What do you think?
On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies, and Conflicts
224 pages, Paperback
Published March 25, 2025
About the author
Benjamin Heim Shepard
10 books2 followersBenjamin Shepard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Human Service at New York School of Technology/City University of New York. He received his Masters at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and training in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in their Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. As a social worker he worked in AIDS housing settings from San Francisco to Chicago to New York, where he directed the start ups for two congregate housing programs for people with HIV/AIDS, as well as served as Deputy Director at CitiWide Harm Reduction.
He has done organizing work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets New York, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd Response Team, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, the More Gardens Coalition, and the Times UP Bike Lane Liberation Front and Garden Working Groups. Combing ethnography with social change activism, his work considers the interplay between theory and practice.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Read
January 10, 2026i adored the source material of the often invisible social binds and conflict that constitute movement work. a heartfelt reminder to get your heart broken, fail, and keep organizing anyway. sometimes the mode of storytelling through oral history was rich (isn’t that always how we get the best gossip?). sometimes it defamiliarized the authors voice and made the insertions of his own opinions and arguments awkward.
January 18, 2026
A bought this book to help me gain some insight about conflict after a very close friend had an affair while married to my best friend.I was looking for advice about how affinity groups move on from such violation of trust. This book didnt help me with that 😂 Its more about conflict within movements but I found this book intriguing and it gave me alot to think about when Im working towards goals with people who dont see exactly eye to eye with me.
August 2, 2025
Book Review: On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies, and Conflicts by Benjamin Heim Shepard
Rating: 4.7/5
Benjamin Heim Shepard’s On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting is a revelatory exploration of the emotional scaffolding that sustains social movements. Drawing from oral histories with over thirty organizers across AIDS, queer rights, Occupy, and labor movements, Shepard—a veteran activist and social worker—interrogates how friendships fuel resistance and how conflicts can either fracture or fortify collective action. This is not a dry theoretical treatise but a living archive of movement wisdom, pulsating with laughter, grief, and hard-won insights.
Strengths and Emotional Resonance
As someone with an interest in grassroots organizing, I was struck by Shepard’s nuanced portrayal of activist friendships as both lifelines and lightning rods. The chapter “Queering Friendship: Activism and Comradeship” resonated deeply, particularly its discussion of how queer spaces transform strangers into chosen family through shared struggle. Shepard’s background in social work shines in his analysis of safer spaces, where he balances idealism with pragmatic advice, such as navigating interpersonal tensions without derailing political goals.
The oral histories themselves are the book’s heartbeat. One interviewee’s reflection on ACT UP’s “joyful militancy” brought tears to my eyes, reminding me that movements thrive not just on anger but on the radical act of caring for one another. Shepard’s inclusion of his clashes with comrades (e.g., debates over protest tactics during Occupy) adds raw authenticity, modeling how vulnerability can be a political tool.
Constructive Criticism
While the book excels in capturing emotional dynamics, it occasionally skims the surface of structural analysis. A deeper engagement with how race and class intersect with activist friendships—beyond the chapter on “Safer Spaces”—would have strengthened its framework. The interlude “Anarchy Is for Lovers”, though poetic, feels tangential; its themes could have been woven more tightly into the preceding chapters.
Summary Takeaways:
- A masterclass in movement-building—where friendship is the glue and conflict the whetstone.
- Shepard proves that the most radical act might be learning to fight with each other, not just for each other.
- For anyone who’s ever loved, lost, or locked arms in protest—this is the book we’ve needed.
Final Thoughts
On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting is essential reading for organizers, scholars of social movements, and anyone curious about the human infrastructure behind headlines. Shepard’s blend of oral history and reflexive analysis offers a blueprint for sustaining activism in an era of burnout and polarization.
Thank you to the publisher, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, and Edelweiss for the free review copy. This book earns a 4.7/5—a point deducted only for its occasional theoretical gaps, but otherwise a luminous contribution to movement literature.
