Original subtitles

(man) Uh, the night of the Stonewall riots came along.

Just everything came together, that one moment.

If you were there, you just knew, this is it.

This is what we've been waiting for.

(all) Say it proud, say it loud!

♪♪

(Melissa) Everything changed after Stonewall.

It led us to a time when millions of homosexuals

around the world would no longer hide their identity.

It also marked the beginning of a seismic shift

in society at large.

How did this happen?

How did a new openness among gay people transform virtually

every area of life?

And it's okay to be gay.

This is the subject of After Stonewall.

(man) When Stonewall happened, I was in New Jersey.

(woman) No, I was the only lesbian in New York

who was not involved in the Stonewall riots.

(woman) Native Americans took over Alcatraz

and that to me was the thing I remembered most

about that year.

(woman) I'm not even sure that I knew it had occurred.

Probably not.

I was in Cleveland.

(man) When I was younger, I would always dream

of being a police officer.

When I decided to go through with it,

I knew no one could know my secret.

And um, that's just the way it was.

(man) Some friends said, "You know, you could probably get like,

a state legislator," and I said, "Okay."

But I do remember this decision that I made

which is okay, this really means staying

in the closet because in 1972,

it was inconceivable to me that you could win office and be out.

(man) When I first came out in Melbourne, Australia, in 1969,

age 17, homosexuality was still totally illegal and it could be

punished with several years' imprisonment

and even enforced psychiatric treatment.

(woman) I led what I called my double life.

During the week, I was working for the police department

as a social worker and then I would literally

disappear on Fridays and head over to New York

and do the bars.

(woman) All I had was the Baptist church, the vision of what

happened to queers in this society

and I figured it would kill me.

And I'd been working it, looking for ways to die without actively

suiciding... passive suicide, the solution

of the working class, liquor and fast cars and brutal women.

(woman) Most people when I talk to them about events in the early

history of our movement are amazed that conditions

were like that.

Say it proud!

(man) I can't hear you!

Say it loud!

(woman) In the wake of the Stonewall riots and the sudden invasion

of people into our movement, a good invasion,

a number of organizations starting in New York

and spreading to other cities called

Gay Liberation Front were established.

(man) When Stonewall happened, it just seemed a logical progression

from leftist radial politics and then I joined Gay Liberation

Front right away after Stonewall.

We were a front like the Vietnamese Liberation Front

from whom we got our name.

(woman) Why are you here today?

Darling, I want my gay rights now!

(Karla) There were drag queens, there were

lesbian feminists like myself.

There were truck boys who had sex in the back of trucks.

It was tremendous excitement because we're all moving

together and thinking in terms of "we",

not in terms of “I.”

(man) Hey, gay is good and gay is great!

Our first big action, we had an eating place in West Hollywood

which has been there for 20 or 30 years

called Barney's Beanery.

It's an article about a restaurant in Los Angeles

with a sign that says “Faggots Keep Out.”

They spelled faggots wrong, F-A-G-O-T,

"Faggots stay out."

The gentleman who put this sign up in this restaurant

said he thinks that homosexuals should be shot.

Two, four, six, eight...

I imagine we got between 8 and 10,000 people out.

Because our very existence is political right now.

(Karla) But the drawback was these meetings

were very unstructured and terribly chaotic.

People were screaming at each other,

people didn't listen to each other.

It was a little too much like my family.

(man) By '71, people had split off to form, down in New York,

Gay Activists Alliance.

We worked by Robert's Rules of Order.

Our predecessor, Gay Liberation Front had worked by consensus.

That's how GAA started by the way.

People just couldn't abide with the procedure.

♪♪

(man) You will meet people who will rhapsodize about how the dances

at the Firehouse changed their lives.

♪♪

(man) On Saturday nights, we would have a couple thousand people

in there sweating and dancing and having a blast.

All of us were tripping and stoned having a ball.

(Melissa) At the same time, these early gay militants took aim at

a number of mainstream institutions.

This is what we're going to be doing, babies.

This is what we're going to be doing, babies.

(man) It was very very clear that a primary obstacle

to our getting anywhere was the allegation that homosexuality

was an illness, a disturbance.

(Barbara Gittings) They had a panel called Psychiatry,

Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?

Well, it was not easy to find someone who was both openly gay

and a psychiatrist in 1972 and we finally landed someone who

said, "Yes, I'll do it, provided I can wear a wig and a mask over

my face because I'm in fear of losing my job.”

(Frank) The APA, like most organizations that have their conventions,

has a banquet at some point.

There was a dance floor and there was going to be dancing

and I knew that.

(man) Then we got up and started dancing.

We made a beautiful couple.

Frank is a very good leader and I can follow very well.

(Frank) We dance around with the psychiatrists and their wives

dancing around us.

(Phil) One of the psychiatrists came over and said he would introduce

a motion the following year to make homosexuality no longer

considered a sickness and in December of 1974, gay men

and women went to bed sick and we woke up the next morning

and we were instantly cured.

Give me a K!

K!

Give me an I!

I!

(Arnie) In the very first days of GAA, we created

a street theater committee.

We invaded the city clerk's office because a couple of guys

tried to register to get married and of course,

it was against the law, so he wouldn't allow it.

Gay power!

Gay power!

(man) They brought a wedding cake with two grooms and two brides,

separately and took over the office for the day.

♪ I ain't gonna stay in the closet no more ♪

♪ I ain't gonna stay in the closet no more ♪♪

(Arnie) I don't know how much we changed them, but we started changing at

least ourselves and our demands and our expectations.

♪ The dykes are here ♪

♪ What the hell do we care? ♪

♪ What the hell do we care? ♪♪

(Karla) The women started to split off for a number of reasons.

Some men were very feminist and they were very good, but a lot

of the guys were insensitive; they called us girls,

they told us that our job was to bake cookies.

Betty, do we have a big knife here?

(Karla) I mean, they couldn't have been more revolting if they tried.

I came to consciousness about my own lesbian sexuality primarily

through my involvement in the women's movement and in

the feminist movement in the early '70s.

(chanting) Double, double, sisters in trouble.

When you mess with women you're asking for trouble.

(Dorothy) The women's movement was the place where everything changed.

I was not a monster.

I was not alone.

And I had the possibility of preventing what had happened

to me from happening to other people.

For little tiny lesbians of my age, people coming of age

in my era, what made us soar

was just this amazing women's movement that was emerging.

No matter what any woman ever says today,

it was chock full of lesbians.

(woman) And lesbians were closeted because they felt like

the women's movement could not survive having out lesbians

in the leadership or in major roles and that's just fact.

(woman) Betty Friedan, may she live in peace,

had called us the Lavender Menace.

She said the lesbians were going to ruin the women's movement.

And there were a lot of lesbians in NOW,

including Rita Mae Brown who was ejected from NOW.

I was just a kid when I got thrown out of NOW,

which of course then, I immediately began

calling NOW WHAT,

for which they've probably never forgiven me.

God forbid you should have a sense of humor

about these things.

You were supposed to just weep and wail

and just immediately become a victim.

The more victimized you were, of course, the more of a woman

you were and I'm like, “What are you talking about?

The women I came from weren't victims; they kicked butt.

So I'm going to kick some too, little Yankee girls.

