Sarah Schulman’s Radical Approach to Conflict, Communication and Change

Sarah Schulman’s work — as a nonfiction writer, novelist, activist, playwright and filmmaker — confronts the very thing most people try to avoid: conflict. Schulman, far from running from it, believes we need more of it. This was true in Schulman’s 2016 book, “Conflict Is Not Abuse,” which argues that people often mislabel conflict as abuse without recognizing the power that they have to potentially abuse others. Viewing oneself as a victim can be one way to earn compassion. But powerful groups often use their perceived victimhood as an excuse to harm those who are more vulnerable. And more individually, people often don’t see when they have power, and they often fear or dodge the work of repair. It’s a challenging and prescient book, with a deep faith in the healing power of not just communication, but of collision. Schulman’s latest book, “Let the Record Show,” is a history of ACT UP New York, the direct-action group that reshaped AIDS activism in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It’s a book about necessary conflicts: between the AIDS community and the U. S. government, and between queer people and a widely homophobic society. But it’s also about conflict among people who generally agree with one another and are working toward a common goal. Schulman calls the book “a political history,” but it’s also a work of political theory: a proposal for how social movements can become more effective by embracing dissensus rather than striving for consensus. We began this conversation discussing ACT UP, conflict and Schulman’s theory of political change. But we also ended up discussing Israel and Palestine, a topic she has written widely about. And Schulman shares her thoughts on contemporary L. G. B. T. Q. politics and what she thinks has been lost as queer culture has become more mainstream. Mentioned in this episode: Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman Recommendations: Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University by Matt Brim Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  I've been wanting to have Sarah Schulman on the show for a while now. I first came to know her work through her 2016 book Conflict is Not Abuse, which has become a kind of cult classic. It's a kind of amazing, very, very challenging book. The central argument is that we often mislabel conflict as abuse and view ourselves and act as victims of abuse without recognizing the power that we have in the situation, the way we may be part of and have a responsibility for ending a conflict. And also, within that frame, not seeing that we then can harm others. It is particularly about the way people who are formed by trauma, as they develop more power, can then not see that they are the ones inflicting harm.

• 1:02Ezra Klein?

  It's a book that goes through a lot of what you might think of as a cancel culture conversation, right? Trigger warnings in schools and all kinds of things that are debates on the left in America today, but ladders up all the way to Israel, Palestine. It's a really fascinating, strange, distinctive book. And it's built around an almost utopian belief in the power of communication, really difficult forms of communication to heal and resolve. And so, in some ways, it is centrally about the need to see ourselves as in and put ourselves in communication with each other. I think about it often. But then I saw Schulman was bringing out another book, Let the Records Show: A History of ACT UP New York. ACT UP was this direct action group that during the 80s and 90s reshaped both policy and visibility around the AIDS crisis.

• 1:47Ezra Klein?

  Their success, which was remarkable, has slipped into near legend today. But Schulman and her collaborator Jim Hubbard have been building an oral history of the group for over a decade now, and she really wants the lessons and structure of that group and that moment to be understood. She calls the book a political history, but you can really read it, I think, as a work of political theory. "A proposal for our social movements can be more effective by embracing disagreement internally and with the culture broadly, rather than striving for consensus," which is to say that this book is also, in its way, about the virtues of conflict and the need for really difficult forms of communication. So I thought going into this, we would mostly be talking about Act of New York, about conflict, about Schulman's theory of how political change happens.

• 2:31Ezra Klein?

  But this conversation, which took place a few weeks ago, it also ends up veering into Israel-Palestine, which Schulman has written books on, which is part of Conflict is Not Abuse, and which was, of course, dominating the news at the moment. As always, my email is ezra kline show at nytimes.com. So I'd like to start by just invoking this era. What were the years of the AIDS plague like before the treatments? So for people who weren't there, who weren't even born yet, how do you describe the scale and the toll of it?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Well, the context is really important. So let's go back a little bit. First of all, science observed the pattern that became known as AIDS in 1981, but we now think that it existed for a century and within the United States in the 40s and certainly in New York in the 60s and 70s. But the first public announcement was the famous New York Times article, July 3, 1981, "41 Cases of Rare Cancer Found in Homosexuals in San Francisco." So to get the context for that, at the time, there was a lot of talk about homosexuality being biological, that homosexuality was one thing and that it was attributed to a

• 3:47Speaker 01

  biological source. And for many people's minds, homosexuality itself was a disease. So the first name for this new disease was gay-related immune deficiency. Today, if somebody said gay cancer, you'd say, are you crazy? Cancer can't be gay. But at the time, homosexuality was so stigmatized, and that stigma was there from the beginning. Eventually, the name was changed to AIDS.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Now, white gay man is now a category of privilege. But in the early eighties, gay people were a profoundly oppressed minority. Gay sex was illegal. In fact, the sodomy laws were not overturned until 2003. In New York City, there was no gay rights bill until 1986. So you could be fired from a job, kicked out of an apartment, and you could be denied public accommodation, like restaurant service or hotel. Familial homophobia was the norm. It was virulent, and it was a force of history. It made people have to leave their countries, leave their hometowns,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  and it put people with AIDS in a position of being abandoned by their families. And physical violence was a sport. It was called gay bashing. And straight people would come into gay neighborhoods for entertainment to hurt people who looked gay. So you're talking about a despised group of people with no rights facing a terminal illness. And so in those first five years, the AIDS community really was about trying to create some kind of volunteer-like form of the social services that people needed but couldn't get. So you had Gay Men's Health Crisis had a buddy system, where a person with AIDS might be assigned a buddy who could help them do their grocery shopping.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  There were organizations that would walk your dog. There was God's Love We Deliver that was bringing home-cooked meals to homebound people with AIDS. But the political reaction did not really start until ACT UP was founded in March of 1987.

