Thank you so much for this James. I think a lot of younger queer people have no idea how much radical, law-breaking defiance was necessary back in those days! They may know about Stonewall and vague ideas about when gay sex was decriminalized and when gay marriage was passed, but I don't think people recognize how disruptive and revolutionary AIDS activism really was -- which is a real shame, not only because of the erasure of history and the legacy of so many people like you who participated in it, but also because we desperately need to keep those tools in our toolkit right now. I guess this is also an eternal problem, the push and pull of assimilation versus defiance, the peace of attaining acceptance versus the liberation of building our own spaces -- progress sure isn't linear and we're all getting a painful reminder of that now.

I'm a reading a book right now, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality by Patrick Moore, and it's been a really great expansion of my understanding of how queer defiance looked, especially in the 70s and into the early 80s before ACT UP came to the fore. There's also a trans woman I've been following on Youtube and TikTok, Mardi Pantz/ Mardi Pieronek who talks a lot about running away at 17 years old and medically transitioning in the 1970s (illegally!) and while of course I have always known people like her existed, hearing the exact contours of what accessing hormones and bottom surgery looked like during that time, is just breathtaking. I don't want to romanticize it but wow, it's amazing how powerful queer people have been forced to be.