Let me show you how this works.”

(Melissa) Despite their differences, gay men and lesbians come together

a year after Stonewall to commemorate the riot

with a march.

(woman) If people hadn't decided to commemorate Stonewall with

a political march, no one would remember Stonewall.

(chanting) Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight.

(man) It was incredible, it was so empowering.

(man) We were chanting, there were great signs like

"Better Blatant Than Latent,” “Hi Mom.”

(man) You know, people chanting, "Two, four, six, eight,

gay is just as good as straight,"

“Out of the closets and into the streets.”

(chanting) Out of the closets and into the streets!

Out of the closets and into the streets!

(man) There were drag queens and you know, just this mad rag-tag

bunch of hippies and freaks and weirdos and you know,

we were just all out in force.

(man) We got to this little knoll at the Sheep Meadow and we turned

around to see what had happened behind us and all of a sudden,

we all started to cry together because behind us,

there were 15,000 people.

This was the moment when the closet door was actually opening

and the gay community was coming out into the light.

♪♪

(man) People came to San Francisco because they could be free.

This was a unique place where they could be that person

they hoped they could be as a lesbian or as a gay person.

(man) When I arrived in San Francisco in 1971, there was still

a great deal of the old hippie thing going on.

The culture hadn't really calcified into that hyper-male

thing that happened in the later '70s.

(Michael) What it was was a lot of gay men who had been told all their

lives they were not real men suddenly being told they could

be whatever they wanted to be and some of us

wanted to be real men.

It didn't mean real men living in the suburbs; it meant real

men like dressing up like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.”

(Jim) You had in the '70s with the sort of drug culture

also changing; you had a different kind of tribal energy.

It wasn't about changing the world,

it was about getting laid.

(Mel) Sex was easy, if you got horny, you just went out

and found someone-- it was that easy.

The Mineshaft, I would often go on Uncircumcised Night,

because I'm uncircumcised and you could get in for free

and I didn't have a lot of money in those days.

I literally died when I went downstairs and saw this bathtub

sitting in a basement and says, "What the hell do they have

a bathtub for,” you know?

Pretty soon, there was a guy inside the bathtub.

Okay, this is an art installation,

I can deal with this, you know.

(man) All the early disco music was code.

It was very much like the '50s and '40s code music, which was

cocktail music, which straight people heard one way

and gay people heard another way.

Disco music was the same thing.

♪ Oh do you wanna funk? ♪♪

(man) Do you wanna funk with me read very differently

in a gay disco than it did in a straight disco.

♪ Let me show you how ♪♪

♪ Do you wanna funk with me? ♪♪

Here it is you could be yourself and express yourself and listen

to music that sort of spoke to your heart.

♪ Oh, you make me feel ♪

♪ On the real ♪♪

Sylvester was a big woman.

You know, big...

♪♪

(Craig Lucas) I met lovers at the baths-- people used to say,

"You don't go to the baths to meet a lover,"

well, I had like, three lovers for like, 10 years

that I met at the baths.

People I married.

So... I miss all of that.

When I felt how it was to lie in someone else's arms,

to meet a stranger in the dark and find gentleness

and kindness there, from someone that I didn't even know.

There really was something truly regenerating about it and it

helped me create myself in a way that was quite a different self

than the one I'd left behind in North Carolina.

I began to re-examine all of my prejudices, my racism,

my tenseness as a conservative,

all of that fell by the wayside once

I realized how good it was to be myself and to enjoy others

who were doing the same thing.

(man) The great thing about the continental baths

was they were clean.

It was very social.

There were so many guys there wandering around that you know,

you could just go sit and talk.

♪♪

(Larry) And then one night, this woman came out

and you just couldn't believe it, it was fabulous.

♪ Friends, friends, friends oh friends ♪♪

♪ You got to have friends oh... ♪♪

(Robin) Who wanted to go into the bars and bathhouses?

Not me, but everybody said, "Oh, they won't let us in

the bathhouses, isn't that terrible?"

Yes, that's just disgusting.

(woman) But at least we recognized we were two different cultures.

That's a nice way of putting it, you know?

(chanting) Three, four, seven, nine, lesbians are mighty fine!

Three, five, seven, nine, lesbians are mighty fine!

(Dorothy) It was a period in history in which each and every one of us

felt as if we held history in our hands,

as if everything we did had the possibility

of changing the world.

There was just a tremendous onslaught of little magazines,

little presses.

The small presses were so fabulous.

First, there were all the underground newspapers.

(Dorothy) Little coffee shops, little poetry readings, all small.

And writ small so it was accessible, you could do it.

Christ, the first magazine I worked with,

we did on mimeograph.

Do you know what a mimeograph machine is?

Their hot, bare bodies pressed together as before...

And poetry... oh, God, thank God for bad poetry.

The main method of communication for me in the early '70s

was poetry.

Other women's bad poems, my bad poems.

And some of them weren't bad.

There was some great poetry being written.

But it didn't matter.

What we were creating was a voice

that had not been heard before.

(Rita Mae) And so, I sat down and wrote my first novel.

And you know, you're supposed to suffer.

I loved it.

I didn't suffer for one minute.

I thought, this is the most fun thing I have ever done

in my life.

Couldn't get anyone to publish it.

So this little tiny press picked it up and published it.

They gave me $1,000.

And that was how Rubyfruit Jungle started.

The issue of racism, you know, I can get on a soapbox,

but the issue of racism in the women's movement

is such is that many white women everywhere all over this country

don't believe that black and white women can work together.

I mean, they literally don't believe it.

To be a southern working-class woman suddenly joining a group

of editorial activists, most of whom were black and they were

Yankees, forget that, they were black Yankees with attitude.

I met my best friend Jewelle.

I remember looking at her and being tremendously afraid,

looking in her eyes and seeing that she was looking at me

and thinking, "Cracker."

And I'm looking at her and thinking, “Boston.”

There was a distinct separation between lesbians of color

and white lesbians.

♪♪

(Jewelle) But what grew out of that separation was kind

of a cultural fountain of activities.

I would go to Brooklyn and see 50 lesbians of color

that I never saw anywhere else.

(woman) The Combahee River Collective was probably the most important

ongoing political involvement of my life.

I mean, here was the manifestation of my greatest

fear and my deepest desire all on one little packet called

other black lrsbians, lots of them!

(woman) In the community of lesbians of color, different kinds of social

organizations grew up which were specifically social

like Salsa Soul Sisters.

(Barbara Smith) I remember this one meeting where we decided to talk about

the images of black women in the media.

This is 1975.

And there was a discussion about whether or not straight hair

versus afros at the time, versus locks.

Afro, straight hair, whatever.

Whatever we were looking at, there was no articulation that

black women had any right to be on the planet.

That's what we were dealing with.

Everything we do has got to contribute to the struggle

because everything they do is grinding us into dust

and we will not be ground.

♪ Hello hooray ♪

♪ Let the show begin ♪♪

Women started performing at night in the early '70s,

everything from church basements to women's centers.

There were the bookstores.

♪ Again and again ♪

♪ And again ♪♪

(Judy) And then the artists were starting to interact with

each other and suddenly there were audiences

going from 50 to 300 to 1,000 to 2,000.

We saw it all change from being little coffeehouses

to being large theaters.

