Let The Record Show is an immensely valuable resource, grounded in 188 oral history interviews as well as Sarah Schulman’s own experiences and recollections. Though this is a long and multifaceted work which covers a great deal of ground, all is held together by a fairly clear thesis: that ACT UP NY both succeeded and ultimately broke apart because of “a strategy of difference facilitating simultaneity of response”. Schulman describes an intensely heterogeneous group with an internal culture dominated by largely autonomous and self-selecting affinity groups, which limited overall liability for the its most disruptive actions while also allowing people from different backgrounds to contribute in dramatically different ways (the “outside/inside” strategy), bound together by the radically democratic space of Monday general body meetings. To some extent, this heterogeneity was a strategic choice. In other ways, it was a reflection of the unique dynamics of the AIDS crisis between 1987 and 1993; a crisis which brought together a certain number of previously wealthy, connected, and culturally empowered gay men with unhoused people, intravenous drug users, and other socially marginal groups. This duality allowed ACT UP to employ certain tactics that most activist organizations today could not replicate – for instance, achieving its most significant funding windfall by leveraging connections in the art world (and HIV- artists’ feelings of guilt) to hold a lucrative auction of contemporary art (a strategy that, in part, allowed ACT UP to eschew 501(c)(3) status and the political constraints that come with it). Many tactics and tools, though, can be learned from ACT UP, and Schulman orients her book to making such information available to those who might use it. For instance, she provides extensive discussion of the ways in which ACT UP members became scientific and policy experts, devising their own solutions to problems before protesting to demand those solutions be implemented. She also provides valuable accounts of internal teach-ins, creative/theatrical demonstrations that at the same time facilitated easy media access to designated spokespeople, and legal strategies that orchestrated valuable  test cases for civil disobedience (most specifically, needle exchange). 

Let The Record Show also covers the interesting ways in which subgroups split off from the activist core of ACT UP to become direct service providers (in the case of Housing Works) or community-based scientists (in the case of the Community Research Initiative). Schulman profiles a great many prominent ACT UP members, most notably Larry Kramer, Mark Harrington, and Maxine Wolfe, using Harrington and Wolfe as a vehicle to discuss the 1992 split in which Harrington’s TAG (Treatment Action Group) left ACT UP. Both Harrington and Wolfe gave interviews for the project and are quoted at length. Schulman does not hide her own perspectives and opinions, but also doesn’t spend much time on them – she was not a particularly partisan participant during the split, and her project in compiling this book is to document the personal and ideological clashes involved rather than to comment upon them. Much of the story here is about the distinction between a focus on treatment (“drugs into bodies”) and access, although Schulman acknowledges that this is a reductionist framing. Still, she clearly explains how the mostly white and middle-class but HIV+ men in the Treatment & Data committee, relatively politically-connected and desperate to use those connections to save their own lives, differed from the Women’s Committee and other factions broadly aligned with Maxine Wolfe, who saw ACT UP's work as a grassroots political struggle for access to healthcare. Some of the thorny issues implicated in this divide revolve around the dilemma of patient-centerdness when experimental treatments are the only treatments available; to what extent are studies about the interests of study participants, and to what extent are they about getting the highest-quality data possible? Specific disputes include issues surrounding placebo groups, the inclusion of study participants with certain opportunistic infections, the inclusion of women (and pregnant women specifically), and the flexibility of dosing protocols (especially in reference to AZT, which is highly toxic and was at first prescribed in dramatically excessive doses). Schulman’s effort here is not to resolve these disputes, but to build a picture of the different priorities of different ACT UP members, informed and shaped by their often radically-different identities. She succeeds. 

It cannot be omitted that Let The Record Show provides fascinating and humanizing insights into the lives of ACT UPers, for whom ACT UP became a social and sexual milieu as well as a political one. It is notable how many of the quoted interviewees describe attraction to and/or fluid relationships with other ACT UP members as meaningful drivers of the group’s overall vitality. Such aspects of the ACT UP experience might not appear in more conventional histories, but they valuably contextualize many of the interviewees’ lives and experiences. Also on a human note, Schulman ends by describing a series of political funerals that occurred in the early 1990s. Choosing a political funeral for yourself or your comrade is an intensely dramatic step, and Schulman quotes two eulogies from such funerals in full to leave the reader with some impression of the immense grief and rage embodied in these moments.
 

Schulman’s writing is not beautiful, but it is clear and direct. More importantly, the way in which she structures this book leaves a stronger and more usefully applicable sense of ACT UP than a straightforwardly chronological history would have done. As all 188 oral interviews are listed and have been made available online, Schulman is to be commended for having given us not one but two precious resources of enduring political value.