In the memoir, he also turns to the question of identity and how it is constantly interrogated: "All of us live with multiple identities. . . . How we imagine these varying and changing identities helps determine how well we manage to live together as a society." In a related vein, he is interested in "the ways in which 'communities' and 'nations' are constantly created and re-created through human imagination" and in "a recognition of the central importance of human agency and imagination in creating new concepts of who we are and in what sort of society we wish to live."

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In Global Sex, Altman investigates how globalization has changed how sex is understood, regulated, even practiced. The exportation of Western sexuality, he argues, has led to greater homogeneity, but at the expense of sexual inequality, exploitation, permissiveness, and, of course, AIDS.

He believes that, though desirable in the U.S., tolerance and difference may not play well in other corners of the world: "Globalization does not abolish difference as much as it redistributes it, so that certain styles and consumer fashions are internationalized while class divides are strengthened, often across national boundaries. The yuppie woman with her portable phone in Kuala Lumpur or São Paulo has more in common with her counterpart in Stuttgart or Minneapolis than do either with the rural or urban poor of their societies."

Altman's most recent book, 51st State?, focuses on Australian identity in a U.S.-dominated world. He fears that Australia has been so Americanized that it is in danger of "fast becoming America's 51st state." The (liberal) tendency to attribute malign American influence to everything we feel uncomfortable about in the contemporary world, Altman suggests, is the downside of seeing the U.S. as the only model worthy of emulation; this trend only conceals the deeper question Australians must face: how does Australia imagine its future?

In the United States, glbtq people have played an integral and often leading role in AIDS activism, greatly influencing AIDS treatment and advocacy.

Given its history, it is somewhat surprising that Australia now has exceptionally gay-friendly laws and public attitudes, with widespread public tolerance and acceptance of the glbtq community.

In the past two decades Australia has come to occupy a leading place in gay and lesbian literature, and New Zealand has recently produced some significant gay and lesbian texts.

A growing body of scholarly and other work on Cultural Identities challenges the "naturalness," and even the political necessity, of a unitary gay and lesbian identity.

The Gay Left refers to a cluster of positions on the political spectrum that has existed within the lesbian and gay rights movement at least since the Stonewall riots.

Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.

The sexual revolution of post-World War II America changed sexual and gender roles profoundly.

James Baldwin, a pioneering figure in twentieth-century literature, wrote sustained and articulate challenges to American racism and mandatory heterosexuality.

The founder of psychoanalysis and the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud initiated a fundamental transformation in the self-understanding of Western men and women, including especially the role of sexuality.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse had an enormous influence on theories of sexual liberation, particularly in the early post-Stonewall gay movement and on the left.

Homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Manuel Puig's eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman, homosexual desire is central to the fiction.

The confrontations between police and demonstrators at the Stonewall Inn in New York City the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 mark the beginning of the modern glbtq movement for equal rights.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.