Key Takeaways for Academic Readers:
-Oral History as Praxis: Demonstrates how personal narratives can document movement strategies often excluded from formal histories.
-Conflict as Pedagogy: Challenges romanticized notions of unity, framing disagreements as generative forces.
-Teachability: Ideal for courses on social work, community organizing, and queer studies, with case studies on harm reduction and labor solidarity.
For classroom use: Pair with Sheila Rowbotham’s Dreamers of a New Day to compare historical and contemporary models of activist kinship.
Rating: 4.7/5
Benjamin Heim Shepard’s On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting is a revelatory exploration of the emotional scaffolding that sustains social movements. Drawing from oral histories with over thirty organizers across AIDS, queer rights, Occupy, and labor movements, Shepard—a veteran activist and social worker—interrogates how friendships fuel resistance and how conflicts can either fracture or fortify collective action. This is not a dry theoretical treatise but a living archive of movement wisdom, pulsating with laughter, grief, and hard-won insights.
Strengths and Emotional Resonance
As someone with an interest in grassroots organizing, I was struck by Shepard’s nuanced portrayal of activist friendships as both lifelines and lightning rods. The chapter “Queering Friendship: Activism and Comradeship” resonated deeply, particularly its discussion of how queer spaces transform strangers into chosen family through shared struggle. Shepard’s background in social work shines in his analysis of safer spaces, where he balances idealism with pragmatic advice, such as navigating interpersonal tensions without derailing political goals.
The oral histories themselves are the book’s heartbeat. One interviewee’s reflection on ACT UP’s “joyful militancy” brought tears to my eyes, reminding me that movements thrive not just on anger but on the radical act of caring for one another. Shepard’s inclusion of his clashes with comrades (e.g., debates over protest tactics during Occupy) adds raw authenticity, modeling how vulnerability can be a political tool.
Constructive Criticism
While the book excels in capturing emotional dynamics, it occasionally skims the surface of structural analysis. A deeper engagement with how race and class intersect with activist friendships—beyond the chapter on “Safer Spaces”—would have strengthened its framework. The interlude “Anarchy Is for Lovers”, though poetic, feels tangential; its themes could have been woven more tightly into the preceding chapters.
Summary Takeaways:
- A masterclass in movement-building—where friendship is the glue and conflict the whetstone.
- Shepard proves that the most radical act might be learning to fight with each other, not just for each other.
- For anyone who’s ever loved, lost, or locked arms in protest—this is the book we’ve needed.
Final Thoughts
On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting is essential reading for organizers, scholars of social movements, and anyone curious about the human infrastructure behind headlines. Shepard’s blend of oral history and reflexive analysis offers a blueprint for sustaining activism in an era of burnout and polarization.
Thank you to the publisher, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, and Edelweiss for the free review copy. This book earns a 4.7/5—a point deducted only for its occasional theoretical gaps, but otherwise a luminous contribution to movement literature.
Key Takeaways for Academic Readers:
-Oral History as Praxis: Demonstrates how personal narratives can document movement strategies often excluded from formal histories.
-Conflict as Pedagogy: Challenges romanticized notions of unity, framing disagreements as generative forces.
-Teachability: Ideal for courses on social work, community organizing, and queer studies, with case studies on harm reduction and labor solidarity.
For classroom use: Pair with Sheila Rowbotham’s Dreamers of a New Day to compare historical and contemporary models of activist kinship.
May 12, 2026
In this fiery, evocative work published on Common Notions, On Activism, Friendships and Fighting, Benjamin Heim Shepard weaves together auto-ethnographic first-hand accounts from more than thirty U.S.-based movement organizers, in movements ranging from ACT-UP, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Lower East Side collective, to paint a story of social justice activism involving social justice movements and the webs of support, conflict and resolution within.
Citing contentious friendship-relationships between organizers, writers and activists, like Marx and Engels, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and others, Shepard uses accounts of protests, of conflict and transformation, to paint a multifaceted story of both the pain of conflict and political and ethical disagreements but also the strength and sharpening of values and found family that can be found among social movement friends.
