When We Rise (2017) s01e00 Episode Script
The People Behind the Story
1 We won't go back! Young LGBT people deserve to know we have a rich history.
- We shall overcome - We've had tragedy.
Gay people faced massive discrimination.
When we go against God, we pay the prices for that.
All the images that we did see were usually outcasts.
But when ordinary people rise up, they can accomplish anything.
A gay revolution started to take form.
What kind of inhumanity is this? We were criminals, and if you weren't criminalized maybe they'd lobotomize you.
And now we have icons.
I'm running because it's obvious.
There was Stonewall.
The AIDS epidemic.
Marriage rights.
I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
The LGBT movement is built on the shoulders of great heroes.
They stayed in that fight all the way to today.
Homosexuality has been a subject of major public debate for more than 65 years.
No other group in American history has faced this many campaigns to proactively take their rights away.
Hollywood, under pressure, enacted a censorship code in the 1930s that prohibited films from including gay and lesbian characters, or even discussing homosexuality.
We were after school stories, and then we were one-off characters.
Usually to move a plot along, but never a repeat character until you got into the '90s.
I thought, this is about time for us to be able to depict LGB people as our primary characters.
When we rise, to me, is a call to action.
We wanted to share at least a dramatic side of this, how this struggle evolved.
Making sure that all of those rich stories are being told is so important.
Are you ready? Let's march! And at a time when our country is very divided, I think it is important to hear what people can accomplish when we work together across all the barriers and boundaries that people create between themselves.
We're fired up.
We won't take it no more.
We're fired up.
Looking back, it's really kind of amazing to me what I've seen happen just in my own lifetime.
One of the most damaging things about life before the gay liberation movement is isolation.
I was part of the last generation of gay people who grew up not knowing that there were other people like us.
No one knows exactly how many homosexuals there are in the United States.
There's no reliable way to find out when most of them are unwilling to acknowledge it.
CBS did an hour-long documentary called "The Homosexuals.
" You had gay men describing their lives who felt tortured about it.
Since my parents found out, they couldn't understand what they had done to bring about such a turn of events.
We were told that we were mentally ill.
Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness.
My father was a psychologist.
I went to his library and his textbooks, and discovered that I had a condition that was supposedly treated with electroconvulsive shock treatment.
And if that didn't work, maybe they'd lobotomize you.
I mean, it's horrific.
What Jimmy didn't know is that Ralph was sick.
A sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less dangerous and contagious.
50 years ago, there were no role models.
There was nothing positive.
All the images that we did see were usually winos and outcasts.
I felt as though I was the only one in the world.
When I lived in West Africa, my first woman lover was Diane.
We had this this amazing love affair that we had to keep secret, that nobody could know about, and then she left.
If you came out, you most certainly would lose your job, lose your family, lose your friends as you knew them.
I'm a lesbian, and I didn't know how to take that on, and this is internalized homophobia right up the kazoo.
I said, "I'm not I'm just not.
" Stonewall was a breaking point.
Stonewall was a gay bar in the middle of Greenwich Village.
Police raids on bars were fairly routine affairs.
But it just happened that most of the bars they went after were gay bars.
And usually they would just sort of come in, check I.
D.
cards and then everybody would disappear into the streets.
The raid on June 28th, 1969 was different.
As they march the ones that are being arrested out, they discover "Wait a sec, there's a big crowd out there.
" It was the kind of crowd that was ready to fight back.
The crowd starts going off.
Two trans women of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P.
Johnson were the real rebels at the front lines.
I grew up in northern New Jersey, five minutes away from New York City, and I knew I needed to be a part of that.
And as I was hanging around in the Village I began to feel like there were other kids just like me.
What was happening in the heart of New York City, on Christopher Street, was a gay revolution started to take form.
And that changed everything.
One year later, people organized around this event called Stonewall and marched and marched out in the open.
Men and women, cisgender and trans, black and brown and white.
That is the critical moment of Stonewall.
And then the word began to spread, and within just a couple of years, hundreds of gay liberation groups started on campuses.
And the revolt just was felt across the country.
There was what people called a great gay migration to the burgeoning new gay meccas in New York, San Francisco, L.
A.
, Houston, Chicago.
No one is a people until they have a history.
And LGBT people finally thought they deserved it.
One day, I was hiding out in my high school library, avoiding the bullies, and I picked up a copy of "Life" magazine, Year in Review 1971 And in there was a big story called "Homosexuals in Revolt.
" And that was the moment that I learned there were other people like me, that there was a community, and that there was a movement.
And it happens to be the movement that saved my life.
Both my mom and dad had surgeries, and I began pilfering their pain pills, because it seemed to me that the only solution was to kill myself.
I flushed the pills down the toilet, and I said, you know, "No, I'm not going to kill myself.
I'm going to go to San Francisco.
" I ended up in San Francisco in the early '70s.
What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want it? Now! The women's movement in the late 1960s was working very hard to pass the equal rights amendment.
And at the center of that was the freedom to control their own bodies for the first time.
The National Organization for Women the first president and founder Betty Friedan was homophobic.
There is our own responsibility to to take some responsibility for the fears of the other women and not to do things that will alienate them more.
One of the issues was that perhaps that would somehow threaten their relationship with the Democratic party.
I just came from a press conference where some leader of NOW had said that you can't be diverted by other issues such as racism, such as oppression of gay people.
And there was this push to get rid of lesbians.
Lesbians were women, they wanted to be part of the women's movement.
And then they got expelled.
So, we split from the National Organization for Women.
Big fight.
We will not be silent any longer.
We shall overcome We shall overcome The black civil rights movement in the United States had experienced some setbacks.
Good evening.
The Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis tonight.
Clearly the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
A war that was robbing this country of their young African-American men.
After high school, I had joined the Navy.
On board ship I fell in love with another guy.
We had to hide it, because it was reason for dishonorable discharge.
So, we're in the middle of the civil rights movement We march today for jobs and freedom.
you have the women's movement, you have a gay movement.
Seriously, pick your place and go for it.
I thought it was important that social justice movements start seeing how they're interrelated.
I think we all got to realize how powerful we are when we take each other's hands and we move forward together.
You are a united people.
At last.
Without unity, there cannot be any victory.
Gays and lesbians didn't work together at first.
When Anita Bryant showed up, that's what brought us together.
I love the homosexuals, and I know that there is a way out.
Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit as an individual.
This movement is built on the shoulders of greats and of giants whose history has never been told.
