In most parts of this country, homosexuality is still a liability
for those who want to run for political office.
But in San Francisco, the scale is being tipped the other direction.
In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,
becoming the first out gay elected official in California.
As soon as we found out that Harvey had won and could declare victory...
my girlfriend took my motorcycle down to city hall
and brought him back to his camera store.
It was great. He was just encircled as soon as he got there.
He knows his audience. He already has a big gay bloc there.
But he's like, "Who else in this city can I address using that camera?"
I will fight to represent my constituents.
I will fight to represent the city and county of San Francisco.
I will fight to give those people who had once walked away hope
so that those people will walk back in.
Thank you very much.
He's building bridges all over San Francisco using local news.
When Harvey got elected, I was covering city hall.
The TV news cameras loved him.
And I loved him too.
Because you would get a, you know... a great story, no matter what it was.
If you're gonna utilize television, you have to entertain.
You have to keep people's attention.
Here's Harvey. This is Thursday Night Live.
So other candidates might have had this opportunity of this new audience
and just failed 'cause they're so boring, but not Harvey.
And one of the great moments was when he invited the cameras down to Duboce Park,
which is right near the Castro,
and he said, "What is an idea that everyone can get behind?"
It may be the day before San Francisco's dog litter ordinance goes into effect,
but for the city's dogs, it was business as usual.
Just before the news conference,
Harvey went out with his dog and planted dog poop in the park.
He "accidentally" stepped in the dog poop.
He lifted his foot up, he looks at the bottom of it, and he says,
"I'm gonna make it a fine and a crime to leave your dog's poo behind."
He was a showman.
He had the audience, and he knew how to use it.
Being at Stonewall the night that this went down...
My memories of that night are so clouded with the pain.
We were fighting for our fucking lives.
And the fact that this went on for six days
is a testament to what we had to do to survive.
In the aftermath of the Stonewall uprising,
LGBTQ activists formed resistance groups,
including the Gay Liberation Front,
Gay Activists Alliance,
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
and Lesbian Feminist Liberation.
Television was a way to get our message across.
And because there weren't too many out gay men and lesbians,
we were invited on to talk shows.
I don't know what's new about homosexuality.
I guess it's been around for centuries and thousands of years.
But they call it the newest sexual revolution.
And maybe it is. Maybe you can explain that to us.
- First, welcome to Pittsburgh. - Glad to be here.
Welcome to Hotline, Randy.
Back in the '60s, when gay people had been on television,
often they stood in the shadows.
It was considered a disgrace to be a homosexual. That wasn't my reaction.
It was important for me
to show that homosexuals could be just as well-adjusted as heterosexuals.
You say that homosexuality is not a sickness.
- And... - And it's not contagious.
- I mean, it isn't...
You are or are not a homosexual. It isn't something you become by choice.
So we had the opportunity to talk about who we were
and what it is to be a gay person.
But we were also a curiosity to people.
I was invited to appear on a live talk show in Boston.
And when I got to the talk show,
I realized backstage
that I was going to be on the show whose theme was disability.
There was a person on the show who was deaf.
There was a man who had multiple sclerosis.
And there was me, the lesbian.
And I thought, "Okay, here we are, the trifecta."
It's hard to talk about this kinda stuff without stressing
just how invisible gay people were.
Invisibility led to the homophobia being standard.
And so everything was played for a joke.
I watched late-night TV from the moment that I can remember watching TV.
And it was Carson. It was Carson, Carson, Carson.
And many times, gay people were the butt of the joke.
Could I do it a couple minutes?
- No, no! - No!
- That's no fun. - Give me a break. I'm so lonely.
It was such cheap humor.
And for some reason, people just loved it.
I don't know whether you know this,
but Don didn't get married until late in life
because he felt that marriage would jeopardize his career working gay bars.
Whenever you needed to take somebody down a peg,
you would just infer that they were gay.
Because that was the lower-class citizen.
Terms of abuse were order of the day.
JACK PAAR: The word fairy is the most objectionable?
BRUCE VOELLER: There are many objectionable terms...
