GLR September-October 2024

height almost to the ceiling.” Their city, though, has become al most unrecognizable, “shaken by earthquakes and reshaped by relentless gentrification, but it was the AIDS crisis more than any other event that had the most tragic impact upon the San Francisco they knew and loved.” Hester’s final pilgrimage is to Killian’s resting place in a niche at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. This had been sacred ground for Killian as the gravesite of the “visionary queer poet” Jack Spicer, who was a hero to Killian. It’s a full-circle moment to have Killian interred “in the columbarium, two rows beneath Spicer.” As Hester describes it, “Kevin’s story is a story about community and where it is situated. His life and work were ded icated to using spaces—online, offline, literary—to bring peo ple together and cultivate a sense of belonging among them. Among us. ” Hester has given us a companionable book, one that retells some stories we already know but recontextualizes others in a way that is, finally, uplifting and inspiring. He got to his desti nation, which he defines at the end of the book’s introduction: “Underneath it all, I was looking for proof that queerness has a place in a world that has often seemed so inhospitable to it.” He found it and took his readers there with him.

Hester’s take on Baldwin juxtaposes the great author’s iden tities as a Black man and a gay man. In his view, Baldwin was more comfortable going public with his growing radicalism around race, while his sexuality remained more private and in dividual. He didn’t become a gay activist in any way that Hes ter can find. The fact that Baldwin left Harlem for Greenwich Village and then left America for France brings up the issue of exile, which “allowed Baldwin to flourish as an artist, permit ting him to diagnose from afar the many ills of his country, and that of his adopted country. At home and abroad, he embodied the role of the ‘stranger.’ ... He was, as he later admitted, ‘a stranger everywhere.’” The best part of this book comes last, when Hester tells the story of Kevin Killian in San Francisco. Killian is well known is some circles as a founder of the “New Narrative” writing movement and as half of a notorious queer marriage, to lesbian writer Dodie Bellamy. The two wrote a great deal about their unusual partnership, which began in 1986 and ended with Kil lian’s death in 2019. Their South of Market Street apartment “was also their office, their art gallery, their classroom. ... The hallway, living room and toilet were all full of books: row upon row, some stacked two deep, many piles reaching above head

An Oral History

W HEN INTERVIEWED in these pages in 2016 (Sep tember-October issue), Sarah Schulman declared: “I never write about an ongoing conversa tion. That is to say, every nonfiction book I write is to start a conversation.” Not only has Sarah Schulman started many conver sations in her eleven books of nonfiction,

serts frankly. “The question is: People who actually exist, do they have rights?” Schulman also takes aim at certain members of the gay white male community for appropriating the fight against AIDS, and she’s not afraid to name names. She maintains, for example, that activist Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart “holds up” in its realistic depiction of AIDS better

A NNE C HARLES

CONVERSATIONS WITH SARAH SCHULMAN Edited by Will Brantley Univ. of Mississippi. 175 pages, $22.

than the “ornamented theatricality” of Tony’s Kushner’s Angels in America , which represents scenes that “almost never hap pened in real life.” Similarly, she freely shares the derisive nick name activists gave to David France’s acclaimed 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague : “The Five White Peo ple Who Saved the World.” Schulman places it in the tradition of the 1993 mainstream movie Philadelphia in that they “make the dominant culture feel comfortable.” The arc of history covered in the book highlights the cul tural changes that occurred during the timespan the interviews describe. In 1988, the initial conversation considers the “les bian aesthetic” in the depiction of lesbian violence in a novel that will be read by heterosexuals. The piece featuring the leg endary Karla Jay as interviewer was published in The Village Voice . During the course of the conversation both writers dis cuss the impact of small women’s presses like Naiad, Firebrand, and Seal. Only Seal continues to publish today (as an imprint of a mainstream press). Yet the time stamp of this context only en hances its value, as readers are granted a snapshot of the world of lesbian life and publishing 36 years ago. The final interview, from 2021, focuses on Schulman’s lat est nonfiction book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of

she has participated in dialogues of many kinds with a range of interlocutors in over forty years of public life. Editor Will Brant ley has done a terrific job of assembling 24 such pieces occur ring over 33 years. These interchanges point to the writer/ activist’s love of engagement, clearly affirming Brantley’s ob servation that “conversation is a key component of Schulman’s life.” To date, besides her nonfiction, Schulman has written eleven novels, which she describes as “witness fiction,” along with nu merous plays. She has held academic posts for over twenty years but doesn’t identify as an “academic,” preferring the epi thet “public intellectual.” While an outspoken advocate for les bian causes, she’s quick to point out that she doesn’t speak for the lesbian community. Rather, she says early in this volume, “I see myself as a social critic” in the tradition of New York intel lectuals starting with Delmore Schwartz. Her materialist world view is showcased in her rejection of the argument in some lesbian circles that lesbians are disappearing because so many people are transitioning to male. “That is idiotic,” Schulman as Anne Charles lives in Montpelier, VT. With her partner and a friend, she co-hosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ. 36

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