ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines how government inaction in response to HIV/AIDS prompted new forms of science that appeared to offer great promise to psychology in the 1980s, and which contributed to the broadening out of gay-affirmative perspectives in psychology. It considers legal activism by the American Psychological Association from the 1980s into recent support for equal marriage. The book examines the American Psychological Association's 2009 Report on Transgender Issues. It describes the emergence of affirmative approaches to lesbians and gay men in the 1970s and 1980s. The shift in recognition in the APA from LG to LGB to LGBT over the last 30 years asks lesbian and gay psychology to be a paradigm for how social movements and psychology can creatively come together, to make good on the promises of Galtonian normativity.
