BETWEEN 1981 AND 1996, over 80,000 people died of Aids in New York City, in conditions of horrifying ignorance and fear. Patients were left for days to die on gurneys in hospital corridors. Politicians and public figures called for people with Aids to be tattooed with their infection status, or to be quarantined on islands. At the time, the Plague, as Schulman sometimes calls it, seemed like the beginning of the end of the world. And yet somehow, as treatment improved and the death rate declined, a seeming normality was restored.
According to conventional wisdom, that somehow was a natural process, a slow shift from prejudice towards justice and effective care. When the lesbian novelist, playwright and activist Sarah Schulman realised this was becoming the official history of Aids in America, she was appalled. A long-standing member of ACT UP, the direct-action group formed to end the crisis, she knew what was being elided: fifteen years of struggle by people who were profoundly disenfranchised – by queers, drug addicts and sex workers, many of them now dead.
This process of banalisation, this insidious forgetfulness, seemed furthermore to reflect a larger cultural trend that has taken place in the wake of Aids: the ongoing creep of gentrification, the physical reconstitution of cities such as New York from diverse and vibrant to homogenised and bland; exclusive compounds for wealthy whites. In the post-Aids world, this tendency has spread like bindweed, suffocating diversity and bringing with it conservatism, disempowerment and passivity. Are the two linked? Schulman wonders. And if so, why does it matter, and what can be done about it?
Gentrification is never the result of single factors. In New York, it was facilitated by tax incentives for developers and moratoriums on city-sponsored low-income housing. The role of Aids in all this was both coincidental and expedient. Because of rent control, properties couldn’t be moved to market rate unless the leaseholder either moved out or died. Aids accelerated turnover, changing the constitution and character of neighbourhoods far more rapidly than would otherwise have been permitted. In Schulman’s own East Village, ‘the process of replacement was so mechanical I could literally sit on my stoop and watch it unfurl’. The new residents, for the most part the clean-cut citizenry of corporate America, were largely ignorant of the people they’d displaced. In short order, an entire community of ‘risk-taking individuals living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art, and social justice’ had almost disappeared from record.
It’s hard to imagine, for those who have not lived through it, what it might be like to lose one’s entire community, one’s social circle, one’s peers and friends and lovers. Harder still to gauge what it might be like to have such a loss publicly unacknowledged or erased. Schulman hauls old enemies to account, among them Ronald Reagan and New York’s late mayor Ed Koch, who by their homophobia, indifference and indecision permitted the disease to spread. ‘There has been no government inquiry into the fifteen years of official neglect that permitted Aids to become a world-wide disaster,’ she writes. ‘Where is our permanent memorial? Not the Aids quilt, now locked up in storage somewhere, but the government-sponsored invitation to mourn and understand’. It’s understandable that she might feel bitter at the institutional opulence of the 9/11 memorial to ‘the acceptable dead’, noting: ‘in this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of Aids.’
A self-declared old school avant-guardian, there’s nothing homogenised about her counter-attack. Gentrification of the Mind is best understood as a polemic, a passionate, provocative, scattergun account of disappearance, forgetfulness and untimely death. To her mind, the undigested, unacknowledged trauma of Aids has brought about a kind of cultural gentrification, a return to conservatism and conformity evident in everything from the decline of small presses to the shift of focus in the gay-rights movement towards marriage equality (the Gay Fifties, she observes scathingly).
The sorry thing about this is that the true message of the Aids years should have been that a small group of people, ill and at the very margins of society, succeeded in forcing their nation to change its treatment of them, ‘thereby saving each other’s lives’. The memory of this lost moment of accountability and empowerment drives Schulman’s final, stirring call for degentrification, her dream of a time in which people realise not only that it’s healthier to live in complex, dynamic, mixed communities than uniform ones, but that happiness which depends on privilege and oppression cannot by any civilised terms be described as happiness at all.