PositiveThe BafflerLet the Record Show’s massive size is the result of Schulman’s decision to structure the book around oral histories collected over the course of nearly twenty years for the ACT UP Oral History Project, which she cofounded with the experimental filmmaker Jim Hubbard ... Grounding the book in the tradition of oral history also allows for voices previously sidelined from major ACT UP historiographies to be heard ... Activists of color, too, are front and center, as evidenced by Schulman’s editorial—and political—decision to open the book with the stories of Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Moisés Agosto-Rosario, two Puerto Rican members of ACT UP who played significant roles in the Majority Action Committees and Gran Fury, and the Latino Caucus and ACT UP Puerto Rico, respectively ... But Let the Record Show is still missing a crucial set of voices: HIV positive women, specifically HIV positive women of color ... Not merely a matter of representation, Schulman’s recontextualization serves as an intervention in the political analysis of ACT UP. While histories focused on T&D can make it seem like they alone won victories for the activist group, Schulman argues that most ACT UP wins must be viewed as the result of what she calls the group’s \'inside\'/\'outside\' tactical approach ... The irony of Schulman’s choice is that Gran Fury’s Let the Record Show assumes that the record of harm will reveal itself without explication, which is surely not an interpretive task Schulman believes regarding the oral histories. Not only are the oral histories meticulously edited and organized for the purpose of the book, but there’s an inherent instability to them ... we can and must differentiate between unfounded criticisms of ACT UP and the necessity for multiple, and at times conflicting, histories of the group, and to not allow the fear of the former to prevent the latter. Otherwise, we run the risk of losing sight of those activists now receiving the overdue recognition they deserve.
Zak Salih
PanLos Angeles Review of BooksLet’s Get Back to the Party’s opening decision to jam its characters into outdated and mutually exclusive gay roles—instead of exploring the overlap between them—sets up the book for an inevitable failure ... None of Oscar’s literary cruising is handled with any nuance or depth ... While a successful first-person point of view is a unique opportunity to interrogate a character’s interior world, in Let’s Get Back to the Party it cockblocks the novel from developing a political consciousness of its own beyond the wooden ideological dyad of its leading men. As Oscar’s internal monologues veer into offensive cliché and caricature, he becomes a monstrous hodgepodge of the worst gay men have to offer ... So what does it mean to be a gay man today? Let’s Get Back to the Party doesn’t offer any clear or compelling answers, but perhaps the larger issue is that the book’s fundamental question isn’t all that interesting. Who still believes in a world where one can talk about a unified, homogeneous gay subject? ... Unfortunately, the reader is given superficial characters slotted into a contrived plotline, resulting in a politically shallow book that devolves into utter nonsense.
