MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksSarah Schulman’s provocative new book, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, reckons with the intellectual and spiritual consequences of this displacement, with an eye to its impact on queer politics and queer communities in the wake of the AIDS crisis ... As Schulman provocatively argues, the seemingly astounding success of the gay rights movement over the past five years is itself a symptom of a gentrification of gay politics ... Schulman swings a lantern over deprivations we’ve forgotten or repressed ... But in leaving out any evidence of actual progress, she does some forgetting of her own. She asks, for instance, to see a New Yorker story with a lesbian theme written by a lesbian, but there’s been at least one of those ... lesbians and gay men simply are not always and everywhere out in the cold. That complicates Schulman’s limited view of what constitutes political progress ... Schulman resurrects a city that is equal parts myth and memory for younger queers, offering rich history lessons for which I am grateful. Yet she is surprisingly unforgiving of the new kinds of sacrifices the city requires of its residents now.
