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 SchulmanHIV 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.
Sarah SchulmanI'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 SchulmanSince Freud, people think you either want to be a man or hate men. You only exist in relationship to men.
Sarah SchulmanProbably, 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