People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

Part of the Vintage Stonewall anniversary series, this is a blistering 90s novel about love in the time of AIDS, featuring a fictionalised Donald Trump as its villain.

It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away.

New York, late 80s. The AIDS crisis has taken hold and the world is on the brink of imploding. Ronald Horne, an entitled property tycoon, lords over the city. Kate, a successful artist, lives in Manhattan with Peter, her husband and fellow creative. She’s having an affair with Molly, a younger gay woman who, when she’s not working a dead-end job, is caring for sick friends.

At one of many funerals during an unbearably hot summer, Molly learns about Justice, the guerrilla activist group fighting for people with AIDS. She immediately signs up. Kate isn’t so sure. And Peter is by the changes he’s seeing in his city, its inhabitants, and most crucially, his wife. Soon the trio learn that a tragedy of this kind not only warps our closest relationships but how anger - and its absence - can make the difference between life and death.

'Strong, nervy and challenging' - The New York Times

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Historical Fiction, Lesbian, Historical, Novels

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

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. She is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

Reviews

[Merritt K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Schulman once told me that a novel is a commitment to the idea that other people are real, and People in Trouble exemplifies that. Everyone in the book is real—Peter is eminently hateable as the self-involved, pathetic straight man; Kate is recognizable as the male-partnered queer woman who just can't wrap her head around her girlfriend's separatist ideology; and Molly is the embittered but still hopeful classic New York homosexual.

Oh, and it has to be said—the musical RENT stole most of its best plot points and contextual details from this book, including the "AZT break" moment. But RENT is about straight people, and AIDS is completely decontextualized from any political movement or social conditions. Additionally, the enemy in RENT is nefarious "development" threatening the characters' bohemian (tourist) lifestyle, while the antagonist looming over People in Trouble is a Donald Trump stand-in, which sadly makes this book more relevant than ever.

RENT is one of the first big instances of queer people's art being stolen, repackaged, and sold back to us (and straight people). For more on that, see Schulman's Stagestruck. And read this book.

[Helena Scanlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can’t remember the last time i finished a book in a day to be honest, but Schulman’s writing made this book hard to put down. i loved reading about gay women in AIDS activism, written by someone who experienced it firsthand. it may have been written in the late 80s but this book is still so relevant today - the theme of liberal self-satisfaction permeates the entire book and really made me, as a reader, question my own complicity in the status quo. and the love triangle is such a clever plot device to showcase this i cant get over it !!!

skimming the other reviews of this book, i can certainly see the validity of some of the critiques - is the only straight white man in the book annoying as fuck? yes! but i ask you, is that not the teensiest bit true to life? the characters felt like real people to me - both in their personal life and in their politics - and i loved that.

there were definitely several points (the whole book) where i just wanted kate to cop the fuck on but hey, she was living her life. i must also admit, i did find the ending a bit lacklustre, but i think i’ll appreciate it more if/when i reread the book.

overall i would recommend to a friend, i’m really looking forward to reading more of Schulman’s work. she captures and depicts queer camraderie so well! someone read it so we can talk about the Trump foreshadowing pls (freaked) !

ps apparently whoever wrote Rent plagiarised this book and didn’t credit Schulman - never seen Rent but wow, you’d be shook

pps molly is an icon, ugh, what a queen.

[Fikri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every other comment on this book will tell you it's what Jonathan Larson stole plot points for Rent from, and you can kinda see it (protest performance, "AZT break", the whole NYC setting). Annoyingly, however, the main thing they have in common is an overemphasis on a cishet white dude — Peter may not be the main protagonist, but I had to spend so much more time with him on the page than I had to with Mark onstage and I resent it. Also, I'd take Maureen's unapologetic bisexuality over Kate's internalised homophobia any day. The political parts of the novel and secondary characters are excellent and I really, really wish there'd been more of them, instead of the boring-ass love triangle I had to suffer through instead.