♪ So long, so long ♪♪

I run into people all the time my age, their mid-40s or 50s

or late 30s who can still remember their

first women's music concert.

I can remember piling six dykes, or actually, let me say this,

six women, sort of half-straight, half-gay,

bisexual, who the hell knew, into my little baby blue

Volkswagen bug and driving down from Burlington, Vermont

where there was no gay subculture to see my first

Cris Williamson concert.

♪♪

One quit her job as a nurse and formed Coven Carpentry

so she could do lesbian carpentry.

One of them left her husband.

We're talking this concert literally

changed people's lives.

The empowerment had an ongoing impact.

It was an extraordinary force.

(Jewelle) Oh, God, I would think for me, the women's music festival

in Michigan was like Babes in Toyland.

(woman) It's from me to you with much love.

(Robin) I was the MC.

Now they're all in Birkenstocks and...

well, the ones that were dressed were in blue jeans.

Most of them were in nothing.

(Jewelle) I went with a big stack of books and a Thermos of martinis.

I arrived and it was like the new moon and there was a group

of Salsa Soul Sisters, they were trying to get the tent up at the

right angle so that the moon would be where it was supposed

to be for the nighttime ritual.

And then there was this moment where I said,

"Would anybody like a martini?"

And they all looked at me like I had lost my mind.

But, we did kill off that Thermos of martinis.

(Robin) I walked onstage and I declared my area a crystal-free zone

and I thought they were going to kill me.

Anything ludicrous, I immediately started

making fun of.

So all of a sudden, the gods of lesbians, excuse me,

the goddesses, the goddesses were tofu, vegetarianism.

We can make fun of that as much as we like and I like to have

a sense of humor about it, but the idea that we can be

sensitive to other people, that's an accomplishment.

I mean, I would be there watching them unroll the snow

fence so that wheelchairs could get up and down the terrain.

I would see women stop to help women

who were on crutches or who were blind.

That's... that changes your life, you know,

in ways that you don't forget.

♪♪

(Melissa) Beyond creating secular institutions,

some gays and lesbians began to build religious ones.

(man) I came from, you know, a Pentecostal background,

a Southern Baptist background.

And they taught us how to start churches.

12 people showed up in the living room of my home.

When I served communion, only three people came forward,

but there wasn't a dry eye in the place.

The next Sunday, we had 16 attendants, 18.

I said, "Whoo, hallelujah to the lamb."

Jesus came and died for my sins, not my sexuality.

(Gil) This person really spoke a word of affirmation,

which was something I never really experienced before

and which from a very spiritual place, I was being affirmed.

...Say in those churches.

Ain't no hypocrite gonna out-shout me, Amen.

(Melissa) If claiming a place in the church was a challenge,

cracking the political closet would also be an uphill battle.

In 1974, Elaine Noble ran for a seat

in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

I wasn't prepared, I don't think,

for all of the vitriolic part of a campaign.

People had shot through my windows, scratched "Lesbian"

on the back of my car which totally flipped me out

and my friends came out and I'm beating on the back

of the car screaming, "The illiterates misspelled it!

They misspelled it!"

I kept repeating it.

It was like the worst insult.

Elaine Nobel's victory for many will probably hold significance

because she is the first admitted gay person

to be state representative.

(Elaine) It was staggering.

I had a larger constituency of gay folks throughout the country

and the world who would call me and say, "You have to come here,

you have to help us with this."

And when I'd say, "Look, I have to be in the House to vote,

I can't be really be there."

Remember the guy who wrote, he used to live in this state

and he's gay, and he moved to California and he wanted me

to help him with his welfare check in California.

That was the difficult of being the only well known of anything.

It is well known that I am a gay person and in this state,

there is a law that says gay people cannot be married,

but there is no law that says two human beings

cannot love one another.

(Melissa) And in San Francisco, after four unsuccessful tries,

an openly gay man was elected city supervisor.

Harvey Milk made national headlines.

I remember it really grabbed me when I read that in the

newspaper because I'd never seen anything like that before.

And I was living in Fargo, North Dakota at the time.

(Melissa) In 1975, Time magazine puts its first gay man,

Sergeant Leonard Matlovich on the cover.

And in 1977, Miami, Florida becomes the first Southern city

to pass a gay rights ordinance.

However that victory would backfire.

♪ Glory, glory hallelujah ♪

♪ His truth... ♪♪

(Anita) I believe that more than ever before

that there are evil forces round about us,

even perhaps disguised as something good.

Anita was the precursor of a whole movement

that has turned gay bashing into an art form.

The war goes on to save our children because the seed

of sexual sickness that germinated in Dade County

has already been transplanted by misguided liberals

in the US Congress.

She took it into her head to form an organization

called Save Our Children.

Save them from homosexuality is what she had in mind.

Who knew anything about the religious right or that people

would become professionally anti-gay

as we were professionally gay.

(chanting) We are your children, we are your children.

(woman) Suddenly, our gay hotlines, our gay switchboards were flooded

with calls and inquires from people who said,

"What can I do to make a difference?”

(Rev. White) And what she was doing was simply, I think, setting up

a trial balloon in terms of their demographics to say,

"Does this play," and it played.

(man) When they take to the streets, it's a parade of homosexuals.

Men hugging other men.

Cavorting with little boys.

Even my father was completely confused by the rhetoric

of Anita Bryant and the right.

One day after hearing her on TV, he called me up and said,

"Do you sleep with little boys?"

I said, "Oh, Dad, I don't even sleep with big boys.”

You talk about that kind of stuff, people get afraid

and that fear causes them, motivates them,

to join the crusade and to send in money.

♪♪

(man) We lost in Miami and we lost in St. Paul, Minnesota.

We lost in Wichita and suddenly we lost in Eugene.

And they escalated the stakes in California

with a gentleman named State Senator John Briggs.

(man) The Briggs initiative would give boards throughout the state

the power to fire any openly gay teacher...

Thank God for you, sir.

(man) ...or anyone who encourages or promotes public

or private homosexuality.

Somebody's gotta draw the moral line in this country and say

enough is enough and that's what Anita Bryant did

and that's what I'm attempting to do.

The first thing I did was wrote a letter to all of my straight

friends in politics, in the same letter announcing that I was gay

and asking them for a contribution to fight

Proposition 6, the Briggs imitative.

One of those letters was to Mr. and Mrs. Clinton,

President Clinton.

He was Governor at the time in Arkansas and actually I got an

extraordinary response to the letter, I got a contribution.

So that brought me out of the closet.

To this day, I'm grateful to Anita Bryant for liberating me.

(chanting) No more Briggs!

No more Briggs!

(Melissa) On November 7, 1978, California voters

defeated the Briggs initiative.

Say it loud, gay and proud!

Say it loud!

Supervisor Harvey Milk led a celebration through

the streets of San Francisco.

20 days later, he would be assassinated.

I'm typing a letter to Harvey and I turn the TV on

and the news was broadcasting live from City Hall.

Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk

have been shot and killed.

(man) Oh, Jesus Christ!

And I was sitting here with this letter to this man who was dead.

And... mmm.

It was like my life had imploded, not exploded.

I didn't know what to do about all this.

In fact, I'm one the people, I did not go to City Hall

in that outrage.

