Kay Gabriel: I’d love to start by knowing more about your history working with Performance Space and going to Performance Space as an audience member, which I imagine goes back to when it was Performance Space 122.
Sarah Schulman: Actually it goes back to when it was an empty school. It was the location for the movie Fame. They put in the dance floor so they could film Fame. So then there was this dance floor, and then this group of people took it over and turned it into PS 122. I knew all those people.
The weird thing was that they were not welcoming to lesbian work, ironically. A few years later there was The WOW (Women’s One World) café on 11th Street, and that's where we would all perform, and it was very hard for us to get gigs at PS.
As the years passed, they started this thing called Avant-Garde-A-Rama. It was a sample show where people could come in and perform, and I did something there called the World’s Worst Performance Festival. It was a collaboration with Diane Torr. She was one of the popularizers of the drag king. We were making fun of the whole scene, and that was the first piece I did there.
There was this very butch woman named Luke Carson, who I guess would probably be trans now, but at the time was not. Luke was older. She worked the door at PS 122, so she got us all in for free. So for years I went and saw everything, and I didn't pay because of Luke. A little lesbian conspiracy there.
Finally I had a show in the downstairs. There was a crappy downstairs basement space, and I had a three-part show. One part was called “The Group,” and it was like a lesbian version of Boys in the Band. Nora Burns was in it. And then I did an experimental piece called “Killer In Love,” with Bina Sharif. And then the third piece was a monologue about a gay man with AIDS, performed by Mark Ameen, and this was in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and that monologue became the novel Rat Bohemia.
I did one full-length piece at PS. It was a Salomé with Lucy Sexton, Bina Sharif, Jennifer Miller, Scott Heron. And it was good, actually. It was pretty interesting. But even when we finally got programmed at PS, it was a second track.
But I was friendly with a lot of people who worked there, and I saw a huge amount of work. It had an enormous influence on me. I saw everything: post-modern dance, performance art, interdisciplinary stuff. I was exposed to improvisational new music. I would say that the aesthetic of the period was improvisational interdisciplinarity.
I also organized what I think was the first benefit for ACT UP at PS. And it was quite small, very, very early on, 1987. I lived across the street, so it was really like a hangout place.
And then it got closed down and renovated. When Jenny [Schlenzka] came in for the new incarnation, she was from Germany, and she didn't really know the neighborhood, and she was having meetings with people, and she said she wanted to do something about Kathy Acker. And of course, I knew Kathy, so I suggested this collective reading of one of Kathy's books,
KG: The 2018 Blood and Guts in High School marathon.
SS: Yes. I already had many, many years of curating experience, because Jim Hubbard and I had founded MIX [the experimental queer film festival] in 1987. We were the chief curators together for the first seven years, and then I kind of was emerita for the next 33 years. So I've had a lot of curation experience. And I’m also a very relational person. I’ve known a lot of people, and I started inviting people to this Kathy Acker event, so Carolee Schneemann came, and Richard Foreman came, Lynne Tillman, and all these great people. And I realized that this is a great thing to sit down together and read out loud. Karen Finley, who had been Kathy’s student at the San Francisco Art Institute, came. So then Jenny and I talked about doing a reading series. And I was like, well, it has to be free, and why don't we do new work in progress, because nobody does that.
It's been an incredible experience because so many amazing people who are emerging, mid-career, and also very advanced have been willing to come and read from something in progress that's not being streamed or recorded, so that they have the freedom to work it out. And it's attracted an incredible audience of writers. I've met a lot of writers just because they come every month.
I started publishing work to be read in 1979 and my first book came out in ’84 so I've been on the scene for a very long time, more than 45 years. And consistently I've noticed that really terrible work is constantly praised. We're always being told that things are great and they’re not. What they are is repetitive. Things that get prizes and people who are put forward, they’re usually very, very repetitive, because there’s a confusion in the culture between repetition and quality. And I know that there’s all these great people out there doing all this great stuff at all stages, and they’re just not fitting into that reward apparatus. Those are the people that I want for First Mondays, and I’ve gotten them, and they’ve been incredible. And of course there is some overlap.