• 5:57Ezra Klein?

  In this period, what is the toll in the community like? What is it like to live in places that are the epicenter of the AIDS crisis?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  It's a mass death experience. And as Vito Russo famously said, "It's like there's a war, but no one knows about it but you." You know, one of the really big differences between AIDS and COVID is that COVID is a collective, public experience that's discussed on television and people talk about it over dinner. AIDS was a private nightmare. At the time, there was no accurate representation of gay people or people with AIDS in media. The entire media was controlled by white men. The government was almost entirely white male. The private sector was dominated by white men. Gay men who were part of that power apparatus were usually in the closet.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  And the people who were affected by AIDS were primarily gay men, women, people of color, poor people, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and people who were born HIV positive. So it had very little overlap with those who controlled the power apparatus at the time.

• 7:13Ezra Klein?

  You quote an ACT-UP'er in the book, Zoe Leonard, saying, "What AIDS revealed was not the problem of the virus. What AIDS revealed was the problems of our society. It was this fissure through which everything, all the ways in which our society isn't working, became really clear." It's very resonant of what people say about coronavirus now, but as you say, these are really, really different, profoundly different situations. So what did it reveal then?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It revealed that most people were not in touch with gay people. Many families had abandoned their gay family members. You know, it's interesting, in ACT-UP, there was only one parent of a person with AIDS who was a full-time ACT-UP member. That was Patricia Navarro, who was a working-class Jicana who had come from California to take care of her son Ray Navarro. So if the families of people with AIDS had acted as any kind of political force, there would have been change much earlier. But they were almost completely absent.

• 8:15Ezra Klein?

  So what was ACT UP for somebody who's never heard of it?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so now we're in 1987. And there's a few political precursors to ACT UP forming. The first was the Bowers decision, the Supreme Court decision upholding the sodomy law. So you're five years into this devastating mass death epidemic. And instead of helping gay people by decriminalizing or bringing in gay rights, the Supreme Court is reinforcing sodomy laws. And this really hit the community very hard. People took to the streets. There were demonstrations in New York and in Washington DC, and demonstrations that were held without police permits. So real acts of rebellion.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  At the same time, a small artist collective of graphic artists called the Silence Equals Death Project designed a poster of an upside down pink triangle against a black background that said Silence Equals Death. And they weepasted it all over New York. Similarly, a ZAP group called the Lavender Hill Mob did an action. Now, ZAPs were a strategy that came from gay liberation. And it's an action that only people who are excluded from power can do because it involves bursting in to business as usual and disrupting. And they dressed up in concentration camp outfits and disrupted meeting of the CDC. So these were the precursors.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Then in March, Larry Kramer, the writer, gave a speech at the Gay and Lesbian Center in which he famously said, "Half of you will be dead in two years." People in the audience decided that they wanted to meet and try to create a political response. And a few days later, a group of people met and they chose the name ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. From then on, in their first six years, from 1987 to 93, which are the years that I cover, what they accomplished was phenomenal. You know, in many ways, ACT UP was the last social movement in America to be successful. And that's one of the reasons that I wanted to do this book, because it's not about nostalgia.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  It's about the time we're living in right now, where so many people in this country want change and they want it now, and they don't have access to activist information about which strategies worked and which ones didn't. And that's, you know, my purpose. So in, in six years, let me tell you some of the things that ACT UP accomplished. They forced the pharmaceutical companies to change the way they researched treatments, so that instead of looking for one pill that would cure AIDS, which had the largest market share, they were forced to shift to opportunistic infections. So let me explain that AIDS is a disease that destroys your immune system.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  And so people would develop dementia, blindness, swollen nerves in their legs, wasting syndrome. All these symptoms were opportunistic infections. ACT UP forced the Food and Drug Administration to allow people with AIDS access to experimental drugs that had not been approved. ACT UP ran a four-year campaign that forced the CDC to change its definition of AIDS so that women could qualify for benefits and could be part of experimental drug trials. ACT UP made needle exchange legal in New York City. ACT UP started Housing Works, the organization for housing for homeless people with AIDS.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  ACT UP confronted the Catholic Church when they tried to obstruct the distribution of condoms in public schools and stop them from doing that. And ACT UP changed the way that gay people and people with AIDS saw themselves and were seen in mass media. So those are enormous accomplishments.

• 12:12Ezra Klein?

  You've been saying "they" for, for ACT UP, but you were a member, you, you were very involved. How did you join it?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  So I was a reporter. Now, at that time, in the early eighties, the mainstream press did not cover gay people at all. They wouldn't say that somebody was gay and there was almost no, no news about us. So there was a series of underground newspapers. The New York Native was a gay male newspaper. Gay Community News was a gay and lesbian socialist newspaper. Woman News was a lesbian and straight feminist paper. And this was how our community got its news. The work was done by volunteer journalists who did not get paid and who went out and figured out what the stories were. And that was our only coverage. And I was like a girl reporter on the go, you know, I was in my early twenties.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  So I was on assignment at City Hall for the New York Native. And the issue was that there was no gay rights bill in New York. And this was when AIDS was revealed, eighty-one, eighty-two. So since I was already there, I started covering very early AIDS stories. And most of the work that I did had a social justice lens. So I covered pediatric AIDS, women with AIDS being excluded from drug trials. I did, I think, the first story on homeless people with AIDS. But I also did assignments, like I covered the closing of the bathhouses, which is an odd assignment because women were not allowed in the bathhouses. But it shows you how chaotic everything was. You know, journalists were dying, editors were dying.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  My editor at the Village Voice, Robert Massa, gave me an edit in his pajamas at home because he was too sick to go to work. So by the time ACT UP was founded in nineteen eighty-seven, I'd already been covering AIDS for about five years. And I joined in July of nineteen eighty-seven and I stayed until about nineteen ninety-three.