There's so many players.
So many unsung heroes.
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were our key icons.
They were the founders of the first lesbian organization in the United States.
Frank Kameny of the Mattachine Society in Washington coined the slogan, "Gay is good.
" Jose Sarria was giving gay men strength on the streets of San Francisco and when Harvey Milk ran for political office, the first signature on his petition was from Jose.
Gay, straight, black, white, same struggle, same fight! The black civil rights movement had a profound impact on the LGBT movement.
It gave people a framework, a language of minority rights but it remained very weak, very localized.
You see that in the fact that Harvey Milk became really a Saint for the gay movement.
Does a person care? Does a person care about his city or her city? Is a person sensitive to the needs of people? Harvey was certainly a character.
When I first met him, he still had long hair, and he seemed kind of old to be a hippie.
He was very funny.
He was very endearing.
He had several campaigns that all failed.
I'm running because it's obvious.
But each time he got better.
He got stronger.
He got more articulate.
He had a really broad vision.
It wasn't just about being gay.
He was a real leader and then he became my mentor.
And then he actually got elected.
He showed that you could come out and it didn't limit your ability to achieve.
We were demanding acceptance, and you know, organized religion, the media, the government, they all started paying attention.
By 1977, a handful of municipalities and counties across the country had enacted limited protections for LGBT people.
An ordinance was passed in Miami, Florida, prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals in employment and housing.
But across the 1970s, only 40 cities and towns passed such laws.
Anita Bryant was a Miss Oklahoma, who becomes a bit of a pop star, singer.
She wound up being the spokeswoman for the orange juice producers.
Nice to meet you.
Anita Bryant led a campaign to, quote unquote, "Save our children from Miami's recently passed anti-discrimination law.
" As a Christian, as I said earlier, that I love the homosexuals and I know that there's a way out.
That they're not born that way.
Anita Bryant organized one of the first backlashes an organized gay movement had to face.
Voters in California will be deciding next month on an initiative.
It's called Proposition 6.
A guy named John Briggs, a state senator, put Prop 6 on the ballot, which would have banned gay people from working in any public school district in the state.
Not only if you were perceived as gay, but if they thought that you might have been associating with gays you could lose your job.
We organized to defeat her, and at the time, we organized to take on the world.
Harvey Milk, his cry to the community was to come out, to be visible.
Thanks a lot.
Appreciate your help.
And so, the Prop 6 campaign was really the first time in history where gay people in large numbers, by the thousands, came out.
We knocked on doors.
We put out fliers.
We talked to anybody.
And we said, "Please don't vote for this.
We are your neighbors.
We work with you.
If you vote for this, it's going to hurt me.
It's going to hurt my family.
" One of the most surprising things to a lot of young people is, you say to them, you know gays and lesbians didn't work together at first.
They didn't even like talking to each other all that much.
When Anita Bryant showed up, that's what brought us together.
Sally Gearhart was a great speech maker.
She'd say, "You know, we need to go up to those senators who are so religious and against us and give them a big kiss.
That's how you defeat them.
" And, you know, the crowds would go crazy.
And so she and Harvey worked as a team.
And so, that brought not only lesbians, but women into all of this.
We thought we would lose.
We thought we'd lose overwhelmingly.
And much to our surprise, we won.
When we defeated Prop 6, it was a true social statewide victory.
It was, like, happiness beyond happiness and nobody is ever ready, you know, for tragedy.
I got up early on November 27th, 1978, because one of Harvey's assistants was away.
So, I got there early, but I annoyed him, because I'd left a file he needed back in my apartment, so, he sent me home to get it.
So, I came back here to the Castro and got the file.
And a bus came by and somebody yelled at me out the window that the mayor had been shot.
So, I grabbed a taxi, I got down to city hall and I ran in, looking for Harvey.
I remember turning the corner and seeing his feet sticking out of the doorway.
I recognized his second-hand wingtip shoes so I knew it was him.
I had never seen a dead person before.
You know, he'd been like a dad.
He was my mentor.
He was our leader.
We had fought a lot of things.
Right? But we didn't expect our leader to be wiped out like that.
All afternoon, I just kept thinking to myself, "It's over, it's all over.
" Not only did Milk die but the most liberal mayor this city ever had died.
George Moscone.
Our dreams were in this liberal man.
It was overwhelming.
Overwhelming.
And then the sun went down and the people began to gather here on Castro Street.
Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.
There was a march from the Castro.
A march of mourning.
It became the Candlelight March.
And we marched, gay and straight, black and brown and white and young and old, and immigrant and native born.
The whole city responded and that showed you that we had arrived.
And that was when I knew it wasn't over.
It was just beginning.
It was really a joyous time.
More lesbian couples started having children.
I had to tell my parents that I was a lesbian and I was having a child, and my parents actually threatened to sue for custody.
We won't go back! Before Harvey Milk died, there was a lot of conversation in the community about how our new movement needed a new symbol.
We had two symbols at the time.
One was the lambda, the Greek letter "L".
The other was the pink triangle, which came from the Nazi death camps.
Not a very positive kind of symbol.
And each year, the parade used to put out a call for submissions where we'd ask people to submit their ideas for the theme and the logo.
Gilbert Baker created this rainbow flag.
Without any explanation at all, people got what it meant.
Because we are born into every color of skin, religious background and economic status.
It was very powerful.
We won't go back.
We won't go back.
We won't go back.
We won't go back.
It was announced that Norfolk would go forward with a test tube baby clinic.
The great medical schools of this country are all determined to achieve some kind of a first with this.
At that point, we would cross our fingers and hope we have fertilization.
Reproductive technology developed over the course of the '70s more lesbian couples started having gaybies what came to be known as the lesbian baby boom.
Often they had a gay friend help out by supplying the necessary ingredients.
I grew up knowing that I wanted to be a mother.
In 1979, I was living with Linda Jupiter.
And I had a next door neighbor.
And one day, she came over and said that a friend of hers had the perfect donor.
He donated sperm, which got handed off to one person, who handed it off to another person, and it was in, like, an artichoke jar.
This spermy nightmare has a 60-minute shelf life.
You've got 20 left.
Two weeks later, I was pregnant.
And nine months later, I was here.
I had to tell my parents that I was a lesbian and I was having a child.
And immediately my parents reacted very negatively.
And my parents actually threatened to sue for custody.
And then they got over it really quickly when they came and they met Annie.