[I. Merey · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Well,” Kate said sometime later in that conversation, “I don’t think we’re as far apart as you say. I mean, when the shit comes down, we’ll both be on the same side of the barricades.”
“The shit is already down.”
“I mean, when people are dying in the streets.”
“Kate, people ARE dying in the streets. It’s not the movies, where the world divides into freedom fighters and brownshirts. Here in New York City there are people who take action and people who do nothing. Doing nothing is a position. It means giving approval without having to actively do so.”

I had read this book ages ago and a conversation these last weeks made me go back and pick it up. You’ve already maybe heard that this is the novel RENT had chopped and remixed and defanged without ever crediting the author, but that’s not even the best part. At one point, the whiny white protag complaining that it is much harder to be a man than it used to be is hanging out in a New York tycoon’s luxury hotel with a colonialist theme. The drinks are all called shit like Ceylon Sling and Rhodesia Refresher, and the male bathroom is marked Bwana. The bathrooms are designed to look like blood diamond mines. At one point, the owner—Ronald Horne—walks in. The same owner who will try to evict hundreds of HIV-positive male tenants from his various properties to pull luxus housing up over the demolished sites. I can’t help but wonder if “Ronald” seemed like some unreal parody of moneyed evil back when it was published in 1990. Today? Just your run-of-the-mill hyperrich megalomaniac.
It’s been a while since I read characters this real and this raw. Painful to see how much has not changed, cannot change. Nobody here can be really likable—either because they refuse to see what’s going on, or because they see it all too well and it’s made them too hard for others to like them—or it’s made them give up.
“Another friend of Molly’s died.
‘That’s the problem with having friends,’ she said. ‘You have to watch them suffer and die.’"
This sorrowful and tender queer story about AIDS, housing activism, and the United States slowly grinding the life out of you is just as good now as when I first read it.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this at Waterstones in their 2nd hand LGBT section as it was the only fiction book they had about queer women. It was actually much more about activism, gay men dying from aids and the problems of homeleessness in New York. It was really interesting and had some amazing passages. The only problem with it was that the characters were all rather unlikeable. The portrayal of a bisexual woman in an open relationship seemed terribly judgemental and she was pretty horrible. Her husband was just atrocious. The other characters were nice, but had much less of their own story told. Despite that I still enjoyed it. I saw that Sarah has also written a non-fiction book about activism and the gay community in New York in the 90s and I'm tempted to pick that up. This was a really sad book in many ways, the setting with everyone dying was heartbreaking. It made me very glad that the drugs have improved to take care of people with HIV and was a stark insight into what it used to be like.

[Gloria · Rating 5 out of 5]

ok I'm not giving it 5 stars because it's perfect but it was perfect for me to read right now - the mix of queer life in New York just at the peak of the AIDS epidemic there, ACT-UP, plus hypergentrification, people being shitty, addicted, pathetic, sad, scared, people in trouble. I don't think it's optimistic but there is a lot of space in this novel for a politics of mutual care, survival, dreaming and transformation.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

If only someone really had assassinated Donald Trump in 1990.

[charlotte, · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rep: lesbian mc, bi mc

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

It very quickly became apparent while I was reading this that it was one of the best novels I've read (this year? Ever?).

[Silvio111 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read People in Trouble when it was published in the early '90s, in the thick of the AIDS crisis. AT the time, Schulman was revered as an artist in the LGBT community who believed that art was not enough; activism was also necessary.

Schulman's novels documented the New York lesbian scene set in the context of the AIDS crisis; gay men were the majority of people getting sick, but lesbians stepped up to the plate, as women do, and brought their considerable organizing skills, developed during decades of feminist activism, to the gay male community, who were new to it.

I just re-read People in Trouble for the first time in those 20-odd years (hard to believe that much time has gone by.) While I still have a huge respect for Schulman (especially after reading her most recent nonfiction, THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND, where I learned that 20 years on, instead of scrambling in the mean streets of the Village, she now teaches literature on Staten Island in a public university, and presumably can now make ends meet, but she still has her heart firmly in activism and community service.

