This article is part of Hyperallergic’s 2026 Pride Month series, featuring interviews with queer and trans elder artists throughout June.
Sarah Schulman says she's "one of those New Yorkers who can't leave New York." In her nearly seven decades in the city, the novelist, playwright, and filmmaker has co-founded the Dyke March, conducted 187 interviews with members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), reported on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and drawn pedagogy from Audre Lorde, who was her college professor. Though widely recognized for her documentaries and nonfiction books, including Conflict Is Not Abuse (2016) and Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (2021), Schulman identifies first as a novelist; several of her works of fiction focus on lesbian characters and reflect the world of queer poets, artists, and activists she grew up around. Her writerly sensibility and deep belief in community come through in her political activism, mentorship as a professor at Northwestern University, and continued support of student organizers. I spoke with her over the phone about the origins of her interest in writing, the publishing industry's resistance to lesbian protagonists, and the next generation of authors and activists who give her hope for the future.
Hyperallergic: What was your first memorable interaction with the arts? Was there a work of art made by a queer or trans person that made an impression on you as a child?
Sarah Schulman: I was born in 1958 and like New Yorkers at that time, I grew up going to the theater because it was so cheap. A Wednesday matinee on Broadway was $7. I saw Hair. I saw For Colored Girls. I went to the Yiddish Theater. You know that movie theater on Second Avenue and East Street? I was in some plays as a kid because growing up in New York at that time, a lot of my friends' parents were actors. I was a child in Sartre’s The Flies, and I was a child in The Lottery.
But gay … perhaps it was Judson Church. I saw The Faggot, which was a musical by Al Carmines, and it had moved to the Truck & Warehouse Theatre, which is now New York Theatre Workshop. So maybe that's the first. Or Bergman's Persona. There was that scene with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann where they merge and the film catches on fire. I saw that in high school.
SS: I started writing when I was six. Because of my generation, every Jewish girl was given a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. And the lesson was that girls could be writers. Then there was this great book called Harriet the Spy. She was also a writer. So, I think a lot of girls my age started diaries. I started a diary when I was six, and I wrote, "When I grow up, I will write books."
SS: I don't have that one, but I have 47 years of diaries that I just looked at for the first time, and it's mostly gossip about dead people. That's really what it is. And then I wrote plays as a kid. I would write a play for Hanukkah that me and my brother and sister acted out. I wrote the high school show, all that. From the beginning, I was always making things.
H: How were your early years as a college student in New York City? Where did you find and build queer community?
SS: I came out in 1975, and there was the Oscar Wilde Bookshop on Christopher Street. They had the lesbian shelf with xeroxed articles, things like The Woman-Identified Woman by the Radicalesbians. Things like that. Or just pieces of paper. And the men's shelf for, like, porn novels about motorcycle guys and stuff. I mean, this was really before gay presses. But there was the Village Voice. I lived on 10th Street as a kid, and the Village Voice office was right down the block. When an Argentinian gay guy [Diego Viñales] was arrested in a bar raid, he was put into the police precinct on 11th Street and he jumped out the window, and he was impaled on the gate. And that was a huge story. I read that in the Village Voice. We lived across the street from the Albert Hotel, and there were a lot of trans people who hung out there. It was kind of a welfare hotel. Years later, I found out that the Cockettes stayed there when they performed in New York.
H: Were there any specific artist or writer groups you frequented?
SS: Oh, millions, because the whole lesbian world was around poets. Every big social event was poets. Like, the leaders of the community were Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and there would be these huge poetry readings that would be packed. That was a big social scene. Because we didn't have anything else. There were no movies or TV or anything like that. So from the beginning, those were the people. And then Audre was my college professor at Hunter College.
SS: Not really, but I mean, I taught at CUNY for 25 years, and I did use a lot of her pedagogy for these large classes. There'd be, like, 30-something people in the class. And she knew everyone's name by the second class. Then she would put everyone in a circle and stand in the middle and teach you sort of individually one minute at a time, and I did that for 25 years at the College of Staten Island. I learned that from her.
H: Were there any other professors or teachers who influenced you in those years?
SS: No, I was a terrible student. I was too terrible. I barely have a bachelor's.
SS: It is true. I finally got a bachelor's from Empire State College where I got, like, half the credits for lifetime experience. It is a State University of New York degree, but I could not function in a classroom because I disagreed with everything the teachers said.
H: I imagine academic spaces were especially stifling at that time.
SS: It was bad. You didn't read any books by women. It was just not a good environment for a young intellectual.
H: Did you find that for yourself outside of the classroom?
SS: Well, I published my first novel when I was 25 in 1984, so I've been in print as a novelist for 42 years. I was already part of the whole scene, and I had started writing for this newspaper called Women News in 1979 when I was 21. And so I was part of what was called the Women in Print movement. But every city had a gay paper and a feminist paper. So I wrote for Women News, and I wrote for Gay Community News, which was the socialist gay paper out of Boston. And there also used to be a Marxist newsweekly called the Guardian that was 100 years old. I wrote for them, I wrote for the New York Native when that started. I had a whole career as a journalist. I mean, “career” … we didn't get paid. And then my novel came out in ’84.
H: Was that a few years before you started working with ACT UP?
