In the spring of 2012, Sarah Schulman invited me to her partner’s Toronto home on a rainy Saturday afternoon. The partnership being somewhat new and long-distance, she moved about the space a bit awkwardly, claiming she had never spent much time in a house before, having lived in Manhattan for fifty-three years, and in the same sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village for the past thirty. “In New York City, if you want privacy, you just sit in the same room and don’t talk. This house thing is very new to me.” She made me a cup of tea and we sat in the living room with my iPhone recorder between us on the ottoman.

At the time, her fifth nonfiction book, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, was the forthcoming lead title from Duke University Press, and she was in Toronto for the launch of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Her documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, had just premiered in New York City. But while Schulman is many things—an accomplished political activist, a distinguished professor, filmmaker, playwright, and general cultural agitator—her primary love is writing fiction. When we met, she had just finished writing her tenth literary novel, The Cosmopolitans, which she described to me as “an answer book to Baldwin’s Another Country and a response to Balzac’s Cousin Bette,” set in New York City in 1958.

A gifted storyteller, Schulman has spent much of her career chronicling queer lives. She approaches fiction with a fearlessness regarding both form and content, and possesses an unflinching ability to create nuanced, emotional characters while simultaneously crafting stories that embody the political and cultural complexity of America at its most unrepresented. Her versatility as a writer is proven with each new story she puts out, whether she’s embracing her own imaginative take on literary realism or jumping into satirical speculative fiction, as she did with her latest novel, The Mere Future. She is best known for her widely praised, groundbreaking 1995 novel, Rat Bohemia, which was set in the swirl of the AIDS crisis in New York City.

While many writers of her generation are content to stay coyly closeted—too many prominent best-selling American writers to mention—Schulman has steadfastly refused. As a result, her status as a cultural pioneer and icon to aspiring queer writers has been cemented, while her literary career has, on occasion, suffered. As the publishing industry has grown more conservative, her last two novels were difficult to place. When recounting the plot of her latest literary manuscript, The Cosmopolitans, she acknowledges: “It’s...