Rat Bohemia

by Sarah Schulman

First published in 1995, this award-winning novel is a bold, achingly honest story set in the “rat bohemia” of New York City, whose huddled masses include gay men and lesbians abandoned by their families and forced to find new bonds with one another in the wake of this loss. Navigating the currents of the city are three friends: Rita Mae, a rat exterminator; Killer, a career plant-waterer; and David, an HIV-positive writer. Together, they seek new ways to be truthful and honest about their lives as others around them avert their glances. Alternately elegiac, defiant, and funny, Rat Bohemia is an expansive novel about how one can cope with loss and heal the wounds of the past by reinventing oneself in the city.

Rat Bohemia won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named one of the “100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of All Time” by the Publishing Triangle.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Lesbian, New York, Contemporary, Gay

226 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Cyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read a schulman book I swear never again. I always spend the first 2/3rds being astounded by the exquisiteness of the writing, the intelligence of how she puts words together, leaves moments hanging in micro chapters that invite reflection as you jump into the next one.Then, somewhere near the end, I realize the book stands as an encyclopedia of everything that is heartbreaking about being queer and then become very depressed. But of course it's good to have these things illuminated - how AIDS, familial homophobia, gentrification and internalized homophobia paralyzes us. Just hard. But read this book

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story revolving around three queer characters and their community. Rita is a rat exterminator working for the city of New York, Killer is her unemployed friend, as well as David, their friend who is a writer. This book is split in parts where these friends' stories are each explored, meshing and splitting to merge again in a wonderful tale.

Schulman writes of relationships queer people have with their families. The disappointment and betrayal one feels when cast out by their loved ones because of their sexual orientation and the yearning for a love and understanding that is deserved but withheld and the inner conflict caused by this.

The characters are hard to like, they do come across as annoying and their sarcasm is quite clearly their way to cope but Schulman has created such solid characters with weaknesses, desires, dreams and friendships.

I also enjoyed the question relationships in this book. The friendships and companionship. A kinship fostered by mutual acceptance, support and love. This story is very much told during the AIDS crisis and thus is incredibly sad as should be expected. The activism and community development touched upon was inspiring. A wonderful wonderful read and a fantastic introduction to a great writer.

[hawk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm happily greatly enjoying most of what I'm reading currently, and this was no exception 😃

a novel in four parts, each part told by one of the three main characters, each a kinda monologue, tho some more/less than others.
each part comprised several short chapters, and I enjoyed how each chapter ends with a good closing line/in kinda just the right place 🙂

each of the four parts has its own style to some extent, and I enjoyed this - both for the different voices, and also wrt the exploration and experimentation with structure. all four parts come together well - I felt that there was no dissonance within the book. and the stories and characters, chapters and parts, are interlinked, each telling a part of the whole.

I enjoyed the writing 🙂 and found the writing and novel a nice balance of humourous and poignant..

I noticed a couple reviewers referring to the characters as not very likeable... but I found them sympathetic and relateable, while of a time and age (wrt maturity) that maybe irked other readers.

❤🐀💔

Part 1
Rita opens the novel, and introduces us to the time and place, and some of the characters, including herself. talking about friends, lovers, work, thoughts, feelings and observations.

❤🐀💔

Part 2 - 1984
narrated by David. talking about being HIV positive. about sex, friends and lovers. about childhood and family. erasure by others, especially by family, as a gay man and as someone HIV positive.
about community, activism, (and community politics), Act Up.

❤🐀💔

Part 3 - Killer In Love
narrated by Killer. about funerals, politics, love and romance, (family briefly). about art, writing, and writers. about sex, tender and rough.
David dies. "it is shameful not knowing how to really feel it, being overprepared for death"

this part of the book is maybe the most experimental, and has quite a different pace and feel. each chapter has its own title/subtitle 🙂 I also found the writing and/or structure poetic in alot of places, with Killer and Troy creating poetry about the other, or their dialogues and/or monologues being poetic. similarly Killer's mother's letter 💔

"my eyes were wide open, the whole city was a poem"

❤🐀💔

Part 4 - Rats, Lice and History.
Rita is our narrator again. some nice chat about rats, their histories and ecologies, specifically in New York 🙂🐀
about funerals, their frequency, and the impact of that. the sometimes politics around funerals within Act Up.
David's dad turns up at his funeral - I appreciated how people, as a community, dealt with that, tho 😥 that they/we have a practised way of dealing with parents who chose not to know their LGBTQI children, and weren't there for them in life 😥
comes around again to Rita meeting the Cuban woman Laudas (? spelled by ear) from Part 1. their discussion/navigation of dating cf sex, and a resumption of their conversation/conflict about safer sex within lesbian communities (interesting to be reminded of that too!).
more about family/parents.
about aging/generations within LGBTQI communities.

