Sunday Morning! “Rat Bohemia” by Sarah Schulman
A few weeks ago, my partner and I went to the Strand and paid to hear a conversation between Lucy Sante and Jeremiah Moss about the book Feral City and “finding liberation during lockdown in NYC.” Moss is best known for “Vanishing New York” and the discussion afterwards took on the character of a support group meeting as longtime New Yorkers were invited to share their accounts of the liberating moments of the early pandemic when the city felt like the “old New York” again.
Of course, for the comparison to really work, this would have to be a support group for people who didn’t quit: they all still live here. I mean, it really is impossible to begrudge anyone for fighting the good fight, it’s nevertheless hard to wonder if the things they found in NYC years ago might be better replicated somewhere else. Everywhere could be the Lower East Side.
It’s still fascinating to me how we all tend to associate certain places with certain times in our lives when life felt flush with possibility. I’m not sure we can ever avoid this sort of romanticizing, even if we know how toxic nostalgia can be when taken in heavy doses. At this point, there’s a bit of a sunk cost fallacy to staying in places like New York and hoping for them to be as culturally relevant as they were three decades ago. Big cities are a bit like crypto currencies at this point: pumped up with hype, severely overvalued, and creating nothing of lasting value. It turns out that when you price out everyone but the top ten percent, you lose all the people who create vitality in a city. Who knew?
This week, I also read Sarah Schulman’s 1995 novel Rat Bohemia, which I’ve been circling around since I moved here and finally picked up in the great Bluestockings Collective Bookstore on Norfolk Street in the Lower East Side (not the “East Village”!), and it was a good reminder that the sort of “community” that is lacking in our modern transient cities really existed back then as a survival mechanism. Many of those people came to the cities because they weren’t welcome or wanted anywhere else. Especially not at home.
Schulman’s novel is most striking for the ways it refuses to romanticize the subject most tempting to romanticize in the era: the AIDS crisis. Her characters are a gay man and three or four lesbians in the Lower East Side of the late 80s; everyone they know is dying, or caring for someone who is dying, or attending all too many funerals. They’re not saints or martyrs, but complicated people who fight and bicker, get sick of each other, tell the same stories to the point of boredom, go in and out of the closet, and get weary attending funeral after funeral. As Edmund White wrote when the novel came out:
“AIDS burnout has at last found its bard in Sarah Schulman.”
Her central character, Rita Mae Weems, is unblinkingly honest about the non-transformative nature of dying:
I know that we tend to romanticize things like death based on some kind of religious model of conversion and redemption. We expect that once people stare down their mortality in the mirror they will understand something profound about death and life that the rest of us have to wait until old age to discover. But that’s not what happens. Actually, people just become themselves. But ever so much more so.
They know how to hustle.
Rita works as a rat exterminator for the City of New York, an endless battle the city has waged for decades and is gearing up to fight again. The metaphor is never pushed to its breaking point, but it’s clear that Schulman’s characters are seen as vermin by their families and much of the society around them. The vehemence of 1980s homophobia is somewhat forgotten about now, but I still remember one of the first jokes I learned as a child (when I was too young to get it): “What do you call a gay in a wheelchair? Rollaids.” And certainly, every respectable teen comedy film from that era had at least one “fag” joke.
Laugh? You’d die trying.
And so, people found some strength in numbers. In fact, it would be better to say the novel has four central characters: Rita; her best friend Killer, semi-employed at best; Killer’s new girlfriend Troy; and Rita’s old friend David, who narrates the second section of the book while dying and wondering who will remember him; his family hardly remembers him in life, never mind after death. On the periphery, the much discussed now-closeted writer Muriel Kay Starr has moved on from her former life and written a best-selling novel about nice, trendy, and straight versions of her old friends.
It strikes me that a lot of LGBTQ fiction from the last century are basically ensemble pieces: City of Night and Boys in the Band also came to mind. One of the things “Rat Bohemia” does best is to show how recreating ourselves through our “elective families” is a messy business; her characters still carry the scars of rejection by their birth families. The novel offers a painful reminder of how many families were reunited by AIDS deaths only to find that Mom and Dad still resented their child’s homosexuality as something that was “done to them.” In reality, “family values” destroyed many a family.
So, reading Sarah Schulman and Rat Bohemia about 30 years after it was published, offers insights both cheering and grim about modern New York. Much of the Lower East Side today resembles a resort town or expensive college quad. In a new introduction, Schulman pulls no punches about the role of AIDS in gentrification: landlords salivated at all the rent-controlled units suddenly becoming available. I was reminded of David Wojnarowicz, whose landlord finally agreed to let him live out the remainder of his life in Peter Hujar’s apartment, with the caveat that, if a cure for AIDS was ever found, he would have to move out.