I just wanted to get out of San Francisco.

(Melissa) For many local gay leaders, the Briggs threat coupled with

Milk's assassination emphasized the need

for a national political presence.

(Rev. Perry) Near the end of the '70s, we knew that we needed

a national lobbying group.

We set up a group called the Gay and Lesbian National Lobby

and a young man emerged who we wanted to lead that.

His name was Steve Endean.

(woman) All of a sudden, we were building this presence on

Capitol Hill and we were not only going to ask them

for their votes, but we were watching

when they voted against us.

(Melissa) The new Gay and Lesbian National Lobby

would become the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

The National Gay Task Force and Lamda Legal Defense Fund

also came into being.

This developing national presence was very much on

display at the first march in the nation's capital

in October 1979.

(woman) There was nothing like the 1979 march.

They say you always remember your first.

I remember standing on the sidelines and I just started

crying, because it was New York and then it was Nevada and then

it was what comes after N, Omaha, and it didn't end.

♪♪

(man) And then came AIDS.

And it changed everything.

I remember that day, I actually was here.

Within an hour, every single person I knew had either

called or I called them.

I mean, it was a shockwave.

Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.

Outbreak occurs among men in New York,

...and California.

Eight died inside two years.

Second paragraph.

The cause of the outbreak is unknown and there is yet...

...no evidence of contagion.

It was scary.

I mean, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look at that article

and see that it's an infectious agent.

Just look at it, it's like, two plus two equals.

And then we thought, poppers or amoebas.

I'd done all those things.

(man) We knew something was going on much earlier.

Friends were dying at Fire Island very mysteriously,

one or two or three a year.

People were getting sick.

We had like, a mad orgy of maybe five or six guys.

Within two months of that, both he and I had meningitis.

You know, you change the line in the sand.

I think I went, "Oh, well see, these people have had eight sex

partners a night, I've only had four.

Uh, so it won't be me."

(man) And I was afraid that it was

gonna ruin the community because we'd done such a magnificent job

of creating our own lives, our own place.

And we were going to lose it all.

It scared the shit out of me when he told me that yes,

I had it.

I mean, that's what it was.

It was "it."

It was gonna kill you, we knew that.

And so I spent the next six months of my life being numb.

Absolutely numb.

(Chuck) I didn't want to go back to being closeted.

I didn't want to go back to a wasteland with nobody in it.

And that's what I feared probably more than anything.

(President Reagan) As I've interpreted the gay rights movement,

it is not asking so much for civil rights

as it is asking for recognition

and acceptance of them as having an alternative lifestyle

and I'm sorry, but I can't agree with that.

Thank God for a President who agrees in totality with what

we morally stand for here.

(man) And we love drunkards and we love thieves

and we love homosexuals.

When I grew up in the Christian church,

the idea of being political was sin.

We hate homosexuality.

Falwell said, "No, no, we'll save the souls of the nation,

but if they don't go along with us, we'll change the laws

accordingly."

That was a major paradigm shift.

(Larry) There was something about Ronald Reagan that we were afraid of.

He was a Teflon god.

It was very hard to get anybody to protest anyplace

that he was at.

It wasn't the same kind of activist, street action culture

that there had been in the '60s or the beginning of the '70s

or there was eventually in '87.

♪ Do you really want to hurt me? ♪

♪ Do you really want to make me cry? ♪

♪ Do you really... ♪♪

(Melissa) Despite the growing anxiety of about AIDS and persistent

assaults from the religious right,

the gay culture continues to develop.

Vito Russo publishes "The Celluloid Closet,"

his history of homosexual images in film.

It is part of a surge of books and scholarship on gay history.

Harry Hay, who founded America's first gay association,

the Mattachine Society back in the 1950s,

becomes the spiritual leader of the Radical Faeries.

♪♪

This back to the land gay male drumming

faction opens communal farms and sanctuaries across the country.

We're losing the quality and certainly losing the shine

and the joy of being gay and we wanted to find a way by which

we could find a spirit way of coming back to that.

We didn't call it spiritual;

we called ourselves the Radical Faeries.

And you suddenly realize that in this circle of strangers,

you know each other better and longer and been closer

to each other than anybody that has ever known you

before in your life.

I went home and all of a sudden, the brotherhood was born.

♪♪

(Melissa) Also in the '80s, various groups begin to assert their presence

within their own communities.

♪ Follow your heart's desire ♪

♪ Light up the sky on fire ♪♪

(woman) I was very active in the spiritual movement

of the Lakota people.

This are some of the beads we got in exchange

for Manhattan Island.

The original...

My fear was if I came out and said I'm lesbian

that I'd be banned from those ceremonies.

When I came out in 1985, some of my fears came true.

A couple of old women came and said, "You should go somewhere

else and have a ceremony for your own kind."

But I prayed about it for a good year

and I did go on to begin a ceremony for native lesbians.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters...

(Melissa) In 1983, the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays

was determined to participate in the 20th anniversary

commemoration of Martin Luther King's

“I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.

(Barbara Smith) Gil Gerald who was based in Washington, he was working with

others to try to get one black lesbian or gay speaker.

There was a great deal of resistance within the march

organization by some of the march leaders,

including Walter Fauntroy, the delegate in the congress

for the District of Columbia.

He said in one infamous statement that to talk about

gay and lesbian rights, he said,

"That's like talking about penguin rights."

(Gil) It finally ended up in a confrontation.

We had people sitting in in the Congressman's office

on the hill.

(Barbara Smith) They sat in and they were arrested.

(Gil) We negotiated and were able to succeed in getting Audry Lorde

to be part of the program and we also succeeded in getting

Coretta Scott King to come out in a press conference and call

for amending the '64 Civil Rights Act

so that it would include sexual orientation as a protection.

(Melissa) Even America's second religion, sports,

would not be ignored.

In 1982, the first gay games were held in San Francisco.

(Phil) Oh, well, if you're a gay man, you can't throw a ball.

That is the purpose of the gay games.

We couldn't be open-- Tom Liddell wanted a place

where gay athletes could be in the open.

So we started our own gay games.

(woman) It was phenomenal, it was amazing.

I mean, we reached women that would never come to the bar.

We reached women who would never see themselves

as part of the lesbian and gay community.

But that's what it was.

Sports, bingo.

And I'll never forget opening day as long as I live.

It was like, tears for days.

It was just, oh.

Proud moment.

Yeah.

♪♪

When rodeo really became anchored initially,

leather people had their element and drag queens

also had a world that they lived in.

And only the cowboys seemed to be left out.

♪♪

(Melissa) While gays and lesbians are striving to maintain a sense

of pride, thousands of gay men begin entering hospitals.

The gay community is hit by the first tidal wave

of death from AIDS.

(Karla) People began to get sick in droves.

And suddenly a lot of people I knew were sick or were dying.

(man) Nobody was doing anything and the reason they weren't treating

this as a normal health epidemic was because

it was affecting gay men, period.

I've never heard once in this chamber

anybody say to the homosexuals,

“Stop what you're doing.”

(man) It was awful.

But you know, we made up our minds

we're going to fight through this.

It kind of was a natural progression to go from this

incredible activism around gay civil rights and to sort of take

the lessons learned there and apply it to AIDS activism.

