Original subtitles

We must open opportunity to all our people.

Unidentified Female: We feel that women

will work just as good as men and better.

Jack Palance: The husband is the guy

who is in charge and should be all of the time.

The latest threat to the status quo

is the women's revolt.

Cesar Chavez: It is a pleading for social change.

Even the fear of imprisonment

forces most homosexuals to camouflage their identity.

Let's grow up, Conservatives.

The public did not have the whole picture.

Gloria Steinem: What we are talking about

is a revolution and not a reform.

♪ (theme music) ♪

We agree that the sixties saw explosive social change.

But the question is, why in the sixties, Eric?

There are periods in history, as far as I can see it,

when human energies, both constructive

and destructive, seem come to a boil.

You were living in a time of incredible economic growth.

In theory, things had never, ever, ever been better.

It was just a really American Norman Rockwell vision.

Gloria Steinem: But the trouble is there are

all kinds of tensions.

Dan Cater: The Civil Rights Movement

is the seminal event of the 1960s

that ignites so many other changes in society.

The day has come when racism must be banished.

Steinem: The Civil Rights Movement

was incredibly inspiring.

But at the same time, the women in it

were not recognized as leaders

in the same way that the men were.

It said to us if these movements

we love still are not equal,

then there has to be an autonomous women's movement.

Mr. President, the democratic platform

promises to work for equal rights

for women, including equal pay.

What have you done for the women?

I'm sure we haven't done enough...

(laughter)

In 1961, President Kennedy creates

the Commission on the Status of Women.

That Commission produced a report in 1963

that revealed things like the fact that

women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned.

That women were kept out of

the most lucrative professional positions.

Cecille Richards: Women couldn't open

a bank account in their own name.

They couldn't get credit.

They certainly couldn't open their own business.

Women couldn't serve on juries in some states.

There was one, kind of, disadvantage after another

that was revealed altogether in this one report.

Perhaps you would be willing to tell the people what you feel

is the real need for it.

We want to be sure that

women are used as effectively as they can

to provide a better life for our people,

in addition to meeting their primary responsibility,

which is in the home.

Women's position, as it had traditionally been,

was that they were husband's help mates.

Jack, what is your definition of a husband?

I think it's like driving a horse.

He's got to hold the reins.

There are just a couple of reins.

And if there were two people holding these reins,

the horse is going to go skitter-scatter everywhere,

you know.

The husband is the guy who is in charge

and should be, all of the time.

Well, by the 1960s, women's position was changing.

There was a big change going on in the country.

People were talking about this book called

The Feminine Mystique.

A woman today has been made to feel

freakish and alone and guilty

if simply she wants to be more than her husband's wife.

Betty Friedan wrote

very much out of her own personal experience.

Muncy: The Feminine Mystique

said that women were suffering from

a problem that has no name,

a vague sense of dissatisfaction

with the lack of meaning,

the lack of opportunity in their lives.

So many women The Feminine Mystique

and said, "That's it.

That's why I'm so angry."

It was a huge, huge deal at the time.

The middle class woman up and down America is just

so wretchedly unhappy that she is sick.

You could call it by anything you like,

but it is wretchedly boring

to be with little tiny children

one end of the day to the other,

especially if you think

that you should love it all the time.

Women who were being educated

for one way of life,

which was one in which they had brains,

and then they were supposed to have

wombs and arms to run vacuum cleaners.

And that was a mismatch.

O'Neill: Betty Friedan called for

blowing up the rules.

You cannot be given equality.

You have to assume it.

And it had a hugely profound impact.

Young women started to see other women saying

that women had not gotten enough out of life.

And the point was you don't have to be this.

Choose what you want,

but you don't have to be this one thing.

Here she is, Mrs. Helen Gurley Brown.

(applause)

Collins: Helen Gurley Brown

had lived without being married

very happily, you know, dating men,

having sex, supporting herself.

And she wrote a book, Sex And The Single Girl,

which was about her life.

And it became a huge hit.