• 14:04Ezra Klein?

  So I want to go back to something you said a minute ago, which is that ACT UP was the only truly successful activist movement of the kind of past couple of decades. This is important to the framing of the book, but when I think about it, I think of the, the fight for gay marriage is very successful and then Black Lives Matter in this era as, as quite transformational. So I'm curious either how you define it or why you'd argue ACT UP is alone in its ability to claim that level of change in society.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I don't think I said the only. I said, I think it was the most recent successful movement. Black Lives Matter has transformed the society but hasn't yet won its demands. Although I hope that that will come. You know, before AIDS activism, gay marriage was considered a bizarre demand. It was considered so radical that it was impossible. But once ACT UP went into St. Patrick's Cathedral and disrupted mass, suddenly something like gay marriage became much more acceptable to the general public. Because the way that movements work is that the more to the left your left is, the more credibility your center has.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And so the part of gay life that was different than straight people was much less acceptable than the part of gay life that straight people felt resembled their choices.

• 15:25Ezra Klein?

  How many people were in ACT UP?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  The Monday night meetings were somewhere between 300 to 700 people. And our largest demonstration was Stop the Church, which was about 7,000 people. Now, that sounds like a lot of people to have in a meeting, but it's actually a small number of people. It's not a mass movement. It's a vanguard movement. It's just that the people in ACT UP were so committed to being effective that they were able to accomplish so much. And when I interviewed people, I interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years. You know, it was clear that ACT UP was a way of life. People lived with each other. They spent all their time together. They got their jobs through ACT UP.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  It was a complete and total commitment.

• 16:12Ezra Klein?

  This goes to something you say at the beginning of the book that I've been thinking about since I read it, which is, "The fate of a society is determined by very small groups of people. Only tiny vanguards actually take the actions necessary, and even fewer do this with a commitment to being effective." One thing that I've been struggling with with that quote is, do you think of that as an optimistic theory of social change or a pessimistic one? The way in which it feels optimistic to me is that it does imply that individuals, if they have a ferocious enough level of commitment,

• 16:47Ezra Klein?

  And enough of a commitment to being rigorous in whether or not they're achieving their goals really can have a big impact. And so I'd be curious, not just about what you think brought people to join ACT UP, but what it was that made the people who joined it effective? Like what it was they were willing to do, the conflict they were willing to be involved in with society? What allowed them to be effective? Where so many people who join activist movements often give up because of the feeling that they're not getting enough change, they're not being sufficiently effective?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Well, ACT UP was a constituency movement, right? So the people who had AIDS were the people who were in the movement. And it was heavily influenced by previous movements that ACT UP members had been in. And one was the Feminist Women's Health Movement. So the concept of patient-centered politics was brought, literally brought to ACT UP at educationals by people like Marion Banzoff and other activists who had worked at feminist clinics before. And the idea that people with AIDS are the experts and that people with AIDS determine the agenda was central to ACT UP. So for example, there was controversy

• 17:57Speaker 01

  about the use of placebos. If you're looking at it from the perspective of a scientist, you want to use placebos because it gives you better stats. But if you look at it from the perspective of a person with AIDS, nobody with AIDS wants to be given a placebo. And so we always said that the standard of care, whatever drugs were out there, should be the counterpoint and not a placebo. And that's an example of looking at things from the point of view of a person with AIDS. And that's something that ACT UP did that contemporary movements can really learn from. ACT UP designed the solution. They did not take an infantilized relationship to power, treating power like your parents, begging them to

• 18:42Speaker 01

  solve it. ACT UP would study the institutions, study the drugs, members became citizen scientists or learned about housing policy or learned about narcotics policies and designed solutions that were winnable, reasonable, and doable. And then presented these solutions to the powers that be. And when they would say no, which inevitably they would, ACT UP would then do nonviolent civil disobedience actions that were theatrical and designed to attract the attention of the media so that they could communicate through the media to the public to pressure these institutions for change.

• 19:21Ezra Klein?

  You were saying a moment ago that ACT UP was a pioneer in pushing patient-centered solutions. So tell me a bit about some of the campaigns that were effective here, because to the extent I think a lot of people know about ACT UP. They know about the spectacular, very media-friendly, direct confrontational work, right? You know, unrolling a condom over Jesse Helms's house. I think the actual inside work, inside institutions, is somewhat less well-known. So what was that and why was it actually effective?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  You know, in the book, I contrast three different campaigns in ACT UP that were based in three different constituencies. And by looking at them together, you can really see the range of how your strategic plan must meet your social position. And as your social position is different, your strategies have to be different. So for example, Larry Kramer went to Yale with the head of a pharmaceutical company. So he could call him up and they got a meeting. And he came with Mark Harrington, a very brilliant leader in ACT UP, who was a Harvard graduate, and Peter Staley, another brilliant leader in

• 20:32Speaker 01

  ACT UP, who had been a stockbroker. And they met with pharma in their office and they had a catered lunch and they had a face-to-face. But there was another campaign that was organized primarily by women with HIV and primarily white lesbians inside ACT UP that was to change the CDC definition of AIDS.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Now, let me just explain this for a minute. In the 1960s, there was a drug called thalidomide that was given to pregnant women, and many of them had children who were born without limbs. And Pharma had to pay out millions of dollars in damages. So after that, they didn't want women in experimental drug trials. So, women were excluded from these trials, and the definition of what constituted an AIDS diagnosis did not include symptoms that only women got. Women with HIV tended to be poorer than gay men with HIV. And they couldn't get benefits, and they couldn't get experimental drugs, and they couldn't get drugs tested on women. So this campaign and ACT UP took four years to win,