The lesbian feminist movement was really larger and more sophisticated politically than the gay male movement in the 1970s, and created a much wider range of institutions, from coffee houses, publications, bookstores.
When we became the Women's Building, we had lesbian, gay we had abortion rights groups, reproductive health and justice.
And we had immigrant organizations.
And we had meetings there to get women to have their own identity in the community, a place of our own.
For the first time in history, lesbians and gay men from all over the country will come to Washington, will march up to the capitol.
For any civil rights movement to succeed, it has to go to the federal level.
Activists around the country had tried for years to organize a national march on Washington.
But there was no real national leadership yet.
In 1979, activists organized the first national march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights.
About 75,000 people showed up.
Not a huge number, in those days, but still really significant.
And it was an effort of activists who felt really besieged by Anita Bryant's victory and Harvey Milk's assassination to rally together, to see their numbers.
We're fired up, won't take it no more! We're fired up, won't take it no more.
Politicians were now forced to make a public choice.
20 million lesbian and gay Americans whose lives are blighted by a veil of ignorance and misunderstanding.
And this contributed to the pressure on Jimmy Carter and the Democratic party during the 1980 presidential election to include a gay rights plank in the Democratic party platform.
We are here as lesbians and gay men, and we are here as Democrats.
It wasn't until 1982 that a state, Wisconsin, wrote anti-discrimination protections into state law.
It was both an important victory and another sign really of how weak the gay movement still was.
In 1981, I was working for the California state legislature as a consultant to the assembly committee on health.
So I subscribed to the morbidity and mortality weekly report, published by the Centers for Disease Control.
And I remember reading an account of about 40 gay men, young, previously healthy, who had been stricken with a very, very aggressive form of pneumonia called pneumocystis.
And also a very rare skin cancer called Kaposi sarcoma.
And I remember clipping that out and putting it on my bulletin board and I wrote on it, "Just when things were looking up.
" I knew this was bad, though of course, I had no idea how bad it would turn out to be.
A-I-D-S the most frightening initials in America today.
All of the sudden, a lot of people were coming out.
But they were falling out of the closet and into their grave.
For many, AIDS seemed like God's punishment.
When we go against nature, we therefore pay the prices for that.
Upfront tonight A-I-D-S, AIDS.
The most frightening initials in America today.
In the early 1980s, we were just beginning to achieve some kind of acceptance, some kind of political power.
AIDS changed the entire movement.
AIDS devastated the gay meccas that had grown up across the country in the 1970s.
All of the sudden, a lot of people were coming out but they were falling out of the closet and into their grave.
The LGBT community had to take care of itself and turn inward.
It made the LGBT movement into a family, as lesbians stepped up to take care of their dying gay brothers.
They were nurses.
They were volunteers.
And as the gay men who had dominated the organizations died, they stepped up into the leadership positions and kept the movement going.
I had gone to nursing school because I wanted to be a midwife but at San Francisco General, I got assigned to the adult medicine ward.
It was a 34-bed ward.
Half of the patients were people with AIDS.
Some doctors believe that 50% of the gay population is walking around with the AIDS virus.
In the early years of the pandemic there was, of course, no treatment.
To be diagnosed with HIV typically meant you had less than two years to live.
There were examples of great neglect, finding three food trays stacked outside the room because nobody had bothered to take the food in.
You were drawing blood.
You were getting needle sticks.
How do we provide compassionate care and how do we protect our staff? I'm a brand new nurse.
I know nothing.
But as a lesbian, I knew something about homophobia.
When AIDS was first noticed by doctors, it was so associated with gay men that it was called G.
R.
I.
D.
, gay-related immunodeficiency.
The only clues about this disease comes from the type of people caught in the epidemic.
This epidemic hit just as Ronald Reagan got elected.
Reagan had been elected, in part, to suppress the sex revolution.
A very anti-gay administration.
- I will, to the best of my ability - preserve, protect and defend preserve, protect and defend During the AIDS crisis, not only were people dying, but they were invisible.
You would turn on the television, you didn't see Reagan talking about it.
I remember the first time I saw a pink triangle, and across it, it said, "Silence equals death.
" I was like, "Oh, they're killing us with silence.
" It took Ronald Reagan six years to turn an eye on the AIDS crisis.
When we go against nature and God, of course, is the creator of nature, we therefore pay the prices for that.
There were quite a few people who were really gleeful about the plague.
Now is the time for salvation! There were those who thought that AIDS was God's way of striking down this sinful community.
Not only were they physically dying, but emotionally, they were being villainized.
God says repent, so repent! I found out that I was HIV positive shortly after the antibody test was developed in 1985.
In November 1990, I was diagnosed with late stage AIDS.
I had been in denial.
I mean, I had all of the symptoms, but I was very sick.
I had less than ten T-cells and we normally have between 800 and 1,200.
One time, I got arrested.
I was locked into a pod with 20 gay and bisexual men.
They included transgender women in the same cell.
I had to have sex against my wish, with one of the cell mates and shortly after, I tested HIV positive.
The last thing the test counselor told me was that I should try to make a plan on how to say goodbye.
The AIDS crisis really shined a light on how many protections as a community we didn't have, and people were shut out of their partner's hospital rooms, or weren't invited to funerals.
There was a tremendous growth of fear about this disease and anger and hostility towards gay people.
Terror among homosexuals of the disease, AIDS, and people who have it have become outcasts.
Nobody wants to go near them.
Living in the Castro back then, it sort of felt like a slow motion avalanche.
You would lose your friends, and then you'd make new friends.
And then they would die.
And then you'd make new friends.
And they would die.
There are still ghosts everywhere I walk.
And I feel them all the time.
My immune system had completely collapsed.
I was looking at having a few months left.
I had actually purchased my funeral attire.
Everything was taken care of.
Some encouraging news about AIDS.
In 1985, a thousand San Franciscans had already been killed.
All of those thousand who had died had lived and died within just a few blocks of where I was standing, but there was no evidence.
You hear music.
You smell coffee and food, and you have no idea that you're standing at the epicenter of this horrendous catastrophe.
A few nights later, when people gathered for the candlelight memorial, to remember the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, we passed out the posters and the markers and we asked everybody to write the name of one person they knew who had died of AIDS.
And we covered that front gray stone building with these names of our dead and I thought, "Well, that looks like a quilt.
" I thought, "Ah, we need to make a quilt.
" I'm overwhelmed.
It has been such a privilege to work on this.