PAAR: Surely not fag and queen. Are they objectionable?
VOELLER: Yes, they are.
ARNIE KANTROWITZ: I'm a real human being.
PAAR: But we have a right to be a little uptight when you people go too far.
We weren't getting anything when people were speaking softly.
We had to demand it and force television to respond.
NBC would do guided tours of 30 Rock.
So we arranged to take the last tour of the night.
Television was live back then.
And because you have millions of people watching,
airtime is worth a lot of money.
So any disruption can be extremely expensive.
We snuck away from the group.
And we literally hid in a closet till 6:00 in the morning.
And thanks to the tour, we knew where the studio was.
So we all of a sudden appeared on The Today Show.
US District Judge John...
- Gay people are tired of NBC's bigotry! - Oh, Christ.
NBC went quiet for two or three minutes.
They were going to turn me over to the police.
But a woman came up to me and said,
"Who are you, what are you doing and why did you do it?"
And she's taking notes as I'm telling her.
And a guy comes out and says to her,
"Get in there! Get in there! You're on!"
She says, "Not until I have the story."
That was Barbara Walters.
She said the word "gay" on national network TV.
People had to hear that.
But we hadn't completed what needed to be done,
which is to make the television networks realize
that they had to cover our story, our people and our struggle.
The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
I grew up watching Walter Cronkite.
He was this kind of all-knowing, all-seeing legend in news.
He was the man that America trusted.
So much so, 60 million people watched him every evening.
You don't get that kind of ratings today unless it's the Super Bowl.
So we realized that if we're going to make a splash
and if the networks are going to take us seriously,
we had to go after their big baby.
And their biggest baby was the live broadcast of CBS Evening News.
I went in as a student from Temple University
who was in the radio, film and television department.
And I was going to write a thesis
on how the evening news was done with Walter Cronkite.
So the producers invited me into the studio.
With security precautions heavier than those provided President Nixon,
- Secretary of State Kissinger... - Gay people are protesting CBS' policies!
And the CBS television network went totally black.
At which point some people in the room came over to me,
slammed me to the ground, started wrapping me in cables.
We'll go on with the news, at any rate.
With security precautions heavier than those provided President Nixon,
and perhaps with some we could use around here...
I was arrested.
And while I was still in jail, every paper in America reported on it.
I was charged with disrupting the Federal Communications Act,
which carried with it a $10,000 fine and ten years' imprisonment.
So our defense was that we weren't trespassing.
And to do that we had to subpoena Walter Cronkite.
The prosecution did its bit, saying how horrible and bad I was
and how I was a militant and a radical and had to be put away.
And in the hall, Al, my lawyer was talking to me.
And all of a sudden, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I turned around, and the gentleman said, "You must be Mark Segal."
I said, "You must be Walter Cronkite."
And he said, "Why did you do what you did?"
And I said, "Your show discriminates. It's censored. It's biased."
Walter Cronkite didn't know everything about what was going on in the world.
He was a legend. I'm not taking anything away from him.
At CBS News it wasn't a very diverse group of people who were reporting the news.
It didn't really reflect the width and the breadth of America.
When we got back into the courtroom, he was called to testify.
And the first question that the prosecution asked,
"When these people trespassed into your studio..."
And he said, "They didn't trespass. We invited them."
We were found guilty but fined $200.
Mark Segal was incredibly brave.
So subversive and so smart. He was getting himself in there like a spy.
And then at the exact moment, he'd pop in front of the camera.
It was the only way we could get that message out there.
Well, that interruption of our broadcast a moment ago
was by a member of something called Gay Raiders,
an organization protesting, he said, CBS' alleged defamation of homosexuals
on entertainment programming.
To be able to reach 60 million people and have them say,
"Hey, did you see this fairy disrupted Cronkite last night?"
That's how mass communication works. It brings dialogue.
And dialogue brings a desire to want to know more.
After that zap, Walter started covering LGBT issues.
He would do different things for the gay rights struggle.
And we became friends.