• 21:40Speaker 01

  and it took two years before they could get a meeting with Tony Fauci. But they used all different kinds of strategies than the men who were meeting with Pharma. They screamed at people in airports, they handcuffed themselves to people, they occupied offices, they put things in people's files. You know, they really stepped outside of respectability politics. Then I contrast that with a third campaign that was run by active and former IV drug users inside ACT UP. And that was even messier. Two people died of ODs, one guy stole $10,000 from ACT UP. The group broke the law by doing illegal needle exchange.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  They were arrested, they had a trial, and they won. And they made needle exchange legal in New York. So what it really shows is that you have to build tactics based on where you're situated, and you have to assess your position realistically. And there was something very human in these strategies, because they expressed where people were at and what they needed. And it shows you how diverse the organization really was.

• 22:50Ezra Klein?

  This is very core to your argument of why ACT UP was effective, though, which is that you almost describe ACT UP as a platform. And people came to the platform and they could use it to almost do what they wanted. You describe ACT UP as an organization that never demanded consensus. If you didn't like the campaign I was planning, the action I was planning, you didn't tell me not to do it. You didn't tell the governing board to tell me I couldn't do it. You just went and did something different. And so there was, I don't want to call it an anarchy, but there was a ferment to it in the way you describe it, where it really did allow for tremendous amount of experimentation. And as such, was able to attack with a broader set of strategies

• 23:32Ezra Klein?

  than most activist groups can that are more controlled. Could you talk a bit about that organizational structure?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  ACT UP was an organization that practiced radical democracy. And it was a big tent organization. People were very different inside. There was only one line of unity, principle of unity, direct action to end the AIDS crisis. And that was direct action as opposed to social service provision. So if you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. My feeling is that historically, movements that try to force conformity or homogeneity, where everyone has to have the same analysis and all agree on one strategy, I think that those movements always fail. And that the movements that really succeed are ones that are very broad,

• 24:21Speaker 01

  that have more radical wings, that have central wings, where people can respond on all different levels at the same time, a kind of simultaneity of response. When you examine the amount and range of actions that ACT UP was doing, it's phenomenal what was going on. The Latino Caucus was organizing ACT UP Puerto Rico. There was a Haitian working group that was helping HIV-positive Haitians get out of Guantanamo, where they were being incarcerated. There was an Asian Pacific Islander Caucus that was doing safe sex educationals in Asian gay bars. I mean, when someone was fired from Macy's for being HIV positive, a guy who was playing Santa,

• 25:06Speaker 01

  25 Santas walked into Macy's and chained themselves and started saying Santa has HIV. I mean, wherever something was happening with AIDS, ACT UP was there, and the structure facilitated that. And that's really why they were so impactful.

• 25:23Ezra Klein?

  In the ACT UP schema, what is the meaning of direct action? What is a, what is an action that an activist group might take that is not a direct action? And how does it contrast with the kinds of things ACT UP did?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Okay, so what ACT UP did not do was have passive demonstrations where people would stand in the cold and listen to speakers. Because that is not empowering. The image of direct action that ACT UP used, I think, was something that we've all seen, which was black resistance in the 1960s. And that movement was very impactful on ACT UP. Most of us were born in the 50s and 60s. And when you're a queer kid in the 50s or 60s, you don't know that there's a gay community waiting for you, that there's going to be a gay movement. But you're seeing black people resist on television, or in Life Magazine, or in Jet Magazine, or some people's families were involved in those movements.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And there's an identification there, and something was internalized. So later, when I was researching and I reread Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defines direct action, and it was exactly the structure that ACT UP used. Even though we never referenced him, or we never had a study group or anything like that, but clearly we had internalized it. So the structure is basically that you identify the needs based on the, on the community who's living in the experience. You design the solution, you become the expert on your issue. You present your solution to the powers that be. And then when they don't respond, you do what Dr. King called self purification.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And of course, the best known direct action in American history is when black students sat in at segregated lunch counters to demand the end of segregation. Because what they're doing there is they're not just picketing in front with signs saying, "End segregated lunch counters." They are creating an image of the world that they wish to inhabit by sitting at the counter and not being complicit with the restriction. And that's the kind of image that I think ACT UP was responding to unconsciously. When we decided to disrupt mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, or when we shut down the FDA,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  when we occupied Grand Central Station to protest the Gulf War with a slogan, "Fight AIDS, Not Arabs," when we interrupted Dan Rather on television because TV media was not accurately representing the AIDS crisis. Over and over again, it's an insertion of queer people and people with AIDS into the power apparatus that was excluding us.

• 28:04Ezra Klein?

  One of the tensions you see in activist groups, and one reason they end up being more controlled than ACT UP was, is that they're worried about actions, messages, aesthetics, images that could create backlash to them. I'm somebody who cares a lot about animal rights, and PETA is a very controversial group in that world. Because on the one hand, they do a lot of direct action, they insert themselves into conversations, and on the other hand, a lot of people feel, at least in the past, they've created more enemies than they've created friends. So how do you think about that trade off for ACT UP or for other groups between trying to win people over and trying to force them to recognize you when they're trying to ignore your issues?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Well, ACT UP had nothing to lose. You know, people were dying all the time, and we were very young, and there were people who were suffering. AIDS is a horrible death. And our friends were suffering in front of our eyes and dying. And so, so what if somebody says that you're being inappropriate because you're fighting for your life? They're wrong. You know, we were very clear about that. There's a certain point when you have to accept that it's no business as usual. There are people who are willing to risk a certain kind of ostracism or marginalization to tell the truth to institutions. And those are the people who make change.

