SARAH SCHULMAN’S FACEBOOK PAGE

In 1992 I went gay with gusto and ran off to New York City to be gayer than ever in the great big gay pride parade. I wore my best outfit – a hot pink bra heavily swagged with rhinestones, pearls, tassels, pom-poms, sequins, etc, with a matching hit pink girdle worn as a skirt thanks Mode Merr – and was handed a flyer to participate in something called The Lesbian Avengers. Exciting! I was a new lesbian! There was much to avenge! The flyer was handed to me by none other than Sarah Schulman. The author. Do You Know Who That Was? Do You Know Who That Was? I shook the flyer in the faces of my faggot friends. That was SARAH SCHULMAN! I was so happy that I had come to New York City and had a celebrity sighting, something you always want to happen. After Dolores was the first queer book I ever read, and it was heady and profound to see that these things that felt so far away from where I languished, oppressed by both gays and non-gays, in Boston, were real. Sarah Schulman was a queer who wrote books about being a lesbian and she was real and her books were real and her world was real and for a second I had passed through it and was handed an invitation to join. I totally wanted to be the bomb I threw! That sounded so much cooler than the embarrassing NOW activism I was attempting back in Boston. Also it was deeply exciting that in my drag queen get-up I was recognized as a lesbian with a potentially avenging nature, since in Boston lesbians seemed to punish me for not adopting the regional uniform of gender-neutered short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, baggy khakis and dumb t-shirts. THANK YOU SARAH SCHULMAN! I felt like such a lez!

Anyway, welcome to 2011. On November 12th Sarah Schulman will be reading from her new work, The Mere Future, at  RADAR event especially for her at Viracocha, on Valencia. I’ll ask her a bunch of questions about the novel – a very plausible-looking NYC utopia where everyone works in marketing, re-distribution not only of wealth but of attention and fame are in play, and where, of course, a distopia begins to ooze into the life of the narrator, an obscure lesbian writer who in the new society finds herself on the cusp of recognition. Like all of Schulman’s work, it is imaginative and brainy and whacked all around with ironic humor. AND YOU CAN BUY IT RIGHT NOW AT 20% OFF THROUGH THE RADAR BOOK CLUB! Sorry to get all car salesman on you there with the caps  but I’m excited. Go to Arsenal Pulp’s website, enter RADAR as your code upon checkout, get the book at a discount, read it, get your mind blown and entertained, then come to Viracocha on the 12th and be part of the conversation! Bonus treat: Ali Liebegott opens the night with some of her fantastic new work.

And now here is a thread from Sarah Schulman’s Facebook page.