entertainment in its broadest sense-popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-has not only been a pr… - Michael Bronski

I have no “vision” as a professor. I think the best I can do is give my students interesting, provocative material they cannot find on their own and make them think – think deeply – about it. In many ways I learn more from my students than I think they learn from me. Education has to be a two-way street of knowledge and information and thoughts should be freely flowing, both ways. Of course I know more “facts and “statistics” etc. than my students but I do not necessarily know better what they mean or how to think about them in complicated ways. An “educated society” is a society that just spends more time thinking and trying to understand itself: its impulses, its desires, its fears, and its dreams. That is what I hope happens in my classroom!

Today we routinely use LGBT, a fairly recent, and accepted, amalgamation of identities, each of which has a specific history that often had little to do with the others.

in many ways my personal life (which I wrote about a lot) was really a public life. This may not be the case for many, even most people, but for me my private and public life became one. People can say what they thought – and did – but what I was doing, felt perfectly natural to me.