Ideas of ‘inappropriate’ bodies, challenged by Kane in Cleansed, circulated in the 1990s: a decade that inherited the homophobic panic generated by the Aids crisis of the 1980s. In the popular imagination, fuelled by media representation, Aids had renewed the idea of homosexuality as a disease, a ‘disease more dangerous than diptheria’ as Clive claims in Churchill's Cloud Nine. ‘Healthy’ (heterosexual) citizens needed to be protected from the (gay) disease; the family needed to be kept safe from ‘contagion’. In 1988 the government passed the anti-gay legislation popularly known as Clause 28: legislation that prevents local councils from funding work perceived as promoting homosexuality. As legislation it creates, as one analyst explains, a ‘structure in which an otherwise unspeakable “private” concern can be brought into the public sphere and given a proper place in “public” official discourse’. In brief, Clause 28 legitimised homophobic fears. Among lesbians and gays that only fuelled the desire to see an end to discrimination and for greater recognition in all walks of life. Arguably the decade did give way (albeit grudgingly) to more liberal views though, despite the election of the New Labour government in 1997, Clause 28 has yet to be repealed in England.

Views on identity also shifted among lesbians and gays themselves. A younger generation advocated queer politics: looked to more flexible views on identity, ways of crossing a range of identities, rather than occupying just one.