Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist,[1] and AIDS historian.

[6] Schulman published her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, in 1984, which was followed by Girls, Visions and Everything in 1986 — which is considered important among lesbian subcultures.

The novelist Edmund White reviewed her next novel, Rat Bohemia (1995), for the New York Times,[12] and it was named one of the 100 best LGBT books by The Publishing Triangle.

[14] In 2018, she published Maggie Terry, a return to and comment on the lesbian detective novel, addressing the emotions of life under President Donald Trump.

[15] Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998), which won the Stonewall Book Award, argues that significant plot elements of the successful 1996 musical Rent were lifted from her 1990 novel, People in Trouble.

[16] Schulman never sued, but analyzed in Stagestruck the way the musical depicted AIDS and gay people, in contrast to work made by those communities that same year.

[23] In 2018, the second edition of her 1994 collection My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years was issued including new material by Urvashi Vaid, Stephen Thrasher, and Alison Bechdel.

[30][31] In 1987, Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard co-founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now called MIX NYC.

[28] She is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and is faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine at the College of Staten Island.

[citation needed] In 2011, she published an op-ed in the New York Times on pinkwashing, a term coined earlier by Ali Abunimah to describe how the Israeli government uses LGBT rights in its public relations.

[39] While employed as a university professor, Schulman continued to teach and mentor writers through a number of community-based initiatives including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Queer Artists Mentorship, an independent workshop for trans women writers sponsored by Topside Press, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a number of workshops run out of her apartment before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[42] Schulman was admitted into the Sundance Theater Lab in 2001 with the play Carson McCullers, based on the life of the 20th century writer.

Schulman secured the rights to write an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story, which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2007, directed by Jiri Ziska starring Morgan Spector.

In 2018, her play Between Covers was included in the New Stages Festival at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, her play Roe Versus Wade had a reading at the New York Theatre Workshop and she was commissioned by BMG and the Manchester Factory to write the book for The Snow Queen, a theatrical work highlighting the music of Marianne Faithfull.