Over the years I've kept in touch with one of those young men.
His name's Mark Segal. Brilliant young fellow.
He operates a gay newspaper in Philadelphia. Very successful.
Gay people watching would say, "Hey, wow. There's other people like me.
Maybe we can band together and make a positive change."
So those are really heroic acts of almost, like, guerrilla warfare
and using the media as your tool.
As gay activists were forcing themselves onto the airwaves,
screenwriters Richard Levinson and William Link were pitching
the first gay-themed television movie to network executives.
We took it to NBC.
And they said, "We wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole. Get outta here."
Not that long after,
an assistant of Barry Diller's came into our office and said,
"You know, Barry's the head of ABC Movies.
He's really looking for good stuff, offbeat."
And we said, "Well, we've got this idea."
In ABC's TV movie, That Certain Summer,
a boy visits his father and finds out that he's in a relationship with another man.
We couldn't get actors to play that role of Doug Salter.
Cliff Robertson said, "I'd rather play Hitler than play that man."
There weren't a lot of out gay actors at the time, in the '70s.
So those stories, when they were told,
were going to be played by straight actors.
This was the decade when they did some extraordinary movies for television.
And I was doing one all the time.
My second wife, Carol Rossen, said, "What about that script you were reading?"
I said, "I turned it down."
But then I start to describe the story to my wife.
And about halfway through that, I remember this wonderful scene.
It takes some of us a while sometimes to come all the way out.
I am out.
Okay.
I'm thinking... "This is not so bad."
And then she said, "Holbrook, are you nuts?"
I said, "Yeah."
She said, "When we get to the house, you go to the phone,
you call Monty Johnson and see if he hasn't cast the role, and say yes!"
The network was nervous as hell about it.
And I got this wonderful memo from a top executive.
It said, "Lamont,
there must be no physical contact between the two men in the story.
Not even lingering eye contact."
Standards and Practices were running for the hills.
They made us put this speech at the end where Hal Holbrook says to his son...
If I had a choice...
it's not something I'd pick for myself.
But it's the only way I can live.
The scene's implication that homosexuality was an undesirable affliction
offended gay activists.
But because of the film's relatively sensitive nature,
GAA president Rich Wandel ultimately praised the film
as a significant if tentative step in the right direction.
The fact that we were allowed on the screen at all was a breakthrough.
That Certain Summer was a critical and ratings success
and became the first TV movie to depict homosexuality in a sympathetic light.
That Certain Summer offered the hope of a rosier vision of gay life
because it celebrated the fact
that these two guys had made their love that important.
The point of the movie was we happened to be gay,
but we were just people... having a life.
That's who we are.
Walking down Fifth Avenue in New York,
I remember a man in a beautiful business suit stopped me...
and said, "I just wanna thank you for that..."
It's very moving. When I think of that, I get moved.
"I just wanna thank you for that show you did with Marty Sheen.
I just want you to know how much it meant to me, and thank you."
And I said, "Thank you."
While TV movies were beginning to push the envelope in the 1970s,
sitcoms also began to experiment
with gay and lesbian characters in recurring roles.
But the characters weren't always authentic.
I'm not?
Are you crazy, moving in with two girls? Not in my building.
- Wait. It'll be strictly platonic. - I don't care what it is.
On Three's Company,
John Ritter's character had to say he was a gay man
in order to live with these two women.
It was the first time I remember thinking that I was ahead of the joke.
I think I wasn't old enough or gay enough
to understand what I was actually watching.
I feel like it was really ambiguous. Was John Ritter's character gay? I don't know.
It played on this fantasy of one man having two women to himself.
Jack, thank you.
- It's just what we needed. - It's just what we needed.
But it was a lot of bait and switch.
It also played on the other fantasy that the women were together
and the man really was gay.
My being in bed with you, and you being a...
Tinker Bell?
Yeah. People are liable to get the wrong idea.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
Obviously Jack Tripper was a very stereotypical gay guy.
Yes?
He wasn't even really gay. It was part of the ruse of the show.