this last/fourth part kinda draws alot of previous threads together, and fills in some missing details from along the way, in a similar way to people chatting about a mutual friend/acquaintance.
it covers alot of ground, tho ends kinda frivolously 😉

🌟😆🐀😥🌟

Appendix - Good And Bad
heheh, a piece of writing by Muriel K Star 😉 previously referenced as an author who was once part of their networks and communities. it felt very much like an extract, and within it there's a turning around of characters and relationships from our novel 😉 it's hilarious, but also sad - doing what she was criticised of doing by our main characters, erasing and hetero-normalising her own, and here all the others', sexuality and lives within her writing.

🌟😆🐀😥🌟

there were alot of interesting threads woven into this novel. published authors not being open about their sexuality and do they have a responsibility to be openly Queer and/or write about LGBTQI characters and lives? the touching on disparate views about safer sex practices within lesbian communities. poverty, homelessness and gentrification. Judaism. Rats 😉 (I realise I didn't mention anything about the rats being beings of the more hidden and poorer sides of the city, and the parallels there with the lives of many queers and other marginalised folk. let alone extermination! it didn't feel as heavy handed as that maybe sounds while reading the novel 😉).
with broader skeins around relationships and family (biological and chosen). and HIV and it's impacts on gay male communities, but also on other marginalised groups and communities.

it felt very much a novel about HIV, and how it especially impacted gay male and some lesbian communities in the 80s and 90s (wrt lesbian communities, mostly the solidarity shown by some in supporting and campaigning alongside HIV positive gay men... and the loss of many friends and community members). and not just about, but within. all of our characters are living within a time and place, and within communities, where HIV is having a huge and inescapable impact - it would be impossible to write about the time and place and communities without writing about HIV. and I think it was nicely written about on different levels - individuals, communities, activism, collective approaches and some division, sex and relationships and families, and the larger social and political situation. how HIV suffuses life, and death, at each and all of these levels.

it was interesting reflecting a little while reading, about how things were and how they are now in regard to HIV - the difference between the 80s and 90s and now. the HIV positive friends and lovers who made it from then to now, survived against all odds and often without medical explanation. how well treated and controlled HIV can usually be now. how many options there are now wrt staying HIV negative if you are - the reduction of the once considered inevitability of infection, if you were sexually active within certain communities and/or participated in certain sexual acts. the freedom within sex again, tho a different one.

🌟❤🐀💔🌟

I took a little time out towards the close of the book to rewatch 'The Living End', after it - and kinda a critique of it, tho I think the point was to ask questions and create discussion - came up part way through the novel 😉🙂


🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
4.5 rounded up 🤔🐀


accessed as an RNIB talking book, well read by: Laurence Bouvart, Geoff Harding, Jacqueline King, Laurel Lefko and Eric Meyers 🙂

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am woefully underread in Important Queer Literature, and I found this book while looking for some writing that would give me an idea of what gay New York City was like in the mid-90's for another project. This definitely fit the bill, in Edmund White's very-good NYT review he called Schulman the "bard" of "AIDS burnout," and that is exactly what I was looking for. This is an experimental novel and yet it's still extremely readable.

I very often do not like New York City Books because they are so romanticized, so filled with wealthy white people whose emotional attachment to the city has an awful lot to do with the way they can so easily possess it. You can tell just from the title that that is not RAT BOHEMIA. And yet it is one of the most New York City Books I've ever read. It doesn't gaze longingly at the city, it doesn't see it as full of adventure and potential. It knows full well that it is a place full of rats and poverty and suffering. It also knows that it is a place where the misfits and the disowned can escape and find some kind of family.

Rita, David, and Killer are all those disowned misfits. They have all been abandoned in various ways by their families. And they are all surrounded by the constant destruction of their community by AIDS. David has the virus, and continues to grapple with what he already knows lies ahead for him. He is a brilliant man who will soon die far too young and as much as he may want to make his loss an epic tragedy, he already knows that it will be just another in a long parade of weary funerals. Rita also lives surrounded by death, and still struggling with the neverending pain inflicted on her by her parents, and through all of it has to get through each day, still looking for love and friendship and some kind of meaning.