(Chuck) The decision was made to close the bathhouses.

I went to a public meeting there where I feared

for my physical wellbeing.

The emotion was so high, the people were so concerned that

the bathhouses would be closed.

(Melissa) In New York City, playwright Larry Kramer invites friends

to a meeting in his apartment to hear Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien

explain that AIDS is spread by sexual contact.

Just to watch, all the faces around the room, panning around.

Every kind of reaction imaginable

from horror to being asleep.

That handful of people started meeting regularly.

We didn't have any money.

We had to go out and beg for it.

The city wouldn't give us dipshit.

So when there were no health care organizations that would

treat us, suddenly gay doctors formed AIDS practices.

We created organizations to deliver food.

We created organizations to get money for their rent.

The most extraordinary sense of renaissance and renewal

in the midst of Holocaust.

You're in a support group?

That's great.

(woman) I think that actually the gay and lesbian community was able

to learn a lot from the women's health movement

about how to deal with this.

Women had been dealing for many years since the publication

of Our Bodies, Ourselves, very consciously,

of taking our health care into our own hands.

(woman) So the gay men, being politicized and radicalized

and understanding the linkage with an oppressive health care

system and understanding significant family issues,

their agenda became a lesbian agenda.

That's the way I look at it.

(Robin) You see these tough-as-bull dykes talking about how

they'll never talk to a man again in the '70s

and there they were pushing the wheelchair,

making the hospital visits, changing guys

and so history brought us back together,

this historic happening of AIDS.

In the minority community,

a lot of information did not get in until very late.

It took the black churches a very long time

to even acknowledge AIDS.

(Renae) When my brother was alive, when he had to get services,

he didn't get services where he lived.

He went to Timbuktu, because services

weren't available where he lived.

(Jewelle) You know, when my cousin died, you know,

I could see his lovers there, all involved in church.

They were there in the choirs, and the preaching and the,

you know, they were all there.

But why didn't they have that information?

(Melissa) At the same time that information about sexuality

and safe sex amongst men were proliferating,

lesbians were shaking up conventional attitudes

about sexuality and pornography within

a larger women's movement.

(Dorothy) What we were talking about was an open-ended approach to sex.

Okay, so women use sex toys, my God.

So some women dress up for each other.

So some women act out different roles.

So some women like to take their girlfriends on the streets

in short skirts and walk behind them.

This is not like a huge secret or massive revelation.

(Jewelle) A number of my friends were targeted and pointed out

as their work being pornographic.

Joan Nestle because she talked about butch/femme.

Gail Rubin because she talked about S/M.

And you know, the Meese commission had been going around

the country holding these kind of hearings about the damages

of pornography.

The very limited...

(Hilary) I mean, there were many of us who really

thought we were about to embark on some other set

of kind of McCarthy-like hearings and scare tactics.

(Jewelle) The hysteria around it ended up clouding the issues

because of course, there are issues around pornography

in this society and violence against women,

but the hysteria of the right wing ended

up closing down the discussion ultimately and putting

the discussion back in the hands of the government.

But it was all of a sudden as if we had come out of this little

tiny safe corner we'd been hiding our sexuality in

and it was enormous and dangerous.

(Melissa) The sense of danger grips even Capitol Hill

as hysteria about sex becomes a topic in the US Congress.

(man) Congressman Jerry Studs is on the left of your screen.

Studs was censured by the House for his sexual relationship

with a 17-year-old male congressional page.

Studs announced publicly he is a homosexual.

(Melissa) Closeted gay congressmen were being forced to change

with the times.

I had a lot of gay and lesbian friends,

but I still wasn't even out to them.

It was bizarre, but I guess I was so terrified

of coming out and what finally decided me was the death

of Stewart McKinney.

The fact that the hideous disease has now claimed

a sitting member of Congress is expected to go a long way

towards galvanizing...

His dying wish was to reveal that the cause of his death

was AIDS.

I'd known Stewart and I'd known of his bisexuality.

I just was so depressed we got into

this kind of tug of war, about was he or wasn't he gay.

And I said, "You know, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,

I'm not going to let this happen to me."

So I just decided I had to do it.

His coming out was very important, I think not so much

for the country, although for the country too,

but so much in Congress happens in those cloakrooms.

You really can't discount the importance of having openly gay

people in those meetings.

(Sheila) When I was first running, I was sitting in a restaurant

in Santa Monica, which is in my district,

and this guy came barreling up

to the table and I thought, oh my God, I'm in for it now.

What's he going to do?

And he came right up to me and he said,

"Sheila, I hate all politicians.

They all lie to you, they dissemble, they distort

the truth, you can't trust them at all.

I hate them all except for you."

And I said, "Me, why me?"

And he said, "Well, you already told us

the worst thing about yourself.

Why would you lie about anything else?”

I think we should do away with gays if possible.

♪ Glory, glory hallelujah ♪♪

(man) The wages of sin is death.

You want to see the end result of this lifestyle?

Then come with me into the hospital and see...

(Melissa) In the midst of this growing backlash to homosexuality,

the Supreme Court upholds state anti-sodomy laws

in its Bowers v. Hardwick decision.

Michael Hardwick had been arrested for sodomy in Georgia

and appealed his case to the Supreme Court.

When he lost, gay people again took to the streets.

(man) We planned a major demonstration at the Supreme Court.

(Susan) You know, sodomy, abortion, medical care,

these were all the same issue.

Keep your laws off my body.

This is like, nuts.

How could this possibly be happening?

(man speaking French)

(Melissa) Five years and 5,000 deaths

into the AIDS epidemic, movie star Rock Hudson dies.

And AIDS finally makes the front page.

It spurred a lot of people to come into

the gay and lesbian community.

It spurred a lot of straights to support us more and more.

But the greatest coming out process was testing

HIV-positive.

Sometimes I'm introduced as I am today, and I'm proud of it,

to be HIV-positive.

(David) And they had no choice but to come out.

And the question is, do you come out and be defeated in life

and a victim or do you come out as a warrior and fight back?

That was one of the things that motivated me to come to

San Francisco was I thought I might only

have six months to live.

In San Francisco, you could do something.

It wasn't just about coming and dying or getting sick

or waiting to die, it was really about coming

and doing something.

♪♪

(man) So that's one of the reasons that Act Up was formed.

It is appalling...

(Vivian) Larry Kramer called that meeting at the center.

The very first demonstration was on Wall Street

at Burroughs Wellcome.

That was my idea to close down Wall Street.

I mean, we couldn't lose down Burroughs Wellcome,

but we could close down Broadway.

How many people did you kill today?

(Vivian) A lot of people were willing to get arrested for Act Up.

That's what brought me to Act Up,

the level of homophobic hysteria.

...To promote a perverted lifestyle,

a lifestyle that brings forth death.

People, you know, for the first time, a friend of mine was

walking across the street for years and somebody yelled out,

you know, “Faggot.”

That hadn't happened in a while.

United in anger and committed in direct action

to end the AIDS crisis.

(Maxine) It was very open, anybody could say anything.

You could stand up and if you had a good idea,

people would do it.

(Larry) Again, a lot of it, as I said, was motivated by fear.

This is the probably the last time I'm going to be here.

There wasn't a meeting where somebody didn't come up to me

and say, “do you know of anything that's coming along?

