Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York
Review by Rachel Pitkin
In six parts, Ron Goldberg’s Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP guides readers through what can often seem like a dizzying terrain of AIDS-related political networks, medical jargon, and direct-action campaigns. The tour is intimate and strikingly honest. Goldberg, a self-described unsuspecting activist, charts his growth from an aspiring theater actor to core ACT UP member and finally—with the publication of The Boy with the Bullhorn—to a “witness.”
Ono’s earliest performances took place in the Chambers Street Loft Series, which featured artists who had met in [John] Cage’s composition class at the New School. For this performance series, Ono conceived the idea of renting the loft of a hundred-year-old Italianate commercial building in Tribeca and paid the $50.50 monthly rent. Ono co-organized the series with the composer La Monte Young. Nonetheless, her works did not appear formally on the series program. And Ono found herself denied credit for her role in organizing and producing the series, which Young claimed as solely his own in the series invitations, programs, and oral history….Ono creatively responded to the challenge of her own noninclusion by staging dramatic guerilla performances.
Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
Review by Michael Woodsworth
Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus…. The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment.… Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism.
During her life, some members of the public drew connections between her antisemitism and her fervent anti-Zionism. But Woloch is right to separate these developments--there were Jews who rejected Zionism and many non-Jewish anti-Zionists who were not antisemitic. Gildersleeve pointed to her affection for Arab people and nations as the root of her anti-Zionism. This affection was, to be sure, inflected with Orientalism and the desire of some Progressives to remake Arab nations in the Protestant image. Still, she saw in Zionism the makings of bitter conflict in the Middle East. …Gildersleeve was active in the American Friends of the Middle East, a CIA-funded organization designed to cultivate closer ties between the U.S. and Middle East Arab nations… Digging deep into her controversial positions on Jews and Zionism, Woloch explains how the pieces of Gildersleeve’s worldview fit together.
The Pirate’s Wife: the Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
Review by Kevin McDonald
…[S]he has produced a lively and entertaining biography of Sarah Kidd, from her arrival to the city through her multiple marriages and business dealings, with the book’s main focus on her relationship with William and the aftermath of his notorious demise. The narrative hits full sail when the privateer-turned-pirate returns from the Indian Ocean and Sarah becomes his accomplice in crime. Overall, the book is a stirring and fast paced yarn that helps reveal another layer of the Kidd saga, and more broadly suggests that the old axiom, “behind every great man is a great woman,” might be true even when dealing with pirates.
A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
Reviewed by Danica Stompor
The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.
Sodomites and Gender Transgressors In 1840s New York
Marc Stein, interviewed by Katie Uva
We have ample evidence of queer acts and desires, but not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans identities and communities, in colonial America or the United States before the late 1800s. That’s part of what makes this set of documents from the 1840s so interesting and so significant — they might allow us to push back the clock on when such identities and communities emerged in the United States…. these sources capture widespread cultural anxieties about the genders and sexualities of young white men and the new pleasures and dangers of life in urban America.
The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America
Reviewed by Carolyn Eastman
It isn’t easy to read the story of a seventeen-year-old girl from a modest family raped by a wealthy and politically well-connected man. Making it even harder to read is the fact that when she chose to charge him with the crime, he and his lawyers accused her of lying, promiscuity, and greed. …The Sewing Girl’s Tale doesn’t hold back … the horrific implications of the crime, nor from tracking the painful modern-day resonances of this story… a powerful narrative about early New York City chockablock with extraordinary details drawn from an enormous range of archival and literary sources, a story that only becomes more compelling over the course of the book… for those of us fascinated by the history of New York, this book is irresistible.
It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
Reviewed By Ivan Bujan
In a recent conversation with my students in my undergraduate course that explores the politics of pleasure, the class reaffirmed my belief that the current US sex education still gives little practical information about sex and sexuality, largely reinforcing the Victorian myths about abstinence, monogamy, and reproduction. One student had not heard about HIV/AIDS or its history before coming to college. Only a few had heard about Gran Fury and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and their importance in the history of contemporary politics of sexuality.
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island
By David Allen
In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.