All that aside, looking at this somewhat dated novel, which by that very measure serves as a time capsule of the times, I did find that her straight male and female characters are cardboard straw men; she is indicting the art community whose values border on the smug and superficial as they are surrounded by the pain and tragedy of New York society disintegrating around them. Each chapter of this novel is titled with the character whose voice it contains. Kate (bisexual married woman cheating on her husband with a lesbian but she herself does not call herself a lesbian; ever met one of those?), Peter (straight, self-absorbed male artist), and Molly (Lesbian, having an affair with Kate and paying for it, immersed in the scene). This time around, after the first 30 pages, I found myself skipping the Kate and Peter chapters and just reading the Molly chapters. (And I NEVER do that!)

What can I say; time goes by,not every novel holds up. Still, as a testament to the times, People in Trouble is part of a continuum of lesbian novels Schulman has produced, just in case anyone forgets what people went though during the first ten years of the AIDS crisis.

One last note: It is worth pointing out that the AIDS activism group, "JUSTICE" referred to in the book is actually based on the real group,
"ACT UP," whose trademark uniform was black t-shirts with the slogan "ACT UP" over a pink triangle. To see hundreds of these members at a "die-in" in Washington DC, where they would march down the street together and then all lie down in the road was enough to send shivers down my spine. I also have a memory of a protest in Rockville, MD at the Health and Human Services building (they were protesting the lack of government research being done into AIDS) where dozens of police officers wearing rubber gloves (I think they were yellow, but I can't remember but it was a garish sight) sent the most chilling message to the public that PWAs (People with AIDS) were just "germs." There was quite an outcry over that. So even though the scenes in the book were short, they brought back a lot of memories.(less)

[Elizabeth Addison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this mainly to form my own opinion on whether Jonathan Larsen plagiarized it to write Rent, and I’ve come to the conclusion that unless writing a musical that takes place during the same time period and also features queer people, homelessness, and art counts as plagiarizing, I don’t think that argument holds much water. None of the plot lines up at all, and while there are extremely vague parallels one could draw between Kate and Maureen, Rent is just a totally different thing.

This book isn’t really my style prose-wise but I thought it had some thoughtful things to say about queerness and the AIDS crisis. It was interesting to see what was incredibly dated and what still feels relevant and poignant today.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1990, this is very of its time especially in the way that language is used to talk about queer people and people with AIDS. I loved he writing and the characters, and while it's obviously a difficult book - all about AIDS and grassroots organisations and campaigning for treatment and better services - it's easy to read and not as traumatic as other books I've read about the AIDS crisis as it focusses more on Molly - a lesbian who is on the outskirts of the crisis and trying to help. There's an horrendous property developer who is apparently based on Trump who gets what's coming to him, but I thought that re-issuing this with Trump currently as president was a pretty smart move.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

a chilling call to action while the banal drama of everyday life and tragic beauty of a changing new york passes you by. perhaps the best opening lines to a novel i've ever read:

"It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television."

doesn't let you forget that to tell a new york story is to live alongside other people. the changing vista of the camera. who you choose to see, choose to ignore. who's buying your art. who's buying your building. your fellow tenants. the 24-hour narrated news cycle at a dive bar. street people. the pretensions of a white artist interested in "revolutionary form" towards his Black intern.

"suffering can be stopped.. but it can never be avenged, os survivors watch television. men die, their lovers wait to get sick. people eat garbage or worry about their careers. some lives are more important than others. some deaths are shocking, some invisible. we are a people in trouble. we do not act."