The style varies between the sections, David has his own clear voice, and Killer's section has a loose fluidity that makes it almost an intermission as she spends much of it in bed with her lover. Rita's story bookends their two, and at the very end there is an unusual appendix that is initially quite confusing but wow is it a dagger to the gut once you see what it is. One of the most interesting structural narrative tricks I've seen, and I say this as a person who really loves structural narrative tricks.

At first I was a little hesitant to read a book about the AIDS crisis that wasn't written by a gay man, but Schulman has more than sufficient credentials. She was an active member and founder of some of the most important activist and artist groups of the time and has been one of the most active documentarians of it. After all, what else can those left behind do but make sure to leave a witness?

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Schulman's LGBTQ+ classic, Rat Bohemia is a tale of queer joy in the face material and social insufficiencies.

Rita Mae Weems grew up the daughter of a single father in Jackson Heights, Queens, where she lived until her father found her in bed with another girl. At age 16, Rita escaped into the city, living like the rats that populate the urban landscape. In the city, she pieced together a chose family of other queer outcasts, and watched as many of her gay male queer family died of AIDS. Throughout the book, Rita - and her friends David and Killer - reflect on their queer lives and the joys they've found and reflect on how life could have been different if they'd been straight. And in the end, they find happiness in their outcast, queer, rat-bohemian lives.

Schulman is a stalwart of queer writing, and I can now see why Rat Bohemia is considered one of the classics of American LGBTQ+ literature. The book challenges so many norms about queer life and encourages queer readers to see the happiness that comes from coming out and being who they are. Though at times the book certainly feels dated to a 21st-century reader, the moral of the book itself remain classic: queer babes, who you are is who you were meant to be and that fact should make you feel joyous.

[Bien]

Een gevat/verdrietig/complex portret van queers die tijdens de AIDS crisis gebroken familiebanden, rouw, gemeenschap, heartbreak, nieuwe liefde, nostalgisch-traumatische verledens, (on)mogelijke toekomstbeelden... navigeren en dat in de wonderlijke schrijfstijl van Sarah Schulman. dus ja, weer een aanrader

[diario_de_um_leitor_pjv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lido no âmbito da iniciativa #leradoença

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will admit that I picked this book up because of its title. I had heard of Sarah Schulman, mostly in the context of theatre and activism, but couldn’t quite remember if I had read any of her work. So, when I saw Rat Bohemia I had a bit of an “I need to read a book with that title” moment.

This book got to me. It’s tough and unsentimental, and the characters aren’t that likeable, but it absolutely sings in parts. Schulman’s writing is so weird and wonderful – her words and sentences stretch meaning and understanding yet retain a visceral beauty throughout. The scene of the book is a particularly harrowing snapshot of the urban margins of NYC in the mid 80’s, when the streets were as dirty as the needles and seemingly every corner was inhabited by the living ghosts of the queer communities ravaged by AIDS. Schulman lives this world and clearly loves it, treating it with painful honesty, reflection, care, and a little dose of snarky fun. The action takes place through the meanderings of three different narrators; Rita Mae, a rat exterminator, her friend Killer, a woman in love with a somewhat unavailable girl, and David, a gay man afflicted with HIV coming to terms with loss of those closest to him, including his family that refuses to let him into the fold even as he faces the specter of death. While some of it is repetitive, it is definitely captivating and I found myself wanting to keep going and follow this itinerant trio (I really could have read this in one go if I had found the time). I am now an official Schulman convert. I loved this world and look forward visiting the others she has written.

A nice addition to this particular edition was the introduction by Schulman. In it, she laments the loss of the bohemia of her younger years at the hands of gentrification. Giuliani and his ilk swept the streets of the druggies, queers, homeless, prostitutes, etc. until they shined, leaving behind a world of vapid sparkle devoid of the dimensions and diversity that once defined it. I get her frustration and anger at this. I lived in SF in my 20s and felt a unique pit in my stomach when I visited many years later to see that my old neighbourhood had turned into a playground for dot-com employed hipsters – the gang bar on the corner of my street, once prompting me to walk with head up and a sure step, had been replaced by a sushi bar; my favorite taqueria had become a craft beer bar, and the stoops and sidewalks, once filled with kids and abuelas who filled me full of sugared skulls on the day of the dead, were empty and shining in the sun. I get that change happens, and the almighty dollar motivates it more than anything, but what a loss of multi-life. In that sense, Rat Bohemia is a nostalgic love letter to a place that no longer exists – a place wiped out by death and disease the machinations of men who saw opportunity in the wake of despair.