You had people all over the country creating individual quilts to memorialize this precious individual who'd lost their life to this disease.
And by October of 1987, we had 1,920 panels.
Quilts created by their moms and their grandmothers and their friends and their lovers.
The first time the AIDS quilt was shown on a really massive scale was at the 1987 march on Washington.
It weaved them together in a way that showed how many we had lost.
I think so many people who just wanted to pretend that we didn't exist saw us.
It was the wanton social life of the 1970s which led directly to this crisis.
Initially, the way the press reported on AIDS reinforced the idea that homosexuals were a diseased population who threatened the American people.
I've got a big mouth and I yell.
Larry Kramer became very active in the movement against AIDS.
He pushed really hard when other people were scared to push.
What kind of inhumanity is this? He was one of the founders of Act up, the AIDS coalition to unleash power and said, we need to demand that the government take responsibility for a major health crisis.
Health care is our right! Which led incredibly powerful demonstrations.
People chaining themselves to the FDA and to the NIH and to the White House.
Hundreds of demonstrators blocked entrances to the Food and Drug Administration headquarters.
One of the key successes of Act up and all the political pressure was the dedication of funds to AIDS research.
Some encouraging news about AIDS.
Word of a new treatment with a new drug called AZT.
But the earlier drugs were actually horrible medications to take.
The people that I knew who took AZT died faster than the people I knew who didn't take it.
By the mid 1990s, you had a cocktail of drugs that would at least combat and mitigate the effects of AIDS.
And I was very close to death at that point.
My immune system had completely collapsed.
I had pneumocystis pneumonia.
You know, I was looking at having a few months left.
And my health immediately rebounded, and we sort of bought our lives in three to six-month increments.
When I found out that I had a very short time to live, I moved out to the ocean, where I could hear the sound of the water hitting the shore.
I had actually purchased my funeral attire.
I had a plan.
And everything was taken care of.
And I waited a year.
Then, it was two years.
Then, it was three years, and I'm wondering, "Well, are we going to die or what?" And finally, I went, "I'm not going to die.
" Bill Clinton, when he was running for president, told us he had a vision for America, and that we were part of it.
We can't afford to waste the capacities, the contributions, the hearts, the souls and the minds of the gay and lesbian Americans, either.
"Don't ask, don't tell" wasn't quite what we had in mind at all.
If you were in the military, you could technically be gay but you just couldn't say that you were gay.
It provides greater protection to those who happen to be homosexual and want to serve their country honorably in uniform.
Visibility was all that we could do, and now your U.
S.
Government was telling you to hide who you are.
Even though it was supposed to be a compromise that was somewhat progressive, 13,000 American military personnel was kicked out under "Don't ask, don't tell".
I felt very betrayed by Bill Clinton.
The Republican Congress passed, and the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed, the Defense of Marriage Act, which declared that marriage was only between one man and one woman.
One of the biggest challenges with visibility is people know who you are.
And that can make you a target.
Matt Shepard, the gay college student savagely beaten last week in Wyoming, died this morning.
I remember when it was announced.
That I remember it was announced that a young man, who was my age, who had just come out was tied to a fence post in the Midwest and had his skull cracked open and was left there to die.
And I thought, oh, my God, that could be me.
I mean we sort of looked similar at the time, same age.
You know, and it wasn't, it's like, that's not what you want to face when you're finally coming out and you're starting to experience love for the first time, is to be told that it's a death sentence.
And the choice is allowing yourself to be beat up and victimized and bullied.
Or do you rise and become your authentic self? I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
We started winning.
And I kind of didn't know what to do with myself, I got to admit.
History at the Supreme Court.
And the implications are sweeping.
I want I want you to know who I am, because I'm proud of who I am.
Celebrities are very influential.
I can't overstate the power of actors and actresses and sports figures coming out.
Susan I'm gay.
When you know you're a success is when the media develops their icons for us.
This is who I am and it's okay.
Allies like Whoopi Goldberg.
What made me want to come out? I'm sick of seeing my friends die.
I've been kind of astonished by the speed with which America is coming to understand transgender people.
I'm finally who I'm supposed to be.
I can't go back.
That might seem like nothing in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco but I'm telling you, that kid in Texarkana, Texas, that means a heck of a lot.
Today, the state of Vermont became the first state to formally recognize same-sex unions.
Today in Massachusetts, for the first time in U.
S.
history, the civil marriage laws of a state do not exclude gays.
History was made today as gay men and women serving in the U.
S.
military were finally allowed to live their lives in the open.
"Don't ask, don't tell" is officially over.
At a certain point, I've just concluded that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle.
That we are all created equal.
History at the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage.
Now legal in all 50 states.
We started winning.
And I kind of didn't know what to do with myself, I got to admit.
I look back a lot and I remember all those people I just wish that they could be here today, to see what their hard work has done.
But the fight is clearly not over.
I work for the labor movement today, primarily because the corruption of our political process by big money is the most dangerous thing.
Today, my work is poor women.
Migrant women.
Women who are in jail and don't need to be there.
In the United States, there are 46,000 new HIV infections every year.
They're concentrated in poor communities and communities of color.
Mostly in states that did not do Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
We are still coming to understand trans issues.
40% of homeless youth are kicked out because they were gay or trans.
There are a lot of people who did not want to see us thrive.
The movement is never done.
The victories you've won can be lost again.
Indiana's new religious freedom act, critics say it sanctions discrimination against gays and lesbians.
This is about protecting the religious liberty of people of faith.
The gay liberation movement is like any civil rights movement.
It's going to have its moments of great success, and it's going to have moments where that pendulum's going to swing back.
We go through various cycles.
We're going through one now.
The White House reversed guidelines issued under President Obama.
Public schools no longer required to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice.
For whatever reasons, human beings take their time to change.
Laws can be unwritten, but once you change a heart, you have them forever.
We shall overcome We shall overcome some day "We" is the secret to pushing back on a backlash.
It's really about all of us, all the ordinary people.
Whether we're gay or straight or black or brown or white or immigrant or native born, we need to stand up and fight.
When you have no power, you might have to put your body in the machine to stop it from running.
It's not just building a resistance.
It's time to march.
We need a worldwide movement.
We have an opportunity to have a real colorful world and peaceful world.
I feel really confident in the power of young people.
I want the younger generation to know what we fought for and sense their own power, because it is their world now.
When we rose it was worth it.
We really can change things.
We really can change things.