Isn't this whole subject of sex

being discussed and written and talked about too much?

I can expect a reactionary

opinion like that from you. I don't think so at all.

Steinem: She openly talked about sex

and said, "You won't get struck

by a lightning bolt, you know,

if you, have sex before you're married."

For average run-of-the-mill women,

it was a bigger deal than The Feminine Mystique.

Now that it's all right to discuss sex,

people are now talking about it a great deal,

and I don't think that's so bad.

Yes, Arthur?

I think that talking about sex

-wastes such a lot of time. -(laughter)

Collins: Helen Gurley Brown

pointed out that the guys had one standard,

the women had another.

And that was a revelation.

Rules that had existed for a 1,000 years,

just overnight, they were gone.

In a recent survey,

44 percent of the high school and college girls questioned

said they approve of sexual intercourse

before marriage, if they're serious about the young man.

Do either of you approve for yourselves

of intercourse before marriage?

Yes, I do.

Yes, I would say.

Sexual revolution or sexual renaissance?

The experts are still trying to define it.

CBS reports birth control and the law.

This is a very personal program.

Sometimes the most private matters

are also public matters.

It is about babies that bless a home

and babies that can haunt a home.

Steinem: Reproductive freedom means

that it's a basic human right

to decide whether and when to have children.

But reproductive freedom

had not been enunciated in that way.

Sevareid: The basic disagreement stems

from the differences in the moral attitudes

towards birth control.

In 1957, the pill was approved

by the FDA for severe menstrual distress.

What became funny is then

everyone seemed to be suffering from

severe menstrual distress.

Richards: It wasn't until 1960

that the pill was actually approved

by the FDA for birth control.

The pill was originally very hard to get.

It wasn't like you just went down to the pharmacy

and picked it up. That took quite a while.

Sevareid: This woman asked her doctor

for birth control information.

He said the best thing

for me to do was not be close to my husband.

And if I didn't want to get that way, it was up to me.

Well, I'm 100 percent

against birth control because it's immoral.

It's the same as prostitution or abortion.

There has always been pushback against birth control.

Even when the FDA approved the pill,

it was still illegal

for many women across the country.

So Estelle Griswold, who was the President of

Planned Parenthood in Connecticut,

decided that she was going to challenge this.

And she began handing out birth control,

knowing full well that she would probably be arrested,

which she was.

On the 24th of November,

we issued two warrants,

one against Estelle Griswold,

and the other against Dr. C. Lee Buxton

in violation of the contraceptive statute.

The Griswold versus Connecticut case

changed everything.

I think it's very evident that the law is unenforceable.

I think if you had a policeman under every bed

in the state of Connecticut,

they still could not prove anything.

We are continuing, maybe illegally,

but we are continuing our program.

The case went to the Supreme Court

and made birth control legal finally,

for married couples only.

And it was several years later

that, in fact, birth control became legal for all women.

It was very, very important because it both

decriminalized contraception

and established the right to privacy.

How many states repealed their law

against birth control just in this past year?

Ten states changed or repealed their laws against

birth control. But if I can add

the end of 1964 to that, it makes it 13.

So that's kind of a national movement.

Nearly seven million American women

are now taking oral contraceptives,

and they're said to be almost 100 percent effective.

The birth control pill meant suddenly

women could finish their education.

They could go in the workforce.

And that is what radically changed

I think life for women in America.

It was that ability to not only plan their families,

but to plan their lives.

Reporter: What happened when you went inside?

Well, when I went inside, it said, "No women."

What do you feel about this-

this idea that they won't hire women?

We feel that's it unfair.

Because we feel that women will work

just as good as men and better.

We're not hiring women at this particular time

for the very simple reason

the jobs we have available

are jobs that only men are able to do.

When the 1964 Civil Rights Act

was going through Congress,

an amendment was inserted

to make it illegal to discriminate

on the basis of gender as well as race.

No one took it seriously.

The National Organization of Women

is founded to press forward on that one issue.

What's the objective of the new organization, NOW?

Full equality for women

in truly equal partnership with men.