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk a bit about how this book connects to another book of yours that I read a bit ago and have been influenced by, which is Conflict is Not Abuse. So ACT UP seems to have been a place where conflict was accepted. You see that, I think, really as a strength. And my sense, I think you're pretty explicit on this at times, is that you worry it's, one, a lot of modern activist groups are losing, that there's a rhetoric of conflict as abuse, a rhetoric as conflict as harm, such that they're losing the ability to have this kind of ferment and letting a thousand flowers bloom that ACT UP did. Could you talk a bit about, first, whether that's a fair characterization? And, second, what you see as the continuities between the books?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  The books do relate to each other because people in ACT UP were doing the right thing, and yet they were being arrested and stigmatized. And that happens often, that when you refuse to accept an unjust situation and you resist it, you're then repositioned as the negative force or the threat. And we see that in every area of life. We see that, for example, within a family, you might have one queer family member, and the whole homophobic family unites around deciding that that person is the problem and they should be excluded and punished. But the reality is, the real problem is the homophobia of the family,

• 31:08Speaker 01

  not the queerness of the queer family member. And so, we see perpetrators positioning themselves as victims. This is very common, whether it's the Israeli state, whether it's Donald Trump telling us constantly that he's a victim and that there's a witch hunt, whether it's racist police officers telling us that they were threatened by black male civilians who were doing absolutely nothing. The trend is for perpetrators to present themselves as victims. And conversely, people who resist injustice are then blamed because they create discomfort. But, you know, my argument is that discomfort is good for a society

• 31:48Speaker 01

  because it means that lots of different experiences of difference are being expressed. And the only people who really insist upon being comfortable all the time are people who are in the dominant position. And the only way they can be comfortable all the time is if everyone else is suppressed, and that's not a healthy social structure.

• 32:08Ezra Klein?

  But I think that's underselling some of the challenge of both books, which is, it is taking aim, The Conflict is Not Abuse, and then at times, I think, this one, at a culture on the left that has become more hostile, or at least I think hostile in your telling, to challenge and to conflict, where, you know, challenge is often considered harm and injury, you know, a form of violence. You talk about the idea that the word violence should be reserved for physical violence. So I think it's true, certainly, that people trying to disrupt the status quo are often framed as the transgressors, as the attackers, when they're actually the ones who are being harmed, and they're simply trying to make that known. But at the same time, one of the moves in Conflict is Not Abuse is to say that people have absorbed that kind of trauma at some point,

• 32:54Ezra Klein?

  then often later see those who push them back into an uncomfortable place as inflicting more trauma. Trauma upon them. And certainly, I read this book, having read the first one, as saying, like, one thing that the modern left needs to learn from ACT UP is that conflict is okay, explosions of disagreement even are okay, and a lot of internal dissension is okay. You don't need, you don't need people to agree. You don't want one set of thinking. Is that, is that not a reasonable read of it?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yes, as long as there's a basic principle of unity. I mean, one of the insights of conflict is not abuse is that dominant cultural people feel threatened by difference, but so can traumatized people feel threatened by difference. And the consequences can resonate. So if you're raised in a dominant position, you don't want the discomfort of having to question yourself. And if somebody else is asking you to be self-critical, you feel like they're abusing you. How dare you? How dare you ask me to question myself? But sometimes when we're traumatized, it's so hard to just keep it together, that the additional questioning of the self,

• 34:02Speaker 01

  or the need to be self-critical feels absolutely impossible. And when that is presented by somebody else's difference, it could feel like an assault or abuse, but it's not. So that's how those two things resonate. But when I wrote Conflict is Not Abuse, I was primarily talking about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the rhetoric of perpetrators presenting themselves as victims, and people defending themselves being presented as abusive. It was not about the American left. It's just that it came out at a time when that discussion was in the air. I think I mentioned cancel culture or call-out culture in one sentence in Conflict

• 34:43Speaker 01

  is Not Abuse. It's not really what I was focusing on. But younger people got interested in the book because it resonated with this kind of over accusatory subculture that they were experiencing. And as I started to tour with the book, I started to see younger and younger and younger audiences, because they were extrapolating from my arguments.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  But it was primarily about the idea that when people with AIDS or Palestinians or any oppressed group fight back, they become accused of being an aggressor when actually they're not. They're responding to oppression.

• 35:21Ezra Klein?

  I read the book more recently and I was really struck by how much in the current conversation, given they came out a number of years ago now, it responded to. I'm interested to hear you say it was primarily about Israel Palestine, though, because that comes in quite late. There's a lot earlier in the book about trigger warnings on campus. I mean, you talk a lot about on-campus things, including with a story of yourself when a student wrote a blog post about being attracted to you and other members of faculty kind of telling you to shun him. There's a lot about domestic violence and the rhetoric that emerged around that. And one of the things I found very moving in the book, I'll say, is that I read it as a real argument on behalf of communication, that your argument was that conflict is often a way of driving people towards communication.

• 36:06Ezra Klein?

