My earliest involvement in the gay community was in the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s. We had very strong opinions then. I have come to … - Michael Bronski

I think that when we look at the larger picture, the queerness, the sexuality, the really complicated sexual relationships, are integral to these people's desire to change the world and make it better.

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.

Books that get banned – historically and now in many, many states in the U.S. – are banned not because they are immoral (under accepted and promoted religious ideologies) but because they challenge a current orthodoxy. Often this orthodoxy is about sexuality, gender and sometimes race. But this is only part of what causes this – for the most part what we call “art” (good or bad art) is a product of the imagination. The nature of the imagination is to, well “imagine” – to think outside of the frames of the real, the material world, what is possible, what is considered acceptable. So this is the reason why “art” gets challenged most often by censorship --- it is, or can be, by its nature, a challenge to the status quo to what we are expected to accept as “normal".