Legendary queer activist, feminist and author Sarah Schulman will be in Dublin this month to speak as part of the Where We Live festival. As Ireland gears up for the referendum on the 8th amendment, she talks to Roísin McVeigh about how successful movements are created and sustained, and the challenges activism must overcome in the age of the hashtag.

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then they came around.” I almost crash the car.

This is the story Sarah Schulman tells in her book Gentrification of the Mind, of how she came to co-found ACT UP Oral History Project with Jim Hubbard in 2001. She was in disbelief that after all of the pain, persecution and ignorance that AIDS sufferers had endured, that it was now simply perceived as something that the public “came around” to. She refused to believe that this would be the official history of AIDS, that everyone eventually just came around, because of course, that’s not what happened. That’s not what happened with the civil rights movement, that’s not how marriage equality in Ireland was achieved and that’s not how the impending referendum to repeal the eighth amendment was brought about. In all of these cases, people united in anger over injustice and forced change.

By 2010, Schulman and Hubbard had conducted 128 two-to-four hour interviews with surviving members of ACT UP. Hubbard’s film United in Anger: a History of ACT UP premiered in 2012 at MoMA and has been screened all over the world since. Yet this momentous pursuit is just one part of Schulman’s expansive life’s work. It’s possible that Sarah Schulman is one of the most underrated writers living today. For someone that is relatively unknown in the grand scheme of things, Schulman has had an astonishingly prolific life. She has published eleven novels, six works of non-fiction and written numerous plays. Margaret Atwood recently referred to Schulman’s latest book Conflict Is Not Abuse as “the book of our times.” As an activist, she has been relentless. Most prominent is her aforementioned involvement in the AIDS movement, but she has also campaigned against anti-abortion legislation and is a founding member of Lesbian Avengers. Speaking with her was a lesson in the trajectory of a successful movement, from rallying support in the beginning and staking your claim along the way to the preservation of its legacy in the aftermath.