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Review

Softcover, 176 pages
Schulman gained small celebrity last year when she complained that the late Jonathan Larson, author of the hit musical Rent, had lifted his plot from her AIDS novel People in Trouble (1990). Larson had ditched Schulman's lesbian-performance-artist protagonist and vibrant community of gay artists, though, in favor of the more peripheral heterosexual artists in her story. There was talk of a lawsuit, but as Schulman asserts in this sharp, inciting, and insightful book, she lacked the resources to take on the moneymen behind the profitable show. Besides, no one, not even her publisher, seemed interested in helping her. Her efforts to win some satisfaction--even to get the Rent organization to recognize she may have been wronged--became increasingly quixotic. Besides her own story, Schulman discusses the various ways mainstream media have appropriated gay culture, marketed a safe, watered-down version of it to the hip straight world, and increasingly "mainstreamed" gay consumers. You don't have to agree with Schulman completely to savor her insights about society and intellectual property"
From Booklist