prohibitionism was the absolute consensus in america and most of the world, for the vast majority of existence of human kind. it is still the overwhelming politics for the overwhelming number of homosexual men and lesbian women and bisexual and transgendered people in the world. today, we see in africa a rather terrifying movement to criminalize, imprisoned, and execute homosexuals, fomented in the united states, created by the american religious right. in my lifetime, when i grew up, when i was born in my own country, homosexuality was illegal. it was criminal. people were jailed. people lived in fear. today, they still live in fear. not really in many parts of this country, but in large parts of the middle east, in vast amounts of africa and asia, people today, even in places we think of as a relatively civilized, suffered tremendously because of this. in iran, young gay men are hanged in public because they're homosexual. this is based on religious doctrine, first of all. it is based in this country on the bible, and i think it is silly to deny the fact that the bible does explici

those politics of homosexuality i called, prohibitionism, liberationism, conservatism, and liberalismments i made in the late 80s and early '90s came from a young gay man trying to make sense of his own life in the world he was living in and try to make sense logical, rational sense, of the discourse around this extraordinarily fraught topic. it remains of course incredibly fraught today. intense, emotional, disturbing, upsetting. the sort of red hot center of a culture war in which many people's lives are discussed and debated. i want to try and tonight defuse that, to calm that. and to try and think, rather than feel about this topic. and i ask you tonight also to help me do that because there is so much emotion, legitimately about the subject, that thinking is sometimes hard. the first concept of politics of homosexuality prohibitionism has actually had a much stronger and longer life than i expected it would back in the early 1990s. prohibitionism was of course the absolute consensus in america and indeed most of the world, for the vast majority of the existence of humankind. it i