On the other hand, things seem a bit less dire for gay children today, in spite of the best efforts of “Christian love” to turn back the clock. Maybe fewer people will need to move to places like New York in order to be who they are and find liberation from their stifling hometowns. Maybe everywhere can be the Lower East Side one day. And, if there’s nothing else to celebrate about the present, thank goodness AIDS is no longer a death sentence.
And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, playing, pondering, or remembering this weekend?
Currently reading Andy Weir’s (The Martian) Project Hail Mary. I can see this one on the silver screen. The main character of the new novel is a lot like the main character in The Martian.Report
Enjoyed that one. A movie version would have to deal with how much of the story depends on happening in zero gravity.Report
I’ve read Charlie Stross’s posts about the huge difficulty of writing while he was dealing with his parents dying. In addition to writing, as my wife disappears down the dementia hole I’m finding it difficult to stick with reading anything. Fiction has to grab me quite quickly or I abandon it and look for something else. The Starless Crown has managed to catch me right now. I’ve had to give up on non-fiction of any length.Report
Have you read anything of Emily St. John Mandel? Everything she’s written has been impossible for me to put down. Her latest, Sea of Tranquility, is beautifully written. Her prose is absolutely magical.Report
The ultimate problem for someone like Moss is that the preferred solution requires a genie wish. In the meantime, Bohemian NIMBYs end up shooting themselves in the feet by opposing new buildings for aesthetic and cultural considerations. The icky normies that they despise so much are not moving away. Objecting to new buildings just is going to be more displacement down below. But people like Moss would rather be righteous and lose than change and have a city too.
I just don’t understand this view especially because today’s yuppies would largely consider the “joke” you listed above disgusting. I think people like Moss guce their own proof for the Horseshoe theory of politics. Moss yearning for the East Village of yesteryear is reactionary in a way that rhymes with MAGAs yearning for the age when it was perfectly acceptable to tell homophobic and racist jokes in the office.
I don’t understand wanting to return to either world even if it means a more scruffy, exciting, and romantic downtown New York. The return of Danceteria and CBGBs is not worth the return of open and casual homophobiaReport
I think this is an insightful point, Saul, we take the good and the bad in any place and era. I also think we would all do a little bit better to work on taking yes for an answer when it’s presented.Report
A couple of our class mates from suburbia have expressed visible disgust to me, after they had decent seized families, of ever moving into suburbia.Report
Honestly, I’ve never read Jeremiah Moss. Is this something he does: opposing new buildings? I’m not sure if you’re talking about “people like Moss” or something Moss wrote. If I’m going to be totally honest, I’ve never even looked at Vanishing New York.
Since he’s a trans man, I doubt he’s keen to return to casual homophobia. But, like I was saying in the post, I don’t get why people who remember the East Village in the 70s don’t pinpoint what it was they loved about that era and replicate *that* in whatever city hasn’t got the highest rents in the country.
I’ve actually got some friends who did just that- moved to a nowhereville in Northern California and formed an art collective and are basically doing all the stuff older people in New York wish they could still do in New York. It’s possible to take inspiration from the past without romanticizing its grosser elements.Report
The shtick of Vanishing New York is romanticizing all those, for lack of a better word, low rent petit bourgeois businesses and similar stuff as being the real true New York. And yes, he does seem to oppose new construction as a way to prevent gentrification despite no evidence that it works.Report
It is quite striking to watch the movies from the 80s and see just how casually homophobia was incorporated as humor. Quite often it was as basic as “see that guy? He’s GAY! That’s it, that’s the joke.”
Even into the mid-90s, the mere existence of queerness was seen as humorous, just “that girl? REALLY A GUY!” or “haha, that girl wants to be a guy” was the entire joke.Report
When I was in high school in the early 80s, jokingly implying that someone was gay comprised probably a third of our humor. We were a pretty liberal crowd so there was always an unspoken “not that there’s anything wrong with that” assumption, but I do remember us feeling rather awkward about it a few years later when one of our crowd came out.
