I thought the beginnings of “gay liberation” would remove the limitations of revolutionary vision and action. And, at first, it did. Being openly queer was so marginalized then that the other radical ideas we debated about sex and desire, gender identity, non-monogamy, and our notions of creating a revolutionary, sex-positive, erotic culture, were conversations we took very seriously. It was an astonishing time.

But even then, we made people nervous. And even then and even in the queer leftist movements, we were generally seen as an unwelcome sexual minority. For us—the drag queens, stone butches, S/M lesbians and leather men, high-femme dykes and queer sex workers, radical fairy boys and bisexual activists, and others too strange to name or categorize—we were too outside the norms established even by “gay” standards to be included. We stood out! We represented what other, more traditional queer people feared.

We weren’t exactly banished; we were passively tolerated. Because the other reality back then was that we all still had to go to the same areas of town, to the same clubs and bars, the same meeting places (except for those, of course, who were extremely rich). We all shared the geography of the sexual outsider. Sure, those of us who most explicitly showed our erotic desires and gender identities were seen as an embarrassment, but being queer then was frankly so despised that everyone, both inside and outside the zone, understood that, while there were queer and queerer-still levels of deviance, we were all swimming together in the same “homosexual” pool of depravity.

Still, for a moment there, sex and desire, and the idea that these issues were political, had its tiny second of credibility and power. Those of us who were radicals understood the ideas of revolution, of the need for fundamental, anticapitalist change, and we were dammed if we were going to be left out one more time. 

And then came AIDS. A tragedy, a devastation unlike anything we had ever seen or imagined; and it ushered in a time when desire and sexual acts became demonized, yet again, in ways we had only just begun to resist. I won’t retrace more of that history except to say that we were courageous, and we confronted the terrible anguish in our communities, and we helped one another. And even then, even while being made into sexual pariahs, gay men and drag queens and dykes and queer men of color and their sisters and brothers, and other communities of sex and racial justice warriors, spoke up and spoke out for sex, struggling to claim the right to desire even in the face of an epidemic and a virus transmitted through sex. We refused to be shamed or disowned because of our desires or our antibody status. This was a truly terrifying time. But through it all—although we were frequently wrong—we were also brilliant, and we were brave.

The epidemic continues today, of course, although HIV and AIDS are too often absent from the current lists of LGBT political priorities. But as the epidemic thrives now in this country through the vulnerabilities resulting from racism and the history of oppression in communities of color, those who struggle today with HIV and AIDS are often poor and queer, or transgender, or immigrants, or all of the above. For these members of our communities, the thrust of activism and radical political action has almost disappeared. Because now AIDS is about queerness in the context of poverty, of prison life, of drug use and addiction, immigration status, homelessness.

The mostly white, middle-class LGBT movement of today does not see this as their issue or their priority. In the current LGBT equality movement, we fight to get married to each other in big churches, and to serve in the US military, because we think some sort of legislated equality will be enough, will be all that we have a right to ask for or get, and if we can finally attain the status of “normal” we’ll have arrived—well, almost—and that that will be enough for us. But then, of course, it becomes even more important to never, ever, seem too queer.