In the television show Mad Men, one of the characters of the first few seasons was gay, and I have read somewhere that his dress reflected that of someone whom was in the closet but dressed to 'signal' to other gay men that he was gay. How true would this be for someone in the early 60s and if so, how did this 'system' develop?

I've heard that the movie "Philadelphia" is controversial in the gay community because of how it represents the aids crisis, why?

I see that you answered this to some extent in the last AMA, but I wanted to widen it a bit. One of the things I've always wondered is how much the AIDS crisis and the Stonewall riots were essential to the establishment of the GBLT political movement. They obviously had huge impacts ans were highly important, but were they essential? Would the GBLT rights movement been wildly different without these formative events?

Another one! As you no doubt know, in Europe the 19th century sexologists, such as Heywood and Ebbing were the ones that really established 'gay' and 'straight' as binary categories and as sexualities. How did this develop in America? where these categories embraced and developed by American voices? Or did they take a different path?

One more question from me -

In the movie "Milk", there are a few scenes where Harvey Milk implores gay men and gay women to work together in their efforts to work for equal rights and better treatment. The scenes all seem to indicate that there was a severe lack of trust between the genders and that each gender discounted the experiences of the other. The movie also seemed to strongly imply that gay men felt gay women were not nearly as discriminated against or that they didn't have it as hard in life, and vice-versa.

How true is this in the history of LGBT movement and to the extent it is true, what is your opinion on the roots of the distrust and why it occurred?

ninja edit to correct a double negative.

How did an overly sexual element to Pride parades and festivals show up? That is to say, the people engaged in overtly sexual displays or wearing as little clothing as possible?

I am hoping you are familiar with Radclyffe Hall's The Well Of Loneliness. This book was tremendously important to me as a young person in its depiction of lesbian perspectives and relationships in a way that was not sensationalized for a hetero audience.

In my senior year of high school(1996) I wrote a report on advancements in acceptance of 'alternate' sexualities since Stonewall. While sources at the time were somewhat limited in the first place for a high school student just prior to the internet becoming widely available, I still found it much easier to find information on the topic specific to gay men rather than gay women.

Though it's a large question, any way you'd like to respond I'm sure would be great. What difference has western culture seen as far as acceptance of male homosexual activity versus female? Thank you in advance, and thanks for doing this!

In Russian LGBT/Sexual history there tends to be a pattern of acceptence and then regression. For example the Tsarist government had an outright law banning homosexuality and then the Soviet Union opened it to being legal during Lenin and then going back to being illegal under Stalin. Does a same pattern exist in the current LGBT history for the United States as well? Or has the United States been more linear towards outright acceptance?

Could you talk about the process of reclaiming slurs in the LGBT community? I have in mind queer, but surely there are others? Were there arguments about it? Was there the same sort of tension between gay men and women in this process as there seems to have been in other matters?

I have a few questions:

• How did the experience of broad swathes of the male population being drafted in the various wars of the twentieth century affect the gay community? Sailors have a certain reputation, how did that develop?

• When exactly can you say a "gay community" first formed? Did it grow out of the gentleman's clubhouse culture of the late nineteenth early twentieth century? (Note that the sum total of my knowledge for that is Oscar Wilde and PG Wodehouse)

• What exactly was the relationship of the "flamboyant" musical genres of the 70s (eg, glam rock) to the gay community? They are associated today, did they grow out of it or was it more appropriation (no idea who did the appropriating!).

• And for maybe a more complicated one, why exactly does it seem that gay men are more "normalized" in society than lesbian women?

In a recent video, George Takei describes how he discovered a magazine published by the Mattachine Society that was very helpful to him when he was still young and closeted. I've never really heard of the Mattachine Society, do you know anything about it, or can you give a quick description of its role and influence?

Oh! Another question!

This is somewhat tied to what I am researching as well, and may even tred into /u/VertexofLife's forte.

