I fundamentally disagree with. As Sarah Schulman herself explains, this is not systematic social science, although there is plenty of compelling evidence, but a personal intellectual memoir. I think it's, therefore, fair - in fact inevitable - to critically engage with Schulman's own emotions and mindset when reading and reviewing this book.

Schulman has experienced prolonged and profound trauma. She has experienced - and fought against - social apathy and systemic injustice. She has seen her community be gutted. These experiences, her anger, her longing for her community, and her ideology, create blind spots in her arguments about gentrification, about the evolution of the gay community, about the mechanics of history and society. Underneath her core thesis you'll find important contradictions - e.g. to name but just an obvious one, she implicitly celebrates the mobility of immigrants who moved to the Lower East Side (replacing communities that used to live there), yet laments the end of a way of life that is subject to the same forces of urban, social and global change; she articulates the necessity of a radical, subversive queer life, art and politics because of systemic injustice, yet rejects integration when that same system finally begins to move towards equality. Her traumatic experiences and life-long radical activism mean that at time she appears bitter or engages in bizarre generalisations about parents and children, that only reveal her unease with human nature as it is.

Having said all that, the very same thesis and memoir that Schulman puts forward contains a vital, painful perspective of the truth that we have to acknowledge and engage with, truth that we cannot avoid. Her memories and descriptions of the AIDS crisis and of the gentrification that took place in the 80s and 90s is heart-breaking. Her core argument about avoiding a false life, about always fighting against the gentrification of the mind, is inspiring and powerful. Her unease with humanity is not a nihilistic, apathetic delirium, but a call to action - a call to work on ourselves and our communities.

Above all else, Schulman's book is honest. It does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It is reflexive throughout. Schulman thinks out loud. She documents the thought process that led to this. She acknowledges the limitations. She turns her lens of criticism against her own communities of academia and publishing. She is brutally honest about her own workplace. She generously presents the other side (e.g. fascinating interview with Andrew Sullivan). It may sound impossible, but it is possible - I would argue vital - to see and acknowledge the truth and the blind spots in both Schulman's and Sullivan's arguments.

Regardless of one's objections, I don't think it's possible to come out of reading this book without being profoundly affected - in a positive, empowering way.

[Navya · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I am not quite sure what to say about the book, except that I absolutely loved it. I did not always agree with it though - it often made me swing from "YES THATS THAT AND SCHULMAN IS A GENIUS AND A GODDESS" to "uh, what", and often within the same paragraph. In her defense, Schulman does say that this might happen right in the introduction, so I won't hold it against her. That's one of the things I loved the most about this book, actually - reading it did not feel like a passive process. I was challenged and intrigued as much as I was informed. More than once, I formed responses in my head and argued with myself. It was fantastic.

So, this is a memoir/history/proposition from Schulman, who was active in ACT UP during the AIDS crisis and has since dedicated herself to preservation of the memory of those years along with being a professor, author and all-round fantastic thinker. As she recounts her experiences in the movement and compare it to what she sees in the Young Queers (TM) of today, her argument is that queer ethos and mindset has undergone a sort of gentrification - its radicalism has been scrubbed clean and replaced with a sort of conformist homogeneity. While she doesn't uses the phrase, this idea comes very close to notion of respectability politics. And she suggests that this process is the result and companion of actual gentrification, which has transformed New York (and other major cities) in the last few decades.

Two criticisms - all these wonderful ideas are delivered in a mildly obnoxious voice with a strong current of "kids these days". That was both amusing and annoying. Secondly, Schulman sidelines all online activism, community building and art spaces. Which, why.

In the end, not only would I recommend this book to everyone, I will start a persistent campaign to get everyone to read it, if only so I can discuss it with them.

[Madison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was in college in the early 2010s, when Sarah Schulman was in pretty intense conflict with that era's vision of gay politics (think trigger warnings, queer is a slur, etc), so I feel like I've had an evolving relationship with her work for many years now. She wrote this book just prior to that time, and while basically all of her predictions about the future of gentrification have not come to pass, there's still a lot of interesting historical context and thoughtful critique here. However, Schulman airs a lot of grievances on a lot of subjects and about a lot of specific individuals whose influence on modern political culture have waned, so the specifics aren't immediately relevant even though the ideas often are.

I say "often" because there are definitely points where her criticisms seem to be rooted in her own individual annoyance or inconvenience rather than any real political motivation. For example, she goes on a random tangent in the conclusion about how parenting is useless and means her friends can't hang out anymore, and children usually turn into bad people anyway so what's the point in having them? It seems ridiculously short-sighted not to see the political and revolutionary potential in radical queer people raising members of the next generation when so much of her book is about the harms perpetrated by straight parents on their queer or otherwise degenerate children. She wraps it up in a critique of the lack of universal childcare, but it's an incredibly weak segue back to social commentary.

Also, I think it's worth mentioning that she pats herself on the back repeatedly for teaching the poor and unwashed at a public college, but now she teaches graduate students at Northwestern.

[Sam Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is essential reading.

Schulman’s careful synthesis of the large-scale and un-accounted loss, grief, and replacement caused by AIDS (still ongoing too!) crafts an argument for the gentrification of our minds and imagination that I’ve never seen elucidated in such plain terms. Part memoir, part historiography, part polemic, and part theory, this book will and should remain with me forever. This was kind of my second time reading it and even in the year that passed between readings, my perspective on so much of what she outlines has only gotten clarified with experience.

My particular favourite ideas she interrogates are the corruption of the avant-garde by academia, the avoidance of discomfort gentrification has imbued us with, the extent to which the massive loss of life during the height of AIDS permitted such blatant gentrification and replacement of cultural enclaves by money-hungry yuppies, and of course, the most shocking revelation, which is the massive forgetting of important cultural and artistic figures the AIDS epidemic enforced. Of course, Sarah Schuman being Sarah Schulman remembers a lot of it and so should we all.

I’d love to see an update to this collection given that we have technically entered the “progress” era she predicted would happen 15 years after her writing.

Important to consider but so is everything about this book. Important.