I just know, I just feel I don't have much time left.”

At about the same time that Larry Kramer was talking about

setting up an organization, I was in London getting together

a group of gay men to set up a similar organization.

By now, Act Up chapters were opening around the country

and people literally from around the country, maybe as far away

as Canada, came and descended on

the Food and Drug Administration.

I was part of a group called Wave Three and we were all

wearing white lab coats with bloody hands on the backs.

(Charles) The use of blood, the use of the Silence = Death slogan,

those are truly important visual tools

that we were able to take advantage of.

You know, some are too shocking for other people,

but at that time in our lives, the shock value was important.

They were just not paying attention to us.

(Mike) Some of the aspects and some of the things that they did,

I didn't understand why they did it.

But I know in my heart that because they did it,

things have changed today.

(speaking Spanish)

Health care is a right!

(Vivian) The beauty of Act Up, it put fear

in the hearts of individuals.

It became a protagonist, it became the bad guy.

But it became the very smart bad guy.

It knew all the stuff about drugs.

It was a powerhouse of information and research.

What Act Up and people like myself were trying to do

was challenge that orthodoxy.

Unless there are parallel drug trials that address the way

drugs function inside women's bodies, we will never...

And say, hang on, it's the patient that has the right above

everybody else to know the facts and to make

their own informed decision.

Health care is a right!

Health care is a right!

I didn't mind calling up somebody's doctor I didn't have

to have a relationship with and saying,

"Well, you seem to have washed your hands of this guy.

'Cause there's shit all over the walls and he's having

convulsions and your office isn't taking his calls.

So what are you going to do?”

♪♪

(Charles) I have mixed feelings about what Act Up did inside the church.

I don't like Cardinal O'Connor, I do not believe in his

politics, but I will respect the church for what it is.

People were afraid of us.

That's what made us.

Drug companies did what we wanted them to do

because we had gone into St. Patrick's.

We were no longer the limp-wristed effeminate person;

we were men in jeans and boots who would infiltrate a mass.

Stop killing us!

We're not gonna take it anymore!

You're killing us!

Stop it!

Stop it!

(Jewelle) And to see these men using up their last bits of energy

to create something that would last beyond them and...

Sorry.

I don't think you see that that often.

♪ Oooh... ♪♪

(woman) And the second march was called the Great March.

♪ Oooh... ♪♪

And maybe it was because we got up and we talked about AIDS.

♪ Oooh... ♪♪

A million people showed up, it was really a million,

close to a million.

America is not all red or white or blue.

America is a quilt.

(Phil Reed) There was this larger than life figure on our stage and he was

the only prominent politician in the country

who would come to the rally.

(Jesse) Everybody must have equal protection under the law

in the real America.

At the 1987 march, people would bring their ideas

and they'd want to get it sponsored by the march.

It was about a quilt, some kind of a quilt.

He wanted to bring a quilt.

They thought it was a sewing bee.

They didn't understand a quilt.

And none of us really understood it.

I didn't know what to make of it at first.

It had this funny name, the Names Project.

I didn't understand what it was until I actually walked on to

the field, and saw and started to walk around and see also

the reaction of other people who were looking at the panels.

This was the first time that anyone had ever done

this kind of memorial.

I think the quilt, our AIDS quilt, is one of the most

inspired ideas of the 20th century.

(man) I have found it therapeutic to make a panel.

There was one leader of the gay community and his favorite song

was "There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover."

So when I made his panel, I put bluebirds on it, you know.

And underneath it, I wrote "Memory Maker."

And this was him.

One particular quilt, I'll never forget it.

The two arms were sewn together and then two white gloves

and two officers holding hands.

Obviously, they had been partners.

They both had passed from AIDS.

(Phil) So I walk up and down these rows and every once in a while you'll

find a box of Kleenex that you can stop,

collect yourself for a few minutes.

(man) There is a religious war going on in this country.

It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall

be as the cold war itself,

for this war is for the soul of America.

(man) And the artists, don't you know, they are so upset that ol' Jess

might stay there and cut off their little pipeline to

your pocketbook called the National Endowment for the Arts.

Well, I got news for them...

(man) The whole NEA thing was just a way of attacking homosexuality

by certain politicians.

Jesse Helms is very right.

He does not want people to see queers living real lives

where they actually take care of their children.

(woman) I was walking down the street here in North Hampton

and a woman stopped me and she said that she

and her female lover had just started a family

and they had no books to read to

their daughter that showed their kind of family

and somebody should write one.

So I said, “Well, I'm somebody.”

So I wrote the book.

I never expected it to be taken up by the radical right,

to be taken up by the Lesbian Avengers.

Joseph Fernandez commissioned a committee to come up

with a multi-cultural curriculum.

They came up with a 443-page bibliography of suggested texts

to use in the classroom about all kinds of families,

including gay and lesbian families.

Somehow, that got twisted into, "Look, lesbians want to steal

your children and recruit them into their lifestyle,"

which is ridiculous.

I mean, when I grew up, I read thousands of books

about straight people.

Not one of them changed my sexuality.

I don't know any religion that accepts homosexuality.

When you take my child, you are teaching her something that

is against a parent's religion and that is a violation

of that parent's and that child's religion

under the First Amendment.

(Leslea) The Lesbian Avengers showed up at a school in her district on

the first day of school with lavender balloons

that said Teach Us About Lesbians.

(Maxine) And we had big balloons that said Ask About Lesbian Lives

and we had a marching band that played things like

"We Are Family.”

(Leslea) So that's what I mean about everyone using the book

for their own agenda.

You know, things escalated, things got really ugly.

Joseph Fernandez lost his job.

Heather was kicked off the Rainbow curriculum.

It was a real mess.

Hey, hey, ho, ho...

(indistinct chanting)

(Melissa) For a short period in the early '90s, the activist style

pioneered by Act Up was expanded upon by a younger generation

calling itself Queer Nation.

I think Queer Nation was sort of,

that was very much generational.

It was sort of a cultural expression.

♪ When the queers, when the queers ♪

♪ Go marching in, go marching in ♪♪

(Melissa) Meanwhile, non-gay organizations began to appreciate

the political energy of these new charged-up activists.

♪ When the queers go marching... ♪♪

I'm Susan Moir with the United Steelworkers of America,

Local 8751, the Boston School Bus Drivers Union.

One of the very first regional events I went to

was a conference in New York,

District Council 37, which is a huge union in New York.

And the executive director of the union was

an African-American man, straight man,

came to this conference.

It was the first time anything like this had ever happened.

The place was full of all these queers of many colors

and many of who had never been in their own union hall before.

And Stanley Hill who was the director at that time,

he stood up and he said, "Make no mistake about it,

we know that we need you even more than you need us.”

(Charles) You know, living in New York, we always think that we've seen

everything or have done everything.

♪♪

(Melissa) Gay life was now being seen in small town America.

Since coming to New England, when I first moved here,

I could walk down the street and people just like,

kind of knew and some people would chuckle or whatever.

I know of a town, small town here, had kind of a guy,

he had AIDS, was dying of AIDS, went to school

and told them what caused AIDS and what should they not do

and everything and they really fell in love with the guy.