We’ve launched some people. I was just remembering the other day that Torrey Peters read before she had a publishing contract, and there were editors in the audience to see her. Rabih Alameddine read a piece that was just nominated for a National Book Award. So if you stick with it, you sometimes do see the cycle of people rise and work being appreciated.
KG: Something I feel like I’ve learned from you is feeling a little bit of fury over mediocrity getting rewarded while brilliance is right next door being loudly ignored. Your curatorial instinct is to not just cycle through the names and the works that are already on everybody’s lips but to scan around for what and who else is out there doing currently unrecognized but much more compelling work.
SS: That’s the whole point. And also to juxtapose work, putting people together that people wouldn’t think go together, but yes, that work resonates, not because of identity but because of aesthetics or the ways that their minds work. One of the most exciting readings last year was by Harriet Clark, whose book has not come out yet. It’s a novel about growing up with an incarcerated mother, and it’s exquisitely written. It's coming out this year from FSG. I paired her with Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian novelist and Booker Prize finalist, who’s writing about Africans in Germany during the Weimar period. You wouldn’t necessarily think that those two things would resonate, but they both are very, very emotional, very smart, and very ornamental, and so the work just glistened next to each other.
And I also like pairing unknown people with very well known people. Like Radhika Sainath, who is an attorney at Palestine Legal. She’s writing a novel, and it’s not published yet. I paired her with Vivian Gornick, who’s 90, and who read a memoir about having gone to CUNY. And the third person was Saeed Jones, who’s a former student of mine. And it was an incredible night. And it was packed. Sometimes we get hundreds of people, because they’re so excited to see some of their favorite writers in person.
KG: I also find that the crowd is quite young. Do you see this as well?
SS: I’ve just been on book tour for the last year and my audience tends to be very young. It started with Conflict Is Not Abuse. Suddenly I had a room full of 20-year-olds, and that has continued. And I take people very seriously. So if a young person tells me they’re a writer, I’ll say, well, send me something.
In fact, one of the writers that I programmed this year, Bobuq Sayed, we met because they were coming to First Mondays. And I’m like, Who are you? And turns out they’re writing the first Afghan gay novel. It’s a great book. The program is a great way to meet younger writers and older writers.
KG: That’s a principle we use for programming at the Project, too, putting different generations of writers together, people who bring different crowds. It’s very different from the version of the poetry reading where you go in and it’s a little churchy, you say hi to everybody, and everybody already knows each other. There’s a version of that that can be quite dynamic, but more often it’s a little stale. The thing I think is really exciting is when you have some of that hardcore dedicated element plus a lot of people who are new or young and who are experiencing each other for the first time through these works and hearing things that they wouldn’t have expected.
SS: Because it’s also the kind of thing that people bring their friends to. It’s a word-of-mouth thing. And also it’s free, and also there’s free drinks. That was the German innovation, apparently, but it really pays off. It’s not that expensive to do, and it makes people feel welcome. And New York is so expensive, and this way people can come to a really cool thing and have fun, and it’s free, and that’s what it should be.
KG: I’ve got a First Mondays story that illustrates some of this. You had us for a reunion for the We Want It All anthology, me and my coeditor Andrea Abi-Karam and some of our writers. But you were really insistent that we couldn’t read from the book. We would have to read new work. And I read for the first time my poem “TRANNIES, by Larry Kramer,” maybe you remember. And at the end of that poem I start speculating: Did he ever think about the idea? Did he ever think about transition? And if he did, did it excite him or disgust him? It’s speculation for the purpose of a joke, it’s not actually a theory. And then from the audience you were like: “Larry Kramer was absolutely not trans.” I so appreciated the firmness with which you squashed the idea. But anyways that poem is in my book Perverts. And so it’s now published and out in the world. And so that is the life cycle you were talking about. It was my first time experimenting with reading “TRANNIES” in front of an audience, and people really ate it up, they really laughed.