But when he was overly effeminate and "acting" gay,
that's when my parents were laughing.
Like, they were loving him.
Larry, poopkins!
Where have you been?
I told you I flew to San Francisco.
I know, you silly goose. I've just missed my roomie so much.
They were mocking it, certainly.
But it was also a kind of power that he had.
Tinker Bell.
Mr. Roper was mainly afraid of him when he was playing that persona.
No, actually, not all of us are interior decorators.
Some of us are boxers.
You mean you'd actually hit another guy?
No. Only if he made fun of us.
Funny show sometimes, but ultimately very insulting.
'Cause they got to make gay jokes about somebody who wasn't even gay.
There's something funny about it and grotesque.
I remember hating it so much.
I mean, it's great. Great show. Lovely performances, blah, blah, blah.
I watched it all the time, and I laughed. But no.
Bullshit.
Don't worry, Mr. R. It'll be our own little secret.
While Three's Company was featuring a fake gay character in 1977,
Soap, a new sitcom that premiered the same year on ABC,
became the first hit series to feature a gay regular character.
Soap was on, like, at 10:00 or something that was past curfew.
But I remember they had an out character which was played by Billy Crystal.
Jodie Dallas pretty much was the first gay character on TV that I remember.
- Hi, big brother. - Hiya, little brother.
Why don't you offer him some Froot Loops? It'd be very appropriate.
Soap was an over-the-top parody of a soap opera, so they were just like,
"What funny situation can we put Billy Crystal in?"
The second episode had this scene where I'm at home alone.
I'm in my mother's clothes, and she comes in.
Jodie, how many times do I have to tell you to leave my things alone?
- Mother... - Look at that.
My wig, my necklace, my best dress.
- You wear that belted! - Oh, yeah.
The first few episodes I wasn't happy with 'cause I thought we weren't right.
I'm sure if I go back and watch some episodes of Soap,
I would probably cringe, like, "Oh, my God. What?"
But back then, that was progress.
At least we were there, we were included.
- Dad! - Peter!
Peter!
Peter.
Some gay groups were uncomfortable with it.
"Who is he? Why is he cross-dressing?"
But then,
by show six or seven, something like that...
I have a scene with my brother.
And I tell him that I'm gay.
Hey, I'm still the Jodie who plays tennis with you.
I'm still the Jodie who bowls with you.
I'm still the Jodie who laughs with you, and I'm still the Jodie who counts on you.
I just loved everything about it.
He was gay, but he was...
That was everybody else's problem.
You're probably not gay.
I am! And it shouldn't make any difference.
And if it does and you don't love me now, then you've never loved me at all.
That was, to me, the breakthrough where it was honest.
There was no camping. Now Jodie was becoming a real guy.
And then over time, the character got involved with the pro football player.
You can laugh at me and tell me to get lost, but I've gotta say it.
I love you, and I want you back.
There was that nervous laugh that got under my skin
where I wanted to stop and go, "What is your problem?"
It made me very defensive
and uncomfortable with their laughter in the studio
'cause it was the wrong kind of laughter.
Carol, there's not gonna be any romance here.
- Why? - I'm a homosexual, remember?
The character of Jodie first identified as gay,
but in later episodes, fell in love with a woman.
Maggie and I are an item.
My son is normal.
That was all about shock and big laughs.
But the problem is is that what they were laughing about was our lives.
And they never quite knew what to do with his character.
Although Jodie dated both men and women,
Soap never overtly identified him as bisexual.
Maggie, don't you understand? I don't know what I am.
What if in two years I fall in love with another man?
In 1981, ABC canceled Soap and green-lit Dynasty,
a prime-time soap featuring character Steven Carrington,
who identified as gay.
I'm a homosexual, Dad.
Dynasty started great
because you had Steven Carrington,
who was gay and super cute with these supple lips.
Just my type.
But the problematic part was a few years into the show
when he started dating Claudia.
And I'm at home like, "What are you doing?
You're fucking up this amazing story line you have going on.
This is impossible. He's not straight.
I'm in St. Louis and I'm 15, but I know this for sure."