One of NOW's campaigns

is to make the Civil Rights Act of 1964 really be enforced.

Suddenly the Ivy League colleges

began to open their doors to women for the first time.

The quotas against women

in the accounting field

and the legal field and the medical field

began to drop away.

Betty Friedan wanted results.

She wanted something to happen and it started happening.

Basic training for stewardesses

is meant to turn a girl into a woman.

The airline gives her beauty tips,

a sense of responsibility.

Stewardesses must be slinky sex symbols.

Pilots can be homely and bald.

They had hearings on the airline industry

and the stewardess situation,

because the stewardesses

were fired if they got married.

And they had to have a certain weight and height

and their hands had to be soft and all this other stuff.

We have an issue here the "32 year" age retirement

because, behind that age retirement,

lies the future of the whole profession.

The airline executives are saying

that their clients are not going to get

on board the plane unless there is a beautiful

young unmarried woman greeting them at the stairs.

Miss Boland, what are you girls asking

the Congress to do for you?

We're asking them

to give us an equal chance to continue in the job

that we have chosen as a profession.

There is no bonafide reason

for terminating girls because they reach 32

or 35 years of age.

Don't you girls know that

that's going to happen when you take the job?

We know that the companies have applied this policy.

We're hoping and are asking

to find a way to change this policy.

Congress began enforcing

the Title VII job discrimination laws.

Things did begin to happen.

The barriers started coming down,

and it was real results.

Hugh Hefner: My name is Hugh Hefner,

and I'm editor and publisher of

Playboy magazine.

In eight years, I've built an empire worth 20 million.

Gloria Steinem was a reporter and a very pretty one.

So she went undercover as a bunny at the Playboy Club.

I remember the young woman who

took my false bio.

I had said that I was a secretary,

and thought being a bunny would be more exciting.

And she leaned forward and whispered to me.

She said, "Honey, if you can type,

you don't want to work here.' (chuckles)

Bunnies are forbidden to wear jewelry, pale lipstick

or gold or green nail varnish.

Provocative cottontail must be clean and striking.

Gloria exposed how the Playboy bunnies were treated.

What they were paid and how they were running around

in a club with their breasts exposed

and a tail on their butt.

And with men sort of snapping the napkin at them

as they walked by.

And so, through her reporting,

she was showing sexism in all its different flavors.

Steinem: That assignment,

it was not a great experience.

But in retrospect, I'm glad I did it

because I got a notice from Hugh Hefner.

And they did change the working conditions

of those women for the better.

Richards: Gloria Steinem challenged

every stereotype of a feminist.

She was this fabulous looking

incredibly smart, direct speaking woman.

Moses Znaimer: Forgive me, but I always thought

that you had to be stacked,

absolutely stacked to be a bunny girl.

How did you get the job?

Well, you don't have to be stacked to be a bunny.

In fact... all of that is usually

stuffed with gym socks or something.

It's where the girls keep their tips.

It's... sort of traveling a cash depository that's all.

Gloria Steinem could disarm

even her harshest critics with humor and humility.

But she was willing to challenge

patriarchy at every step of the way.

Gloria Steinem became a brilliant spokesperson for

the Women's Liberation Movement.

We've been much too law-abiding and too docile for too long.

But I think that period is about over.

The latest threat to the status quo in America

is the women's revolt.

This is the symbol for the female.

The Women's Liberation Movement

has added the equal signs.

As a lot of women know, including this one,

equality is often missing.

You have this, sort of, bubbling up

of a desire for real equality.

And then you get women beginning to

gel from community-based activism

to real solid organizing.

The Women's Liberation Movement

was a parallel movement to Betty Friedan's

the National Organization for Women.

So almost as soon as NOW has formed in 1966,

women's liberation groups are emerging around the country.

This younger generation moves in and very much broadens

the perspective of the women's movement.

All of these things build on one another.

And this younger group not only believed

that you needed economic power,

but that you needed a revolution

in the relationship between the sexes.

(chanting)

There was a revolution going on outside.

