It's easy to find fault with "The Homosexuals," a 1967 documentary from CBS, the first ever aired on a major network about "the problem" of homosexuality. Dave White at The Advocate, rediscovered the relic, and provides a litany of its sins. For example, it focuses exclusively on gay men, and has not a word to say about how lesbians (who, one assumes, are also homosexual) might be different. Amazing how that focus on gay men to the exclusion of lesbians plagues our discussion even now.
That may be because lesbians don't fit so comforably into the stereotype of relentless, anonymous sex that is the documentary's framework. Mike Wallace's sometimes squalid questions and lascivious tone appear presumptuous and patronizing today, if you can't give yourself a little distance and appreciate its camp value:
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. His sex life, his "love" life, consists of a series of chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits, and even on the streets of the city, the pick up, the one night stand, these are characteristic of the homosexual relationship.
It's impossible to do justice to his spin on the word "love;" you have to hear it for yourself (this passage is about the 8:20 mark) to appreciate how near to contempt he finds the very thought.
And that age's experts on homosexuality are given almost total deference in the piece. Charles Socarides pronounces, to a classroom of curious students (including us) the conventional notion of the time that homosexuality is a mental illness. But he then goes further in responding to a student question about "happy homosexuals," by scoffing; they don't and can't exist. Question answered. Next?
That's why it might be hard to appreciate how groundbreaking this documentary really was. No one who missed the 1950s and 60s can imagine how much sheer effort it took, then, for the nascent gay rights movement to be heard or taken seriously. Mention of the word "homosexual" on commercial television in a neutral way was almost inconceivable. An hour-long slot on the subject -- even with condescension, misinformation and insults -- was a bonanza.
We simply have no conception, today, of how dominant -- and successful -- the closet was in virtually shutting down any public conversation at all in which gay men are viewed as citizens rather than predators. Yet the documentary opens with a gay man who is well adjusted even by the standards of our own time. There are also interviews with a judge (from North Carolina!) and a prosecutor who are going through the first stages of questioning social conventions about homosexuality. And, of course, any journalism from those days that includes an interview with Frank Kameny won't make it easy to leave unchallenged the notion which took for granted our (in Dean Rusk's candid phrase) "personal instability." (Kameny and Rusk make their points starting at the 29 minute mark.)
The toxins that still infect our debate today are closer to the surface here. And chief among them is the human distortion that Jonathan Rauch, Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan have all tried so valiantly to have heterosexuals of good will envision: What would life be like if you grew up believing that love would have no role in your future? How would that affect a human being's ordinary development and moral thinking?
I can't imagine any way to make that point better than Mike Wallace's discrediting of the word "love" for gay men. He honestly felt, as virtually everyone else at the time did, that gay men were "not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of heterosexual marriage." In fact, the documentary ends with a (heterosexually) married homosexual saying that he doesn't believe he could have a "love relationship" with another man. His moral imagination was formed, along with the rest of the culture, around the notion that homosexuality involves no emotions, no affection, no relationship to others except the physical.
Wallace has since regretted the documentary's tone, as well as the prejudices of the time. But he has no reason to regret having participated in helping this nation begin an open discussion about homosexuality.
Forty-three years later, this documentary is timely again. Heterosexuals today don't have to imagine the moral deformity that was demanded of gay men by assuming they had no need for love. "The Homosexuals" shows exactly what that looks like. When we fight for legal recognition of our relationships, it is because of this sabotage of our souls. I am grateful we have it today to help make our case.