  And that one of the dangers you're worried about were things where people decided communication was no longer helpful, that the conflict had become something where it was now abuse and now communication was something that should be off the table because simply more contact would be re-traumatizing or it'd be a problem of its own. And that's what struck me as a real connection to ACT UP, which was, at least in many of its more public, direct actions, it seems to me a real effort to use conflict, the generation of societal conflict, to force society into communication and into recognition of people with AIDS.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's true. People need to be heard. And that because people with AIDS were not allowed to speak. And when they tried to speak, they were arrested. So they had to force themselves into television stations, et cetera, to be heard. So that's absolutely true. But the other thing to remember is that I'm a novelist. And so my nonfiction books are a cumulative story that's always building towards a revelation. And in Conflict is Not Abuse, I start with the intimate and I start with the interpersonal and relationships. And then I build to the classroom and then I build and then I build. But what I'm really talking about are negative systems of loyalty.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  And how cliques or families define loyalty by joining together to collectively hurt people who are different. And that argument, as I build it, lands in Palestine. Because what I'm trying to expose or explain is my own experience of being held to support Israel no matter what as a thing of family loyalty. That loyalty to your group. You know, in that case, the Jewish people, right? Because in my generation, being a loyal Jew was equated with supporting the Israeli government. Now, fortunately, there are organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, which I'm on

• 38:04Speaker 01

  the advisory board, and then growing, growing, growing movements of Jewish people who oppose the occupation.

• 38:10Ezra Klein?

  You know, I'll be honest, I've been thinking about how to just talk about Israel-Palestine on the podcast and didn't quite expect that this would, this would be the, the conversation of, of entry into it. But I did think of that book as very profound on, on a number of levels for, for that. I also grew up in a, in a Jewish context where supporting Israel was a question of familial loyalty, particularly with my grandparents, although not only. And something that I reflect on a lot now, because I'm sensitive to the way the trauma of the Holocaust still shapes Jewish people, still shapes older generations, but also mine, and very much still shapes Israel, is something you talk about there, the way

• 38:53Ezra Klein?

  trauma can create a foundation upon which future domination can stand on.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:59Ezra Klein?

  And it makes it an incredibly difficult conversation to have because you rapidly end up in people's terror and people speaking from their terror, and particularly their historical terror, their, their passed down terror. It's not the part of them that can usually see how they have also become strong.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Well, you can see it in interpersonal relationships. You know, people who had severe trauma and abuse in childhood can often act out in the present from pain that is unresolved in the past and ask the present to be accountable for pain that the present has not caused. You know, and I think we all have experience with that. And we need to be able to understand that what is happening now and how we are treating other human beings is the priority. And if we have unresolved pain from the past, whether it's individual or collective, it's up to us and the groups that we're in to support each other in not projecting that.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  You know, when you hear a racist police officer justify having killed an unarmed black man, you can hear that he had anxiety caused by his own racism. It's internal. He felt threatened and he felt afraid because he thought that the book that that man was holding was a gun and so he killed him. And that's sort of the metaphor for the phenomenon that you and I are discussing right now. Yes, we have anxieties from the past, but how are we treating real people today and what are going to be the consequences of those actions?

• 40:38Ezra Klein?

  I wonder if anxiety is quite the right way to put it. I mean, you talk about anxiety as a dominant emotion in that book. And I'm not saying it's not true. It's very much true at the intimate level. The thing that is always hard for me, and I used to cover the Israel-Palestine conflict more closely. I've written op-eds for Haaretz. I've been on reporting trips in Israel and in Palestine. And what always struck me was that Israel was a state that would always feel psychologically weak and geopolitically weak, no matter how actually strong it became. And that that had become a very toxic dynamic. And I'm not saying that there was not, there was not, and is not, real reason for fear.

• 41:22Ezra Klein?

  I mean, any society that has rockets being shot at is going to be afraid. But nevertheless, it is so convinced of its own weakness and vulnerability that it cannot fully, I always felt, talking to people there, it cannot fully apprehend its actual strength and what that strength was doing and how it was being perceived now because its actual situation was different than its internal perception. And that had become, and has become, I think, and is geopolitically and there, just a tremendous danger to it now going forward. Like that growing chasm between what it sees itself to be and what the rest of the world sees it as. Is a real vulnerability.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Well, also, those rockets that you mentioned, I mean, that's like, you know, act of occupying Grand Central Station. It's a response to profound oppression. And then the response is the thing that gets blamed or gets focused on to the exclusion of the originating action. And that's the standard structure. You see that everywhere. You see that in families, you see it in cliques, communities, religious groups, national groups, where the response is the thing that gets blamed. And the originating action, no one takes responsibility for it.

• 42:37Ezra Klein?

  What seems very true to me now about the situation in Israel, actually, within the framework of your books, is that conflict is not leading to any kind of communication. And instead, particularly in the way Israel has transitioned its approach to the Palestinians over the past, say, decade, it's become a way to not have communication. And so there is like, we are further and further and further away from any kind of process that could lead to resolution. And the idea that I think some in Israel, how that this is stable, is just baffling to me. I mean, you're just gonna keep all these people completely under lock and key forever? Like, that's just asking for it to only end when somebody finds a weapon big enough to end it.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, as long as Israel is aerial bombing and murdering civilians and children and doing it with American money, we have a responsibility as Americans, not just as Jews, but as Americans, to interrupt this process and to end it. And I believe, and even though I know you and I disagree in some aspects of Israel-Palestine, I think we do agree, that people should not have different rights based on their religions, and that that's not justice. And, you know, I call it apartheid, you may or you may not.

• 43:55Ezra Klein?

  No, I would. I don't think there's any doubt at this point.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So clearly, the world has to intervene. And there's been more global support for Palestinians.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  This round than has ever been before. I think that people are really fed up and the global support for change is there. We finally have people in the Congress in the US who are speaking up for Palestine and we're going to just have to stop funding Israel, the Israeli war machine.

