Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights

Creating Change tells the story behind some of the most bitterly contested and controversial public events and public policy battles in the past generation and possibly in American history. In the thirty years since the Stonewall Inn riots marked the beginning of the modern gay and lesbian movement, there has been a dramatic change in the texture of gay and lesbian life and in its relationship to American society. Despite an apparently deepening conservative hold upon national and state politics, this shift has been as extensive - over a comparable period of time - as that witnessed in race and gender relations.

Creating Change traces the work and gauges the impact of the gay and lesbian movement since Stonewall. It explores a critically significant, though often ignored, area in which change has occurred - the world of public policy making, especially at the level of the federal government - and scrutinizes the who, how, why, and what of it. A work of scholarship and a work of passion, it recounts how a specific constituency - gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans - were able to make tremendous progress despite seemingly insurmountable barriers. Creating Change is the story of the way in which the American political and cultural landscape became what it is today and how social change is brought about.

John D'Emilio is a Guggenheim fellow, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, and author of numerous books including the classic Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities.

William B. Turner is a visiting assistant professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.

Urvashi Vaid is the Director of the Policy Institute (and former Executive Director) of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She is the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation.