The Early Days of ACT UP, and Its Lessons for Today’s Activists

Sarah Schulman is a novelist and playwright, and also a well-known activist and documentarian. She was an early member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and, for twenty years, she and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard have run the ACT UP Oral History Project, interviewing surviving members of the group. Out of that work comes a new history of the organization in its early days, “Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993.” Schulman talks with David Remnick about the group’s successes, its lessons for young activists, and also its greatest failing. “We were able to defeat H.I.V.,” she said. “But we couldn’t defeat capitalism. And we still don’t have a workable health-care system in this country.”