Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman

Rat Bohemia Reviews

• 
  Cyd

  Every time I read a schulman book I swear never again. I always spend the first 2/3rds being astounded by the exquisiteness of the writing, the intelligence of how she puts words together, leaves moments hanging in micro chapters that invite reflection as you jump into the next one.Then, somewhere near the end, I realize the book stands as an encyclopedia of everything that is heartbreaking about being queer and then become very depressed. But of course it's good to have these things illuminated - how AIDS, familial homophobia, gentrification and internalized homophobia paralyzes us. Just hard. But read this book
• 
  Raul

  A story revolving around three queer characters and their community. Rita is a rat exterminator working for the city of New York, Killer is her unemployed friend, as well as David, their friend who is a writer. This book is split in parts where these friends' stories are each explored, meshing and splitting to merge again in a wonderful tale.
  
  Schulman writes of relationships queer people have with their families. The disappointment and betrayal one feels when cast out by their loved ones because of their sexual orientation and the yearning for a love and understanding that is deserved but withheld and the inner conflict caused by this.
  
  The characters are hard to like, they do come across as annoying and their sarcasm is quite clearly their way to cope but Schulman has created such solid characters with weaknesses, desires, dreams and friendships.
  
  I also enjoyed the question relationships in this book. The friendships and companionship. A kinship fostered by mutual acceptance, support and love. This story is very much told during the AIDS crisis and thus is incredibly sad as should be expected. The activism and community development touched upon was inspiring. A wonderful wonderful read and a fantastic introduction to a great writer.
• 
  Jessica Woodbury

  I am woefully underread in Important Queer Literature, and I found this book while looking for some writing that would give me an idea of what gay New York City was like in the mid-90's for another project. This definitely fit the bill, in Edmund White's very-good NYT review he called Schulman the "bard" of "AIDS burnout," and that is exactly what I was looking for. This is an experimental novel and yet it's still extremely readable.
  
  I very often do not like New York City Books because they are so romanticized, so filled with wealthy white people whose emotional attachment to the city has an awful lot to do with the way they can so easily possess it. You can tell just from the title that that is not RAT BOHEMIA. And yet it is one of the most New York City Books I've ever read. It doesn't gaze longingly at the city, it doesn't see it as full of adventure and potential. It knows full well that it is a place full of rats and poverty and suffering. It also knows that it is a place where the misfits and the disowned can escape and find some kind of family.
  
  Rita, David, and Killer are all those disowned misfits. They have all been abandoned in various ways by their families. And they are all surrounded by the constant destruction of their community by AIDS. David has the virus, and continues to grapple with what he already knows lies ahead for him. He is a brilliant man who will soon die far too young and as much as he may want to make his loss an epic tragedy, he already knows that it will be just another in a long parade of weary funerals. Rita also lives surrounded by death, and still struggling with the neverending pain inflicted on her by her parents, and through all of it has to get through each day, still looking for love and friendship and some kind of meaning.
  
  The style varies between the sections, David has his own clear voice, and Killer's section has a loose fluidity that makes it almost an intermission as she spends much of it in bed with her lover. Rita's story bookends their two, and at the very end there is an unusual appendix that is initially quite confusing but wow is it a dagger to the gut once you see what it is. One of the most interesting structural narrative tricks I've seen, and I say this as a person who really loves structural narrative tricks.
  
  At first I was a little hesitant to read a book about the AIDS crisis that wasn't written by a gay man, but Schulman has more than sufficient credentials. She was an active member and founder of some of the most important activist and artist groups of the time and has been one of the most active documentarians of it. After all, what else can those left behind do but make sure to leave a witness?
• 
  Erik

  Sarah Schulman's LGBTQ+ classic, Rat Bohemia is a tale of queer joy in the face material and social insufficiencies.
  
  Rita Mae Weems grew up the daughter of a single father in Jackson Heights, Queens, where she lived until her father found her in bed with another girl. At age 16, Rita escaped into the city, living like the rats that populate the urban landscape. In the city, she pieced together a chose family of other queer outcasts, and watched as many of her gay male queer family died of AIDS. Throughout the book, Rita - and her friends David and Killer - reflect on their queer lives and the joys they've found and reflect on how life could have been different if they'd been straight. And in the end, they find happiness in their outcast, queer, rat-bohemian lives.
  