Is there any link in the rise and abundance of pornography and specifically gay/lesbian pornography to the acceptance and successes in the LGBT rights movement?

Hi! Thanks for the AMA!

I've heard a lot of reports that President Buchanan(?) could have been gay, what is some evidence that backs up that claim?

hi all! a gentle reminder of the subreddit rule that in an AMA post, questions are to be answered by the AMA panel, in this case /u/cephalopodie

Could you just tell me about asexuals involvement in the LGBT rights movement? Asexuality always seems to be at the fringe of the discussion, and is rarely brought up, and I wonder what role they've had.

My question is similar to vertovex's, but several decades in the future. Post-Stonewall, how did the LG(BTQ) community react to the different models of sexuality, things like sexual orientation and sexual preference, or more basically, ideas that sexual attraction is hard wired is a hard-wired orientation vs. the idea that it exists on a scale (like the Kinsey scale)? Moreover, how did they deal with the idea that lived experience could relate to sexual preference. Most basically, you dealt with the alliance between gays and lesbians elsewhere, but I have heard from my colleagues who study social movements that including the "B" in LGB was a controversial move. How did people who weren't "just" gay or lesbian get brought into the movement? How did this play into the debates in LG's advocacy for scientific models that did not stigmatize same-sex sexual activity as abnormal?

Who were some prominent Americans who at the time weren't out, but now today we can look back and say "they were totes gay" or whatever they happened to be? I'd be especially interested in any bisexual or otherwise less gender-focused in their sexuality.

Can you speak to the influence, or lack thereof, of the Radical Faery movement and Harry Hay? I'm wondering about how it managed to survive for over thirty years and what role it played in early activism? If you can speak to current (okay 90s?) activism, that's great, but might be outside our scope.

Categorization of sexuality became kind of a thing in the sciences during the Industrial revolution. While not a perfectly linear transition the idea of "Gender Inversion" gave way to new categories based on sexual-object choice (homosexual or heterosexual). My understanding is that terms like homosexuality and heterosexuality emerged from and became popularized by scientific/medical fields in the late 1800s to early/mid 1900s and that it was mostly in the 1900s when knowledge of the terms heterosexual and homosexual entered into the general public discourse. What major factors led to the adoption of these categories based on sexual-object choice as identities by laypeople--why did people start thinking of themselves as heterosexual or homosexual?

I read the transcript for the Reagan Administration press conference that first touched on AIDS and gay men. How did the rest of the country react to it at the time?

How were homosexual men and women treated in the 20s? As you have stated, America had a shift toward conservationism in the 40s and 50s and again in the 80s, but how was it during the 20s?

I hope this doesn't get buried.

In the Great Gatsby (book) there is a throwaway paragraph which strongly implies Nick had sex with a male stranger he met at a party. As an upper-classer (Ivy-educated New York bondsman of Midwest Old money) of this time (1923 I think), is this possible? Would it have been common of people of his class (and by extension, Fitzgerald's)?

As far as I know, homosexuality was always outlawed in american history, but there were always kinda outlets for gay men. Such as there being gay bars in the 1950s. Is this to a certain extent true? What would it be like in the latter half of the 1800s?

When was the idea of homosexual marriage first proposed? Have ceremonies always been illegal or is it that the state doesn't recognize those ceremonies?

Some of my older friends in the community (most of them from the midwest, specifically Ohio) have told me stories about how even after sodomy was legalized in some places, asking someone to have anal sex wasn't. These stories were all framed around awkward conversations they had to have at bars, propositioning someone for sex without ever asking if they wanted to have sex.

Was that kind of legal situation ever really around in America? If it was, would cops go to gay bars to try to catch gay men propositioning them -- something like the "bag a fag" practices in Detroit I've seen a little bit about?

I don't know if you're still answering questions but I'll try. What were race relations like within GLBT communities/movements around, say, the late 60s and 70s? For example, how integrated or segregated they were, the relationships between the gay/lesbian movements and race-based movements, and so on.