The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

by Sarah Schulman

The announcer is discussing events that I know intimately, organically, that have seared the emotional foundation of my adult life. And yet there is a strangely mellow tone to the story. It's been slightly banalized, homogenized. This is the first time I've heard AIDS being historicized, and there is something clean-cut about this telling, something wrong. Something…gentrified. “At first America had trouble with People with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.” I almost crash the car. Oh no, I think. Now this. Now after all this death and all this pain and all this unbearable truth about persecution, suffering, and the indifference of the protected, Now, they're going to pretend that naturally, normally things just happened to get better. That's the way we nice Americans naturally are. We come around when it's the right thing to do. We're so nice. Everything just happens the way it should. This? I realize the way one realizes that the oncoming train is unavoidable and I'm stuck on the track. This is going to be the official history of AIDS?

As artists as well as queers, these people wanted to be able to think in radical ways, to have insights, to realize, to make work that was outside of social assumptions, to be radical people who could—like the weary ACT UPers—achieve justice in some fashion. They admired their predecessors who had created change through confrontation, alienation, and truth telling. But their professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious maneuvering of the queer content they did have so that it was depoliticized, personalized, and not about power. A month later I was talking to a young man whom I like very much. “You know,” he said. “I'm interested in making work about an artist who died of AIDS.” “Oh, who?” I asked. “I don't know yet. I've been looking at people who are unknown.” “Like who?” “Well, I'm interested in someone named Patrick Angus. And in another one named Mark Morrisroe.” He said these two names with a kind of contemporary upslide at the end. Like they were questions: Patrick Angus? Mark Morrisroe? “Those are both really well known artists,” I said, realizing that these two were among many who had not been properly historicized. “Mark Morrisroe has a catalogue raisonné.” “Oh,” he said. “Do you know any artists who died of AIDS who no one's ever heard of?” “There are thousands,” I said. I loved that he wanted to know, and hated that he didn't get it, didn't understand what was missing, how much is gone. How would he?

Year after year my colleague, queer theorist Matt Brim, and I cry on the night bus coming home from work about how profoundly traumatized our queer students are. We do everything we can to intervene but for most of them, by the time they get to us, it's too late. This night a girl, Michelle, came out in class. She had been taking my courses for two years and had never given any sign of being queer, but this one evening she read a story about falling in love with a girl in high school and starting a passionate sexual relationship. When her parents found out, they gave her an ultimatum. If she wanted to have a family, she would have to break up with her girlfriend. Without much thought, she followed their instructions. Three years later, waiting in the bathroom line of a Staten Island straight dive bar, she met another woman and fell in love. In her story, Michelle described uncontrollable desire, accompanied by the knowledge of the tremendous familial punishment that lurked, waiting to pounce. And it did. After one year together, again there was a terrible show-down with her family when they confronted her with her hidden cache of L Word DVDs. There was another ultimatum, and finally she again broke up with her lover in order to have parents. At the end of the story, the protagonist finds a boyfriend, Danny. She says that she is able to “be comfortable” with him. And the story closes with her parents gleefully welcoming Danny into their home to watch the football game, offe...

That was one of the bizarre things about these new businesses. They would open one day and be immediately packed, as though the yuppies were waiting in holding pens to be transported en masse to new, ugly, expensive places. Quickly the battle was on and being waged block by block until the original tenants had almost nowhere to go to pay the prices they could afford for the food and items they recognized and liked. So the Orchidia got replaced by a Steve's Ice Cream, and then by a Starbucks. The used refrigerator store and Nino Catarina's Italian wholesale grocery were replaced by a series of expensive restaurants who put whirring motors on the roof of our building and made it impossible to sleep. The corner bodega that sold tamarind, plantain, and yucca was replaced by an upscale deli that sells Fiji Water, the emblematic yuppie product. Habib's falafel stand, where he knew everyone on the block and put extra food on your plate when you were broke—he was replaced by a “Mexican” restaurant run by an NYU MBA who never puts extra food on your plate. An Asian fish store was replaced by an upscale restaurant. The Polish butcher was replaced by a suburban bar. The dry cleaner was replaced by a restaurant. Wilfred, the Dominican tailor, was replaced by a gourmet take-out store. Now if I want to buy fresh meat or fish, I have to go to Whole Foods (known as “Whole Paycheck”), which is ten blocks away. Rents in my building have gone from $205 per month to $2,800 per month. And to a...

Authentic gay community leaders, who have been out and negotiating/fighting/uniting/dividing with others for years, the people who have built the formations and institutions of survival, become overlooked by the powers that be. They are too unruly, too angry, too radical in their critique of heterosexism, too faggy, too sexual. The dominant culture would have to change in order to accommodate them. And most importantly they are telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty. The dominant culture needed gay people who would pathologize their own. Supremacy ideology could not tolerate the confrontation with the heterosexual self that is at the core of gay liberation. So instead of the representative radicals, there was an unconscious but effective search for palatable individuals with no credibility in the community, no accountability to anyone, with no history of bravery or negotiation with other queers, who were then appointed in their stead. This replacement process, facilitated by the straight media, really became visible in the late nineties. It was the first time that I noticed a crew of guys being interviewed on television as emblematic gay men whom I had never seen in a community capacity. It was the moment when the corporate media was creating its own gay personalities, who were entirely different from the people featured in the gay-owned press. And eventually, the grassroots voices were drowned out completely, as gentrification co-opted the gay media, and the gay lib...

Through the rest of the trial the government repeatedly made clear their view about any gay sex. They had seized a lesbian anthology called Bushfire because it included the line “she held me tightly like a rope,” which they said was “bondage.” They had also seized a book called Stroke, which was about boating.

What have we internalized as a consequence of the AIDS crisis? As with most historical traumas of abuse, the perpetrators—the state, our families, the media, private industry—have generally pretended that the murder and cultural destruction of AIDS, created by their neglect, never actually took place. They pretend that there was nothing they could have done, and that no survivors or witnesses are walking around today with anything to resolve. They probably believe, as they are pretending, that the loss of those individuals has had no impact on our society, and that the abandonment and subsequent alienation of a people and culture does not matter. But of course, that could not be farther from the truth.

During the AIDS crisis, the sexist imbalance of the gay community was overwhelmed by the necessities of trauma. Men became endangered and vulnerable. They needed each other and women to intervene with the government, media, and pharmaceutical and insurance industries. They needed intervention in all arenas of social relationship. They needed women's political experience from the earlier feminist and lesbian movements, women's analysis of power, and women's emotional commitments to them. They needed women's alienation from the state. As men became weak, they allowed themselves to acknowledge the real ways that women are strong, particularly recognizing our hard-won experience at political organizing. There was more room for women to be seen at our level of merit, to occupy social space that we deserved to occupy, even if the reason was that men were disappearing. Like Rosie the Riveter, gay women gained more equality within the queer community, more social currency and autonomy because men were threatened, wounded, and killed.