  Schulman is a stalwart of queer writing, and I can now see why Rat Bohemia is considered one of the classics of American LGBTQ+ literature. The book challenges so many norms about queer life and encourages queer readers to see the happiness that comes from coming out and being who they are. Though at times the book certainly feels dated to a 21st-century reader, the moral of the book itself remain classic: queer babes, who you are is who you were meant to be and that fact should make you feel joyous.
• 
  diario_de_um_leitor_pjv

  Lido no âmbito da iniciativa #leradoença
• 
  Toni

  I will admit that I picked this book up because of its title. I had heard of Sarah Schulman, mostly in the context of theatre and activism, but couldn’t quite remember if I had read any of her work. So, when I saw Rat Bohemia I had a bit of an “I need to read a book with that title” moment.
  
  This book got to me. It’s tough and unsentimental, and the characters aren’t that likeable, but it absolutely sings in parts. Schulman’s writing is so weird and wonderful – her words and sentences stretch meaning and understanding yet retain a visceral beauty throughout. The scene of the book is a particularly harrowing snapshot of the urban margins of NYC in the mid 80’s, when the streets were as dirty as the needles and seemingly every corner was inhabited by the living ghosts of the queer communities ravaged by AIDS. Schulman lives this world and clearly loves it, treating it with painful honesty, reflection, care, and a little dose of snarky fun. The action takes place through the meanderings of three different narrators; Rita Mae, a rat exterminator, her friend Killer, a woman in love with a somewhat unavailable girl, and David, a gay man afflicted with HIV coming to terms with loss of those closest to him, including his family that refuses to let him into the fold even as he faces the specter of death. While some of it is repetitive, it is definitely captivating and I found myself wanting to keep going and follow this itinerant trio (I really could have read this in one go if I had found the time). I am now an official Schulman convert. I loved this world and look forward visiting the others she has written.
  
  A nice addition to this particular edition was the introduction by Schulman. In it, she laments the loss of the bohemia of her younger years at the hands of gentrification. Giuliani and his ilk swept the streets of the druggies, queers, homeless, prostitutes, etc. until they shined, leaving behind a world of vapid sparkle devoid of the dimensions and diversity that once defined it. I get her frustration and anger at this. I lived in SF in my 20s and felt a unique pit in my stomach when I visited many years later to see that my old neighbourhood had turned into a playground for dot-com employed hipsters – the gang bar on the corner of my street, once prompting me to walk with head up and a sure step, had been replaced by a sushi bar; my favorite taqueria had become a craft beer bar, and the stoops and sidewalks, once filled with kids and abuelas who filled me full of sugared skulls on the day of the dead, were empty and shining in the sun. I get that change happens, and the almighty dollar motivates it more than anything, but what a loss of multi-life. In that sense, Rat Bohemia is a nostalgic love letter to a place that no longer exists – a place wiped out by death and disease the machinations of men who saw opportunity in the wake of despair.
• 
  evelyn

  "Troy was making my deepest wish come true. She was watching me and seeing me and telling me face to face, difficult unpleasantries about myself that I would never otherwise know. That is really what I want from another person."
  
  when characters are kinda insufferable but also can you blame them? And sometimes they produce the most earth shattering sentences that make u want to curl up in a ball and die. yeah!
• 
  RP

  I love Schulman, but found this one hard to get through, though I got through most of it pretty quickly, because Schulman knows how to propel a book forward, and I like the people in it. But, it's a kind of 90s literary fictions that lacks a force of suspense. There's no real plot, which is fine. It's just about people living through the AIDS crisis in NYC, and that is enough to make a book interesting and emotional and vital, isn't it? The novel also beautifully exposes the pain and trauma caused by familial homophobia, a subject Schulman writes about with great skill. Her book The Ties That Bind is THE book on the subject. I, personally, seem to like her later novels better! That's ok! :)
  
  This book is really 3 to 3 and 1/2 stars for me, but I gave it four because it's Sarah. She's wonderful and deserves more readers. (also, my star rating is about my enjoyment of the book, and not some declaration of what I think a good or bad book is). God, I'm neurotic. :)
• 
  Daniel Schechtel

  Read in one sitting, amazing novel. Been growing fond of these kind of subculture-character-based novels, in which the main characters are criminals, junkies, prostitutes, homosexuals, blacks, that is, minorities. My perception of the world finds itself totally outdated and reveals itself bourgeois, coward, hypocrite, fearful, insecure, opinionated, judgamental.
  This book shows the hard-core reality of HIV-bearers and homosexuals through out the sixties, seventies, eighties but mainly during the nineties, their enduring struggling inhumane (whatever that means, actually) situation. Some dialogues and passages are just brilliant and left me thinking. This book really constitutes what I call, following W. Benjamin, an Experience.
  
