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

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.

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.

what we wanted to do was a Queer History, which would be rather a history of a sensibility rather than a history of what certain people did or didn't do. I think that a Queer sensibility would be a sensibility that would be from the outside. So whereas LGBT people may have lived to a large degree on the outside--although not always since many of these people were in fact not openly gay at the time--what the book does is that it looks at American History from the point of view of an outsider.