language is both an entryway and a dead end. - Michael Bronski

There are many times that these representations – novels, songs, films, graphic novels, tv shows – make us laugh or cry because we recognize parts of ourselves in them. That’s great. But we shouldn’t think that these representations actually represent us. Rather can’t. We are all much too complicated to be represented in this way. But nevertheless the longing to see our lives represented is powerful – and we need it. It is great to feel connected to a community because of popular culture – we just have to realise that almost any artefact of popular culture that – by its nature becomes popular – is never the whole truth of people’s lives. It is a consumer item – and that’s fine.; just don’t compare it to the authenticity of human experience, to understand the uniqueness of an individual life.

Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.

The old saying that “history is written by the winners” is – to some degree – true for a great deal of traditional, written history. Only recently – maybe the past 100 years – have traditional historians been willing to look at the histories of minoritized groups and begin including them in mainstream narratives. But this is only focusing on traditional, mainstream histories – there are a number of ways that minoritized groups wrote, recorded, maintained, and saved their own histories. Often this was through alternative means – private correspondence, diaries, folk lore, songs, oral histories, visual cultures, theatre – and often dismissed by academic and traditional historians. The problem with how we conceptualise history is that it is prone to wanting to tell one story (usually the dominant one). The reality is that history – at its core – is multiple stories from multiple points of view. It is not a series of snapshots but many films, all shown at the same time. I do not think that history has a “responsibility” – that is very abstract – but that each and everyone one of us share the responsibility to not only insist on telling our own stories, but on encouraging everyone to tell theirs.