• 
  Madelyn Sundquist

  read this!!
• 
  Greg Thorpe

  This was a typical thrilling/painful read, which is the specific emotional cocktail I now associate with reading Schulman's work (both her fiction and non-fiction). This novel ties the 70s and the 90s together, emotionally and tactically, to deal with some of Schulman's pet themes: dykes, AIDS, gentrification, love and sex. I began reading it while staying in a gentrified Meatpacking District and over successive visits to New York in the last 16 years have lost something of my thrill at being in the city and can only summon it up for certain by immersing myself in fiction like Schulman's, or certain records. But New York owes me nothing and it owes nothing to Schulman's main character Rita Mae either, which is sad because we have both adored it in our own ways. Everything this novel attempts –
  e.g. protracted metaphors, submerged Jewish trauma, first-hand mass death fictionalised, wry humour – it more or less succeeds at, and I haven't quite worked out how but it manages to be historical and post-modern at the same time (I think). If I didn't know her I would assume she had written the dyke equivalent to Coupland's Gen X, but that's only one part of this deceptively complicated work. While I was reading, Schulman was announced as the 2018 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award winner which I have no doubt is perfectly fitting. One of my absolute favourite writers.
  
• 
  Ray

  I just happened to page through the beginning of this book and found that it was actually autographed by Schulman and a note had been written to Kate Bornstein of all people. How awesome!
  
  As for the book itself, as always, Schulman's superb prose and her careful and insightful observations about life were amazing. Especially since she never relents when it comes to holding straight people accountable for the horrible things they can do to queers.
  
  However, I did not really dig the changing point of view. It disrupted the narrative too much. Because Schulman is such a good writer, I presume there was some reason she did this, but i can't really figure out why.
• 
  Stacy Helton

  I have always had the idea for a sociological study on the gay generation gap, which I feel is necessary since at no time in history (and not for much longer) will there be five different generations of gay America overlapping the population. Men of the Greatest Generation, writers like White, Rechy, Holloran, Morrden, and Kramer have left detailed literary studies, alongside historians like Martin Duberman. The boomers came of age with Stonewall and the beginnings of gay rights. Generation X was unfortunate enough to mature with the initial HIV deaths, which also took out a generation of older gay men. Fran Lebowitz argues that a generation of gay artists died, along with the audience who understood the importance of the arts. Then the millennials and Generation Z, who have little in common with the rebels and survivors of a movement and a plague, and in many cases, do not care, nor are they curious. All of this to discuss lesbian novelist and activist Sarah Schulman, whose 1995 novel, Rat Bohemia, examines three younger boomers in 1995 New York City. Rita, an exterminator who kills rats for the city, her best friend Killer, an unemployed plant waterer, and David, a writer in the latter days of HIV. In David, Schulman has created a gay man with a realistic outlook, who has seen the city ravaged in the 1980s and 1990s by AIDS and sees life for the brief dance. David comments on his family's polite exclusion of their son and brother, the funerals he attends, making a striking point when discussing the straight family. David points out that “parental discourse is at such a high pitch that “It is really hard to be angry at your parents if they didn’t rape you or burn you in boiling oil.” They swoop in to give their deceased son an "Episcopal" funeral, and not one thrown by his real family, the network of friends that gay men of that generation that earned the moniker. David discusses the importance of attending ACT UP meetings and becoming entranced with every miracle cure and ponders mentioned (note: Schulman is publishing the history of ACT UP Spring 2021). Even without reading Vito Russo or seeing his documentary, the average consumer of popular culture has, by now, seen or read over a hundred AIDS stories. Like "the letter" that Mouse sends his mother in the Tales of the City series, some stories are creations of a time and a place and are just one reason Maupin is underrated. The idea of AIDS in the days of Grindr and Prep is a far place from those of the Maupin series, Love! Valour! Compassion!, Longtime Companion, and And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts must-read volume of the epidemic from the beginnings. Recently season 2 of Ryan Murphy's Pose examined AIDS in 1990 New York City and hit some of the realism that Schulman injects into Rat Bohemia. If I were writing a freshman paper, I would connect the overabundance and need to kill rats in the city with the same way the city treated its dying gay men. Written in 1995, when Generation X was discovering their own gay literature and films, Schulman realistically portrays the excitement and, more often, the mundanity of gay life and the family structure that existed for the unluckier members of that generation.
• 
  Bill

  "The most common link between all gay people is that at some time in our lives, often extended, our families have treated us shabbily because of our homosexuality." This quote from the book says it all; the story is centered on 3 people abandoned by their families due to just that. I haven't read a lot of lesbian fiction but this book grabbed my attention due to its setting in NYC in the height of the AIDS crisis, and the fact that the author is an activist for AIDS related causes. That involvement gave her insights into the story that I haven't often thought about even having read many such works.
  
