The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

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.

• Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
• How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood
• Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State
• Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
• Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
• Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America
• Different Daughters
• Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
• Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures)
• The Argonauts