SS: That’s really great. But I also remember that you met Elena [Comay del Junco] at First Mondays. I introduced you two, because I just want everyone to know each other. Because we need each other.
The other thing I wanted to bring up is Palestine. There was a big struggle at PS about going BDS, but ultimately they did. They don’t use the words BDS, but they are the largest brick-and-mortar arts institution in the city to make a commitment to not work with anybody that has Israeli government funding. First Mondays was BDS from the beginning, without any interference from the larger organization as they were figuring themselves out. We’ve had so many Palestinian writers, and particularly Susan Abulhawa, who was the director of the Palestine rights conference that got the president of UPenn fired. And I was so proud to have her. And then Randa Jarrar, and other Muslim and Arab writers: Bina Sharif and Nuar Alsadir, who’s also an incredible voice. This year we’re having Tareq Baconi, who has a new memoir coming out about being a gay Palestinian. We’ll also have Saed Atshan, who is a queer Palestinian academic and intellectual. And then on closing night we’re having George Abraham, who’s an amazing gay Palestinian poet. So queer Palestine this year is like the sub-theme.
Trans work, of course, from the beginning was completely integrated. And this year in our finale we’re having another one of my students, Julián Delgado Lopera. They’re a trans Colombian writer. They have a novel called Fiebre Tropical, and they’re writing a new novel. And they were my student. They’re an unbelievable writer. I really think this person is going to be major. And also they replaced me at CUNY. I’ve mentored them into my former job.
And then of course First Mondays will feature one of my favorite writers of all time, Mary Gaitskill. I couldn’t believe she said yes. She’ll be reading with David Velasco and Dennis Cooper.
KG: I want to hear more about the rule for First Mondays about readers only presenting works in progress. And there’s a different version of this rule that I notice at the Poetry Project: people who’ve gone to Project events for a long time have internalized the ethos that if you read at the Project, you can read from published work, but you should bring something new as well. It’s not a rule, ’but it’s a principle. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about your version of that rule, which is usefully strict: only new work, unpublished, and there’s no streaming and no recording.
SS: The problem with only reading published work is that it’s out of date. We’re in a society that is disintegrating very rapidly. You can go to First Mondays, and you’re going to see what that person is writing right now, about what we’re experiencing right now. Not only does that work have urgency and immediacy, but also a lot of great work doesn’t get published because publishing is so fucked up. So we’re gonna see the writer’s intention, what they’re actually grappling with before they have to deal with the machine of the publishing industry.
30 years ago, the East Village was open mic. It wasn’t called open mic, but it was basically a free for all. Jack Waters, one of my closest friends, has a theory that performance art was originally something that developed in artists lofts in SoHo. People had a lot of space, and they would do these long, epic pieces with huge casts and lots of components. But as gentrification came and space became unavailable, it shrunk. Eventually it became solo performance art, and the emphasis on solo performance that we have today is a consequence of gentrification that’s distorted the aesthetic intentions of performance art.
I just saw Morgan Bassichis’s piece about Frank Maya. I knew Frank. It was a great piece, and the audience loved it, but even that one person show was so expensive to produce. Downtown performance art started as this more collective effort. And the way things were at that time, there was art every second. There were so many spaces. And anywhere you went, you could see things, and you could do things, and you could just get up there and try something, and that doesn’t exist because of this real estate constriction and also by how conservative the artistic context has become. And that’s something we’re pushing back against.
Like our opening night is going to feature M. Lamar, Karen Malpede and Phoebe Legere. Now, Phoebe Legere is someone I have been watching for almost 40 years. She’s a phenomenon. The quote about her that we’re using is Andy Warhol saying, “Phoebe Legere is a genius,” that’s how long people have been loving her work. But I don’t think she’s been looked at in a critical way. I don’t think anyone recently has said, “This is an interesting person.” You know, there’s these avant-guardians. Bina Sharif is another one. And Penny Arcade is the archetype of an artist who’s worked her entire life, who’s constantly changing, who’s doing new work constantly and who’s never really been rewarded. Like, where is Penny Arcade’s HBO special? I don’t know. It should have happened 20 years ago for sure, you know. Let’s take these people seriously, respect them and honor them, and look at what they’re about. What do they have to say that’s driving them all these decades?