  As a gay man I related most to David; the gay character who dies. His funeral brought back so many memories. I didn't find the story dated at all; it still has a emotional impact that many LGBTQ+ and hopefully our allies, will be able to relate to. I recall a drag queen I used to see perform at a local club ending many of her shows with this quote - "Friends are the family we choose for ourselves." Amen!
• 
  Rachel

  this one goes out to all my yes - close to the edge lesbians. we see you
  
  i get up
  i get down
• 
  Charlie Hayes

  Quick and brutal. Really unique. Short enough that everyone should probably read it.
• 
  Mersini

  This was fantastic. It's another book my supervisor recommended to me, and I was wary because I hated the last one, but this one was great. It's a peek into the lives of those disenfranchised in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. It's about the death of so many lgbt+ people, how those left were tired of mourning, and who expected the worst at every moment, and yet, who never stopped living their lives. There is a bit at the end of the book, where the characters realise that they are part of a historical moment, that the lgbt+ movement was in part, due to them, and that's such a slap in the face. The world wouldn't be as it is without those people in the 80s.
  
  I love the title of this book. I love the way the rats are intertwined with the bohemian lifestyle of the characters. The rats are never far away, swarming around New York City, running between the ankles of the characters. I loved Rita's point of view the most. I feel like she was the one I understood the most, the one I felt most connected to. Not because we are similar, but because in some ways she is the most open. The others, David, a gay man who is lonely and dying and watching all his friends die, and Killer, in love with a girl who has a girlfriend, are somewhat removed, somewhat unknowable, even though we read their thoughts. I love that Rita's voice frames the book. It seems fitting, since she is the one connected to the rats via her job.
  
  I feel that there is a whole bunch that I'm missing from this book, that I'll have to read again to understand. I also feel that there is something about the way it's written, the style, loosely connected sentences that sometimes seem like they have little to do with each other. There's something Eileen Myles about it. I think this is the kind of book I'd like to write someday.
• 
  Emily Davies (libraryofcalliope)

  𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘺-𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘳? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵? 𝘓𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵. 𝘉𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦.
  ——
  (Trigger warnings for discussion of AIDS and death)
  So this novel is fucking sad. I generally don’t swear in my book reviews, but there’s no other way to put it. Rat Bohemia tells the story of three people, Rita, David and Killer, two lesbians and one gay man living in the height of the AIDS crisis in New York. The novel isn’t so much angry as exhausted. It does an amazing job of depicting the sheer exhaustion and the normalisation of the events they are living through. When so many of your peers are dying the feelings expressed aren’t simply rage and indignation because those feelings aren’t sustainable 24 hours a day but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel them. David is HIV positive and through him we get the perspective of someone dying from AIDS, and knowing he will be just another in an ever growing list as he struggles with his desire to be remembered, to be exceptional, rather than just another AIDS death. In Rita and Killer we have the perspectives of the lesbians that outlive their male peers. The ones who attend the funerals and are tasked with remembering them even though there’s so many to remember. This novel depicts really complex emotions and I had to take regular breaks from it but it’s such a powerful book and a real insight into the day to day life of gay people at the time.
• 
  Kim

  I'm halfway through this novel, and although it's short, I'm not confident I'll make it to the end. The subject matter is grim, certainly, but that's not the problem. The characters are unlikable and irritating, but that's only part of the problem. The prose is remarkable only in it's lack of clarity in places - some of the similes she uses make no sense to me at all. Many paragraphs I had to read two or three times, and then ultimately I gave up on, unable to understand what she was trying to say. That is a larger part of the problem. But the key problem is, I can't see what the point of the novel is. It reads like a rant from someone's journal, not like a story. There is no plot, not that I'm all that big on plots anyway. But there appears to be no character development, either. In fact, the characters come across as soulless zombies just going through the motions. I get that this is how she views the impact of the AIDS epidemic, I do get that. But without any character development or plot, it is simply exhausting and tedious. And then there are passages where the author's own voice intrudes - it very definitely doesn't sound like whichever character is meant to be narrating the chapter (it is written in alternating first person) - with a series of facts or theories about how badly gay people are treated by their parents and society. Those passages comes across as simply tracts of anger, and they don't fit with the character voices. A very disappointing read.
• 
  Tim

  I'm sorry this keeps getting grouped as Gay/Lesbian lit. It is, but that makes it sound like it doesn't have anything to offer anyone else. It does. It's a sharp, extremely tragic look at a vast part of New York killed off by AIDS and AIDS-related gentrification. The author makes the grotesque but accurate observation that the sudden deaths of 75,000 New Yorkers had a rapid, probably permanent effect on their neighborhoods and the character of the city. Not just for gays, but for everyone under the city's thrall.
  