[Fridzd · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 😭😭😭 haluun ostaa tän ja lukee uudestaan

[Nick Melloan-ruiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very of its time in the best way

[Charlott · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schulman’s short 1990 novel was brought up again recently when a journalist noticed that the main named villain in this novel is none other than a roman a clef edition of Donald Trump. Named Ronald Horne, he looms less as a political figure than a dark vague corpulence embodying the worst parts of the 1980s fetish with wealth and power. At the time of writing, Horne and the snarky passages about his dastardly new developments along the waterfront/his offers of sponsorship to corporate art would have rung timely , if a little too pissed off and earnest to seem sophisticated in a landscape where multilayered allusions and ambivalence tend to get more accolades. Today, of course, a reread of this text makes schulman appear at the very least focused and prescient if not prophetic about the direction that New York and America were heading. But leaving the analysis of this as “the villain is Donald Trump!” is limiting.

If the main named villain of the piece is Ronald Horne and all he stands for as a developer hungry for power , the less obvious villains of “people in trouble” are complacency, lack of empathy, and a tendency to excuse oneself when confronted with moral dilemmas. As noted by Schulman, the musical RENT bears startling similarities to this novel in terms of characters and plot components—a half closeted woman artist about to leave her straight male partner, the straight man and his own art and concerns, the queer scene around them, questions of rent strike and politics and AIDS and homelessness. The main difference in terms of content is that where in the late nineties RENT lionized white artists who hate their parents and made poverty porn art and drink and do drugs and go on rent strike for no apparent reason in a milieu where much seems wrong but nobody can satisfactorily explain why, People In Trouble looks at similarly semi-dumb, mostly-oblivious (slightly older) white artists in a similar world, but has a clear vision of the material causes of the problems they see around them. Where RENT and many narratives of HIV and homelessness in New York interpret the issue as senseless tragic decay that can be combated only by uplifting song and a will to continue to party, Schulman paints a portrait of a city in which HIV based housing discrimination is casting people out on the streets, racist rezoning is changing the face of neighborhoods, drug addiction is met with callous ambivalence and lack of services, and white New Yorkers feign innocence and shock.

If the villain of the novel is complicity and silence, the hero is collective action. To be honest, none of Schulman’s main characters are particularly good people. Even the lesbian who the closeted woman leaves her boy for is at best morally conflicted. The real hero of the story is an organization meant to be a fantasy version of ACT UP. There are no visible obvious heroic leaders of this fantasy organization, and their activity takes place mainly in the background, circling closer and closer to the story. On the one hand, I sort of resent the lack of gay male characters and scenes in the novel —the only gay male characters we see are friends of the story’s main actors. On the other hand, I think it speaks to Schulman’s very consistent politics that there are no lionized figures from her own group saving the day for all New York. Instead, salvation (or rather its beginning) comes in the form of decentralized radical action which eventually prompts people to join in and fight back —and perhaps set a real estate developer on fire in a pile of corporate art.

Schulman has always puzzled me as being both an optimist and a pessimist—friendly and outgoing and willing to talk with almost everyone and build coalitions across enormous differences while at the same time having a very cynical view of most activist movements and modern political efforts toward meaningful change. I don’t know if her approach is effective at getting what she wants to get done done. Some people find her condescending or just weird. But this story was good for me to read in order to understand better where she and others from her generation come to us from.

[Meri · Rating 2 out of 5]

had heard such great things about this novel, and of course had heard that RENT had plagiarized from it. Well, I could not engage with the characters at all--they were so detached, from each other and from the reader. And as a huge RENT fan who is quite familiar with the show and the soundtrack, I see little resemblance except the general neighborhood of the East Village, 20 years later.

I really wanted to like this book, and maybe I'll re-visit it some day...but I was disappointed with it. i RARELY do not finish novels, but I could not finish this one. I hated the characters and didn't want to spend any more time with them.

Some lovely descriptions from the author throughout the parts of the book I did read.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a weird, weird book. The dialogue was stilted. The prose was meandering and robotic. There was just enough surrealism (especially toward the end of the story) to make things really strange.

I’m pretty sure I got the gist of what the political message of this book but it’s very much a product of its time. The language used for gender identity and sexual orientation was… dated.