• 44:23Ezra Klein?

  I used to be more optimistic that American funding was a kind of leverage that would really matter. And in my more recent reporting, I don't think it is. Israel's rich enough to fund its own military. And so that's why, when I think about the conflict, I will say, like, I am in a space of, I completely don't know what the answer is. I agree with you that when there's aerial bombing, it needs to be stopped. But in terms of how you get parties to the table for something constructive, where you can imagine some kind of answer emerging, I mean, I would absolutely end funding of anything within Israel until all settlement construction is ended. Like, I've said that for years and years and years. But I am past the point where I believe Israel would care, which

• 45:07Ezra Klein?

  has actually made me much more pessimistic about the whole situation than I was, say, you know, called 10 years ago, when I thought America actually had more control. But the drift in Israeli society and in Israeli politics, and we'll see what the new coalition that's emerging right now will look like. But the drift in Israeli society and politics towards a much harder right form of politics and a much harder right form of philosophy in terms of how this should go, I think it has taken this so far from anything you can imagine moving towards peace, that we're at a point where you could just, like, the only hope is to get towards communication.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  One of the steps that's necessary towards better communication is for the American media to stop falsely presenting this as a both sides conflict, where they do something wrong and then the other person does something wrong. This is a very powerful militarized state that is oppressing a diasporic, scattered people who don't even have a functional state apparatus. It's extremely uneven. And when I watch MSNBC or read the front page of the New York Times, I'm just so frustrated that there's not an honest conversation.

• 46:21Ezra Klein?

  How does conflict and communication and conflict versus abuse work when there really are profound power differentials? You talk about power over versus sort of conflict with. But in a lot of cases, and a lot of places where we see it now, one, you have disagreements over who holds power, right? That's the core of the whole cancel culture debate, who is actually in power right now and what it means. A corporation seemed to be leaning in a different way they did a few years ago. But two, even within something like Israel Palestine, you have really big disparities in terms of where there's power. And so is there a demand for communication then? Or does that change the the the underlying dynamic? And perhaps the underlying answer is where it becomes something where one side just needs to win in order to get the power back

• 47:05Ezra Klein?

  to even have communication in the first place?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  I'm a person whose story was not allowed to be told when I was young. So I had to be part of inventing lesbian literature. I was in a community that had no rights. My friends were dying of a disease. I've had a lot of experience of people who are not allowed to be heard and who are not considered to have lives that have value and are not allowed to participate. And that's why when I started writing this book, I think the first line is that this is a book in which all people with AIDS matter. Their lives are all important. Because in order to understand the truth of any situation,

• 47:50Speaker 01

  you have to start with a place that every person is equally valuable. And what they have to say must be heard. And whether that is in a clique where somebody's being shunned and blamed for everything, or whether that's an entire class of people whose experiences are not taken into account, it's the same formula from the bottom to the top, to let everyone speak and let everyone be heard. And until then, you cannot have a solution that addresses people's needs.

• 48:25Ezra Klein?

  I'm not knowing that the pink triangle is built on Nazi iconography. Could you talk about the the story of that?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Well, the pink triangle was the concentration camp badge that was put on male homosexuals to identify them. Jews had a yellow star and lesbians were given the black triangle of the asocials or anarchists. And so, just as the word queer was reclaimed, this sign of destruction and murder was reclaimed and turned upside down as a sign of identity. You know, there's a lot of Jewish influence in AIDS activism and in gay liberation. When you look at who the leaders are, even in ACT UP, Larry Kramer, Avram Finkelstein,

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Maxine Wolf, there were just a lot of Jews. And I I tend to think that in that generation, people born in the 40s, 50s and 60s, they were raised with certain kind of American Jewish social values. And yet, as gay people, they were not allowed in the community. If they were openly gay, they they couldn't be in their families, they couldn't rise in the Jewish community. And so they brought those values to gay politics. And that's why in that particular generation, Audre Lannan, Rich, et cetera, you know, Jews are in a sense overrepresented in the driving voices of gay liberation and ACT UP.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  So you see a lot of comparison by that generation, which is a post Holocaust generation, between the AIDS experience and the Holocaust. Larry Kramer wrote a book that had the word Holocaust in the title. Avram Finkelstein was in Silence Equals Death Project. Because people felt that there was a mass death experience that others were allowing to take place. In my family, I come from a Holocaust family. My mother's mother had two brothers and two sisters who were exterminated. My mother's father's sister was murdered. And I was always raised with this knowledge that other people stood by and let it happen. And that the worst thing you can be as a person in the world is a bystander.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  And so there was that value and that identification was clear in early AIDS metaphors.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  As younger people came up, that was less so.

• 51:15Ezra Klein?

  Do you think something in queer politics or cultural criticism has been lost in the past couple of decades?

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. You know, the most exciting thing that's happening in queer politics is that the leadership of our most important political movements today, which are the movements against police violence, the movement for Black Lives, movement for immigration reform, and Palestine solidarity, all of these movements have openly queer and trans people in leadership. There's no longer this reality that openly queer people can only be in the gay movement. That's over. And so queer liberation ideals are now present in the people and the values of these other movements.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  But there's still that sector of this kind of predominantly male, rights-oriented, gay, highly-funded gay sector groups like GLAD and Human Rights Campaign. I don't even know who these people are. I never interact with them. I've never met them. And they're out of touch with the agendas for progressive change in this country. So we've divided. And, you know, the demand to be in the military was not a liberation concept. Gay marriage, while it's very important for people to have the same rights, it represented

• 52:39Speaker 01

  a kind of white reconciliation, a move away from the collective and back into the family. You know, if the gay community had been divided into privatized family units at the time of AIDS, we never would have been able to overcome. Because at that time, we had a group identification and a community identification, and that's what made us so effective.

