Both Sarah Schulman and the late Urvashi Vaid were born in 1958 — Schulman a fiery Leo to Vaid’s more balanced Libra, or so the stars say. Both are renowned for their tenacious activism, bold thought leadership, and unyielding dedication to the lesbian and queer communities. Longtime friends and comrades in ACT UP, their professional and personal lives intersected in ways that demonstrated how the personal is truly political — further proof of the famously undeniable bond between Leos and Libras. While working in different sectors (Schulman in the arts and academia and Vaid in philanthropy and nonprofits), both have careers defined by a commitment to justice, with political sensibilities informed by the Civil Rights and feminist movements. And, as a lesbian who has witnessed too many lesbians dying far too young, it is impossible not to observe how both have undergone illness — Vaid’s fatal — that has permeated and given urgency to their work.
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This month, both have new books on the idea du jour: solidarity. From recent publications like Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s 2024 tome on solidarity to the Hands Off! mobilization against the corrupt takeover of the US government that resulted in more than 1,200 protests nationwide earlier this month — Solidarity is in the air and in the streets.
The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid is a collection of Vaid’s essays, interviews, letters, and speeches edited by her older sister Jyotsna Vaid and her ex-lover and friend Amy Hoffman. The coeditors emphasize that the purpose of the collection is to present “Urvashi’s vision for achieving the dream of a common movement from a queer lens.” Adopting the language from Adrienne Rich, Vaid threaded this “dream” throughout her writings and activism. “We see our work instead as building common ground — or cultivating soil,” she wrote in Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumption of LGBT Politics. “We see ourselves as part of an earth in which race, gender, sexuality, all of our identities are churned up in a rich and fertile soil. And what we are trying to do is to create new institutions, new policies, new ways of imagining, creating a world out of this common soil of our identities and our experiences.”
The “common ground” of the “common movement” is solidarity — the social force that bonds people, or what Hendrix and Taylor refer to as “the visceral feeling of connection and mutuality.” Critically, while the politics of identity constitute one type of bond, it fundamentally limits the expanse and therefore power of the common movement for social transformation.
Vaid’s critique of identity politics is a prominent motif of the collection. “I think one of the failures of our identity-based movements is that we let go of the project of developing common politics. We focused more on the identity and less on the politics,” she said in a 1998 interview. “There’s a feminist critic who has said that identity politics was a kind of necessary mistake. It’s a formulation I appreciate. It was essential for us to deepen our understanding of our racial identities and various cultures. But for progressive people, it’s a mistake to stop there.”
Yet Vaid understood the significance of identity politics in terms of social inclusion (representation and visibility) and policy, since the United States historically has adjudicated rights on the basis of identity. She earnestly grappled with — yes — the fantasy and necessity of identity a year later in a keynote address at the East Coast Asian Students Union Conference at Brown University:
Inside, I am a hybrid of several cultures and multiple identities — Indian, immigrant, queer, feminist, progressive, Asian, American. Outside, I face the challenge of articulating this hybridity as a politics that could make a cohesive movement for racial justice, economic democracy, the abolition of gender roles, and the liberation of human sexuality and family. We need to create this new common social change movement which allows us both the mooring and the freedom to work on the racial, gender, immigrant, economic, queer, and other human issues we face. My search for a new synthesis of identity with politics is rooted in the faith that we can find or will found this common social change movement. …
Identity-based organizing is indeed vital and urgent — no matter if we are first generation or fifth. And making visible and included the different sexualities within Asian American communities is very important to those of us who are queer. … Does identity politics work? The answer is, it depends on your goal in using it. For what does it work and for what does it fail? I think it works to create self-esteem, empowerment, and visibility in the American political system, community building, and organizing. But it fails as a vehicle to revamp the social service system in this country. Ideology-based movements are more valuable than identity-based ones.