[Bek (MoonyReadsByStarlight) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This multi-POV story peers into the lives of a group of friends living in NYC in the peak of the AIDS epidemic. This looks at the wounds of familial abandonment faced by many queers during this time, more general community disconnect in the face of such tremendous grief, and the trappings of nostalgia. These characters are imperfect, loudly messy, hurting, and in all in need of love and going about it in a myriad of wrong ways. The writing is unique and the style shifts with each character in a way that appears quite disconnected at first, but so many things really came into focus for me in the last part.

I have so many thoughts about parts of this. The way it describes disconnect while also showing connections in the characters' experiences, many of which go unacknowledged. It's also interesting reading more books from this era and seeing similarities, not just in content around the AIDS epidemic, community, and family, but the specific emotions that are evoked. The emotion that is distilled with such intensity in Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown is unmistakable in here. That feeling is so intense and situated so particularly in that historical moment. And yet, it struck me as I was reading this how uncomfortably familiar some of the disconnect is to the moment we are in as well.

Note: there are quite a few CWs to consider (some are obvious by the description, like familial abandonment, death, and description of chronic illness), but also racism, and gay slurs are used throughout this - though they are mostly used not in homophobic contexts

[RP · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Schulman, but found this one hard to get through, though I got through most of it pretty quickly, because Schulman knows how to propel a book forward, and I like the people in it. But, it's a kind of 90s literary fictions that lacks a force of suspense. There's no real plot, which is fine. It's just about people living through the AIDS crisis in NYC, and that is enough to make a book interesting and emotional and vital, isn't it? The novel also beautifully exposes the pain and trauma caused by familial homophobia, a subject Schulman writes about with great skill. Her book The Ties That Bind is THE book on the subject. I, personally, seem to like her later novels better! That's ok! :)

This book is really 3 to 3 and 1/2 stars for me, but I gave it four because it's Sarah. She's wonderful and deserves more readers. (also, my star rating is about my enjoyment of the book, and not some declaration of what I think a good or bad book is). God, I'm neurotic. :)

[Nina Borgeson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following three queer friends—Rita, Killer, and David—living in rise of the AIDS pandemic, Rat Bohemia provides a devastatingly raw perspective of life as a queer person in NYC in the 80’s. The book is split into three sections, one for each character’s POV.

Many of the sociopolitical undertones and struggles experienced by the characters are still very relatable on some level to many queer people, including social ostracism, the strain on familial relationships and the yearning to be truly seen and loved regardless of sexuality.

It also highlighted the disappointing truth of how American society treated those suffering in the pandemic, often turning a blind eye to the pain and loss happening all around them.

Schulman really did such a great job with this book and I absolutely recommend this book to anyone looking to expand their exposure to queer literature or just have a deep appreciation for it.

[I. Merey · Rating 5 out of 5]

At some point over the years, Sarah Schulman has become one of my favorite authors. (I say this as someone who is generally not a completionist type and is happy to read one book from someone, enjoy the fuck out of it, and never seek out anything by them again.) But her writing is so compelling that I keep going back to see what else I've been missing. I didn't think anything could top PEOPLE IN TROUBLE, and while this book is in some ways simpler, many themes of RAT overlap (friendship, family betrayal/abandonment, queer joy and queer sorrow and AIDS)--and I simply enjoyed spending time with Schulman's characters ('enjoy' is probably not the right word for a book like this), and marveling at how fucking fantastic her writing is. If you haven't read something by her yet, this is great book to start!

[Daniel Schechtel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in one sitting, amazing novel. Been growing fond of these kind of subculture-character-based novels, in which the main characters are criminals, junkies, prostitutes, homosexuals, blacks, that is, minorities. My perception of the world finds itself totally outdated and reveals itself bourgeois, coward, hypocrite, fearful, insecure, opinionated, judgamental.
This book shows the hard-core reality of HIV-bearers and homosexuals through out the sixties, seventies, eighties but mainly during the nineties, their enduring struggling inhumane (whatever that means, actually) situation. Some dialogues and passages are just brilliant and left me thinking. This book really constitutes what I call, following W. Benjamin, an Experience.

