Youth sexuality has often been, like homosexuality, unspeakable in our culture. This has been America's dirty little secret: teens and children think… - Michael Bronski

Since the 1960s, there have been movements to include those people who have been "left out" of American history. So we see Women's History, African-American history, Latino history, Native American history. And certainly when we think about Gay and Lesbian or GLBT history, that's the same impulse--to bring Gay and Lesbian people back into American history. When I began writing the book, it struck me that the more research I did, that while this project was well-intentioned, it was rather unnecessary. That in fact gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people, African-American people, Latino people, women have always been in American history. So the very process of separating people out in order to put them back in seemed to me to be shortsighted. So the purpose of the book as I began writing it became clearer and clearer--it was simply to identify and find the LGBT people that are in American history already. The more I did this, what I discovered was that there were so many people, so many events, people's lives, people's personalities were so intertwined with what we think of as American history that there was no separation at all.

Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer.

In our culture, all diseases and afflictions and disabilities are stigmatised. Those associated with sexual activity are even more so. Because since the 1980s, HIV was associated with gay male sexuality – even though heterosexual could easily be infected – the stigma was even stronger. In the 1980s and 1990s people with HIV faced discrimination on a number of levels; medical care, housing, job security, in the media, in social services, social rejection and isolation and much more. Some of this was countered by new anti-discrimination laws fought for by gay legal and grass roots activists, but much social stigma still remains. The implications of this – then and now – are huge. The stigma associated with HIV created a huge divide between the healthy and the sick (which translated into the moral and the immoral.) It also created a culture in which all gay men were thought to be – or presumed to be – HIV positive, thus stigmatising male homosexuality even more. There were laws passed – and still on the books – which criminalised HIV positive people engaging in sexual activity with non-HIV positive people. To a degree this is true of all diseases – think of how uncomfortable people may be around someone with a skin disease or who are disabled. But because HIV was so linked to male homosexuality the stigma was not only worse, but took myriad forms in different public and private venues.