The Need for Sexual Exploration

While reading Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (2002), I found this quotation from Cindy Patton's Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (1985).

AIDS must not be viewed as proof that sexual exploration and the elaboration of sexual community were mistakes. [. . .] Lesbians and gay men [. . .] must maintain that vision of sexual liberation that defines the last fifteen years of [our] activism (235-6).

I think this rings even more true today in light of the continuing conservative backlash against queers of all types at local, state, national, and international levels as well as the mainstream gay/lesbian movement's current emphasis on a liberal (as opposed to a radical) political agenda.