They made sure they had an overstuffed chair there where

he could come and visit and he visited right up

to the week he died.

(Melissa) Along with this greater openness came a new wave of right wing

organizing that would target rural states

with small gay communities.

We're here today to announce the formation of the Oregon

Christian Coalition.

We don't think that homosexuals, heterosexuals, sadists,

masochists, polygamists or any other person based on their

private sexual conduct should receive

preferential status under the law.

(Melissa) In Oregon, the Citizens Alliance, supported by

the Christian Coalition, gathered signatures

for a statewide anti-gay bill called Measure 9.

It was defeated.

But Colorado's referendum, Amendment 2,

was passed by its voters.

It felt like we'd been kicked in the stomach.

It was just overwhelming.

There was one body of people who got very scared and sort of felt

like they needed to retreat back into the closet.

There was a whole other group of people who said,

"We're not going to take it anymore.

We're coming out and we're going to be active

and we're going to be involved.”

(Leslie) There was a large community gathering down on the courthouse

lawn and I spoke to people and basically said,

"We will fight it.

We'll take it all the way to the US Supreme Court if we need to”"

♪ Oh Jesus ♪♪

(Melissa) In many states, the religious right made special appeals to

the African-American community to support initiatives

against gay civil rights.

Ypsilanti passed a pro-human rights ordinance that listed

every possible thing, skin color, religion,

origin, sexual orientation.

A local white right organization got together and got enough

signatures to challenge the language of just orientation,

sexual orientation.

And in the closing days of the campaign, they brought in

Reggie White, black football player for the Green Bay Packers

who's been very anti-gay in his sentiments.

(woman) Tell me what you came here for tonight.

I came here to preach the gospel.

That's what it boils down to.

When I mention, the Bible says that homosexuality was a sin,

I am personally attack anyone.

(Mandy) But some of the black folks in Ypsilanti said, “Wait a minute.

If they're bringing in black folks to try to organize in

the black community to come after gay folk,

we better be doing something.

So we're going to have a non-violent vigil

outside of the venue.”

The day comes, they're there.

They might have had 400 in that venue, 99% white,

which meant what-- the black community said,

"We get it, we're not interested," didn't show up.

That was a win.

(Melissa) On the national level, Bill Clinton in his presidential

campaign quoted the gay community.

Them, the gays.

We've gotten to where we've nearly "themmed" ourselves

to death.

Them and them and them.

This is America.

There is no them.

There is only us.

(man) So celebrate tonight.

This is your victory.

You earned it.

You worked for it.

You paid for it.

And you damn well deserve it.

(Melissa) After his election, Clinton issued a memorandum that

if followed through, would have lifted the ban

against gays in the military.

Meeting come to order.

(Melissa) It caused immediate furor in Congress.

Clinton called his friend and political advisor David Mixner

and asked for six months' breathing space.

(David) And I said, "What I need to know is at the end of that six

months, that you will definitely say there will be an executive

order that we will not back down from that now that

we're in the middle of a battle.”

And he said, “I promise you.”

(Melissa) Clinton broke his promise and instituted the policy known

as Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

I got arrested outside the White House

the week after he issued the policy.

As I was being handcuffed and led to the paddy wagon,

I turned and looked at the White House

and I literally saw friends of mine

who I'd worked with on the campaign who now held jobs in

the administration with their faces pressed against the window

watching me be arrested and led off to jail.

♪ So long ♪♪

(Melissa) Accordingly, the third national march on Washington is a mix

of both optimism and concern for the future

of the gay rights movement.

♪ I wonder what's gone wrong ♪♪

For the first time, because of that third march,

we were broadcast all over the world.

C-SPAN covered us live and then CNN put it all over the world.

♪ You better work Cover Girl ♪

♪ Work it Girl give a twirl ♪♪

Well, that was also the era of gays in the military

and that was like, what?

And I got the London Philharmonic doing

"Anchors Away” and doing the Air Force song and the Marine song.

And I know there may be people who'd disagree with me,

but I think that was kind of the beginning of the end

of what I think of as a movement for justice.

I have to say that people didn't go and become empowered,

but the kind of media production focus

that the march had kind of took away

from some of the personal success, in my own opinion.

(Robin) So we had all these people that had been thrown out

of the military, like Grethe Cammermeyer and then they had

Allen Schindler's mother come up and give a speech

about Allen and what had happened to him.

You know, he was a sailor that was murdered because he was gay.

I don't want any mother to ever have to go through

what I'm going through.

Faith, hope, love.

Abide these three and the greatest of these is love.

(Melissa) In Denmark, Axel and Eigil Axgil become the first legally married

gay couple.

In the United States, gays and lesbians began the legal fight

for the right to marry.

I mean, six people wanting to get married caused more horrific

panic in Washington than the Lesbian Avengers or Act Up

ever did.

Flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of

self-centered morality are licking at the very foundations

of our society.

(David) The Clinton administration panicked.

Bill Clinton, again, without consulting anyone, and this

I find one of the most shameful episodes, announced

that he would sign DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act,

which would make it against the law for gays and lesbians

to be married.

I testified before Congress on the Defense of Marriage Act

and Hilary had given me a ring to wear that day.

And sitting at that table, being shredded by these horrific

members of Congress that were throwing me like red meat

to the right wing, it made me want to get married.

(man) When Jeff presented my ring to me, it was in crowded restaurant

on Main Street in King, New Hampshire.

At the table next to us, there were probably...

It was a big family.

At that point, I think everyone dropped their fork

and kind of looked at us.

To love and to cherish?

To love and to cherish.

(Jeff) We knew that people wouldn't necessarily recognize us

as a family and that was one of the reasons we opted for

the marriage and changing our names.

(Mark) I was Mark Herman and he was Jeff May,

now we are the Herman-Mays.

(Melissa) In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado's Amendment 2

was unconstitutional.

I have a question: How does it feel to know that the Bill

of Rights is healthy and alive in our country today?

(Sue) It was very exciting.

It was really an incredibly exciting moment to have that

decision and know sort of, that this was a really important

precedent-setting decision.

We are redefining the immutable ideals that have guided us

from the beginning.

(Melissa) The '90s also see a string of gay celebrities

in the national media.

(woman) Ladies and gentlemen, Ellen Degeneres.

(Melissa) Ellen comes out on national TV.

Gays become a favorite subject of Hollywood movies.

Yes I'm a middle-aged fag.

But I know who I am, Val.

It took me 20 years to get here and I'm not going

to let some idiot Senator destroy that.

(Melissa) K.D. Lang poses with supermodel Cindy Crawford on the cover

of Vanity Fair.

The media indulges in a frenzy of lesbian chic.

I'm lesbian chic.

I feel like, you know, me, K.D., Cindy Crawford.

Is Cindy Crawford a lesbian?

I came up in the flannel shirt generation.

So anything that goes beyond the flannel shirt,

I think we can benefit from.

K.D. Lang is wicked cute.

I mean, who's gonna bitch against that?

(all) Sheila, Sheila, Sheila, Sheila.

(Sheila) Well, actually, it felt really good becoming a famous lesbian.

People take a lot of courage from other people that they see.

And for better or for worse, a lot of them are people they

don't actually know, people they see on television,

people they read about.

Some young person could say, "Gosh, another one and look how

they've accomplished

and look how they didn't kill themselves.”