Through love and honesty and caring for each other.
Yes, we can change the world.
- We shall overcome - We've had tragedy.
Gay people faced massive discrimination.
When we go against God, we pay the prices for that.
All the images that we did see were usually outcasts.
But when ordinary people rise up, they can accomplish anything.
A gay revolution started to take form.
What kind of inhumanity is this? We were criminals, and if you weren't criminalized maybe they'd lobotomize you.
And now we have icons.
I'm running because it's obvious.
There was Stonewall.
The AIDS epidemic.
Marriage rights.
I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
The LGBT movement is built on the shoulders of great heroes.
They stayed in that fight all the way to today.
Homosexuality has been a subject of major public debate for more than 65 years.
No other group in American history has faced this many campaigns to proactively take their rights away.
Hollywood, under pressure, enacted a censorship code in the 1930s that prohibited films from including gay and lesbian characters, or even discussing homosexuality.
We were after school stories, and then we were one-off characters.
Usually to move a plot along, but never a repeat character until you got into the '90s.
I thought, this is about time for us to be able to depict LGB people as our primary characters.
When we rise, to me, is a call to action.
We wanted to share at least a dramatic side of this, how this struggle evolved.
Making sure that all of those rich stories are being told is so important.
Are you ready? Let's march! And at a time when our country is very divided, I think it is important to hear what people can accomplish when we work together across all the barriers and boundaries that people create between themselves.
We're fired up.
We won't take it no more.
We're fired up.
Looking back, it's really kind of amazing to me what I've seen happen just in my own lifetime.
One of the most damaging things about life before the gay liberation movement is isolation.
I was part of the last generation of gay people who grew up not knowing that there were other people like us.
No one knows exactly how many homosexuals there are in the United States.
There's no reliable way to find out when most of them are unwilling to acknowledge it.
CBS did an hour-long documentary called "The Homosexuals.
" You had gay men describing their lives who felt tortured about it.
Since my parents found out, they couldn't understand what they had done to bring about such a turn of events.
We were told that we were mentally ill.
Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness.
My father was a psychologist.
I went to his library and his textbooks, and discovered that I had a condition that was supposedly treated with electroconvulsive shock treatment.
And if that didn't work, maybe they'd lobotomize you.
I mean, it's horrific.
What Jimmy didn't know is that Ralph was sick.
A sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less dangerous and contagious.
50 years ago, there were no role models.
There was nothing positive.
All the images that we did see were usually winos and outcasts.
I felt as though I was the only one in the world.
When I lived in West Africa, my first woman lover was Diane.
We had this this amazing love affair that we had to keep secret, that nobody could know about, and then she left.
If you came out, you most certainly would lose your job, lose your family, lose your friends as you knew them.
I'm a lesbian, and I didn't know how to take that on, and this is internalized homophobia right up the kazoo.
I said, "I'm not I'm just not.
" Stonewall was a breaking point.
Stonewall was a gay bar in the middle of Greenwich Village.
Police raids on bars were fairly routine affairs.
But it just happened that most of the bars they went after were gay bars.
And usually they would just sort of come in, check I.
D.
cards and then everybody would disappear into the streets.
The raid on June 28th, 1969 was different.
As they march the ones that are being arrested out, they discover "Wait a sec, there's a big crowd out there.
" It was the kind of crowd that was ready to fight back.
The crowd starts going off.
Two trans women of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P.
Johnson were the real rebels at the front lines.
I grew up in northern New Jersey, five minutes away from New York City, and I knew I needed to be a part of that.
And as I was hanging around in the Village I began to feel like there were other kids just like me.
What was happening in the heart of New York City, on Christopher Street, was a gay revolution started to take form.
And that changed everything.
One year later, people organized around this event called Stonewall and marched and marched out in the open.
Men and women, cisgender and trans, black and brown and white.
That is the critical moment of Stonewall.
And then the word began to spread, and within just a couple of years, hundreds of gay liberation groups started on campuses.
And the revolt just was felt across the country.
There was what people called a great gay migration to the burgeoning new gay meccas in New York, San Francisco, L.
A.
, Houston, Chicago.
No one is a people until they have a history.
And LGBT people finally thought they deserved it.
One day, I was hiding out in my high school library, avoiding the bullies, and I picked up a copy of "Life" magazine, Year in Review 1971 And in there was a big story called "Homosexuals in Revolt.
" And that was the moment that I learned there were other people like me, that there was a community, and that there was a movement.
And it happens to be the movement that saved my life.
Both my mom and dad had surgeries, and I began pilfering their pain pills, because it seemed to me that the only solution was to kill myself.
I flushed the pills down the toilet, and I said, you know, "No, I'm not going to kill myself.
I'm going to go to San Francisco.
" I ended up in San Francisco in the early '70s.
What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want it? Now! The women's movement in the late 1960s was working very hard to pass the equal rights amendment.
And at the center of that was the freedom to control their own bodies for the first time.
The National Organization for Women the first president and founder Betty Friedan was homophobic.
There is our own responsibility to to take some responsibility for the fears of the other women and not to do things that will alienate them more.
One of the issues was that perhaps that would somehow threaten their relationship with the Democratic party.
I just came from a press conference where some leader of NOW had said that you can't be diverted by other issues such as racism, such as oppression of gay people.
And there was this push to get rid of lesbians.
Lesbians were women, they wanted to be part of the women's movement.
And then they got expelled.
So, we split from the National Organization for Women.
Big fight.
We will not be silent any longer.
We shall overcome We shall overcome The black civil rights movement in the United States had experienced some setbacks.
Good evening.
The Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis tonight.
Clearly the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
A war that was robbing this country of their young African-American men.
After high school, I had joined the Navy.
On board ship I fell in love with another guy.
We had to hide it, because it was reason for dishonorable discharge.
So, we're in the middle of the civil rights movement We march today for jobs and freedom.
you have the women's movement, you have a gay movement.
Seriously, pick your place and go for it.
I thought it was important that social justice movements start seeing how they're interrelated.
I think we all got to realize how powerful we are when we take each other's hands and we move forward together.
You are a united people.
At last.
Without unity, there cannot be any victory.
Gays and lesbians didn't work together at first.
When Anita Bryant showed up, that's what brought us together.
I love the homosexuals, and I know that there is a way out.
Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit as an individual.
This movement is built on the shoulders of greats and of giants whose history has never been told.
There's so many players.
So many unsung heroes.