Sometimes I think it might've been better had Steven gone on living the gay life.
At least that would've been honest.
LGBTQ activists criticized Dynasty
for only featuring intimate scenes in Steven's relationships with women.
In a lot of these gay-themed stories, touching was the crime.
And unlike Steven's female partners,
multiple male partners were killed.
They weren't ready to legitimize such a thing.
So it's been a problematic journey through television.
'Cause I always feel like there's something we had to give up
in the way of our humanity in order to get the story told at all.
In the '70s, television really moved LGBT equality along.
But it's a double-edged sword because the other side knows how to use it too.
Singer Anita Bryant's well-publicized emotional crusade
to repeal Dade County's gay rights law ended at the voting booth today.
She says no homosexual should have the right to teach her four children.
The overwhelming majority of the constituents of Dade County
are against this moral issue.
And the organization which we've formed says it all: Save Our Children.
To see what Anita Bryant was doing was... so disgusting.
So disgusting, and people were buying it.
Anita Bryant helped coalesce this idea
which eventually becomes the religious right,
a massive backlash against gay and lesbian people.
The Bryant forces had won the election,
and a composed and visibly pleased Anita Bryant
told her supporters Miami voters had spoken.
With God's continued help,
we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws
throughout the nation.
The issue that came to California was Prop 6, the Briggs initiative.
Senator John Briggs
put forward a piece of legislation in California
that would have outlawed gay men and women to teach in our schools.
Somebody's got to 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.
To highlight what gays and lesbians were up against,
Norman Lear's All in the Family featured a lesbian schoolteacher.
Do you think that we would have been allowed
to continue to work as schoolteachers?
Well, why not?
I mean, that don't affect the brain, does it?
It was a scary time for gay people.
If it came out that she was a lesbian, she'd lose her job.
John Briggs was saying that gay men and gay women were pedophiles,
and they were gonna go after our kids, they were gonna recruit our children
and get a whole new army of lesbian and gay men.
John Briggs had a big following,
and early polls showed that he was going to win.
Because Proposition 6 was a statewide ballot initiative,
Harvey made sure he got on television that was across the state,
public television.
Sally Gearhart and Harvey
were co-chairs of the Stop Briggs initiative,
and they together were going to debate John Briggs on television.
Both Sally and Harvey were rather colorful in their day-to-day lives.
Harvey called Sally and said to her,
"We have the big debate tomorrow on statewide TV against John Briggs.
Honey, whatever do I wear?"
Sally, of course, is like, "Oh, God, what are we gonna do?"
Harvey said, "Sally, you're gonna be the mom, I'm gonna be the dad.
We're gonna be like wholesome middle America here."
It was like the one-two punch.
If child molestation is not an issue,
if it is not an issue, why do you put out literature that hammers it home?
We are not talking about homo... about child molestation.
The fact is at least 95% of the people are heterosexual.
We cannot prevent child molestation,
so let's cut our odds down and take out the homosexual group
and keep in the heterosexual group.
Why take out the homosexual group if it is more than...
Overwhelmingly it is true
that it's the heterosexual men, I might add, who are the child molesters.
I believe that's a myth. I've never seen these figures.
The FBI, the National Council on Family Relations,
the Santa Clara County Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center
and on and on and on.
A month after the televised debate, public opinion had shifted,
and the Briggs initiative was defeated 58% to 42%.
We all went down to the No on 6 headquarters.
And the atmosphere on Market Street was euphoric.
We had done it. We had defeated bigotry.
No more Briggs! No more Briggs!
I believe that...
more than ever before that there are evil forces round about us...
even perhaps disguised as something good.
That bright light of TV eventually is going to expose you,
and that's what it did to Anita Bryant.
It became clear that this was an idea rooted in hate
and that people didn't want to be hurting gay people the way Anita Bryant did.
And so once you expose that you've been lying,
you're gonna become a punch line.
Thank you, late-night TV.
Anita Bryant, former mediocre actress and orange juice promoter,
performed coitus in public yesterday
as part of her campaign to promote heterosexuality.
