ABSTRACT
In early January 1995, Radio Four’s arts omnibus programme Kaleidoscope concluded a series about taboos in contemporary Britain with a brief discussion of AIDS. The presenter began, ominously enough, with reference to the idea that it is now widely accepted that there is a ‘gay ghetto’1 Am I simply being a pedantic old fart when I point out the distinction between the ghettos in which Jews were confined against their will by early modern European states, and the emergence of a modern, confident lesbian and gay culture for which we have had to struggle very hard indeed for the past twenty-five years? Such questions of language are not merely academic exercises, for their outcome shapes how we understand our own individual histories, as well as our collective achievements. Since the 1970s this is more or less what many of my generation have thought of as a politics of representation. As I’ve written elsewhere: ‘In a modern media culture, you don’t know who you are if you don’t know how you are represented, by whom, and for what purposes’.2