But on television, there wasn't a real live girl.

And that's what I wanted to do.

That Girl.

Now that is an incredibly subversive

television show, absolutely amazing.

theme) ♪

Daddy was just giving me a lecture on sex education.

Why would you need a lecture on sex?

What I meant was

Ann certainly knows all there is to know about sex.

I wasn't married to Donald, my boyfriend.

I was doing a television series about a single girl

who didn't want to get married

and wanted to live on her own.

I mean, this was like, you know, completely unheard of.

The character that Marlo Thomas played

was a fantastic alternative model of womanhood itself.

Steinem: That Girl was the first time

ever on television that a woman was allowed

to have an independent autonomous life

and adventures of her own.

It's amazing we waited until

the sixties to break the walls down,

but it was time.

Everything to do in any movement

is how do you get the spotlight

and focus it on the issue.

We decided for at least one week,

starting yesterday, to do everything we can

to fight pollution. And Donald, that means

all kinds of pollution. There is air pollution,

food pollution. There's waste.

Thomas: I felt strongly about

the fact that we could not ignore

what the issues of the day were, for everything.

Reporter: There appears to be growing

concern among scientists...

Robert F Kennedy, Jr: Rachel Carson

wrote this book about pesticides called

in 1962.

And it talked about the long-term impacts,

the concept of latency

and bioaccumulation which were all new terms.

Farm animals were dying

with phenomenal regularity because of pesticides.

People didn't have any awareness

that if a fish ate the bug

that was poisoned by pesticides,

then that was going to end up in our bodies.

It touched a raw nerve upon the American public.

The public was being asked to

accept these chemicals

and did not have the whole picture.

So I set about to remedy the balance there.

The major claims

in Ms. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring

are gross distortions of the actual facts.

Douglas Brinkley: We talk about big oil.

Well, there was big chemical.

And Rachel Carson got under their skin

because she was going to cut into their profits terribly.

She was attacked really viciously

by Monsanto, and she was condemned

pretty regularly as a spinster and a communist.

She got called off into this battle

at a time when she was already

in a fairly advanced stage of cancer.

The US government went into

a review of all of her data,

and months later came out with a report

basically backing Rachel Carson.

She dies in 1964,

just shortly after, with cancer.

But if you have to make a hall of fame

of people in the environmental movement,

Rachel Carson is the game-changer.

She is number one.

Lyndon Johnson: By closing loopholes

which permitted pesticides to be sold

before they were fully tested,

this bill safeguards the health of all Americans.

I'm sorry the voice of Rachel Carson is still today.

She would have been proud of this bill and this moment.

There were all of these things

that were beginning to affect human health.

We had cities in America

increasingly having to call smog alerts.

We had rivers catching on fire.

In the Santa Barbara oil spill,

it became clear that even

the very richest cities were going to be exposed

to massive environmental threats.

Bill Stout: The drilling continues

and so do the leaks.

And the question here is not whether it will happen again

but when and how bad will it be.

Issue after issue kept piling up.

Timothy Naftali: There is a building sense

that we are stakeholders in the environment.

That it is something that we humans can ruin.

This is a real shift in our thinking.

Schabecoff: People were really worried.

And the political establishment

started to respond.

Without the environmental movement

coming out of the sixties,

we would not have the Clean Air Act,

the Clean Water Act.

I mean, there was a wave of legislation

that emerged in the immediate aftermath.

We have not been inactive these last four years.

We have saved more.

We have preserved more

than ever before in our history.

I'm convinced

that beauty and order

in our environment

are not frills.

I am convinced that they are urgent necessities.

I think that all of us are looking

for a place under the sun.

By that, I mean for a union

that we can belong as farm workers.

We think as the Civil Rights Movement

as generally being about blacks in the South,

but there was a Latino Civil Rights Movement as well.

How much are you getting for a day's work?

Only $2.

$2 a day?

Yes.

Leonard Steinhorn: Migrant farm workers

were getting paid pennies to feed America

and were being sent from farm to farm

with barely livable housing conditions.