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were our key icons.
They were the founders of the first lesbian organization in the United States.
Frank Kameny of the Mattachine Society in Washington coined the slogan, "Gay is good.
" Jose Sarria was giving gay men strength on the streets of San Francisco and when Harvey Milk ran for political office, the first signature on his petition was from Jose.
Gay, straight, black, white, same struggle, same fight! The black civil rights movement had a profound impact on the LGBT movement.
It gave people a framework, a language of minority rights but it remained very weak, very localized.
You see that in the fact that Harvey Milk became really a Saint for the gay movement.
Does a person care? Does a person care about his city or her city? Is a person sensitive to the needs of people? Harvey was certainly a character.
When I first met him, he still had long hair, and he seemed kind of old to be a hippie.
He was very funny.
He was very endearing.
He had several campaigns that all failed.
I'm running because it's obvious.
But each time he got better.
He got stronger.
He got more articulate.
He had a really broad vision.
It wasn't just about being gay.
He was a real leader and then he became my mentor.
And then he actually got elected.
He showed that you could come out and it didn't limit your ability to achieve.
We were demanding acceptance, and you know, organized religion, the media, the government, they all started paying attention.
By 1977, a handful of municipalities and counties across the country had enacted limited protections for LGBT people.
An ordinance was passed in Miami, Florida, prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals in employment and housing.
But across the 1970s, only 40 cities and towns passed such laws.
Anita Bryant was a Miss Oklahoma, who becomes a bit of a pop star, singer.
She wound up being the spokeswoman for the orange juice producers.
Nice to meet you.
Anita Bryant led a campaign to, quote unquote, "Save our children from Miami's recently passed anti-discrimination law.
" As a Christian, as I said earlier, that I love the homosexuals and I know that there's a way out.
That they're not born that way.
Anita Bryant organized one of the first backlashes an organized gay movement had to face.
Voters in California will be deciding next month on an initiative.
It's called Proposition 6.
A guy named John Briggs, a state senator, put Prop 6 on the ballot, which would have banned gay people from working in any public school district in the state.
Not only if you were perceived as gay, but if they thought that you might have been associating with gays you could lose your job.
We organized to defeat her, and at the time, we organized to take on the world.
Harvey Milk, his cry to the community was to come out, to be visible.
Thanks a lot.
Appreciate your help.
And so, the Prop 6 campaign was really the first time in history where gay people in large numbers, by the thousands, came out.
We knocked on doors.
We put out fliers.
We talked to anybody.
And we said, "Please don't vote for this.
We are your neighbors.
We work with you.
If you vote for this, it's going to hurt me.
It's going to hurt my family.
" One of the most surprising things to a lot of young people is, you say to them, you know gays and lesbians didn't work together at first.
They didn't even like talking to each other all that much.
When Anita Bryant showed up, that's what brought us together.
Sally Gearhart was a great speech maker.
She'd say, "You know, we need to go up to those senators who are so religious and against us and give them a big kiss.
That's how you defeat them.
" And, you know, the crowds would go crazy.
And so she and Harvey worked as a team.
And so, that brought not only lesbians, but women into all of this.
We thought we would lose.
We thought we'd lose overwhelmingly.
And much to our surprise, we won.
When we defeated Prop 6, it was a true social statewide victory.
It was, like, happiness beyond happiness and nobody is ever ready, you know, for tragedy.
I got up early on November 27th, 1978, because one of Harvey's assistants was away.
So, I got there early, but I annoyed him, because I'd left a file he needed back in my apartment, so, he sent me home to get it.
So, I came back here to the Castro and got the file.
And a bus came by and somebody yelled at me out the window that the mayor had been shot.
So, I grabbed a taxi, I got down to city hall and I ran in, looking for Harvey.
I remember turning the corner and seeing his feet sticking out of the doorway.
I recognized his second-hand wingtip shoes so I knew it was him.
I had never seen a dead person before.
You know, he'd been like a dad.
He was my mentor.
He was our leader.
We had fought a lot of things.
Right? But we didn't expect our leader to be wiped out like that.
All afternoon, I just kept thinking to myself, "It's over, it's all over.
" Not only did Milk die but the most liberal mayor this city ever had died.
George Moscone.
Our dreams were in this liberal man.
It was overwhelming.
Overwhelming.
And then the sun went down and the people began to gather here on Castro Street.
Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.
There was a march from the Castro.
A march of mourning.
It became the Candlelight March.
And we marched, gay and straight, black and brown and white and young and old, and immigrant and native born.
The whole city responded and that showed you that we had arrived.
And that was when I knew it wasn't over.
It was just beginning.
It was really a joyous time.
More lesbian couples started having children.
I had to tell my parents that I was a lesbian and I was having a child, and my parents actually threatened to sue for custody.
We won't go back! Before Harvey Milk died, there was a lot of conversation in the community about how our new movement needed a new symbol.
We had two symbols at the time.
One was the lambda, the Greek letter "L".
The other was the pink triangle, which came from the Nazi death camps.
Not a very positive kind of symbol.
And each year, the parade used to put out a call for submissions where we'd ask people to submit their ideas for the theme and the logo.
Gilbert Baker created this rainbow flag.
Without any explanation at all, people got what it meant.
Because we are born into every color of skin, religious background and economic status.
It was very powerful.
We won't go back.
We won't go back.
We won't go back.
We won't go back.
It was announced that Norfolk would go forward with a test tube baby clinic.
The great medical schools of this country are all determined to achieve some kind of a first with this.
At that point, we would cross our fingers and hope we have fertilization.
Reproductive technology developed over the course of the '70s more lesbian couples started having gaybies what came to be known as the lesbian baby boom.
Often they had a gay friend help out by supplying the necessary ingredients.
I grew up knowing that I wanted to be a mother.
In 1979, I was living with Linda Jupiter.
And I had a next door neighbor.
And one day, she came over and said that a friend of hers had the perfect donor.
He donated sperm, which got handed off to one person, who handed it off to another person, and it was in, like, an artichoke jar.
This spermy nightmare has a 60-minute shelf life.
You've got 20 left.
Two weeks later, I was pregnant.
And nine months later, I was here.
I had to tell my parents that I was a lesbian and I was having a child.
And immediately my parents reacted very negatively.
And my parents actually threatened to sue for custody.
And then they got over it really quickly when they came and they met Annie.