Even though the collection unfolds thematically rather than chronologically, Vaid’s writings demonstrate a deepening nuance of and passion for social and racial justice in building a common movement over time. She was never reluctant to call out the gay rights movement, or the LGBT community in general, for its racism: “Neither the grassroots (race-inclusive) nor mainstream (liberal) parts of the LGBT movements have yet meaningfully tackled structural racism and racial privilege,” she said in her 2010 Kessler Lecture, titled “What Can Brown Do For You?” As her career evolved and she took on executive roles in foundations and nonprofits, readers can feel her frustration with the racism, complicity, and capitalist, homonormative desires of the gay rights movement. It is this sensibility that fueled her critique of the movement’s equality agenda in her brilliant 1995 book, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation. In this book, she argued that “if the LGBT movement ignored the broader dynamics of racism, economic exploitation, gender inequity, and cultural freedom, it would achieve only a partial, conditional, simulacrum of equal rights, a situation that I called virtual equality. Some parts of the LGBT community would enjoy legal rights and formal equality, but the institutions that repress, denigrate, and immobilize sexual, and gender minorities would not be transformed.”
The editors of Dream had the impossible task of reducing the expanse and depth of Vaid’s work into one collection. “Engage with the life and work of Urvashi Vaid,” playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner implores in the book’s forward, “and you’ll feel less lost, and braver and smarter about where to go, how to live, how to build resistance, how to move and how to build movements.” For this reader, the visit with Vaid was all too brief, a flirtation that had me longing for more. Perhaps that was the point, because as soon as I finished reading Dream I grabbed the 400+ page Virtual Equality from off my bookshelves.
For the dream of a common movement to become reality, we must articulate and overcome the many fantasies that undergird notions of solidarity. A tactician of activism with the unflinching precision of a novelist, Sarah Schulman draws upon her decades of experience from the European Abortion Underground Railroad to ACT UP, to the BDS movement to show readers that solidarity work is hard work, and it is often dirty work. But in detailing the messy humanity inherent in this work, her intention is “to make solidarity doable.”
The most pervasive and impactful fantasy of solidarity is that it is a relation and collaboration of equals. It is this misconception against which Schulman situates her own understanding. “Since solidarity is a relationship rooted in inequality, it is by definition fraught,” she contends. The fantasy of solidarity in equality coincides with other fantasies based in absolutes or purity. “Part of the fantasy of being in solidarity is a magical combination of pure motive, clean action, and predictably victorious outcome. Part of the fantasy is that we will do everything right and give up nothing, and the afflicted will love us, as we will love each other and ourselves,” she explains. “The delusion is that we are so entitled, we only have to intercede and the desired change will occur.”
For Schulman, solidarity requires “the collaboration and fellowship” of people at all levels of power. Solidarity is a continuous, relational practice that “always requires awareness, self-criticism, consciousness, the decision to act, and the need to create strategy, to build alliances, and to listen. It always requires taking chances, making mistakes, and trying again.” In Fantasy and Necessity, she enumerates three responsibilities that carry forward the notable ideas of her earlier work, from Ties that Bind through to Let the Record Show: “to intervene,” evocative of her ideas on “third-party intervention” and refusing to be a bystander, impassive in the face of violence; “to listen and also to hear,” meaning a kind of active listening whereby one takes initiative to problem solve rather than make demands (“What can I do?)” of the oppressed; and “to be effective,” largely, by tapping into creativity and “negotiating with flexibility.”
In many ways, Schulman’s definition of solidarity aligns with Hendrix and Taylor’s concept of “transformative solidarity”: “We understand solidarity as the recognition of our inherent interconnectedness, an attempt to build bonds of commonality across our differences. It is an ethos and spur to action rooted in the acknowledgement that our lives are intertwined. Intertwined, however, does not mean indistinguishable — solidarity depends on difference, on recognizing that we are not all exactly alike but that we can still come together and take collective action.”
The emphasis on interconnectedness and difference also resonates with Vaid’s conception of solidarity implied in her writings. What distinguishes Schulman’s definition — and her oeuvre in general — is her fearlessness in tackling problems and calling out logical inconsistencies and injustices directly. Her refusal, in short, to abide a purity politics often demanded on the Left and especially in queer circles — what she refers to as “the problem of criteria” that thwarts the longevity of so many solidarity efforts. For example, she recounts of the life of novelist Jean Genet, whose pro-Palestine politics was partly rooted in his fetishization of Arab men and his cross-identification with the oppressed, as an example of “conflicted solidarity”: a solidarity “still welcome, impactful, and necessary, even when its powers are dirty and dependent on historical supremacy, and even when they are rooted in erotic desire and fantasy, both colonial and erotic.”