♪ Shine, shine, shine, shine, shine, shine ♪

♪ Look into the bright side ♪

♪ Shine ♪♪

I'm sitting there and like, sitting on this little bench on

the bus, looking on the bus, doo doo doo,

and I looked up and there was the poster.

It said, "What can you do if your best friend just told you

that they're gay?"

And I was like, "Oh, my God."

It just seemed like, you know, light shone down from heaven.

After I called the phone number, the Gay and Lesbian

Action Council directed me to District 202,

which is a non-profit gay and lesbian youth center.

And the concept of letting a youth, particularly someone

that might even be a minor,

living in a gay establishment was anathema.

But these founders recognized the need and that if we didn't

help these youths whose families had abandoned them

and kicked them out, who would?

(Hope) The first person I met, he had this grand vision.

He wanted a gay and lesbian youth prom.

♪♪

And I was like, “Okay.”

It was amazing.

We put it together and we like sent out press releases

and all this stuff.

People rented limos, rented tuxes.

Everybody was in evening wear.

There was like, guys and guys and girls and girls.

It was pretty cool.

(Melissa) Yet this great visibility which has brought acceptance

for so many...

...this is my boyfriend.

...can still bring out hostility, hatred

and fear in others.

...getting married?

Yeah, in October, I think.

Or something like that.

(man) Because Matt's last few minutes of consciousness on Earth

may have been hell, his family and friends

want more than ever to

say their farewells to him in a peaceful,

dignified and loving manner.

(woman) Does that make you a better person?

Does that make you a better person?

(Barney) This savage murder does call us to the need to improve what

we as a society do to protect other young Mr. Sheppards.

I thought I had an opportunity to use the prominence that

I had, people knew who I was and what I was, to drive home

the reality of this prejudice and say, yeah,

a young man was murdered.

This was not an abstraction.

This could have been me.

Stop the violence, stop the hate!

Stop the violence!

(Melissa) Three decades after Stonewall, journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote,

“The gay moment is unavoidable.

What started tumbling out of the closets at the time of Stonewall

is profoundly altering the way we all live.”

The gay moment had evolved into a global movement.

(Singing in foreign language)

(Neil) South Africa is a fascinating case.

It's the only country in the world where gay rights

are enshrined in their constitution.

The same passion with which I have fought against racism,

I will fight against homophobia.

I give the gratitude to Simon Nkoli, because I fully believe

without Simon Nkoli, black people

would still be in closets.

Some people still believe there are no African gays

in South Africa, but here we are.

(Singing in foreign language)

Our group has been invited to the 25th anniversary

of Stonewall in New York City in 1994.

It was like, amazing, to see all those faces.

Like, incredible, it was, I don't know.

It was the time of my life.

We came back to Thailand with more energy

and we worked hard for the year.

Coming up was the Conference on women in Beijing.

We're everywhere!

Lesbians!

We're everywhere!

Lesbians!

We're everywhere!

Lesbians!

(Anjana) There were several women who came around to watch

the lesbians.

♪ Lesbianas soy lesbianas ♪

♪ Porque... ♪♪

(Anjana) We don't mind. I think a lot of us there were used

to performing and enjoying ourselves.

I don't think I would be here without the Western world.

And therefore, it is a two-way thing.

As much as they want some help from us, we want help from them.

And I guess we live in a global world now and what happens in

Australia, people hear about in America or in the Philippines.

The Mardi Gras now has a webpage and people come and so

the numbers get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

(Melissa) In 1978, the Sydney, Australia police had shut down a political

demonstration of 2,000 gay and lesbian marchers.

20 years later, the Sydney Mardi Gras became one of the world's

largest gay celebrations, drawing 1 million people.

(Lorri) You can be so amazed and blown away by all the neat things that

you see there, but then it doesn't take you very long to

look around to find the evidence of all the death

and the memorials to the people that we lost

and lost way too young and their lives and the lives

of our community.

And it gives you pause.

I was thinking while I was looking at the room tonight

how many times we could fill it to overflowing with people

I remember who aren't here anymore.

♪♪

(Craig) Nightwatch came out of an emotionally very devastating

personal experience.

A dear friend of mine lived for years with HIV and AIDS.

His partner called and said, "If you'd like to see Michael,

you better come now."

And I drove over there and I was so scared

about what I was going to see.

You know, if I could have done anything other than walk

in that room, I would have done it.

And uh, I walked in and his bed had been moved out into

the middle of the room and there was a circle

of family and friends who had just completely

encircled the bed.

And there was this all-night vigil that was happening.

And I was reminded of this little kid's song,

it was one the first songs I remember singing as a kid,

"All Through the Night"

and this whole notion of guardian angels

and all of a sudden, I could see what they were.

And I came home back home after the funeral,

sat down and put together this idea called “Nightwatch.”

♪ Guardian angels ♪

♪ God will send thee all through the night ♪

♪ Soft the drowsy hours are creeping... ♪♪

(Mel) I think of my friends who have died, I think of them through

positive ways, wonderful times we had together.

I still look at videos I have of friends.

To keep them alive inside of you is great.

(Renae) I can't count the number of funerals I went to.

I can't count the number of people's hands

I held while they died.

My brother's whole circle of friends are gone.

The whole circle of friends when I first came to Chicago

are gone.

(woman) My best friend Beau wanted kids,

but he had AIDS and there was just no way.

He said, “I got one for you, I'll give you Dan.”

His lover, Dan.

So Dan became the father of our son.

When you're dying and you look into the world, a small child

is an enormous, it's a reaching into the future.

When Beau died, Dan's wound was so deep.

I would watch Wolf go out, climb on Dan.

And I would watch the way Dan would hold him

and touch him and look at him.

And on that impulse, we had made an extremely wise choice.

HIV to me...

(Phil Reed) And we decided to run out there,

the slogan on our piece of literature said, "My parents

taught me to fight for justice."

And that was what we decided to run on.

And I won the election by the largest plurality of anybody

in the city of New York.

So the whole gay piece, the black piece, the HIV piece

in my life has been completely brought together.

And uh, here I am, sitting here in the city council.

(Rev. Perry) The most important thing I believe the gays and lesbians

have done to change the world is come out of the closet.

♪ Oh... ♪♪

That revolutionary act for me

is the most important thing that we've done in 30 years.

It is unimaginable for us in 1969 to think that in 1999,

there would be all these possibilities career-wise.

(Mike) Back towards graduation and the entire recruit class, all men,

left their wives and girlfriends and dragged me out on the dance

floor and danced with me at graduation.

♪ You make me feel like... ♪♪

(woman) We've come from invisibility to visibility.

We've challenged family, the definition of family.

We challenged diversity.

We've challenged gender.

♪ ...kiss me there and it feels real good ♪♪

♪ And I'll know you'll love me... ♪♪

(Chuck) The rest of the world now knows that we give very good parties.

♪ Ohh, you make me feel mighty real ♪♪

(Barbara Gittings) My partner Kay and I have talked about the need for gay

retirement homes for older gay people.

We know a time is coming.

I guess I would call it the Lavender Light Years Retirement

Home and I will be able to rock and say,

"Do you remember when we picketed

the White House in 1965?”

♪♪