At its best “art” is subversive and can change the world. Thus, making it not only a viable threat, but a dangerous one. - Michael Bronski

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.

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.

the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, [[Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today. Women and men who experienced and expressed sexual desires for their own sex and those who did not conform to conventional gender expectations have always been present, in both the everyday and the imaginative life of our country. They have profoundly helped shape it, and it is inconceivable, and ahistorical, to conceptualize our traditions and history without them.