She and her husband assumed the missionary position for two minutes,
then announced she is a citrosexual.
We were getting to the point
where people didn't want to be perceived as a bigot.
It was losing the nods of approval.
And talk show hosts like Johnny Carson wanted to be on the right side of history.
Did you see this in the paper today?
This was interesting. They held a poll of teenagers.
One of the questions they asked the youngsters was,
"What man and woman have done the most damage in the world?"
Would you believe whom they picked?
They picked Adolf Hitler and Anita Bryant.
On television at the time,
American audiences could accept certain things
as long as they weren't explicitly told that this was gay.
Every now and then, I have given a thought to marriage and having children.
After all, I have so many marvelous qualities.
I should pass them on to someone.
The gay-seeming comics
never actually came out and said it.
They just alluded to it, and it was a shared secret, I suppose.
It's like the only way they could be out was to speak in code.
I dig my tinkle.
I dig any tinkle.
The innuendo, the double entendre.
It felt like they were talking directly to us gay people.
But for straight people, it could do this.
My father didn't think a gay person even existed.
There were no gay people in the world.
And I'd say to him, I said, "Dad, look at Paul Lynde."
On Bewitched, Paul Lynde played the kind of uncle in everybody's family.
The confirmed bachelor.
Gotcha now, Uncle Arthur.
Well, the confirmed bachelor warlock...
in that family.
Excuse me for not getting up, but my feet are killing me.
Paul Lynde was so irreverent.
He was the exotic flavor on the show.
And then he ended up being the center square on Hollywood Squares.
Hollywood Squares was the perfect venue for him.
Whoever is in the center has gotta have jokes
to keep the thing moving along.
Paul was great for the one-liner joke.
When a man falls out of your boat and into the water, you should yell,
"Man overboard."
Now, what should you yell if a woman falls overboard?
Full speed ahead.
He was so sassy and salty.
And he was beloved.
I remember my mom being like, "He's so funny. I love that Paul Lynde."
He was so popular that he got a sitcom
where he was the harassed suburban father
with a family that was crazy, and he was dealing with it.
Martha, sex is not for housewives.
I've noticed that lately.
He wanted to be a leading man, but Paul didn't do much else
that wasn't just Paul doing his character.
Who wants babies?
To be the anchor of a sitcom, you have to be a little bit more diverse.
The audience watched like crazy the first week,
and then it dropped precipitously.
And so they canceled it.
I love Paul Lynde, but it's not like he was really the leading character.
He was always secondary. He would get some funny one-liner.
Paul, you've got a secret according to psychologists.
If you're average, will you probably tell it to a man or to a woman?
If I tell it to a man, he might hit me. Let's see now.
I loved him.
But I didn't know whether people were laughing with him or at him,
and I don't like that.
There was a punching bag element to it, his acceptance.
I remember being sad that he had to twist himself into that figure.
I've asked you to do this show before, and I know you're busy.
We kept coming to you. I said, "Come on, Paul. Drop on the show some night."
I really don't know, other than I'm just absolutely scared to death
of coming out and being myself.
Any of these people that we knew were obviously gay,
we never got to really know.
Because we only accepted them so far.
Where did you develop the things that you're known for?
And I won't even attempt to do them. Your mannerisms.
Have you always done those? Are they natural to you, or did you...
I... I...
He never actually came out and said he was gay.
He felt trapped in this caricature that he had become,
and he wanted much more, but I don't think he knew how to do that.
So, he was miserable.
On one drink, he was hysterical.
On two drinks, he was the Nazi high command.
I mean, he was... hated everybody.
That's the inherent quality of show business, isn't it?
And it's part of television: insecurity.
You're never quite sure if you have arrived.
The anxiety that never lets up,
and it seems, instead of, you know...
As you become more successful, you would think it would ease up.
Instead, it just becomes more and more.
In 1979, Paul Lynde's 13-year run on Hollywood Squares
came to an end, and his acting career dwindled.
Somebody called me up.
I was at home working on a script, and the phone started ringing.
