Slate interviews Sarah Schulman

Manic Flight Reaction playwright and novelist Sarah Schulman is interviewed at Slate about Rent and her charge that the play and film plagiarized from her life and her novel People in Trouble.

Slate: What was most annoying about Larson's borrowing your characters and situations?

Schulman: ...

It's true not only with Rent, but with all the iconic works about AIDS. The political movement of AIDS activism—which is an integral, organic part of the history of the crisis—has been removed from most of the mainstream storytelling around AIDS. [In these pieces,] gay people are always alone and self-oppressed, and have no community, and are dependent on some kind of other—a benevolent straight person, a homophobic lawyer, or even, in some cases, a woman—to take care of them, because they're so self-hating that they cannot take care of themselves.

That's the official story. The real story of the AIDS crisis is the story of a group of despised people who had no rights, who came together, saved each other's lives, and changed the world. And that is not the story you find in any of these mainstream depictions.

Slate: Let me play devil's advocate. Isn't Rent progressive? It revolves around people with AIDS. It shows men kissing, women kissing …

Schulman: That's a retrograde point of view. In a time when people denied the existence of gays and lesbians, work that asserted that gays and lesbians existed with some minimum of human integrity could be coded as progressive. But since the AIDS crisis, most Americans personally know people who are openly gay. At this point, to simply represent or acknowledge that gay people exist is no longer inherently progressive, and to depict gay people as people who have no agency is retrogressive.