• 53:03Ezra Klein?

  Is it strange to live in a time where the social valence of some of these things has changed so much? And here I'm thinking of, so I live in the Bay Area now. And I talked to a lot of younger kids, just as part of my work. And something they they tell me and that I see is that, at least in this area, in this set of politics, queer is a more aspirational identity than straight. And you have the huge, huge, huge rise in women who identify as bisexual. And I'm not making any kind of argument that straight people are discriminating. I think at all that is completely ridiculous. But I do think there's something interesting in the ways in which these identities have been adopted, or people want to adopt them, who wouldn't have 15 years ago, who would

• 53:48Ezra Klein?

  have been afraid of them 15 years ago, might have discriminated against them 20 years ago.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  What you're bringing up is very interesting because, and it does get back to where we started. There's a kind of branding culture that's based not on experience and desire, but rather on situating oneself in a tradition of victimization, oppression, and resistance, even if the individual has never experienced those things. And you know, what is queer life without oppression? It's something very different than it is when you're in the middle of the AIDS crisis. So people have to make decisions about what kind of actions they want to take, who they're

• 54:33Speaker 01

  going to stand with, and how they're going to be effective for progressive change. And if they're not going to be effective for progressive change, then really, it's lifestylistism without the life. So it's, a lot of it is about living in a very market-oriented culture in which the exterior is what drives.

• 54:57Ezra Klein?

  Are there aspects of the queer critique of American culture that you came up in that you wish were resuscitated, that you think have been lost but have value for the moment we're in now?

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the Gay Liberation Front, that was founded after Stonewall, named itself

• 55:14Speaker 01

  After liberation movements that were its contemporaries around the world, anti-colonial movements that were resisting European control. And what the word liberation meant was reimagining the world. So that the ways that we relate to each other were liberatory instead of oppressive. And that meant that sexual relationships, economic relationships, racial relationships, interpersonal dealings, identifications of gender, ways that we expressed ourselves politically and emotionally,

• 55:56Speaker 01

  that we had a dream, a utopian dream, that they could be more open. And so that human beings could be more individuated and yet more within a collective. And that the purpose of the collective is to create more space for the individual voice. And that's a vision that I very much believe in and that I hold dear to.

• 56:17Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a bit about that in the specifics. So when you talk about liberatory ways of relating to each other, what does that mean?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Well, for example, you know, I'm an artist primarily, right? So my life is organized around being an individual voice. And so I want to make the work that I want to make. And I think other artists should be able to make the work that they want to make. But when your work is seized upon by a corporate society and elevated, then you have to analyze its reception. And that's part of your responsibility to the collective. So for example, as we discussed earlier, my current book is being embraced in a way that my previous books were not. I think primarily because we're so far away from the events that they're no longer implicating and because it's basically about men.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  When I was writing novels about AIDS with lesbian protagonists in the 90s, that that kind of reception was not available. So I need to be critical about where I'm being situated, how I'm being co-opted, what advantages I'm getting because the timing is comfortable, because the subject matter is more relatable. So that there's a dynamic between my personal wishes and desires and the individual work that I did and put into this project and the collective that I'm a part of and how things land and what the impact is on other people. And conversely, I've had to work in collective movements my whole life

• 57:49Speaker 01

  to create space so that this conversation can finally take place so many years after the fact.

• 57:56Ezra Klein?

  What do you want to make sure people listening to this don't think is true of you? I mean, here we're talking, this is a New York Times podcast. The New York Times is not a hero in this book. But as you say, this book is being embraced. It got a tremendous review in the New York Times, as some of your others have, but this one got a very, very, very strong review. What do you want to make sure people know is true about what you're trying to say here? That you're worried is going to be lost in the way you're being received or situated?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  I want people to understand that individuals do not make change. It's the collective and that the way change happens in the United States is through coalition. And in order to be in communication, as you would say, or in coalition with people who are different, you need to practice a kind of radical democracy that's rooted in a creativity of thought and action so that people can respond from a place that makes sense to them. They're not forced into homogeneity and that we stand together when we can and have as much simultaneity of response as possible.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  And that, I think, is something that will be helpful, I hope will be helpful, to people who are trying to build change today.

• 59:06Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a lovely place to end, so let me ask you what is always our final question, which is what are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  I have three books that I've read this year that I just thought were incredible. The first is called Poor Queer Studies by Matt Brim. And Matt is a queer studies professor who teaches at the College of Staten Island. He teaches queer studies to poor people. He has people bringing their children to class, traveling from the Bronx because they don't want anyone to know they're taking a queer studies class. And it's a phenomenal book about inequality in our higher educational system with lots of good ideas about how to address that. My second favorite book this year was Vanguard by Martha S. Jones. It is a book that absolutely changed the way I look at things.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  I had always thought that women won the vote in 1920, but what I learned from Vanguard is that white women won the vote in 1920 and that black women are still fighting for the right to vote, especially in this period of voter suppression. So it rehistoricizes and breaks a myth that kept us all back from thinking accurately. And then finally, the book that I think is the best written book of the year, and I say this as a writer, is Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. It's an absolutely incredibly well-written book about when her mother was murdered when she was 19 years old. But because Tretaway waited until she was at the top of her game as one of America's

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  finest writers to tell this story, it is so exquisitely written. It's a masterclass just by reading. So that's Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey.

• 1:00:50Ezra Klein?

  Sarah Shulman, your new book is Let the Record Show. Thank you very much.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:01:07Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roche Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.