There are no bathrooms in the fields.

Often no clean drinking water.

Workers would be forced to use the short handled hoe

which is a backbreaking 18 inches from the ground.

But it's also an instrument of psychological oppression

because the supervisors could look down the row.

And if someone stood up to stretch,

they could order them back to work.

Essentially, there were no labor laws,

no health and safety laws that applied to farm workers.

We have a real tough combination

pitted against us.

Charles Kuralt: In 1966

it has occurred to a few of them

that they ought to have a union.

This is the union they formed,

the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.

Their leader, Cesar Chavez,

started out as a migrant field worker

with a seventh grade education.

Cesar Chavez was largely self-taught

and becomes this great student of history.

He studies Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Chavez: You've got to get out

there with a picket sign and get some action going.

When you put all those things together,

then nonviolence works.

he United Farm Workers realized

very early on you have to move people.

You have to inspire them.

So they set upon a march from Delano to Sacramento.

It's a march to get the strike

and the farm workers' story

outside of California.

Not just Delano. We're fighting for everybody.

Pawel: You get scenes that

resemble some of the things that happened in the South,

workers just being nonviolent

in the face of provocation from the police.

It's a pleading for social change,

for social justice to the farm worker and his cause.

(chanting)

Saturday afternoon, a light rain was falling

as the marchers arrived outside Sacramento.

So when they start in Delano

there are about 75 marchers.

By the time they get to Sacramento,

there are 10,000 people rallying

on the steps of the State Capitol.

The workers are on the rise.

Delano has shown what can be done

and the workers know that they are no longer alone.

(applause)

One of the things that Chavez does that

really catapults the movement

into the national consciousness,

is to ask the Americans to stop buying grapes.

(cheering)

At its height, 15 to 20 million Americans

were participating in the great boycott.

That is almost one out of every ten Americans.

We have, I think, a similar problem that

the people in the Civil Rights Movement had.

It wasn't until they really went out

and started organizing

that the government came across with meaningful legislation.

The boycott, ultimately,

forces California's most powerful industry

to sign contracts with its poorest workers.

The revolution in California agriculture

has moved far more rapidly than anyone expected.

This much now is clear.

California agriculture has been changed.

Will you join in the battle to build the great society,

to give every citizen the full equality

which God enjoins and the law requires?

(applause)

When Lyndon Johnson is pushing through

the great society,

he is riding the wave of the Civil Rights Movement

and the Reform Movement.

But there are a lot of Americans

who are not at all happy about this.

Johnson is a man whom I've known

for a long time and I like him personally.

But I've watched him change from a conservative democrat

to an extreme liberal democrat.

Too often the sixties is simply seen

from a liberal perspective.

But the conservative movement had its fans.

Barry Goldwater: I told my wife,

I said honey,

"What do you think about my running for the presidency?"

Barry Goldwater Jr: I would not say he was

politically ambitious.

What made my father run started several years before that.

It really started with my father's book,

The Conscience of a Conservative

in 1960, which became,

kind of, a Bible of the conservative movement.

Carter: Goldwater brought together

a kind of muscular Americanism,

anti-communism,

and this growing political opposition

to the expansion of the Federal government.

At the time, the Republican party

was dominated by the

Eastern Liberal Establishment.

Dr. Mary Brennan: Conservatives saw the

more moderate liberal part of the Republican party

as not being real Republican

because they're not getting rid of the problem with government,

which was that it had gotten too big.

At the time, nobody thought

of it as a movement, but it was a nascent thing.

But it turned out to be a very powerful thing.

And that was the beginning of

what we now think of as the Conservative movement.

What conservatives lacked up until the 1960s,

was any substantial media outlet

to spread their message.

But during the 1960s,

you begin to get the foundation for this.

Reporter: Barry Goldwater,

jet propelled philosopher of conservatism.

He is the hottest thing on the lecture circuit.

He pours out, with considerable help,

books, articles and columns.

