The Gentrification of the Mind : Witness to a Lost Imagination

English language

Published 2012 by University of California Press.

ISBN:
978-0-520-26477-9
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4 stars (1 review)

In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981?1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

1 edition

I start to feel that I'm on a first name basis with Sarah

4 stars

While the book is marketed as an 'AIDS memoir', I would rather describe it as a provocative essay. In the first pages, Sarah professes to hate books that revolve around a single argument, yet I'm tempted to summarise the one at the core of this book as follows:

*Before AIDS, queers in New York (and possibly everywhere) were outcasts and rebels who made edgy art, which sometimes was good, sometimes was not; but it was experimental and meaningful. After AIDS, most gay people are just hipsters and yuppies, who work in the arts but have sold out and/or are concerned with professional success and paying rents, something that admittedly has become a lot harder to do. AIDS was the key event that marked, and possibly even caused, this transition.

I don't buy the causal relation implied here (AIDS having engendered gentrification), although I'm sure it looks that way from Sarah's …