Hey, I'm Jeffrey Masters, and as you likely know, I have long been fascinated by our history.

I was in my early 20s when I first read about Stonewall.

I was newly out and trying to learn everything that I could about this community which I was suddenly a member.

And there was Stonewall, this singular now mythic event in our history.

It went on for hours.

Nobody was there the entire time.

No one knows exactly who was there because in the middle of a riot, you don't take a roll call.

That was Mark Siegel. He was 18. He was there. Or maybe he wasn't, as he says, right?

Now, I also distinctly remember seeing a production of a normal heart, Larry Kramer's landmark play, and being confused by one of the lines.

Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War?

His name was Alan Turing, and he cracked the Germans' Enigma Code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do.

And when the war was over, he committed suicide. He was so hounded for being gay.

I went home that night after hearing that and spent hours reading about Alan Turing.

This was years before the movie would have come out.

And I was angry. I still am.

The man who figured out how to decrypt the German's intelligence code effectively speeding up the end of World War II was gay.

And for all the countless classroom hours devoted to the war, the only queer people ever mentioned are the ones in concentration camps.

Our history is murky, often unrecorded, and though history books don't label us, we've always existed.

What the radical movement in the early 70s did was not to say that we want to knock on the door.

We wanted to fucking break it down and march through and tell society we're changing you.

You're going to change and you better live with it.

We have made tremendous progress over the last 50 years, but that progress has not been evenly spread.

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