American Experience

(birds calling) (people talking in background) (people talking in background)

MARTIN BOYCE

For me, there was no bar like the Stonewall, because the Stonewall was like the watering hole on the savannah. You know, it was just, everybody was there. We were all there.

DICK LEITSCH

Well, gay bars were the social centers of gay life. Gay bars were to gay people what churches were to blacks in the South.

SEYMOUR PINE

There were no instructions except, "Put them out of business." The first police officer that came in with our group said, "The place is under arrest. "When you exit, have some identification, and it'll be over in a short time." (people talking in background)

PINE

This time, they said, "We're not going." That's it-- "We're not going." (yelling) Something snapped. It's, like, "This-- this is not right." (yelling, object clattering)

DORIC WILSON

That's what happened Stonewall night to a lot of people. We went, "Oh, my God. "I am not alone. "There are other people that feel exactly the same way." (yelling, horns honking in background)

PINE

We didn't have the manpower. And the manpower for the other side was coming like it was a real war. And that's what it was, it was a war.

LUCIAN TRUSCOTT

This was the Rosa Parks moment, the time that gay people stood up and said, "No." And once that happened, the whole house of cards that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble.

JOHN O'BRIEN

In the Civil Rights Movement, we ran from the police. In the peace movement, we ran from the police. That night, the police ran from us, the lowliest of the low. And it was fantastic.

FILM NARRATOR

Do you want your son enticed into the world of homosexuals, or your daughter lured into lesbianism? Do you want them to lose all chance of a normal, happy married life?

WILLIAM ESKRIDGE

The 1960s were dark ages for lesbians and gay men all over America. The overwhelming number of medical authorities said that homosexuality was a mental defect, maybe even a form of psychopathy.

MIKE WALLACE (on film)

The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in nor capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. I was wondering if you think that there are any, quote, "happy homosexuals" for whom homosexuality would be, in a way, their best adjustment in life.

CHARLES SOCARIDES

I think the whole idea of saying "the happy homosexual" is to create a mythology about the nature of homosexuality.

WALLACE

Dr. Charles Socarides is a New York psychoanalyst at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. They are taught that no man is born homosexual, and many psychiatrists now believe that homosexuality begins to form in the first three years of life. Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness which has reached epidemiological proportions.

MARTHA SHELLEY

In those days, what they would do, these psychiatrists, is, they would try to talk you into being heterosexual. If that didn't work, they would do things like aversive conditioning, you know, show you pornography and then give you an electric shock.

MAN (on film)

This involves showing the gay man pictures of nude males and shocking him with a strong electric current. (buzzing) Over a short period of time, he will be unable to get sexually aroused to the pictures, and hopefully, he will be unable to get sexually aroused inside, in other settings, as well.

ESKRIDGE

Gay people who were sentenced to medical institutions because they were found to be sexual psychopaths were subjected sometimes to sterilization, occasionally to castration, sometimes to medical procedures such as lobotomies, which were felt by some doctors to cure homosexuality and other sexual diseases. The most infamous of those institutions was Atascadero, in California. Atascadero was known in gay circles as the Dachau for queers, and appropriately so. The medical experimentation in Atascadero included administering to gay people a drug that simulated the experience of drowning; in other words, a pharmacological example of waterboarding. (device beeping)

WILSON

Somebody that I knew that was older than me, his family had him sent off where they go up and damage the frontal part of the brain. The last time I saw him, he was a walking vegetable. Because he was homosexual.