On a similar topic (humor and cultural change), I often think about a particular joke in Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor from 1971 — it was about a couple of women’s-libbers who were arrested, and after one expressed her fear about the situation to the other, the reply was “Have faith in God — She will protect us”. That was the joke, that God was referred to as “She”. If my kids who grew up in our very-liberal church read that out of context, they wouldn’t even recognize that it was supposed to be a joke.Report
My favorite example of this is Lenny Bruce’s classic “Thank You, Masked Man” routine. The punchline is, essentially, “the Masked Man’s a fag!” who lusted after Tonto. Any dirty dirty-minded 14 year-old boy (a massive redundancy, I know) sniggered over what the Lone Ranger and Tonto got up to during chilly nights on the prairie. Back in Bruce’s day, simply acknowledging that was transgressive and funny. Now, it would have to be the premise of a joke, not the joke itself.Report
Since I’ve been watching quite a few lately, I find there are a handful of ubiquitous jokes in 80s comedies that land kind of weird today:
1. See that guy? He’s GAY!
2. Oh boy! That kid’s spying on an older girl (often his sister) while she’s UNDRESSING!
3. Listen to that guy talk? He’s ASIAN!
To be honest, I still remember making some “gay” joke when I was about 11 years old- so mid 80s- and an older friend saying “I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with gay people,” and thinking “Wait, of course there isn’t!” and it also being a big revelation because I’d never heard ANYTHING like that before.Report
I also remember someone writing about how the big come-up of lesbians in early-to-mid-90s America was mostly enabled by every other form of queerness dying of AIDS.Report
Saul is right that what Moss and others like him want is impossible to achieve. They want the cities to be places for the down and outs and other people on the margins of American society while the normies live in the suburbs and only go to cities for work and entertainment and best. Otherwise the normies need to stay in the suburbs. They do want the generous suburban tax subsidies though. This isn’t going to happen politically.
It was also only a few cities during the grit era that managed to achieve this type of down and out playground status. New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco are probably the big three examples. Other cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis just entered into a long bad phase without much of a hip artsy bohemian scene. Portland and Seattle remained relatively normal cities with a wide class base. New York also had a lot of normies in it because there were seven to eight million people and down and out Bohemians and other marginal groups were just a small number of them.Report
One of the movements in late-90s cinema (that got derailed by 9/11) was the big meditation on gentrification; on the way that cities were moving from “catering to Banished Queers and white-ethnic criminals” to “catering to yuppies who grew up in Suburbia”.Report
Interesting. What are some examples of this?Report
I can’t think of anything in the 90s but I would say it is an underlying theme in 25th Hour.
Best piece of art I’ve ever seen on the subject is a play called Clybourne Park.Report
I kinda remember these movies too, but the only one that comes to mind at the moment is The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which would’ve been a lot later.Report
Guys, I’m really skeptical that anyone living in the real world has any dreams of keeping “normies” out of big cities by 2022. The “normies” are at least 95% of the people in Manhattan, and anyone living here would really have to have come to terms with that by now.
Nevertheless, I think it’s understandable that people with roots here might figure their own days in the city are numbered now that the average rent for a one bedroom apartment is $5,000 a month and rising every year. The most common question I hear from “old New Yorkers” is “Who the hell is going to live here in a few years?” On the other hand, maybe a speculative real estate market will collapse and we’ll be back to the 70s. Sort of a pyric victory.Report
So where does this leave the people who want to move into the city? How is this difference than a xenophobe complaining about immigrants destroying the real true nature of their culture?Report
Me: It’s understandable that people who’ve lived in a place for decades and set down roots there would worry about being evicted from their homes because their income hasn’t kept up with market-rate rent inflation.
Someone on this site: Those people are basically bigots. How are they not bigots?
Every fishing time.Report
[Sweating Spaceman GIF]:
Side With Lower Income People As Social Justice
vs.
Eliminating Urban Crime and Decay As Bourgeoisie Values
But in the end, its really a false dichotomy. The fact that poor people have no other easily available rental units is the problem.
Once you discard people whose objection is in fact rooted in some kind of bigotry, you’re left with a sizable number of people who really are justifiably distressed about having to move out to some uncertain and precarious future.
And we’ve talked about this quite a lot here, where almost everyone agrees that any solution has to include some form of massive increases in building, along with wages commensurate with rents.
FWIW, I’m not impartial here- I live in a recently renovated old historic building on the edge of Skid Row. I don’t romanticize the urban ills.
But I’ve also seen that gentrification, in the absence of a massive building program, becomes a driving factor of urban ills. People often think that gentrifying an area “solves” the homeless and drunks and scofflaws but they just drive them to other areas, and create more of them.Report
The main problem is that most gentrifiers and anti-gentrifiers do not want a massive building program. An actual massive building program is only people with a small number of liberal and libertarian YIMBYs. Most other people don’t want it regardless of their race or political orientation because they want where they live to remain the same as possible.
This is also the real big problem with post-war American suburbia. They were designed not to change but that is impossible. Previously a hamlet could turn into a village a village into a town and a town into the city. From the 19th century to the present, cities could become mega-cities of millions of people. Post-war American suburb by design and law is basically static even if the population grows. It remains suburbia because of strict zoning laws and autocentric transportation policies.Report
I think Kimmi might be back under another name.Report
Yeah, I see what you mean.Report