[Akiva ꙮ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gentrification of the Mind was incredible, but Rat Bohemia gives the lowest point of the AIDS epidemic the emotional depth I'd never quite grasped from the facts. The mid-1990s New York City it paints is saturated with death and friendship and resentment and activism and politics and family and pain and death and death and death.

[Marc Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

About once a month, I encounter something about the AIDS epidemic that makes me cry. This month, it’s this book. While reading I just kept thinking about all the wonderful lesbians in my life, and how they really complete me. I thought of my nights in NYC with these women who mean so much to me. And with this book I traveled through time and thought about how just a few decades ago, gay men and lesbians had these same experiences except it was forever torn apart by the virus. And then I remembered those clubs in NYC and all the older queer people you don’t see. And then I would cry myself to sleep every night.

[evelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Troy was making my deepest wish come true. She was watching me and seeing me and telling me face to face, difficult unpleasantries about myself that I would never otherwise know. That is really what I want from another person."

when characters are kinda insufferable but also can you blame them? And sometimes they produce the most earth shattering sentences that make u want to curl up in a ball and die. yeah!

[Greg Thorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a typical thrilling/painful read, which is the specific emotional cocktail I now associate with reading Schulman's work (both her fiction and non-fiction). This novel ties the 70s and the 90s together, emotionally and tactically, to deal with some of Schulman's pet themes: dykes, AIDS, gentrification, love and sex. I began reading it while staying in a gentrified Meatpacking District and over successive visits to New York in the last 16 years have lost something of my thrill at being in the city and can only summon it up for certain by immersing myself in fiction like Schulman's, or certain records. But New York owes me nothing and it owes nothing to Schulman's main character Rita Mae either, which is sad because we have both adored it in our own ways. Everything this novel attempts –
e.g. protracted metaphors, submerged Jewish trauma, first-hand mass death fictionalised, wry humour – it more or less succeeds at, and I haven't quite worked out how but it manages to be historical and post-modern at the same time (I think). If I didn't know her I would assume she had written the dyke equivalent to Coupland's Gen X, but that's only one part of this deceptively complicated work. While I was reading, Schulman was announced as the 2018 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award winner which I have no doubt is perfectly fitting. One of my absolute favourite writers.

[Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little disjointed and overwritten in places, but the best of this is heartbreaking. The lining of an AIDS victim's coffin smells to a narrator like the inside of a Xerox store. So much death, so much routine death, that it just becomes horrifyingly banal. The sucker punch is a weird appendix in which the preceding narrative gets rewritten in heteronormative terms, which in a way is exactly what happens to the gay liberation movement...

[Madelyn Sundquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this!!

[Sig]

life changing. AND a lesbian who works for the va. i solute thee fellow soldier.

[Clarissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly honest (and therefore brutal book) about the numbness of loss and mourning in the AIDS crisis and the never-healing scars of being abandoned by the kin who are supposed to love and care for you through everything.
There is a sense of chosen family, but the overall feeling I took from this book was pain.

[GwenViolet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shines in individual moments, but it feels too short to reach this grand sweeping tone that it is going for.

[Emma Gabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books that will live in the folds of your brain a while. hard to pin down, but so rewarding to read. easy to love.

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in the mood for an extended metaphor, and the best way I can think to describe this book is a small town fire works show. You're waiting for a bit, sure it's going to be good, wondering when it will start... only when it's dark enough. The first 'work comes from nowhere, startling you with its bright light. The bursts continue, in no discernible order, each one beautiful and slightly different. There are some repeats. There are standouts: the sparkly shimmery one that last for minutes, the fancy smiley-face shaped ones, the multiple explosion type. There's a big finale, and a few seconds of silence as people realize it's over but aren't sure they should continue on with their plans just yet. It ends as it started, calm and unremarkable, just a little darker.
from p. 182
"The thing is that now the guy is getting old. Really old. I'm used to death and I think about it casually, so I have no trouble knowing that my father will die. My problem is that as long as he is still alive, he has the chance, every second, to change the way he views me. So every time he refuses, I'm devastated. Because I don't want my father to die with me knowing that he had that chance every day and never took it. How will I be able to live with that for the rest of my life? At least while he's alive I can hope that he will, someday, try."

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The most common link between all gay people is that at some time in our lives, often extended, our families have treated us shabbily because of our homosexuality." This quote from the book says it all; the story is centered on 3 people abandoned by their families due to just that. I haven't read a lot of lesbian fiction but this book grabbed my attention due to its setting in NYC in the height of the AIDS crisis, and the fact that the author is an activist for AIDS related causes. That involvement gave her insights into the story that I haven't often thought about even having read many such works.