And it was all these people calling, "Have you heard about Paul?"
Comedian Paul Lynde was found dead last night at his home.
He apparently had a heart attack. He was 55.
Though his career spanned 30 years, Lynde was probably best known...
It was a breaking news story, so that was how I found out.
Paul died in 1982.
If he knew that in 2018, people were having conversations about him,
he would die all over.
He would not believe it,
because he thought he was such a footnote.
But if you really want his impact, watch American Dad. The alien is Paul Lynde.
I can't hide it anymore. In fact, I want to shout it from the rooftops.
Klaus and I are in love.
I'm sure, if he were alive, would say,
"I want a piece of that. That alien is me!"
I have so much compassion for people who, like Paul Lynde,
had to live an open secret and had to really hide who they were.
And I am also very grateful for them for living as loud as they possibly could
under the constraints of their lives at that moment.
It's very important to know that...
NATHALIE ROCKHILL: Half of us gay people are women.
And that women...
when gay people are talked about,
usually only men are talked about,
and we're here too.
In 1973...
one hardly saw a lesbian on TV.
We are invisible.
And nobody can see us, apparently.
That, we could work to our advantage.
The thing that television stations forgot is that lesbians worked in their offices.
Lesbians were on the crew.
Lesbians were answering the phone,
and lesbians were xeroxing the script for them.
Those lesbians that they never saw
took copies of these scripts
and passed them on to lesbian groups who would do something about them.
So, then there was a Police Woman episode about some lesbian women
who were running a care facility for elderly people.
It has come, hasn't it?
My bank statement?
And they would rob these people of all their money and kill them.
Okay, so you finally put lesbians on TV.
But you gonna make them killers?
They're murdering old people?
I mean, come on.
That was unacceptable.
So Lesbian Feminist Liberation organized a zap of NBC.
Lesbian Feminist Liberation will not tolerate
the misrepresentation of our lives any longer.
That's the most absurd, ridiculous...
What's going on upstairs?
So these activists storm 30 Rock,
and they demanded for the executives to hear them out.
And they sat in overnight.
Eventually, we had a meeting with the president of NBC...
and quite a few people from programming.
And that was very helpful.
It was very helpful, because we had some time
to really educate those folks.
And I had just read in The New York Times
an article about a lesbian mother in Texas.
I mentioned that story to the programming people, and they said,
"Well, we'll look into that."
The activists continued to pitch the story in meetings with television executives,
and in 1978, A Question of Love premiered on ABC.
A Question of Love was the story of two women,
both of whom had been married and had children.
My character had already been divorced.
And Gena Rowlands played my lover, who was in the midst of getting a divorce.
You had Jane Alexander and Gena Rowlands.
They're playing lesbians, which was huge.
And I know now we look at it and we say,
"Well, how come they couldn't cast lesbians to play lesbians?"
Well, there weren't many out lesbians back then. You know?
So, to have these straight actors take on these roles to tell our story,
that was pretty risky and big on their parts.
ABC told us we had only three touches allowed
and no kissing.
So we thought, "What is the best kind of touch you can have?"
- Wanna give me a hand? - Sure.
Gena said, "I'm gonna brush your hair
in a way that your hair has never been brushed before."
And at the time, I had long brown hair.
I mean, she's just stroking it and stroking it.
It's very sensual.
The real woman that Gena played had a terrible custody battle.
When the ex of Gena Rowlands' character files for custody
because he's saying that she's an unfit mom
because she's in this relationship.
Do you find there's been a substantial and material change
in the conditions affecting Billy Guettner
and that his best interests are served by transferring
managing conservatorship to Michael Guettner?
Jury votes yes, ten to two.
She's denied custody.
Solely because she was in a lesbian relationship.
Even though it was a sad ending...
millions of people saw this on TV.
And audiences felt like this woman was a real victim of prejudice.
Forty years ago when we did the movie,
gay people had to fight very hard to prove
that they were going to be nurturing and responsible parents.
And it continues to this day.
But what that story did was humanize these lesbians.
