Quotes from Sarah Schulman

David is very concerned about being remembered. I'm concerned about remembering because, after all, I'm going to be left behind. People we know die all the time and there is really no way to react. What can you do? Freak out every day? David brings memory up all the time. I can see how appalled he is at how little any of us react to AIDS deaths. He's focused a lot of worry on being forgotten.

Right now, when I think of all my AIDS dead, one of the things they all have in common is about forty conversations just like the one Dave and I had, where each guy talked about death in his own way. Later, they get sick and die in very predictable patterns. Lets face it, this death itself is no longer extraordinary, emotionally, to me.

While police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of "stopping violence" has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes.

Just then, a reversal occurred in which the key turned suddenly in the lock. That is the most comforting sound in a person's life, isn't it? When the other uses his own key to finally come home. Behind

Nothing is ever resolved," Rita said, tired. "That's one of those fake concepts. How can you resolve with a man dead at thirty-four? What kind of peace can you make with that? Lately I've been thinking that the conflict is for the best. Because then we are not pretending that anything about this can ever be reasonable.

Thats why we'll never get rid of homophobia in this country. The brothers and sisters of homosexuals have too much at stake.

Like all the living and the dead, I think I see him everywhere, but it is just new versions, young versions of guys like Stan. Most of us seem to be recreated every fifteen years. I see a twenty-year-old me almost once a month, and a twenty-year-old, forty-year-old, sixty-year-old Stan passes by on the street often enough.

The traumatized person's sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty and they know it is possible.

I think the thing about gay people in that era was that we were not really especially caustic or campy, we just were so far ahead of the regular culture that we got bored very easily, and moved on to the next thing just to keep ourselves interested.

These are stories but the pain they contain is immeasurable. The impact of these losses requires a consciousness beyond most human ability. We grow weary, numb, alienated, and then begin to forget, to put it all away just to be able to move on. But even the putting away is an abusive act. The experiencing, the remembering, the hiding, the overcoming—all leave their scars.

When a person has to put down and pick up their own plate, cook alone and eat alone and wash up alone, then stare at an empty chair, well, there is no breath. Earl

What do we want from life? We wish the responsibilities, opportunities, and realities of the new day to be more delightful and enticing than the escape of sleep.

The problem is that most people are average. This includes people who run universities, publishing companies, and the rewards system in the arts. Most people look at something that is not familiar and think it is wrong. Very few people are able to look at an authentic discovery and be grateful. For that context to exist there has to be a true avant-garde, a large, vibrant community of people willing to think, fuck, love, live, and create oppositionally.

cross-talk, no countering, and no criticism.

It's kind of like you go [forward], and it's still about you, but the picture keeps getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

If we love and identity people with HIV and other oppressed people, we can help transform the epidemic.

Since Freud, people think you either want to be a man or hate men. You only exist in relationship to men.

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.

Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around.