Sarah Schulman has the hypermanic brain of a very smart person – which is exactly what she is. Before you’ve formed a thought, Schulman – whose latest novel, The Child (Carroll & Graf), was just released – has already worked it over in her intellectually acrobatic mind, shaped it into an idea and is mulling over whether it would be best suited as an essay, a book, a play or even a movie.
One of the most respected and prolific lesbian writers of our time, Schulman has compiled a resume so weighty and dynamic that it looks like the careers of several different people – a novelist, playwright, essayist, filmmaker and activist.
“I can think three thoughts at the same time,” said Schulman, who just turned 49 and has lived in the East Village since forever. “It’s not about discipline or hard work – really. It’s my natural state. Maybe it’s a biological or neurological thing.”
Whatever it is, that gift allowed her to write her first play at age 21 and her first novel – the delightful 1984 lesbian classic, The Sophie Horowitz Story – a few years later. And she produced these early works while waiting tables at a Tribeca coffee shop and working as a reporter on three different community newspapers.
That first novel was followed by six others, two nonfiction books, a number of plays and dozens of prestigious awards, fellowships and writer’s residencies. She still found the time to be an early member of ACT UP and later co-founded the Lesbian Avengers, the groundbreaking direct action protest organization.
Regardless of the genre, Schulman’s creations have a stubborn common thread: They are edgy, unflinching, daring and sometimes scary. Or, as Schulman put it, “I tell the truth.”
She’s funny, too. In her work, wit and humor generally accompany her unsparing truths. New York Magazine awarded Schulman a Culture Award for the best “three-liner” from her well-received 2005 play, Manic Flight Reaction:
“There is a cure for homosexuality.”
“What is it?”
“Fame.”
But it has been the obsessive truth-telling that makes her work unique, and it hasn’t always worked in her favor. Witness the rocky road to publication of her latest book.
The Child was inspired by the tragic case of Sam Manzie, a New Jersey teen who sexually assaulted and strangled an 11-year-old boy who came by his house selling candy. In court, Manzie’s parents claimed their son was “pushed over the edge” by his sexual relationship with Stephen Simmons, a 43-year-old man the 15-year-old boy had met online.
In The Child, 15-year-old Stew Mulcahey murders his young nephew after David Ziemska, his older lover, is arrested for pedophilia. The book takes an unvarnished look at violence, desire, homophobia, teen sexuality and the age of consent. In a lengthy and unusual author’s note that accompanies the book, Schulman explains that though she finished the novel in 1999, it took nearly a decade to get it into print.
“Prior to writing The Child, I published seven novels and two nonfiction books between 1984 and 1998,” she writes. “Why was this book so suddenly unacceptable?”
She explains: “Clearly something was going on. It became apparent that because I didn’t come out against the relationship between the man and the boy, the book became unpublishable.”
The companion plot, about a lesbian relationship, didn’t help either. The liaison between Stew and David is written against the story of Eva, a lesbian lawyer, her lover and her HIV-positive legal partner. Schulman believes that lesbian literature is disrespected in America, and the publication of lesbian novels has declined dramatically in the last 15 years.
“Unfortunately,” Schulman said, “my book with its lesbian protagonist came out at a cultural moment when the social space for lesbian fiction is shrinking into oblivion.”
Schulman, a die-hard New Yorker in the put-upon Woody Allen mold, is used to this kind of artistic tsuris. In 1996, sent to review the mega-hit musical Rent, Schulman realized that the play’s major plot points were lifted directly from her own novel, People in Trouble. She then struggled for years trying to gain credit and legal restitution for the use of her material. (For more, read her exposé on the episode, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America.)
Even more recently, by the time gay-friendly Carroll & Graf published The Child, what Schulman calls “the clamp-down on gay books” had grown extreme. One week after the novel appeared, Carroll & Graf was purchased by Perseus Books and folded. Despite generally glowing reviews, the book has had trouble finding an audience.
“We’re in a propaganda moment where homophobia is treated as an inconvenience,” Schulman said. “So, yes, as I have moved away from this kind of false representation about the way people live, I have also had to be more tenacious.”
So Schulman multitasks ahead. She’s almost embarrassed by the staggering number of projects that she has in the works. “I don’t even like to talk about all the things I’m working on,” said Schulman, who is also a professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. “It makes me sound crazy.”
She has four books waiting to be published, including an experimental novel and a treatise on familial homophobia and its consequences. This month, she’s making a return trip to MacDowell, the New Hampshire writer’s colony, with composer Anthony Davis and Grey Gardens lyricist Michael Korie as they develop her novel Shimmer for the musical stage.
Her adaptation of the Isaac Bashevis Singer novel Enemies, A Love Story had its world premiere at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia last February, and a new play, The Lady Hamlet, will have a reading in New York this fall with Elisabeth Marvel, directed by Diane Paulus. She is also writing a play, Choice, about the lawyer and plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade case. And in her spare time, Schulman is also writing a screenplay based on the life of the author Carson McCullers and collaborating on an oral history of ACT UP.
“I first started a diary when I was 6 years old,” Schulman said. “My first entry was, ‘When I grow up, I will write books.’ Writing is how I express my feelings. It is my calling and my destiny. I have no choice; it’s something I have to do.”