KG: Even when a queer artist does get famous for their work, and it’s wonderful to celebrate their success, you ask us to pay attention to where people came from, and the large communities of avant-garde artists who created an aesthetic universe where that thing would be possible. You made that point about Cole Escola when you were talking to Heather Glynis at LaMaMa for Squirts.
SS: Tony Kushner had just been at Oh, Mary, and he had done a public conversation with Cole and had said, “Your work is astonishing.” And I was thinking, God, what if you had come down to the Pyramid and said that to one of those queens who was going to die of AIDS or a drug overdose and was living in poverty and obscurity? Because that’s where this work comes from.
There’s an incredible play by Penny Arcade called Introduction to the End of the World, which is about Rita Redd and how, when she died of AIDS, her mother comes down to the East Village and stands on a street corner and asks people, “Did you know my son? Did you know my son?” And no one knows Rita. And the mother’s like, “But he did shows. He did shows.” These people who gave their lives to developing the aesthetic that are only now being brought to the mainstream public, but who are relegated to obscurity.
KG: There’s a sense of injustice there, and also there’s an urgency of contextualizing and giving people the tools by which to remember and to draw on and actually work with those people.
SS: And also some people are not user-friendly. Some of these Pyramid people were difficult people, but it doesn’t mean that their contribution was any less meaningful.
KG: You’ve lived in the East Village for most of your life, and you’ve seen round after round of transformation, the scale of which is probably actually unimaginable to people who haven’t lived through it. In the midst of all this creative destruction, the gentrification, all the development that gobbles people up and spits them out, I’m curious: what’s your sense of what holds the neighborhood together? What holds traditions together? What keeps people going when there’s so much force to spin them around and throw them somewhere else?
SS: That’s a great question. The East Village is so expensive you can’t move there. It’s filled with rats. There’s so many homeless people. There’s still so much drugs. Even with all the police cameras in Tompkins, there’s all this drug activity. And yet you can’t kill it. That is the thing. Because it has meaning for people. So young kids come, trans kids, goth kids, whatever, come and walk around the East Village. Yeah, they can never move there anymore. But the actual sidewalks are filled with these people with aspirational hope. I mean, they do have to contend with all the Wall Streeters doing their pub crawls and whatever. But you see the weird bohemian kids, and then they still have a feeling that they can look any way they want. And it’s still true. You can dress any way you want and walk around. So there’s something in the spirit of it, because there will always be people who will undergo great deprivation in order to be free in some way, to express themselves in some way, to try to find each other in some way. And this is one of the places that people come for that, for that, to fulfill that wish, if they can. And the fact that we’re about to have a socialist mayor is a reflection of that. The day he’s elected, New York will be back.
I have a childhood memory that’s relevant here. Veselka, which is the only thing in the neighborhood that’s older than me, used to sell foreign language newspapers, and my grandmother and I would go there so she could get the Yiddish papers, of which there were, I think, four at the time: The Forwards (socialist), The Tog (liberal), Der Algeminer Dzjournal (religious), and the Freiheit (Communist.) And I remember one time we were going and this girl was walking down the street barefoot, wearing black velvet with facepaint, laughing, and my grandmother grabbed my hand, and she said, “They're all on drugs.” That was the hippie runaway culture.
I just did this book tour. There’s a lot of new indie bookstores, which is the good news from America. They’re cities that are not the top cities, but they’re affordable. A lot of young people are moving to them and they have great bookstores. And those stores are filled with this, the contemporary version of youth culture, the contemporary hippies. They’re like, genderqueer goth burlesque kind of merger aesthetic. I’ve seen it, and they’re in every city. And I was like, Oh, these are those same kids, but now they’re in Pittsburgh.
