peacock. i'm ayman mohyeldin in new york. have a good night. eldin in new york have a good night. have a good night. [gentle music] ♪ - i am thomas t. carpenter. i went to the naval academy and became a marine officer and a pilot. this is dated 12 march, '74. my dearest love, it starts. god has given me you. [soft dramatic music] and it's allowed me to live honestly and in truth. my life is not a lie anymore, for i have you. and then in this box, i found something that says, in the event of my death, ship the briefcase unopened to-- and it has my address, and it's signed by him. he wanted to make sure that if he got killed in an accident that people wouldn't open the letters and figure out what was going on. protecting me. - well, the policy that banned gay men and women from serving openly in the military, "don't ask, don't tell"-- - "don't ask, don't tell." - "don't ask, don't tell." - "don't ask, don't tell." - well, you know it all started with a stolen memo. [dramatic music] - the entire policy was based on this premise that an openly gay member of the military ruins unit cohesion and morale. - and who would be in favor of keeping the policy like it is now, which is keeping your private life private? - gay people and gay expulsions have existed in the military since day one. ♪ - 14,000 people were removed from the military under that policy. - there were people asking and probing. - it was constant. you never knew when you were going to get discovered. - i could get kicked out for no other reason than who i was or who i loved. - if you think something's really bad, you've got to give witness. ♪ - those service members were being treated as though they were criminals. - they were getting found and literally assaulted. - the fatal beating of a gay sailor at a u.s. base in japan-- - it really didn't achieve its objectives. - we had democrats and republicans talking about how terrible gay people are. - it comes down to integrity. - we're going to fight this. we have died for our country. it's about equal rights. - you can negotiate the wording of a bill, but you can't negotiate freedom. - it isn't about tolerance. it's about pride and respect. - discrimination is still discrimination, no matter how you slice it. - today, focused on the transgender community for partisan gain. - and i saw what happened to us, and i kept thinking to myself, it's got to stop. ♪ [birds chirping] [water sloshing] - i'm an army brat. when i was brought up, i would run around the house saying, go, army. beat navy. so my going into naval academy was a really big deal. [soft dramatic music] i come from a family where service was really important to us. i mean, all the men in my family have served in the military. my dad was in the army in the beginning of world war ii. he always told me-- he said, look, tom, if you're really smart, you want to fly. and i said, well, that's a great idea. i think i'll do it. so i went down to the post office and took a civil service examination. and then i received my appointment to the naval academy from senator j. strom thurmond. [waves crashing] when i was in, i think, fifth or sixth grade, i found myself being attracted to boys. ♪ i thought there was nothing wrong with it. i mean, other than my father had told me it was a sin. but to me, it felt natural. and then when i got to the naval academy, i realized that being gay was going to be a real problem with trying to survive in america. and so i went, like, cold turkey. it was like a switch. i just turned it off. and then i met court. [gentle music] so i was at the bar. and i had seen court before in the officer's mess. and i looked at him a couple of times and i thought, wow, this guy's a real looker. i moved over next to him, like this, side to side. i reached down and put my hand in his back pocket. and so that was the beginning of everything. he was very, very bright. he was witty. he was charming. he was articulate. and he was just fun. and i fell in love with him. i would go flying at nighttime, and he would be the duty officer in his squadron. i had a squadron frequency, and i would call him on the radio and see how he was doing. sometimes, people would be in the ready room and say, who's that guy and how'd he get our frequency? we worked in different places. we had different circles of friends. and so when people would see us together, they would kind of scratch their head and say, what the hell are these guys doing together? [tense music] - coming out as gay in the 1960s and '70s and '80s was a harrowing, risky thing. before "don't ask, don't tell," investigations were being conducted by the cid, the criminal investigative division. and that's how those service members were being treated, as though they were criminals. the ones who had to endure that, they tended just to go quietly. if they could get an honorable discharge, that was the best they could hope for. - if you had a discharge paper that said homosexual discharge, this could mean loss of so many relationships and so many opportunities, economic livelihood. it was a very difficult thing. - you can talk about gays and lesbians serving. you can talk about them serving openly. they're different things. they had always been serving. [sounds of distant fighting] - all the way back to ancient greece, the sacred band of thebes was a military force composed of a couple hundred pairs of male lovers. and in the u.s. military itself, there were always gay people. baron friedrich von steuben was a continental army captain and was a respected expert on order and discipline in the military. and he wrote a training manual still referenced today. and what that means is that a gay person literally wrote the book on the very traits that gay people would later be suspected of threatening by their very presence in the military. - all societies structure themselves around the very notion that there are things within society that are dangerous, that are impure. - god says in the old and the new testament that it's an abomination. - society comes together more cohesively if they find a group that they can