ABSTRACT
The first word of gay and lesbian rhetoric, wherever and whenever verbalized, was spoken to deny the darkness and the silence on the subject of same-sex love and the cultures built around it, to assert the presence of such individuals in the particular social era, and to signify a refusal to accept a wide range of categories and assumptions as to the essential natures, characteristics, and qualities of gay and lesbian people. Yet within the body of scholarship produced by Western society until the late twentieth century, the subject has served more as a source of information for historians and writers engaged in retrieving the past of the movement than as a distinct field of analysis. This is due in part to the fact that many of the speeches given at demonstrations in the early days of the gay liberation movement were sometimes given extemporaneously or from notes and outlines, there being no prepared text preserved beyond notable quotations cited in local alternative newspaper coverage of the events. Another factor complicating the study of this aspect of gay and lesbian history was the low priority frequently given to these speeches by the gay and lesbian press; although, given the space limitations of publications forced to try to be many things at once, this is understandable, if regrettable.
