Sarah Schulman Quotes

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.

Since the most important element of any concept is that its originating question be appropriately framed, any theory demanding an explanation for homosexuality is a problematic one because it maintains our existence as a category of deviance. I mean, no one is running around trying to figure out why some people like sports, for example.

I went to my 30th high school reunion, and I could tell who was gay and who was straight because the gay people were like, 'Sarah, you've been doing so much,' and the straight people were like, 'So, Sarah, what have you been doing?

In the past, heartland whites with some kind of dream or desire left their towns for cities to become citified. They wanted to get away from religion, from their families, they wanted to come out, make art, have sex, have experiences. But this new crew was something we had never seen before. They were the first generation of suburban Americans. They came, not to be citified, but rather to change cities into places they could recognize and dominate.

People see themselves as 'succeeding' because they are individually exceptional -- they don't see that there is a mechanism that has made it possible for them.

HIV criminalization is a global trend, but surprisingly Canada has some of the worst HIV laws in the world - they have incarcerated 200 people to date who have not infected anyone, and half of them are black. This is emotional manipulation that began as an anti-immigrant measure and has devolved into an exploitation of sexual anxiety. It's a crisis of meaning.

Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs.

Probably, the nature of homophobia will never be widely interrogated, while we will continue to be excluded from school curricula, subjected to vicious media distortions, or entirely ignored, denied basic civil rights while our demands are ridiculed and derided. But in the midst of all this only one thing has changed for certain. We have changed. We will never go back into the closet.

You have to have coalitions in order to make change in America.

I've noticed throughout my long life that people with vested interest in things staying the way they are regularly insist that both change and accountability are impossible.

The wind smelled clean, like clean magazines. It smelled like invisible ink.

My readers are 90 percent gay, and it's who I write for. I am not here to entertain straight people.

Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around.

I want to be a witness to my own time because I've had a sneaking suspicion lately that I'm gonna live a lot longer than most of the people I meet. If I'm gonna be the only one still around to say what happened, I'd better pay close attention now.

What I tend to tell my students is, “When you look in the mirror and see a smart, angry girl who wants to be free, you're seeing a paradigm that Kathy [Acker] helped bring into the recognizable.”

Since Freud, people think you either want to be a man or hate men. You only exist in relationship to men.

If we love and identity people with HIV and other oppressed people, we can help transform the epidemic.

You have to notice the truth in order to be able to avoid it.

I am not here to entertain straight people.