Schulman makes sure readers know where failure has occurred: the marginalization of queer voices, gentrification as a physical urban phenomenon, and the gentrification of artists, collective memory, the AIDS crisis, queer politics, queer literature, and our own expectations. Schulman is certainly witness to a lost imagination, and her witness is one of the most important contributions to queer literature in recent years ... Schulman is brilliant at conveying how devastating and surreal it was to live during the AIDS crisis, and in examining its impact on the living, she draws connections between the gentrification of cities like New York and the coincidental timing of the AIDS crisis ... But Schulman doesn’t leave the reader outraged and helpless. She carries optimism and innovation throughout the collection, especially in her conclusion.

As a thinker, lesbian activist Sarah Schulman runs the gamut from exhilarating to irritating. But that's what makes her so interesting ... It's a beautifully written screed (not a bad word in my books), but it does have its limitations ... Most of her commentary applies only to the U.S. ... The ideologue in Schulman loves to equate queer authenticity with marginalization. Her easy dismissal of those promoting gay marriage, for example, ignores the basic cruelty of discrimination ... Schulman shines when she taps her deep knowledge of the AIDS movement - she was a key founder of ACT Up - and the New York art scene to honour those artists who are gone and forgotten ... She can be brilliant.

Sarah 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.

There is a profound historical geography to the ways of living that Schulman articulates, celebrates, worries over, and mourns ... This gentrificaiton of the mind makes it more difficult to learn the lessons of AIDS, to retain the insights of ACT UP. If United in Anger is memory work, then, Gentrification of the Mind is a diagnosis of the roots of forgetting ... For academics studying these issues, the frankness with which Schulman describes the difficulty of getting her study published is one source of discomfort. Another is inherent in her defence of challenging art as necessary to 'convey ideas so complex that derivative narrative constructions would not do those ideas justice' ... Schulman’s brilliant book demands that we consider the place of universities in the gentrification of the mind, in reproducing privilege and normalizing homogeneity of perspective ... Moving and fertile.

Schulman’s book also reminds us that, while gentrification may often work by gradually pricing people out, it works much more effectively if it can exploit death ... The act of forgetting factors heavily in Schulman’s book ... The Gentrification of the Mind is a book intended to fight this process of erasure, which is, after all, one of the most important tools in the gentrifier’s arsenal.

The Gentrification of the Mind is best understood as a polemic, a passionate, provocative and at times scattergun account of disappearance, forgetfulness and untimely death. To her mind, the undigested, unacknowledged trauma of Aids has brought about a kind of cultural gentrification, a return to conservatism and conformity evident in everything from the decline of small presses to the shift of focus in the gay rights movement towards marriage equality ... The memory of this lost moment of accountability drives Schulman’s final, stirring call for degentrification, her dream of a time in which people realise not only that it’s healthier to live in complex, dynamic, mixed communities than uniform ones but also that happiness that depends on privilege and oppression cannot by any civilised terms be described as happiness at all.

Schulman's firsthand experience of the epidemic and the queer community should make for a poignant and stirring story, but the author's argument soon devolves into name dropping and discourses against motherhood and academia, to name a few. These diatribes are brimming with so much vitriol that they ultimately come across as the personal agenda of someone with an ax to grind rather than cogent research.