Sarah Schulman is a longtime AIDS and queer activist, and a cofounder of the MIX Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She is a playwright and the author of seventeen books, including the novels The Mere Future , Shimmer , Rat Bohemia , After Delores , and People in Trouble , as well as nonfiction works such as The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination , My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years , Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences , and Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America , which is also