KG: So what are you working on now?
SS: I’m doing so much. I’m still on tour for the Solidarity book. I’m directing the MFA program at Northwestern, which is a fully funded program where every student gets a free ride, plus $45,000 a year, plus health insurance for three years. And we’ve been really interested in older people, people who’ve already published. We’re not looking for people who graduated from Brown two weeks ago.
I have a first draft of a new novel, which is a fictional revisitation of a great American myth, the Roe v. Wade case. It’s a novelization of the story of the two women at the heart of that case, who were both only 27 when the case went to the Supreme Court.
There’s a musical adaptation of my 1998 novel Shimmer. We’re very, very close to a New York production. It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but hopefully that is happening.
I’m having a reading of my play The Lady Hamlet coming up with Lauren Patton, who won a Tony for the Alanis Morissette musical, and Xanthe Elbrick, who was Tony nominated for Coram Boy, and the amazing Melissa Leo, an Oscar winner. It’s directed by Stephen Bracket who did Strange Loop off and on Broadway.
And then Christine Vachon is making a documentary version of Let the Record Show. Jim Hubbard and I are consultants, and it’s going to be directed by Kirsten Johnson in collaboration with Andrew Haigh.
I’m 67 but for some reason I’m not slowing down. I’m spending a lot of time on airplanes. I used to take the ferry to Staten Island, so it’s better to go on an airplane.
We recently honored Jim at Visual Aids. He and I were talking, and we’ve collaborated for 40 years, and we really feel that we succeeded in historicizing ACT UP. I do feel that a lot of people now know about ACT UP. And it was the two of us putting this history out there. And I think two people can do a lot, and we feel very, very satisfied with the outcome of all of that work.
KG: I remember in 2012 when United in Anger came out, and the David France documentary came out, and I remember the sense of you two fighting against this Hollywood production behemoth to actually communicate the narrative of what happened, that it wasn’t like a handful of heroic white guys were the saviors. And instead you told the story from the perspective of the organizing that actually happened. You stuck it out in the fight and just kept on putting information in front of people in a bunch of different ways and that narrative and consciousness about what happened totally changed over time.
SS: We were fueled by rage, because we could not allow the story that five white men transformed the AIDS crisis, even though HBO loved it and all of that, we couldn’t let that stand. Instead, it was this huge community of very different kinds of people doing different strategies at the same time, and that is actually what created the paradigm shift. And the message that individuals change the world is not only not true, but it’s also impossible. In America, change is created by coalitions.
KG: That false narrative of a few brave individuals changing things at a massive scale is also totally the wrong lesson for what people need to learn about how it is possible to change anything about what’s happening.
SS: That’s what my new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, is about. I’ve been going out on the road and talking to people about simultaneity of response, and how no movement that has tried to force people into one analysis or one strategy has succeeded. This message is one people are very receptive to. And now the book’s coming out in Britain, Korea, France, you know. So I think it’s something that people really respond to. I think the age of purity is over. Thank God.
In my book, I include this document from the BDS movement on effective radicalism. And one of the things that they say is pick goals that are winnable. The demand that universities disinvest from Israel is completely winnable because they did it with South Africa. So we know that they already know how to do it. And the second thing that they say is: Don’t factionalize. It’s so crucial, if you don’t like what another group is doing, forget about it. Do your own project.
KG: I was just watching this documentary about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners during the 1984-85 National Union of Miners strike in the UK. There’s a short discussion about how some people in the organization were turned off when other organizers from different left political parties started trying to push their own party line inside LGSM. People were like, this is not relevant. We don’t all have to believe the same things in order to just do the thing we agree is the right thing to do. We can make decisions and follow a course of action together without trying to fight for everyone thinking the same way, as long as those differences don’t get in the way of our goals and actually achieving them together.
SS: And that takes us right back to First Mondays, and the ethos we’re trying to build through the reading series, because I think this principle you’re talking about is radical democracy, you know, and radical democracy is the recognition of difference with the bottom line. And that’s when we thrive.
