The characters in Love! Valour! Compassion! may not be representative of "mainstream" America in the 1990s, but they face all of the same cultural and political events the rest of the country experienced in that decade, as well as some challenges and crises unique to the gay community. The 1990s in America were years dominated by the Bill Clinton presidency; a soaring economy; an amazing boom in electronics, computers, Internet communications, and commerce; a growing healthcare crisis; increasing acts of terrorism involving United States citizens and the military around the world; and high-profile acts of violence here at home, covered by television news that began to operate twenty-four hours a day.

For homosexuals in America, it was also a decade of important gains, controversial setbacks, and tremendous losses. For much of the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was largely ignored by the federal government. First named "Acquired...