The lesbian feminist movement was really larger and more sophisticated politically than the gay male movement in the 1970s, and created a much wider range of institutions, from coffee houses, publications, bookstores.
When we became the Women's Building, we had lesbian, gay we had abortion rights groups, reproductive health and justice.
And we had immigrant organizations.
And we had meetings there to get women to have their own identity in the community, a place of our own.
For the first time in history, lesbians and gay men from all over the country will come to Washington, will march up to the capitol.
For any civil rights movement to succeed, it has to go to the federal level.
Activists around the country had tried for years to organize a national march on Washington.
But there was no real national leadership yet.
In 1979, activists organized the first national march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights.
About 75,000 people showed up.
Not a huge number, in those days, but still really significant.
And it was an effort of activists who felt really besieged by Anita Bryant's victory and Harvey Milk's assassination to rally together, to see their numbers.
We're fired up, won't take it no more! We're fired up, won't take it no more.
Politicians were now forced to make a public choice.
20 million lesbian and gay Americans whose lives are blighted by a veil of ignorance and misunderstanding.
And this contributed to the pressure on Jimmy Carter and the Democratic party during the 1980 presidential election to include a gay rights plank in the Democratic party platform.
We are here as lesbians and gay men, and we are here as Democrats.
It wasn't until 1982 that a state, Wisconsin, wrote anti-discrimination protections into state law.
It was both an important victory and another sign really of how weak the gay movement still was.
In 1981, I was working for the California state legislature as a consultant to the assembly committee on health.
So I subscribed to the morbidity and mortality weekly report, published by the Centers for Disease Control.
And I remember reading an account of about 40 gay men, young, previously healthy, who had been stricken with a very, very aggressive form of pneumonia called pneumocystis.
And also a very rare skin cancer called Kaposi sarcoma.
And I remember clipping that out and putting it on my bulletin board and I wrote on it, "Just when things were looking up.
" I knew this was bad, though of course, I had no idea how bad it would turn out to be.
A-I-D-S the most frightening initials in America today.
All of the sudden, a lot of people were coming out.
But they were falling out of the closet and into their grave.
For many, AIDS seemed like God's punishment.
When we go against nature, we therefore pay the prices for that.
Upfront tonight A-I-D-S, AIDS.
The most frightening initials in America today.
In the early 1980s, we were just beginning to achieve some kind of acceptance, some kind of political power.
AIDS changed the entire movement.
AIDS devastated the gay meccas that had grown up across the country in the 1970s.
All of the sudden, a lot of people were coming out but they were falling out of the closet and into their grave.
The LGBT community had to take care of itself and turn inward.
It made the LGBT movement into a family, as lesbians stepped up to take care of their dying gay brothers.
They were nurses.
They were volunteers.
And as the gay men who had dominated the organizations died, they stepped up into the leadership positions and kept the movement going.
I had gone to nursing school because I wanted to be a midwife but at San Francisco General, I got assigned to the adult medicine ward.
It was a 34-bed ward.
Half of the patients were people with AIDS.
Some doctors believe that 50% of the gay population is walking around with the AIDS virus.
In the early years of the pandemic there was, of course, no treatment.
To be diagnosed with HIV typically meant you had less than two years to live.
There were examples of great neglect, finding three food trays stacked outside the room because nobody had bothered to take the food in.
You were drawing blood.
You were getting needle sticks.
How do we provide compassionate care and how do we protect our staff? I'm a brand new nurse.
I know nothing.
But as a lesbian, I knew something about homophobia.
When AIDS was first noticed by doctors, it was so associated with gay men that it was called G.
R.
I.
D.
, gay-related immunodeficiency.
The only clues about this disease comes from the type of people caught in the epidemic.
This epidemic hit just as Ronald Reagan got elected.
Reagan had been elected, in part, to suppress the sex revolution.
A very anti-gay administration.
- I will, to the best of my ability - preserve, protect and defend preserve, protect and defend During the AIDS crisis, not only were people dying, but they were invisible.
You would turn on the television, you didn't see Reagan talking about it.
I remember the first time I saw a pink triangle, and across it, it said, "Silence equals death.
" I was like, "Oh, they're killing us with silence.
" It took Ronald Reagan six years to turn an eye on the AIDS crisis.
When we go against nature and God, of course, is the creator of nature, we therefore pay the prices for that.
There were quite a few people who were really gleeful about the plague.
Now is the time for salvation! There were those who thought that AIDS was God's way of striking down this sinful community.
Not only were they physically dying, but emotionally, they were being villainized.
God says repent, so repent! I found out that I was HIV positive shortly after the antibody test was developed in 1985.
In November 1990, I was diagnosed with late stage AIDS.
I had been in denial.
I mean, I had all of the symptoms, but I was very sick.
I had less than ten T-cells and we normally have between 800 and 1,200.
One time, I got arrested.
I was locked into a pod with 20 gay and bisexual men.
They included transgender women in the same cell.
I had to have sex against my wish, with one of the cell mates and shortly after, I tested HIV positive.
The last thing the test counselor told me was that I should try to make a plan on how to say goodbye.
The AIDS crisis really shined a light on how many protections as a community we didn't have, and people were shut out of their partner's hospital rooms, or weren't invited to funerals.
There was a tremendous growth of fear about this disease and anger and hostility towards gay people.
Terror among homosexuals of the disease, AIDS, and people who have it have become outcasts.
Nobody wants to go near them.
Living in the Castro back then, it sort of felt like a slow motion avalanche.
You would lose your friends, and then you'd make new friends.
And then they would die.
And then you'd make new friends.
And they would die.
There are still ghosts everywhere I walk.
And I feel them all the time.
My immune system had completely collapsed.
I was looking at having a few months left.
I had actually purchased my funeral attire.
Everything was taken care of.
Some encouraging news about AIDS.
In 1985, a thousand San Franciscans had already been killed.
All of those thousand who had died had lived and died within just a few blocks of where I was standing, but there was no evidence.
You hear music.
You smell coffee and food, and you have no idea that you're standing at the epicenter of this horrendous catastrophe.
A few nights later, when people gathered for the candlelight memorial, to remember the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, we passed out the posters and the markers and we asked everybody to write the name of one person they knew who had died of AIDS.
And we covered that front gray stone building with these names of our dead and I thought, "Well, that looks like a quilt.
" I thought, "Ah, we need to make a quilt.
" I'm overwhelmed.
It has been such a privilege to work on this.
You had people all over the country creating individual quilts to memorialize this precious individual who'd lost their life to this disease.
