Larry Kramer, born in 1935, is a public health expert, author, and playwright. His works include the screenplay for the 1969 film Women in Love and his controversial book about the New York gay scene in the 1970s, Faggots.

Kramer’s activism and expertise made him one of the leading figures during the AIDS epidemic in the USA during the 1980s and 90s. Kramer co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 19782, which was at the time the world’s largest organisation supporting people with AIDS. He went on to co-found ACT-UP, a key player in the movement, and in 2001 created the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University.

Sandy Stone is a media and academic theorist, performance artist, and author. As a trans woman she is thought to be one of the founders of the academic discipline of transgender studies.

One of Stone’s greatest moments was after she was targeted by transphobic scholar Janice Raymond, whose essay The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male attacked Stone for “destroying the womanhood with ‘male energy’”. Stone shot back to this abuse with The Empire Strikes Back in 1983, a phenomenal rebuttal that advocated for the experiences of trans people and their empowerment. The Empire Strikes Back is a seminal text in trans academia and has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Professor Cathy J. Cohen is a Black feminist, author, and social activist. She gained her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1993 and has been a leading academic at the University of Chicago since 2002, including a stint as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Race (2002–05).

Cohen is the principle researcher for The Black Youth Project and one of the founding members of the Audre Lorde Project, an organisation for queer people of colour that advocates radical action and community organising.