As a gay man I related most to David; the gay character who dies. His funeral brought back so many memories. I didn't find the story dated at all; it still has a emotional impact that many LGBTQ+ and hopefully our allies, will be able to relate to. I recall a drag queen I used to see perform at a local club ending many of her shows with this quote - "Friends are the family we choose for ourselves." Amen!

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

throughout the book, i was searching for just a smidge of the romantic, just a smidge of romanticism
but even towards the end, the book ends in an unsolved despair, and the book is peppered with grotesque imagery

in a way, this is the book version of what gregg araki does in his films (not surprising that he gets featured in the book)… the new queer movement was all about taking the queer experience and showing the grotesque and grim elements of it. there’s no resolved happiness in that media’s movement, no happy ending. just the feelings we are left with at the end of the day as homosexuals.
best way put, this book really gets the gay experience because there’s never a feeling of resolution or peace that comes with that identity, and who ever says otherwise is lying.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just happened to page through the beginning of this book and found that it was actually autographed by Schulman and a note had been written to Kate Bornstein of all people. How awesome!

As for the book itself, as always, Schulman's superb prose and her careful and insightful observations about life were amazing. Especially since she never relents when it comes to holding straight people accountable for the horrible things they can do to queers.

However, I did not really dig the changing point of view. It disrupted the narrative too much. Because Schulman is such a good writer, I presume there was some reason she did this, but i can't really figure out why.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

3 friends in the NYC gay community in the middle of the AIDS crisis. Surprisingly this book makes a powerful statement on the meaning of family and who becomes it when your own family abandons you. This book made me laugh and cry from one line to the next. It is most excellent.

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've ever read. I will be mulling it over for a long time.

[Stacy Helton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always had the idea for a sociological study on the gay generation gap, which I feel is necessary since at no time in history (and not for much longer) will there be five different generations of gay America overlapping the population. Men of the Greatest Generation, writers like White, Rechy, Holloran, Morrden, and Kramer have left detailed literary studies, alongside historians like Martin Duberman. The boomers came of age with Stonewall and the beginnings of gay rights. Generation X was unfortunate enough to mature with the initial HIV deaths, which also took out a generation of older gay men. Fran Lebowitz argues that a generation of gay artists died, along with the audience who understood the importance of the arts. Then the millennials and Generation Z, who have little in common with the rebels and survivors of a movement and a plague, and in many cases, do not care, nor are they curious. All of this to discuss lesbian novelist and activist Sarah Schulman, whose 1995 novel, Rat Bohemia, examines three younger boomers in 1995 New York City. Rita, an exterminator who kills rats for the city, her best friend Killer, an unemployed plant waterer, and David, a writer in the latter days of HIV. In David, Schulman has created a gay man with a realistic outlook, who has seen the city ravaged in the 1980s and 1990s by AIDS and sees life for the brief dance. David comments on his family's polite exclusion of their son and brother, the funerals he attends, making a striking point when discussing the straight family. David points out that “parental discourse is at such a high pitch that “It is really hard to be angry at your parents if they didn’t rape you or burn you in boiling oil.” They swoop in to give their deceased son an "Episcopal" funeral, and not one thrown by his real family, the network of friends that gay men of that generation that earned the moniker. David discusses the importance of attending ACT UP meetings and becoming entranced with every miracle cure and ponders mentioned (note: Schulman is publishing the history of ACT UP Spring 2021). Even without reading Vito Russo or seeing his documentary, the average consumer of popular culture has, by now, seen or read over a hundred AIDS stories. Like "the letter" that Mouse sends his mother in the Tales of the City series, some stories are creations of a time and a place and are just one reason Maupin is underrated. The idea of AIDS in the days of Grindr and Prep is a far place from those of the Maupin series, Love! Valour! Compassion!, Longtime Companion, and And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts must-read volume of the epidemic from the beginnings. Recently season 2 of Ryan Murphy's Pose examined AIDS in 1990 New York City and hit some of the realism that Schulman injects into Rat Bohemia. If I were writing a freshman paper, I would connect the overabundance and need to kill rats in the city with the same way the city treated its dying gay men. Written in 1995, when Generation X was discovering their own gay literature and films, Schulman realistically portrays the excitement and, more often, the mundanity of gay life and the family structure that existed for the unluckier members of that generation.