There is a video clip somewhere of Dennis Altman on the ABC’s Monday Conference program, a forerunner to the late (and unlamented) Q+A. The year is 1972 and Altman is defending his book Homosexual (1971) against a Methodist minister whose name escapes me and the conservative politician and journalist Peter Coleman. The minister is the more strident of the two, suggesting that homosexuality is the consequence of disordered sexual development and citing some specious research to that effect. Coleman takes a more nuanced line. One of the best things about the book, he suggests, is that it confirms one of the right’s main objections to ‘gay lib’: the movement, he says, is aimed as much at the transformation of society as it is at the liberation of gays. Smiling slightly mischievously, Altman is more than happy to agree.