Without fail, every epic struggle for freedom and justice has inspired our writers, actors, artists and poets. With great passion, they have reached into their own souls and discovered the power to express the most abstract question of freedom. Sometimes they have become historians tracing the long journey of suffering. Other times they have created enticing visions of how a future can appear without shackles.

With the battle for LGBT freedom at full speed, more than ever we need those in the arts to step forward to create, teach and record. The LGBT community especially is begging to hear of its journey having lost so much of our history because thousands of their story tellers have died of HIV/AIDS. Often upon their death, their families systematically destroyed any trace of their existence as members of the LGBT community. While we can never recover that enormous loss of stories, papers, photographs and records, we can recreate historical moments like the filmmakers, especially director Gus Van Sant, who made the brilliant and moving film, "Milk." Never have I seen an artistic expression of a man's life create so much passion and action.

Straight or gay, we need our artists, writers, poets and actors to come to the fore and provide hope for those in forgotten places. They need to recreate our history before it is lost to the ages. They need to paint, write and act out our epic battle so they can educate this nation. Their presence at our rallies and by our side in the struggle only inspires us to give more. The arts have always been there, sometimes literally, often symbolically. Yet now is the time for them to rally like they did in the 1960's civil rights and anti-war movements. Artists are truth tellers and they operate free of the constrictions of a society that demands conformity. Many have stepped forward to meet the challenge but so many more need to answer the call.

President Kennedy, shortly before he died in 1963, gave a speech at Amherst College and said this about the role of the arts:

"If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having 'nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope'."

Words of solace, words of inspiration, words that resonate even more vibrantly than they did when first delivered.