Sarah Schulman Quotes & Sayings

What is most difficult to face, but increasingly obvious as gay visibility provokes containment, but not equality, is that homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of supremacy. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It's not fear - it's fun.
We know from photographs of happy picnicking white families laughing underneath the swinging body of a tortured, lynched black man, or giggly white U.S. soldiers leading naked Iraqis on leashes, or terrified humiliated Jews surrounded by laughing smiling Nazis that human beings love being cruel. They enjoy the power, and go far beyond social expectation to carry out the kind of cruelty that makes them feel bigger. In short, homophobia is not a phobia at all. It is a pleasure system. — Sarah Schulman

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. — Sarah Schulman

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. — Sarah Schulman

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

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free. — Sarah Schulman

Some people have sex by putting fishhooks in each other. Couple this act with a simple understanding of the basic function of all living creatures to expand and contract. Now, try that with fishhooks. — Sarah Schulman

People don't become what they were brought up to be, people become themselves. (p.146) — Sarah Schulman

Do most gay women love each other?" Doc asked.
"A lot of them love closeted movie stars. — Sarah Schulman

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

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. — Sarah Schulman

You're not user-friendly. You're too needy. You have no social currency. You're a freak. Without a normative side, you can't get in. That's it. Sorry. — Sarah Schulman

The wind smelled clean, like clean magazines. It smelled like invisible ink. — Sarah Schulman

You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same ... — Sarah Schulman

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? — Sarah Schulman

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

It takes two to tango isn't even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before Doc was even born. Perhaps it was a takeoff on Freud's seduction theory or the more generic practice of blaming victims for being alive. Its origins were unclear, but no one had ever had to take full responsibility for their own actions since. — Sarah Schulman

Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. John — Sarah Schulman

It drives me crazy who quickly the great ones get canonized. 'Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss.' Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living? — Sarah Schulman

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." — Sarah Schulman

All along, he had believed instinctually that his broken heart had something to do with the collapse of culture. He wanted to blame it on economics instead of on the fact that she was a fucking bitch. — Sarah Schulman

Doc didn't have a television but he could predict that sort of thing. He just didn't need one. He could always tell what was on TV when he heard more than two people in a row say the same strange phrase in the same way. He knew that they had just seen it on television. A few weeks later everyone would have those words written on their chests. — Sarah Schulman

Anna liked magazines. They were glossy machines. The only technology that she could fold. She read them on a regular basis because they were absorbing. Each one came out on a specific day of the week and was good for an hour of absorption. — Sarah Schulman

People are no longer interested in analysis. They all prefer catharsis now. They all prefer to say that they are helpless and can't change other people, i.e. the world. Marxism has been replaced by postmodernism. Psychoanalysis has been replaced by twelve-step programs. It was the end of the content. — Sarah Schulman

I am not here to entertain straight people. — Sarah Schulman

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true. — Sarah Schulman

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

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. — Sarah Schulman

Then they went on to discuss other things because there is always something more to a person than what somebody else does to them. — Sarah Schulman

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. — Sarah Schulman

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

As the conversation continued it was clear that these were divided people. As artists as well as queers, these people wanted to be able to think in radical ways, to have insights, to realize, to make work that was outside of social assumptions, to be radical people who could-like the weary ACT UPers-achieve justice in some fashion. They admired their predecessors who had created change through confrontation, alienation, and truth telling. But their professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious maneuvering of the queer content they did have so that it was depoliticized, personalized, and not about power. — Sarah Schulman

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. — Sarah Schulman

Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means we are alive. Mortality is the sign of life. In the most intimate and personal of arenas, many of us have love and trusted someone who violated that trust. So when someone else comes along who intrigues us, whose interests we share, who we enjoy being with, with whom there could b some mutual enrichment and understanding, that does not mean that we are being violated again. Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust. — Sarah Schulman

Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I've never seen such a miserable group of people in my life. They don't know anything about themselves — Sarah Schulman

They were both deciding not to be what others wanted them to be but to brand themselves for the world to see. To do their own packaging, so to speak, and to direct their powers to their specific target audiences. — Sarah Schulman