Amen! I was thinking about some of these things when I wrote an article not too long ago called, "As a gay man who lived, let me tell you what hope means."

I was writing about the audacity required for positive-change activism, and about engrained pushback even from people who would benefit from the positive change.

What I mean is this: members of Act Up like me were not universally viewed as heroes in the 80s and 90s by people at risk for HIV.

Lots of queer people and other people criticized us strongly for being too radical. For dreaming too big. For pissing people off. Chill out, they would tell us. Can't you see you're just making things worse?

But it was our audacity of hope, our envelope pushing, and our radicalism that made change possible. In the light of history, most people today take that as a given. Act Up leaders like Peter Staley and Ann Northup are honored and feted as cultural icons. They deserve that of course, but how quickly people have forgotten that plenty of queer folks used to roll their eyes and ask Peter, Ann, and others to please sit down and behave themselves.

Well, people who sit down and behave are not the people who get things done.