Conclusion

Summary

A movement succeeds not when everything is perfect but when so much has changed that there's no going back. This is inarguably where we're at. Skirmishes will be won and lost, greater changes are to be anticipated, and the fight still needs everyone's best, but think of those women and men at the first Mattachine demonstration in 1965 and then watch a tape of Clinton's HRC speech.

Something's changed … We're still living in a world of shit, a lot of the shit is homophobic, all the shit's interrelated, and the fight is far from finished. But if we don't take an opportunity like a movie or a speech to mark that progress has been made, how are we going to remember, when we have cause to despair, that political action changes the world?

Tony Kushner, “Gay Perestroika”

In 1969 some drag queens started a riot in Greenwich village sparking the gay liberation movement, and in 1997 the President of the United States of America delivered a speech to the Human Rights Campaign in Washington DC. In 1967, after Parliamentary debate ended on the Sexual Offences Act, the Act's primary architect, Lord Arran, contemptuously stated that “homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being homosexual, there is certainly nothing good.” Thirty years later, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair proclaimed “I am eager to see a Labour government make significant progress towards ending discrimination and fostering a society free of homophobic prejudice.” In the mid-1980s few American mainstream films addressing gay themes or having gay characters were released.