  Accurate as it probably is, he gentrification argument - literally tacked on in a new intro to this re-release of the 1995 novel - is probably the least important reason to read Rat Bohemia. More affecting is the book's depressingly informative illustration of how completely many families ostracize their gay and lesbian children. And nothing except for White Noise ("Who will die first?") has forced me to think so starkly about death.
  
  The book also manages to be funny, more often than you would probably imagine possible. The final pages wittily illustrate how pinned the characters are to New York, and the appendix, which Schulman bravely allows to speak for itself, provides a bitter and searing sendup of closeted fiction.
• 
  saïd

  Rita Mae Weems est tueuse de rats pour le compte des Services Sanitaires de New York. Ce job, c'est tout ce qu'elle a pu trouver. à la suite d'une longue période d'errance solitaire dans les quartiers les plus pauvres de la Grande Pomme, après que son père l'eut injustement chassée du foyer. David, lui, est écrivain. Séropositif, il s'efforce de dresser un état des lieux sincère de son expérience de la maladie, tandis que sa famille détourne les veux de ses efforts quotidiens pour rester en vie. Killer, quant à elle, s'adonne aux joies d'un amour nouveau dans les bras de la mystérieuse Troy Ruby, poétesse à ses heures et militante de la cause lesbienne. À travers le récit des destins croisés de ces trois personnages, Sarah Schulman dresse un constat sans concession de la souffrance et des interrogations d'êtres privés de l'amour familial et contraints de puiser à d'autres sources l'énergie nécessaire pour trouver leur identité et leur place dans la société.
• 
  Zoe Carney

  A sharply observed novel, incredibly character- and issue-driven without ever actually tripping into being preachy. Those looking for plot will be disappointed; the author is writing about early 90s New York, with the LGBT community crumbling under the weight of the AIDS crisis, where paying for a lover's funeral is as much a rite of passage as a bar mitzvah.
  
  Bleak, heart-breaking, and painfully real, the style is a little jarring in places, like the author didn't trust the reader to get it, maybe? I don't know. I do know that David, one of the three protagonists, made me cry, and that barely ever happens with books.
  
  In short, not an easy read, not if you can in any way identify with those feelings of rejection and isolation. A story of family, friendship, and death that now reads like a deeply personal love letter to all those young people who died.
• 
  Heath

  This was my first Sarah Schulman novel -- I know, as a queer person I really should have read her a loooooonnnnnggggg time ago, but better late than never. I appreciated the structure of Rat Bohemia and the characters were ones with which I could identify and empathize. There were so many haunting passages in this book that when I read them it felt too close to real for myself and my experiences as a queer person in this world. The parallel between AIDS and rats throughout this book is a well-executed metaphor that sort of hovers in the background, but cuts deep in the magnitude of loss and societal/governmental implications.
• 
  Kym Chapple

  "we exist together in that moment of panic wheremy thoughts turn to the sky" 12
  
  "as for me I don't have a particular sexual taste. I just like the part where she shows her desire" p34
  
  "alone has such a different feeling now Iit is all about waiting for you" 132
  
  "I know he wanted his funeral to be the catalyst for the revolution. Who doesn't? And with wach AIDs funeral the possibility always lingers. But you can tell within the first ten minutes that it is not going to go that way. People were not furious, just exhausted." 157
  
  
• 
  Mark

  Schulman follows several gay characters living among the rats in 1990s Lower East Side, New York. Call it Rent without the happy music. Subtext running through book is the heartbreak of parental rejection of their gay children. Beautiful, sometimes graphic writing. Rats are metaphor for how rejected gay kids live in the shadows while parents pretend they don't exist. Parents live on the rage of shattered dreams when their children "chose" to be gay.
• 
  Rashmi Tiwari

  So this book belongs up there with Angels in America and And The Band Played On as a really excellent history of a time when HIV was a certain death sentence in America. It takes place in New York in the 80's and is so clear about the life and place and atmosphere of that time that I couldn't help but be sucked in by all four narrators of the story. It's a quick read and I definitely feel like I walked away having read a very realistic history of a time gone by.
• 
  Chloë Waters

  I read this the same time I re-watched "Angels in America" (my favorite play.) They both are about young working gay people in NY in the 80s with AIDS problems, drug problems, money problems, relationships problems. "Rat Bohemia" is from the point of you of a lesbian though who works for the NYC Rat Control.
• 
  Amanda

  3 friends in the NYC gay community in the middle of the AIDS crisis. Surprisingly this book makes a powerful statement on the meaning of family and who becomes it when your own family abandons you. This book made me laugh and cry from one line to the next. It is most excellent.