ABSTRACT
Despite its specific concern with male homosexual behaviour under the impact of AIDS, this volume stands in a fragile and fragmented British tradition of research into male homosexuality which reaches back almost exactly a century. In that time the meanings attached to male homosexual behaviour have changed dramatically more than once. To speak, as we do today, of homosexual individuals would have been quite incomprehensible little more than a century ago. The notion that individuals might be arrayed along a spectrum ofhetero-homosexual experience was outrageous when it was put forward in the 1940s. The revolutionary proclamation of gay pride in the 1970s was breathtaking in its audacity. These contributions, together with many others, form a matrix within which this current volume was formed and without which it could not have existed. Equally, it is important to situate the responses of gay and bisexual men to AIDS in the 1980s in a very specific historical moment. It is impossible to appreciate the range and complexity of gay men's responses without some understanding of the community which produced and nurtured them. It is equally impossible to understand the political preoccupations of the gay community with regard to testing, treatment and access to health care without an appreciation of the historical relationship between the communities and the medical profession.