Rick Perlstein: Suddenly Barry Goldwater

is being talked about as

the Republican John F. Kennedy.

We have lost election after election

in the last several years

because Conservative Republicans get

mad and stay home.

Let's grow up, Conservatives.

Let's-- If we want to take this party back,

and I think we can someday.

Let's get to work.

(cheering)

And for the next four years,

the conservatives went to work.

Little dust devils of non-Goldwaterism

are swirling about this convention,

but that's about all.

The cyclone is definitely coming in from Arizona.

In 1964, the liberals,

moderates who were running the Republican party

realized their party had been seized

from underneath them.

During this year, I have crisscrossed this nation,

warning of the extremist trap, its danger to the party.

(crowd chanting)

The Governor is entitled to be heard for five minutes.

All of these liberal Republicans

who were considered the leading figures

of the Republican party,

like George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller,

suddenly didn't have a role

in the '64 election that nominated Goldwater.

He is the man who earned and proudly carries

the title of Mr. Conservative

and is now Mr. Republican, Barry Goldwater.

(cheering) (fanfare plays)

Rockefeller, in his campaign,

was painting the conservatives as extremists.

And then my father followed up

with his famous words about it.

I would remind you that extremism

in the defense of liberty is no vice.

(cheering)

And let me remind you also

that moderation

in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

(cheering)

Goldwater did not recognize

that he was opening up a Pandora's box.

By saying that extremism could be a good thing,

he was basically opening the door

to the Birchers and leftover Ku Klux Klan

and all these other groups that were beyond the pale.

Interviewer: Head of the Georgia clan

came out for your ticket. Do you accept their support?

We don't want the backing of the Ku Klux Klan.

That's a different kind of extremist.

And my father would have none of it.

A thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan.

Thank you.

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat.

I recently have seen fit to follow another course.

Ronald Reagan was an actor,

but it was in 1964 that suddenly he explodes

on to the national scene as a political figure

speech.

In this vote harvesting time,

they use terms like "the great society,"

or as we were told a few days ago by the President,

we must accept a greater government activity

in the affairs of the people.

Barry Goldwater has faith

that you and have I the ability and the dignity

and the right to make our own decisions.

(applause)

The campaign was always run optimistically.

And when Ronald Reagan hit it out of the ballpark

with his speech,

we just knew we were going to win.

Walter Cronkite: According to a CBS

vote profile analysis,

Lyndon Baines Johnson has been elected

President of the United States.

And the landslide has carried him in.

We're going to devote our days and the years ahead to

strengthening the Republican party.

Brennan: After Goldwater loses,

all it did was to make the conservatives

more determined than ever.

In addition, they found another star.

The first question is for you, Senator Goldwater.

It's been said that Ronald Reagan

has assumed the mantle of leadership

of the conservative movement.

Would you comment, please?

I would say that if he continues

in his successful political career, that

I don't think that you could deny

that he would be the leader.

If Reagan is elected Governor of California,

this gets to be a new ball game.

There is this growing social uneasiness

about the kinds of changes

that are taking place in America.

Conservative leaders were able to capitalize on

those resentments towards government

and toward this new America.

As you move through the sixties.

and even as Reagan wins election in '66

to become Governor of California,

the response on the part of conservatives is that

what is more important

is less anti-communism and more the social elements.

Reagan: We who are Republicans,

have been handed a unique challenge ourselves

and a responsibility

to offer something that the people of this country

are crying out for.

They are crying out for leadership.

I saw him make a speech in 1964 for Goldwater.

I said there's the man

that should be running for President.

He has the same type of feeling

with the people that John Kennedy had, I think.

Brennan: Reagan did a very brief run

for President in 1968.

But it was too little too late.

(over TV) Richard Nixon goes

over the top with 287 electoral votes.

And that seems to be the 1968 election.

Conservatives won control

of the Republican party in 1964,

but they didn't figure out what to do with it

for 15 years.

CBS Reports The Homosexuals

Lars Larson is a member of the most despised minority group

in the United States.

