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The Gentrification Of The Mind: Witness To A Lost Imagination

THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: WITNESS TO A LOST IMAGINATION by Sarah Schulman (University of California), 179 pages. $27.91 cloth. See listing. Rating: NNN


As a thinker, lesbian activist Sarah Schulman runs the gamut from exhilarating to irritating. But that’s what makes her so interesting.

The prolific author’s latest book looks at New York’s art scene in the context of a queer community devastated by AIDS. Gone in the now hopelessly gentrified Big Apple are the radical artists who revelled in porn, outrageousness and the sensibility she says is required of art-makers. These days, creators play it safe and suck up to institutions, while queers in general deny their history and identity.

It’s a beautifully written screed (not a bad word in my books), but it does have its limitations.

Most of her commentary applies only to the U.S. Note her observation that theatre is susceptible to commercial values because of its close relationship with movie stars. Her assumption that institutions don’t play well with others doesn’t apply here. For one thing, ours are public, not private, and they tend to take seriously their role in our identity-challenged culture. Thus, the Canada Council honoured queer artist Colin Campbell when he was very much alive, and in death Will Munro got a full retrospective courtesy of York University.

The ideologue in Schulman loves to equate queer authenticity with marginalization. Her easy dismissal of those promoting gay marriage, for example, ignores the basic cruelty of discrimination. And she can’t imagine that lesbian mothers have changed the family, not conformed to its het conventions.

Schulman shines when she taps her deep knowledge of the AIDS movement – she was a key founder of ACT Up – and the New York art scene to honour those artists who are gone and forgotten. Her rage at the developers who swooped in like vultures to snap up AIDS victims’ apartments is righteous, and her pain at how little a younger generation knows about AIDS is palpable.

In one of her most insightful moments, she compares the assimilationist tendencies among gays whose community was ravaged by AIDS with the survival strategies of post-Holocaust Jews: do nothing to get noticed do everything you can to gain acceptance remain silent.

She can be brilliant.

Zoe Whittall interviews Schulman on Sunday (March 11) at the Gladstone. See listing.

Write Books at susanc@nowtoronto.com

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