Just like, "Hey, these are real people,"
and to have her child be removed from this loving home,
that resonated with the audience.
A Question of Love aired on NBC on November 26, 1978,
giving lesbians visibility in an unprecedented way.
The next morning, audiences across the country
turned on their televisions to breaking news from San Francisco.
The streets of the city have taken on a different pall today
as San Franciscans grope for understanding
and attempt to come to terms with
the shocking and tragic events of the past day.
It was a Monday morning,
and we got word that there was a shooting at city hall.
I called San Francisco General Hospital
'cause there was a nurse in the ER who owed me some favors.
And I said, "What do you hear?"
And she said, "I think...
they must be dead,
because otherwise they would be here by now."
So we reported that,
and that was the first from my TV station
to report that there had been murders committed at city hall.
But we didn't know who had been shot and killed.
And then Dianne Feinstein came out and announced...
As president of the board of supervisors, it's my duty to make this announcement.
Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk...
have been shot and killed.
- Oh! - Jesus Christ!
Hold it.
Let her talk.
- Quiet. - Quiet!
The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.
The word was out that the assassinations had happened at city hall.
And we came to the conclusion
that we wanted nothing more than to be with each other.
Throughout the city, people got the word that we were gonna meet at Castro Street.
We were gonna do a candlelight march.
I was in the beginning of the march,
and the only sound you heard was people sobbing.
It was a big, human, powerful... moment.
And we were all grieving, not just Harvey, but something, probably, in our own lives
that had made it so sad that we had come to this point.
I turned around when we got near city hall and looked back,
and it was just a sea of light.
All the way back up to the Castro.
Mothers and fathers and people with their babies.
It was San Franciscans marching for Harvey and George.
And for the travesty that had happened.
Every single person in this country with a television set
could see the heartbreak in the Castro.
And I think the power in seeing that on your television
is pretty transformational.
We've seen him work and struggle for this community,
and we were so pleased and thought, "Now his work will pay off,
and he can continue and get the credit he deserves."
And now it's all gone.
Everyone covered the assassination.
It was huge news.
Dan White turned himself in, admitted the killings.
He'd shot each man five times.
He's pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
I was certain that Dan White was gonna get the electric chair.
And then I had to come out live and announce the verdict.
I was in total shock.
The jury has found Dan White guilty of voluntary manslaughter
in the killings of both George Moscone and Harvey Milk.
The prosecution wanted White found guilty of first-degree murder,
a judgment that could have sent him to the gas chamber.
But yesterday's verdict means...
Dan White ended up getting out in five years.
I still can't wrap my head around that.
What's critical there in how television played a part
is we looked in the eyes...
the world, the city, the state, the country
had looked in the eyes of the people involved in this case,
and we knew that jury was wrong.
We all went to Castro Street.
I was not mentally prepared for that.
All of us were angry.
We want justice! We want justice!
He got away with murder! He got away with murder!
I've found a lot of understanding why people were angry.
And I think that Harvey's death was nothing new.
We've had violence against us before this happened.
Stonewall wasn't covered by television.
And so the first time that America did see this community
rise up in anger was the White Night riots.
It had to do with the horror of injustice, you know?
If Dan White had not killed a homosexual, he would have gone to the gas chamber.
But because he killed a homosexual,
the jury, I believe, did not find him guilty.
They essentially said it's all right to kill a homosexual.
And that's why there was a riot.
- Hey, leave 'em alone. - Stay back, stay back.
I'm not condoning last night, but I had two people inside me fighting.
One of them said, "Let's be a monitor. Let's stop this violence.
Let's stop the window breaking."
And then I'd turn around and I'd see... police brutality.
I'd see three or four policemen
brutally beat innocent people that were trying to stop the violence.
And that other part of me says, "I've got to stand up and fight."
I remember that very clearly.
Because the televisions were resounding in every room
around my parents' apartment.
It was this thing that just tore everybody apart.
And yet it made everybody realize that it couldn't end with that.
Milk started something, and it's gonna keep going
whether he's here or not.