There are many times that these representations – novels, songs, films, graphic novels, tv shows – make us laugh or cry because we recognize parts of… - Michael Bronski

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.

entertainment in its broadest sense-popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.

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.