I scanned and formatted one of my favorite writings about the politics of queer representation and turned it into a zine. Here’s the summary I wrote on the back cover:
This zine excerpts the conclusion of Sarah Schulman’s 1998 book “Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America.” Here she offers a sharp analysis of the liberal recuperation of the threatening, radical queer into a good capitalist subject via mainstream representation. She argues that the “fake, public” image serves to make queerness palatable to heterosexuals while simultaneously turning queers themselves into a new consumer demographic.
In the rest of the book, Schulman provides an account of her fight for compensation from the estate of Jonathan Larson, whose award-winning musical “Rent” shares suspicious similarities to her novel “People in Trouble.” Schulman boldly uses her suspicions of copyright infringement as an opportunity to initiate a larger conversation on how AIDS and gay experience are being represented in American art and commerce.
25 years later, this writing still rings true. Further, it provides crucial context for understanding the cultural forces that laid the groundwork for the insidious rainbow capitalism we know and hate today.
Basically, what I like about this book is that it skewers the shitty, sanitized gay media we’ve seen proliferate in the past several decades without succumbing to the counterrevolutionary logic of representation as praxis. As Cine Móvil writes in their Manifesto 1 (which is my new favorite text about radical cinema culture. Like seriously stop what you’re doing and read it right now):
“The aesthetics of a work alone cannot affect material change. But neoliberal cultural institutions would have us believe otherwise. Their gambit for the past half-century has been to mollify the populace with “representation” and corporate philanthropy while bleeding the world dry via an ever-expanding police state, capitalist relations to land, widening wealth gaps, and pervasive anti-Marxist propaganda. The capitalists know that art & media play a crucial role in shaping how we see the world, and that’s why they keep audiences lost in the realm of aesthetics as opposed to truth and reality.”
Aesthetics are not themselves material, but a critical analysis of aesthetic trends can shed light on certain material conditions. And this is exactly what Schulman’s piece does. Reading this (and though I’m just excerpting the conclusion, I would highly recommend everyone read the book in its entirety) helped me understand how we got from a genuinely radical gay liberation movement to queer banks and boutique HRT subscription services.
If you want to read or download the PDF of the text on your device you can do so here:
If you want to print this into a zine booklet, here’s the deal:
This is the cover I created (graphic design is my passion TM) which can be printed on a single 8.5 x 11 piece of paper and folded in half to create a front and back cover.
And then here’s the insides all formatted so that if you print it out with a 2 page per layout setting, double sided, with short edge binding it should fold into a lil booklet. This will take up 2 sheets of paper but be 8 pages. Don’t try to read this one cuz it’s out of order!!
DEGENERACY NOW! 
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