Through these “rebel friendships”, I have sometimes found worlds of joy, lust, energy and revitalization, love, clarity, joy, bliss, and my own sharpening of values, coupled with deep pain, grief, divisiveness and loss. The accounts in this book are truly magnetic and pulled directly from social movement history across decades of experiences in the United States. In reading this book, I reflected often about my own experiences as a 36 year old, queer, trans organizer who’s organized half my life, of falling in love, of falling into beds, of hate and conflict, of the movementfriends and comrades I’ve loved and lost, the political theory and the cities we’d explored along the way.
Shepard masterfully mobilizes qualitative interview accounts from firsthand participants in social movements to try to answer the questions: how do we find our friends, who do we find friendship and support in and how do we build the better world we want to see? These contemporary accounts definitely created substantive food for thought and are a true meal of a book.
Citing contentious friendship-relationships between organizers, writers and activists, like Marx and Engels, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and others, Shepard uses accounts of protests, of conflict and transformation, to paint a multifaceted story of both the pain of conflict and political and ethical disagreements but also the strength and sharpening of values and found family that can be found among social movement friends.
Through these “rebel friendships”, I have sometimes found worlds of joy, lust, energy and revitalization, love, clarity, joy, bliss, and my own sharpening of values, coupled with deep pain, grief, divisiveness and loss. The accounts in this book are truly magnetic and pulled directly from social movement history across decades of experiences in the United States. In reading this book, I reflected often about my own experiences as a 36 year old, queer, trans organizer who’s organized half my life, of falling in love, of falling into beds, of hate and conflict, of the movementfriends and comrades I’ve loved and lost, the political theory and the cities we’d explored along the way.
Shepard masterfully mobilizes qualitative interview accounts from firsthand participants in social movements to try to answer the questions: how do we find our friends, who do we find friendship and support in and how do we build the better world we want to see? These contemporary accounts definitely created substantive food for thought and are a true meal of a book.
August 27, 2025
Shepard uses fifty interviews with activists to impart lessons on how interpersonal relationships can help or hurt social movements. The biggest takeaway is that when activist groups parallel systems of domination that exist in larger society, they hurt everyone involved, including the movement itself.
Favorite quotes:
"Protests gain in power if they reflect the world we want to create"
"Occupy began as an ideal of challenging inequalities, welcoming strangers, and seeing through differences. Soon enough, the misogyny, status- hungry conflicts, and contradictions of our culture weighed it down, and it came to function as a microcosm of it all."
"At its most egalitarian, friendship helps us experience a tentative sensation of 'freedom and equality' - however fleeting - what Jacques Derrida saw as a space for 'democratic friends'"
Favorite quotes:
"Protests gain in power if they reflect the world we want to create"
"Occupy began as an ideal of challenging inequalities, welcoming strangers, and seeing through differences. Soon enough, the misogyny, status- hungry conflicts, and contradictions of our culture weighed it down, and it came to function as a microcosm of it all."
"At its most egalitarian, friendship helps us experience a tentative sensation of 'freedom and equality' - however fleeting - what Jacques Derrida saw as a space for 'democratic friends'"
February 10, 2026
Struggled with this one because the people, movements, and stories are important and from the kind of folks I care deeply for--it is just not the way oral histories should be told.
Instead of letting the folks speak like in a Studs Terkel book, the author quotes multiple people on each page based loosely around the themes of the chapter. Throw in the academic-style quotes of other author;s and theories, etc. and you get a choppy narrative. This obscures what is actually being shared, hiding meaning behind a swirl of information.
Instead of letting the folks speak like in a Studs Terkel book, the author quotes multiple people on each page based loosely around the themes of the chapter. Throw in the academic-style quotes of other author;s and theories, etc. and you get a choppy narrative. This obscures what is actually being shared, hiding meaning behind a swirl of information.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews