A teenage John Duran was convinced that it was Los Angeles that had done it to him. Raised in a devout Catholic family in the 1970s, it wasn't conceivable that he could actually be gay. So he skipped town for what he thought would be the straighter pastures of Orange County. He got a job at Disneyland, believing the family atmosphere would set him on the right path. Three weeks later, he was dating Peter Pan. He knew there was no more running away from it – he was gay.

Duran, the mayor of West Hollywood and one of only four HIV-positive elected officials in the country, shared his story with students and faculty at the USC School of Social Work's All School Day on Feb. 7. The theme of this year's event was Human Rights, Not Special Rights: Understanding the LGBTQ Community, featuring Duran and a panel of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning leaders from the community.

All School Day began in 1992 after simmering racial tensions sparked the Los Angeles riots. Each year since, the School of Social Work has brought people together in a forum to exchange ideas about diversity and all matters of human conflict.

Duran spoke about his early days in the gay community when the social scene was far less open than it is today. Gay bars had no windows and no doors, he said. They used to exclude lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. Before the LGBTQ movement started, each community was really very separate, and there was not much sense of community between the groups. They didn't work or socialize together, and they didn't identify with one another, Duran observed.

"I didn't know there was such a divide within the LGBT community," said MSW candidate Lydia Lesar. "It's important to hear leaders like this talk about it from their perspective, because you can't have a clue about what they're going through. You think you understand, but you don't have any idea."

Duran acknowledged the first-ever HIV/AIDS case in Southern California, which involved a teacher who was fired for having contracted the virus. The case was thrown out, he said, when attorneys for the school tried to make the argument that the teacher could stab himself with a pencil in the classroom, and then stab students with it, thereby infecting them. Duran said these outlandish arguments and fears were commonplace in the early days of HIV/AIDS.

In 1984, presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche spearheaded the legislation behind Proposition 64, which would have ordered doctors to immediately report anyone they discovered with the virus and quarantine them. Then there was the congressman who claimed that gays with HIV/AIDS emitted spores that spread the virus.

This, Duran says, is part of the problem for the LGBTQ movement. People have been misinformed, and vital issues of human rights have been left in the hands of a frightened majority when the issues are ones of minority protection.

"I thought the history of the community was fascinating – the history of HIV/AIDS and how people have been viewed or marginalized. They're things we've heard a little bit about but never in detail," said MSW candidate Janet Cho.

Duran now dedicates his efforts to the fight for gay marriage and urged people to look beyond the shallow caricatures of identity politics to see that people don't want to get married for tax breaks and hospital visitation rights.

"They get married because they're in love, and they want to be together symbolically as much as officially," he said.

Members of the panel also shared personal experiences and educated the audience of future social workers about diversity within the LGBTQ community, a diversity that is often taken for granted as society groups the various factions together under the umbrella of gay rights.

"There are so many letters and acronyms now, you can't even fit it on a t-shirt," said radio producer and activist Rita Gonzales.

Gonzales, who began her career more than 20 years ago with Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos, the oldest Latino LGBTQ organization in Southern California, echoed the sentiments of Duran and her fellow panelists about the need to recognize each part of the LGBTQ community as a separate entity, with separate issues and methods of achieving the goals of the larger community.

Sharon Franklin Brown, a transgender activist who works at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, told her story of growing up in a southern African-American community, feeling trapped as a girl in a boy's body and sensing her family's shame. After telling her parents she was going to make the physical changes to complete her transition from a man to a woman, they disowned her – for 18 years.

Since Fayetteville State University in North Carolina fired her in 1995 for being a transgender, Brown has fought the difficult and less familiar battle for transgender awareness and equality – which is not protected by current Equal Opportunity Employment laws.

Reverend Neil Thomas, senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church, Lost Angeles, provided a perspective through the prism of religion. Within religion, sex has always had the stigma of being sinful, he said, and heterosexuals scapegoat homosexuals for sexual sin because gays are a small minority and thus, as discriminating straight people believe, socially expendable.

Thomas told students that as future social workers they need to be non-judgmental, and they are in the wrong line of work if they cannot separate their personal beliefs from their work for the good of their clients.

"Your beliefs in social work should not be worked out in front of your client. If you can't handle that, you have no right to be called a social worker," he said.

Miguel Martinez, who manages the risk reduction program at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles that provides HIV care and prevention education to youth, started out protesting for gay rights on the campus of UC Berkeley. His advice to students was to be prepared to help younger clients deal with the harsh social stigma attached to youth with HIV/AIDS. He said the battle is to try to make people see themselves as valuable.

"That's how we break down stigmas by celebrating who we are," Martinez said.

MSW student Eddie Ramos echoed his sentiments, sharing his support for bringing LGBTQ issues out in the open and hoping society sees a broader perspective.

"We're all human beings, and we've got to respect each other," he said.