But few homosexuals

are willing to admit it publicly,

for the fear of being ostracized

or losing a job.

Even the fear of imprisonment forces

most homosexuals to camouflage their identities.

Interviewer: Do you remember how you felt when you first

realized you were a homosexual?

Frightened. Terribly frightened.

Look, I was so scared

that anybody would ever figure out I was gay

that I was a deeply closeted and very repressed gay man.

Tallahassee Police Department is using

Florida State University students

as informers against homosexuals.

The students get $10 a head every time

one is approached by a suspected sex offender.

In the 1960s,

there are a number of these kinds of

committees that investigate gays.

And even though it still is submerged,

you begin to see the first issues

about gay rights.

There were multiple organizations

to try to counteract that repressive regime

that gay men and lesbians were suffering under.

They had the Mattachine Society

and the Daughters of Belitis,

which were part of the homophile movement.

The laws which forbid certain types of

private consenting sexual behavior

among adults need to be changed.

In the Mattachine Society, this was a dilemma.

How do you combine activism with anonymity?

You can't run a social movement

from behind the closet door.

Gays are limited

in their ability to show affection,

can't party the way the straights can.

Their whole entire existence is stigmatized.

One of the Mattachine Society's founders,

a man named Frank Kameny.

He was a worker in the US map service

and he was fired because he is gay.

So he pickets the White House.

I understand that we're being picketed

by a group of homosexuals.

The policy of the department

is that we do not employ homosexuals knowingly.

And that if we discover homosexuals

in our department, we discharge them.

Every American citizen has the right to be considered

by his government

on the basis of his own personal merit

as an individual.

Frank Kameny is a pioneer.

He is standing there.

He doesn't care what people think.

He is saying, "I am just as normal as you are."

It's a polite reform movement.

Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness

which has reached epidemiological proportions.

The American Psychiatric Association

deems homosexuality to be a mental disorder.

This involves showing

the gay man pictures of nude males

and shocking him with a strong electric current

-over a short period of time. -(buzzing)

Hopefully, he will be unable to get sexually aroused.

It's very hard

to achieve civil rights for a group

where the medical world is describing this group

as mentally ill.

So one of the goals of the gay rights movement

was to eliminate that kind of thinking.

It represents prejudice. It doesn't represent science.

Reporter: The dilemma of the homosexual.

Told by the medical profession

he is sick,

by the law that he is a criminal,

shunned by employers,

rejected by heterosexual society.

At the center of his life, he remains an outsider.

I think gay men got, sort of, sick and tired of seeing

the quote-unquote "revolution" going on

all around them while they were being

vilified and kept completely to the margins.

Something is always going to light the spark,

and it was about to happen somewhere.

In June of 1969,

the police staged a raid. Just a routine raid

on a gay bar. The Stonewall Inn

in Greenwich Village, New York.

And unlike a routine raid, in this case,

men fought back.

(crowd commotion)

Stonewall was a watershed moment

in, really, the development of civil rights

for the LGBT community.

Within four years of Stonewall,

the American Psychiatric Association

removes homosexuality

from its list of mental disorders.

In four years,

this was a movement that could not be denied.

With each decade, the glass ceiling

gets chipped away at

and, ultimately, one would hope broken.

Heilemann: So much of the sixties is now

draped in nostalgia.

But the things that were important

and that were so controversial then,

whether it was the movement for civil rights,

the environmental movement, or the women's movement,

much of that work became

cornerstones for the world we currently live in.

I no longer accept society's judgment

that my group is second class.

Women begin running for office,

being able to open up their own businesses.

You now have women doctors and scientists

and astronauts, things that were unheard of.

After the sixties, people began to take a more

holistic view of the environment.

Everybody now fundamentally believes

that they've got a right to a healthy, safe environment.

We explored so many blind alleys in the 1960s,

that perhaps we've put ourselves on a platform

from which we can more

constructively attack the problems,

which we have now begun to identify.

If that happens in the decades to come,

I should not be surprised

if historians didn't date its beginning

in this troubled ten years we've just gone through.