And by October of 1987, we had 1,920 panels.
Quilts created by their moms and their grandmothers and their friends and their lovers.
The first time the AIDS quilt was shown on a really massive scale was at the 1987 march on Washington.
It weaved them together in a way that showed how many we had lost.
I think so many people who just wanted to pretend that we didn't exist saw us.
It was the wanton social life of the 1970s which led directly to this crisis.
Initially, the way the press reported on AIDS reinforced the idea that homosexuals were a diseased population who threatened the American people.
I've got a big mouth and I yell.
Larry Kramer became very active in the movement against AIDS.
He pushed really hard when other people were scared to push.
What kind of inhumanity is this? He was one of the founders of Act up, the AIDS coalition to unleash power and said, we need to demand that the government take responsibility for a major health crisis.
Health care is our right! Which led incredibly powerful demonstrations.
People chaining themselves to the FDA and to the NIH and to the White House.
Hundreds of demonstrators blocked entrances to the Food and Drug Administration headquarters.
One of the key successes of Act up and all the political pressure was the dedication of funds to AIDS research.
Some encouraging news about AIDS.
Word of a new treatment with a new drug called AZT.
But the earlier drugs were actually horrible medications to take.
The people that I knew who took AZT died faster than the people I knew who didn't take it.
By the mid 1990s, you had a cocktail of drugs that would at least combat and mitigate the effects of AIDS.
And I was very close to death at that point.
My immune system had completely collapsed.
I had pneumocystis pneumonia.
You know, I was looking at having a few months left.
And my health immediately rebounded, and we sort of bought our lives in three to six-month increments.
When I found out that I had a very short time to live, I moved out to the ocean, where I could hear the sound of the water hitting the shore.
I had actually purchased my funeral attire.
I had a plan.
And everything was taken care of.
And I waited a year.
Then, it was two years.
Then, it was three years, and I'm wondering, "Well, are we going to die or what?" And finally, I went, "I'm not going to die.
" Bill Clinton, when he was running for president, told us he had a vision for America, and that we were part of it.
We can't afford to waste the capacities, the contributions, the hearts, the souls and the minds of the gay and lesbian Americans, either.
"Don't ask, don't tell" wasn't quite what we had in mind at all.
If you were in the military, you could technically be gay but you just couldn't say that you were gay.
It provides greater protection to those who happen to be homosexual and want to serve their country honorably in uniform.
Visibility was all that we could do, and now your U.
S.
Government was telling you to hide who you are.
Even though it was supposed to be a compromise that was somewhat progressive, 13,000 American military personnel was kicked out under "Don't ask, don't tell".
I felt very betrayed by Bill Clinton.
The Republican Congress passed, and the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed, the Defense of Marriage Act, which declared that marriage was only between one man and one woman.
One of the biggest challenges with visibility is people know who you are.
And that can make you a target.
Matt Shepard, the gay college student savagely beaten last week in Wyoming, died this morning.
I remember when it was announced.
That I remember it was announced that a young man, who was my age, who had just come out was tied to a fence post in the Midwest and had his skull cracked open and was left there to die.
And I thought, oh, my God, that could be me.
I mean we sort of looked similar at the time, same age.
You know, and it wasn't, it's like, that's not what you want to face when you're finally coming out and you're starting to experience love for the first time, is to be told that it's a death sentence.
And the choice is allowing yourself to be beat up and victimized and bullied.
Or do you rise and become your authentic self? I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
We started winning.
And I kind of didn't know what to do with myself, I got to admit.
History at the Supreme Court.
And the implications are sweeping.
I want I want you to know who I am, because I'm proud of who I am.
Celebrities are very influential.
I can't overstate the power of actors and actresses and sports figures coming out.
Susan I'm gay.
When you know you're a success is when the media develops their icons for us.
This is who I am and it's okay.
Allies like Whoopi Goldberg.
What made me want to come out? I'm sick of seeing my friends die.
I've been kind of astonished by the speed with which America is coming to understand transgender people.
I'm finally who I'm supposed to be.
I can't go back.
That might seem like nothing in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco but I'm telling you, that kid in Texarkana, Texas, that means a heck of a lot.
Today, the state of Vermont became the first state to formally recognize same-sex unions.
Today in Massachusetts, for the first time in U.
S.
history, the civil marriage laws of a state do not exclude gays.
History was made today as gay men and women serving in the U.
S.
military were finally allowed to live their lives in the open.
"Don't ask, don't tell" is officially over.
At a certain point, I've just concluded that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle.
That we are all created equal.
History at the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage.
Now legal in all 50 states.
We started winning.
And I kind of didn't know what to do with myself, I got to admit.
I look back a lot and I remember all those people I just wish that they could be here today, to see what their hard work has done.
But the fight is clearly not over.
I work for the labor movement today, primarily because the corruption of our political process by big money is the most dangerous thing.
Today, my work is poor women.
Migrant women.
Women who are in jail and don't need to be there.
In the United States, there are 46,000 new HIV infections every year.
They're concentrated in poor communities and communities of color.
Mostly in states that did not do Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
We are still coming to understand trans issues.
40% of homeless youth are kicked out because they were gay or trans.
There are a lot of people who did not want to see us thrive.
The movement is never done.
The victories you've won can be lost again.
Indiana's new religious freedom act, critics say it sanctions discrimination against gays and lesbians.
This is about protecting the religious liberty of people of faith.
The gay liberation movement is like any civil rights movement.
It's going to have its moments of great success, and it's going to have moments where that pendulum's going to swing back.
We go through various cycles.
We're going through one now.
The White House reversed guidelines issued under President Obama.
Public schools no longer required to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice.
For whatever reasons, human beings take their time to change.
Laws can be unwritten, but once you change a heart, you have them forever.
We shall overcome We shall overcome some day "We" is the secret to pushing back on a backlash.
It's really about all of us, all the ordinary people.
Whether we're gay or straight or black or brown or white or immigrant or native born, we need to stand up and fight.
When you have no power, you might have to put your body in the machine to stop it from running.
It's not just building a resistance.
It's time to march.
We need a worldwide movement.
We have an opportunity to have a real colorful world and peaceful world.
I feel really confident in the power of young people.
I want the younger generation to know what we fought for and sense their own power, because it is their world now.
When we rose it was worth it.
We really can change things.
We really can change things.
Through love and honesty and caring for each other.
Yes, we can change the world.