demonize, a scapegoat. - telling people the source of your problems is an other who's among you, is out to subvert everything you hold dear. - they have done and are doing enormous damage to young people. - as long as people think there is power to be gained by excluding another group, some of them are going to try it. [explosions] - it wasn't until world war i that sodomy was first mentioned in the military regulations. the idea was if you engaged in non-procreative sex, you were potentially a threat to the cohesion of the military and its tight-knit community of people who were expected to abide by the norms and mores of society. it wasn't until world war ii when the military really began to target homosexual identity. this coincided with a shift in the wider culture. you had newer understandings of gay people as a class of people who were beginning to build their lives around it, rather than just as an act that someone, anyone might do as a one-off. during world war ii, bureaucrats quickly had to screen through millions of young people. so you had a lot of shortcuts being taken. and so they relied often on stereotypes. if you're a gay person, you don't necessarily look any different from anyone else. - there was a social norm established for what a gay person was. and it was usually very effeminate, very high-pitched voice, certain interest in the arts, or something like that. - women were often accused of being lesbians because they wanted to work in a non-traditional field, being an engineer or being a pilot. anything that wasn't medical or administrative, they were looked askance at. - increasingly, these stereotypes came to be associated with who gay people were. whether or not you actually were gay, you might be rooted out of the military. during the first and second red scares, both in the military and in the government generally, there were purges. there were more gay people caught up in the firings than there were communists. the idea was that if you carried a secret, such as being gay, you were more prone to blackmail, and so you were a security risk, and you couldn't be allowed to serve in the military. now, of course, you only carried a secret because society and the military insisted that being gay was a shameful secret that you couldn't tell anyone. - you know, living in the closet in the military is much more difficult than living in closet civilian world because you're so close constantly with people. and you became paranoid. you had to hide letters. you couldn't have photographs. it was a really, really difficult way to live. it was like the sword of damocles hanging over your head. i was in okinawa. i got a telephone call from a good friend of mine. and he said, i hate to tell you this, but court's been arrested. [tense music] apparently, he brought an enlisted man home, and the enlisted man accused him of sexually assaulting him. i was dumbfounded. and i asked him up front. i said, just let me know if it's true. he said, i didn't. this guy got drunk. he threw up all over himself and everything. i just had to clean him up. i said, you know, court, you're in real deep trouble. we used to struggle with greasy messes. now, we just freak, wipe, and we're done! with mr. clean clean freak, conquering messes is that easy. clean freak's mist is three times more powerful, and it works on contact. clean freak, just freak, wipe, done. meet the jennifers. jen x. jen y. and jen z. each planning their future through the chase mobile app. jen x is planning a summer in portugal with some help from j.p. morgan wealth plan. let's go whiskers. jen y is working with a banker to budget for her birthday. you only turn 30 once. and jen z? her credit's golden. hello new apartment. three jens getting ahead with chase. solutions that grow with you. one bank for now. for later. for life. chase. make more of what's yours. 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[soft dramatic music] - they offered him a resignation in lieu of a court martial, and said, if you do resignation, we're going to give you an honorable discharge. i said, but i want you to fight it. he said, they're going to give me a general court martial. i could go to leavenworth. and i'm worried that if they find out about me, they're going to find out about you. i said, i'm not important. you need to worry about yourself. he said, i just can't tell my family. i can't tell my dad. he said, i just got to take this thing. so he did. and i never got to see him. he just-- they flew him out of there. he went to camp pendleton, where they took off all his rank insignia, everything that would designate him as an officer. then he gets this paper, and they give him a less than honorable discharge. he was really hurt, as you can imagine. and i was hurt. and i was disgusted that the marine corps would do this to him, so i put in my resignation. - it doesn't make sense right now when they're trying to bring a lot of people into the military today, and they can't fill their quotas, and they're still discharging very, very high qualified people who are gays and lesbians. it doesn't make sense. [upbeat retro music] - 1970s became this time when a lot of people in the military were beginning to awaken to their right to be gay in the military and that we're not going to take this anymore. - the government has no place telling us what our sexual preferences should be. - well, leonard matlovich was a technical sergeant in the air force, purple heart, bronze star, very well respected. in 1975, he decided that he could no longer live with himself being dishonest about who he was. - so i let the air force know that i was gay, that i had a perfect military record, and i wanted to stay in the air force. - discharge proceedings began. so he sued. and his lawsuit made the cover of "time" magazine. this was the first time that this issue of gays in the military had gotten such mainstream media coverage. - here, i have the new centennial $0.50 piece. and on the back of it, it says, 200 years of freedom. not yet. it will be, though. all the way. - once somebody breaks through the