The Future Is Coming, That’s a Fact: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Sarah Schulman in Conversation

Sarah Schulman and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore are both iconoclastic queer writers known for their activism and analysis (and their activist analysis), their fiction and nonfiction (and everything in between), their instigation and experimentation (all or nothing). Sycamore first became aware of Schulman’s work in the early ’90s while coming of age as a radical queer in San Francisco, looking to Schulman’s already extensive history of writing against the grain, her activism with ACT UP, and her journalism of the time as incisive examples of interventionist queer troublemaking. A decade or so later, she invited Schulman to contribute to one of her anthologies, That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (published in 2004), and the two became friends.

This past fall, Schulman and Sycamore collaborated on several East Coast book release events for their new novels—Schulman’s Maggie Terry, hailed by Oprah as one of “18 Brilliant Books for Fall,” and described as “off-kilter neo-noir,” and Sycamore’s Sketchtasy, described by NPR Books as “not just one of the best books of the year, it’s an instant classic of queer literature.” Here Schulman and Sycamore talk about the problem of nostalgia, the writing process, the gentrified gaze, a collaboration with Marianne Faithfull, linear time, a political history of ACT UP, film adaptations, the creative impulse, the theater, Todd Haynes, Palestinian solidarity, a Baltimore artist, Boston’s queeniest tower, Seattle’s suburban imagination, an elevator in New York—and, the future.