I guess this was sort of interesting as far as getting an idea of how bad the AIDS crisis was. But I didn’t really connect with the story at all. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t read the entire book but this one wasn’t my favorite.

[Zweegas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is okay. Its biggest problem is that the three main characters are also the three least interesting characters. Just because the setting and the subject matter are interesting doesn't make a story interesting, but it doesn't hurt. All this book really has going for it is a good setting which it squanders on a cliche love triangle. The emphasis of the book is these three boring characters in a standard love triangle, with a radical historical movement going on in the background.

[Natazzz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gives a great impression of life in the late eighties in NY city during the height of the AIDS epidemic. The stories involving the gay men going through it is done heartbreakingly well.

It’s just such a shame the majority of the story revolves around a boring love triangle with horrible people. We all know that what the world really needs is reading about this time from a straight cishet white male perspective.

This book is very much the product of its time, which is both good and bad. It also could’ve done without the artsy bullshit.

[jaden · Rating 3 out of 5]

more of a 3.5 ive been meaning to read this forever ever since some loser in a discord server told me that rent the musical copied this book which is crazy the only similarities being eclectic gay people doing activism during the height of the aids crisis like why do ppl think that i have no clue... hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby

anyways this book was alright and something about it makes me want to read more of this authors work.. but shrug there wasnt really a good plot here... Just People in trouble doing some shit

[Bryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is kind of off the point, but: maybe not the best book to read while you're going through a rough break-up.

[shamaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. wowowowowow. read this

[Bien]

- deze heb ik echt veel minder graag gelezen dan de vorige twee van Sarah Schulman. Nog steeds wel een goed boek!

- Naar het einde toe vond ik het wel steeds beter worden, waarschijnlijk omdat het minder over de love triangle ging haha

- want ja die love triangle was frustrerend!!! ik wou in het boek kunnen kruipen en de protagonisten bij de schouders schudden en hen dan vertellen dat er zoiets bestaat als ENM en polyamorie en GEZONDE COMMUNICATIE en dat ze daar waarschijnlijk gelukkiger van zouden worden aaaaaah

- I <3 u Molly, you did nothing wrong, u deserve better, don't listen to the haters <333

- FUCK PETER MET ZIJN FRAGILE MASCULINITY EN STOMME OPINIES

- *SPOLIER*: at some point plegen ze massa fraude met credit cards als mutual aid voor hun community en honestly da's echt een goed idee

- heb dit boek zeker drie keer naar de andere kant van de kamer gegooid omdat ik zo boos werd van het neoliberale en homophobic geweld en de pijn en boosheid van de aids crisis! Sarah Schulman knows how to portray a people in trouble!

oke besties sorry voor mijn ongestructureerde gedachten die ik hier altijd neergooi, nu ga ik stoppen maar eerst een mooie quote over revolutie:

As long as the people fighting for change are smaller than the institutions that control information, their activities will be misrepresented, their impact minimized and their humanity questioned. the only way to overcome the machiniry is to become bigger than it is. So that, one day, more people will be participating in the event than watching it on television. That is called a revolution."

[Greg S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess quite an important novel, chronicling the AIDS epidemic in late 80s New York. But for all the political activism and emotional backdrop the novel mostly ploddingly follows a love triangle between a dull straight couple and the wife’s lesbian lover. It’s a shame that the relationship writing wasn’t as punchy as the rest.

[Derek Moody · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 round up to 4. Would be higher if the characters weren’t so awful half the time (and Peter about 95% of the time.) great writing about some terrible people.

[Claire Wathen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around.”

[Dearbhla O’Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5☆

[Jen O'Horror · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful novel that puts things into perspective brilliantly. It focuses on the AIDS pandemic in New York, but from the perspective of queer women directly and indirectly involved in Justice (Act UP). It is beautifully queer and challenges labels and boundaries in a real and personal manner. Highly recommend.