barrier, like matlovich did, right, it brings up the issue in a way that people have to deal with. so people can say, you know, he shouldn't be in the military. or people will say he's a hero for being in the military. he really becomes sympathetic. - gay people are oppressed in this country. whether they're chains of the wrist or the mind, we are an oppressed people. - this was a real turning point for the gay rights movement. [gentle waves lapping] - you know, when i was in the marine corps, i was a legal officer, and i loved it. i thought this is really great. in the military, it provided discipline and justice at the same time. and i thought, you know, this is something i should consider doing. we were applying for law school, and i was getting into law school. and court, he was having a hard time. i was getting into some good schools, and he wasn't. and we figured out that it was because of that damn less than honorable discharge. his dad actually hired an investigator and sent the investigator back to the midwest, where the accuser was from. and they found his criminal record. and he had been accused of standing out in front of either an elementary school or high school, flashing little girls. they took that record back to the board. the board said, your service record is great. we have this one incident by a guy who's now a convicted felon. and we're going to overturn and give you an honorable discharge. well, i graduated from law school, got my law degree, passed the bar. and court passed the bar. and then we moved to san francisco. [mike lesirge's "work it out"] - ♪ ooh! ♪ fire is coming ♪ so let's be ♪ be together ♪ yeah, let's be ♪ be together ♪ can't get higher - i grew up in the san francisco bay area. and the gay community in san francisco was a transformative thing. it was this idea that this community could form itself, speak on its own terms, stand up for themselves, produce a full-blown glorious spectacle of a culture that everybody else in the country was either afraid of or mystified by or covetous of or wanted to visit on vacation. - castro street is kind of the center of gay san francisco. - people came from all over america to live in san francisco. because there, they could live free. because there, you could be who you are. you could live the way you wanted to live. you didn't have to hide. you didn't have to fear. it was magnetic. it still is magnetic. ♪ [somber music] ♪ - in june, a cluster of strange pneumonia cases began to crop up in gay men, then a rare cancer that left purple lesions on their bodies, persistent rashes, lingering colds, fungal infections, dramatic weight loss. - when the first cases of aids were announced in "the new york times" on july 3 of 1981, we see a series of sort of moral panics. - really felt like me and all my friends against our government and our country against us and us experiencing mass death and suffering and being a source of levity, in the worst cases, for the reagan administration, but mostly just being ignored. - to have that many americans dying of something brand new and it not being important enough for the president to even talk about it, let alone act to counter it, is a radicalizing thing and an alienating thing. - it's like being at war. our friends were dying right and left. we were going to more funerals than weddings. it was awful. - with the aids epidemic, it was a regular fact of life to be in your 20s and have your friends who were the same age as you dying all around you. it's, um... you know, it just-- it changes you forever. [bird chirps] - here's court. i love this picture. he's hamming it up with one of my fellow marines and his wife. he was something else. our relationship kind of evolved after we were together for a long time. we decided that we would have an open relationship, did safe sex and all that sort of thing. and then one day court called me in my office. i'll never forget it. he said, i've got some terrible news, and you're not going to believe it. he said, i've tested hiv positive. i said, jesus. he said, i want you to get a test. so i call my doctor on the phone, and i said to him, my lover has tested positive for hiv, and i need to take the test. the next day, doctor said, tom, you are not hiv positive. i said, that is impossible. we had court having to deal with this, and we tried with all these medications. and he would go into the hospital for blood transfusion, and... the doctor said, i want to keep him in here. next day, i went to see him, and got there, and he wasn't in his room. so i went to the nurse's station. where the hell is he? she said, he was delirious last night. he was running around, beating on the wall and screaming. he was so delirious that we took him and put him in another room. and within an hour, he was in a coma. i would go and sleep there at the hospital every night with him and put water on his lips. and the doctor comes to me and says, his organs are starting to shut down. it's not going to be long. it was about 2:00 in the afternoon on a saturday. and they said, he's gone. i said, oh, shit. yeah. sunday was easter morning. and i got up and decided i would go to the chapel at palos verdes. you know, it's the third day, and you got to have hope. [sniffles] before i went to the chapel, i walked over to the cliffs of palos verdes. and he and i had been out there many times. and i looked over the edge. and i came really, really, really close to jumping. i said, i don't know how i can live another day. and then i... i just heard this voice. no, no. you have to go on. you have to go on. you know, what could be more appropriate than easter? he hits his mark —center stage—and is crushed by a baby grand piano. you're replacing me? customize and save with liberty bibberty. he doesn't even have a mustache. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ looking for a bladder leak pad that keeps you dry? when i'm at work, i need to feel secured. what i'm looking for in a pad is, super thin, super absorbent. all of the things that you're looking for in a pad, that is always discreet. - this is t