Of the mélange of case studies of solidarity both successful and not, perhaps the most poignant is that of the “failed solidarity” that prompted a public discussion between Schulman and trans writer and historian Morgan M. Page concerning the backlash Schulman received from her political eulogy for her close friend, the trans writer Bryn Kelly. The final chapter of Fantasy and Necessity’s reproduces the transcript from this event, in which Schulman and Page explained the processes by which they drafted and collaborated on their eulogies with each other and Kelly’s closest kin, before reading their eulogies to the audience. When the floor opens for Q&A, it is as if all the insights that Schulman has articulated about solidarity throughout the book come to life. There is an emotional shift in the room — palpable on the page — that emerges from this space, which has been carefully cultivated by Schulman and Page, to allow for self-expression, listening, mutual understanding, and, ultimately, repair of a community that had begun the evening angry about the unadulterated contents of Schulman’s political eulogy.
There are several similarities between Vaid’s and Schulman’s works. On the theme of solidarity, while the word itself does not recur in Dream, the spirit is apparent in her commitment to building a common movement. It is a solidarity evident in the career she built working within both institutions and the grassroots liberation movement, as well as in her practice and belief that the movement must be anti-racist and anti-transphobic because transformative social justice can only be achieved through an intersectional, or common, movement.
Creativity as a vital resource for innovation is also a point of connection between Schulman’s and Vaid’s works. For Schulman, solidarity is a “creative endeavor” because “using the imagination” enables people to overcome obstacles and figure out a path forward. In an acceptance speech she delivered just two months before her passing in May 2022, Vaid remarked that creativity is the tool we need to fight increasing threats against our freedom and safety:
The LGBTQ movement is not just in a fight for a federal equality act. It’s in a fight for the survival of freedom and pluralism. We are facing an existential threat. Our response must be strong, militant, and much more aggressive than it’s been so far.
What tools do we have at our disposal? Creativity! It’s creativity that enabled us to build self-esteem, to build power and our own institutions, despite rejection and hatred and fear. We have the tools of the vote, which they’re doing their best to eliminate, but which we must deploy in the next election to vote every one of these monsters out of power.
While we failed to vote the monsters out of power in the 2024 elections, we can incorporate the lessons from Schulman’s and Vaid’s books into our daily lives and into our larger solidarity efforts:
- The fight for freedom and justice never ends; solidarity is a practice.
- Solidarity work is messy and complicated because humans are messy and complicated — and because no two people are the same, or treated equally, in our society.
- Capitalism interferes with and impedes solidarity work, but capital accelerates it.
- Purity politics is the death knell of solidarity.
- The bystander’s indifference, or refusal to act in any capacity, is a form of complicity with oppressive structures and cultures. Rather, we must be citizens — we must understand that our lives, and our freedoms, are interconnected and therefore mutually cocreated.
- Solidarity thrives in direct action, in the plurality of strategy and tactic, not consensus.
- Organization > mobilization: While both afford different strategic and tactical benefits, the material existence of infrastructure establishes a necessary stability and permanence to any solidary effort.
- Action precedes theory: Theory emerges from action, but both are required for a common movement to acquire the flexibility necessary for the movement to thrive long term.
- Creativity is the wellspring of effective solidarity efforts.
- Identity is a touchstone for, but not the foundation of, a movement to effect social transformation.
Considering that conservatives are weaponizing identity politics and the language of equality (from “fairness” to “colorblindness”) to attack and overturn our rights and freedoms, what both Schulman and Vaid are asking of us is to use our creativity to think, imagine, and act beyond the politics of identity to create a solidarity movement that strives for freedom and justice for all. This is the challenge ahead of us, since the gay rights movement has relied on identity/equality politics to achieve equal rights, which have failed to effect the society-wide transformation we need for our collective freedom, dignity, and care. However, with Schulman’s and Vaid’s new contributions, we have the blueprint to reinvent the movement to meet this perilous moment head-on.
Marcie Bianco, PhD, is a writer, editor, and cultural critic. She is the author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom.
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