CBS Airs “The Homosexuals”

It’s Tuesday night. Petticoat Junction has just wrapped up. Billie Jo Bradley learned that her sweetheart, dreamy fly-boy Steve Elliot, had all but announced that he’s going to marry a former girl friend.  Or so it seemed. It all wound up being a big misunderstanding. Everything was all cleared up before the credits rolled. Soon after that, nighttime viewers across the U.S. saw a bunch of homosexuals on their television screens.

My guess is that quite a few of them jumped up out of their seats and changed  the channel. Many more probably hustled their kids off to bed. Those viewers who stayed — an estimated 40 million — saw homosexual men, most likely for the very first time. The hour-long documentary, “The Homosexuals,” was presented by the prestigious CBS Reports, an award-winning series that grew out of the game show scandals of the late 1950s. CBS Reports used its hour-long  format, and its prestige, to authoritatively cover subjects other programs feared to touch. CBS Reports won a Peabody for its acclaimed 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame,” about the plight of American migrant farm workers. Other topics it tackled included integration, drug abuse, abortion, the Klan, Black Power, tenement housing, and other uncomfortable and sometimes taboo topics. So why not homosexuals?

Three Years In the Making

The idea first came up in 1964. CBS’s executive producer Fred Friendly, who was just about to be named president of CBS News, selected William Peters to produce it. Peters, a respected writer with a background in civil rights, had already produced six CBS Reports about segregation, voting rights, and the workings of the Supreme Court. He completed his initial research and concluded that one hour wasn’t enough to cover gay men and lesbians. He’d need two. Friendly decided to save lesbians for another day (in fact, that program would never be undertaken), leaving this hour devoted to gay men.

Peters collected on-camera interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Charlotte, and New York City. After completing a rough cut, he asked CBS correspondent Mike Wallace if he would be the on-camera reporter. Wallace declined, saying that he wanted no part in a program that would “pity the poor homosexual.” But after seeing the rough cut — which portrayed gay people in a relatively neutral light — Wallace changed his mind.

Unfortunately, while all of that went on, Friendly had left CBS. His replacement, Richard Salent, saw the rough cut and hated it. It was too sensationalistic, he said. He called it “Daily News journalism”, and killed it. But when whispers about the “The Homoseduals” appeared in trade papers, he felt compelled to revive it. Not going ahead would have been too much of a hit to CBS Reports’ fearless reputation.

Salent turned the project over to producer Harry Morgan and told him to re-work it. Morgan had two CBS Reports installments under his belt. He had just completed “LSD: The Spring Grove Experiment,” and was about to wrap up “The Farthest Frontier,” about the latest drug treatments to treat mental illnesses and impairments. With Charles Kuralt as reporter, Morgan had co-produced those two installments with John Sharnik. This time, Morgan was flying solo.

Morgan threw out most of Peters’s footage — the footage Salent hated — and started over. Morgan found gay people to interview on the East Coast: Lars Larson of New York City, and Frankin Kameny and Jack Nichols, co-founders of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. Nichols appeared under the pseudonym of Warren Adkins because his real name was identical to his estranged father’s, who worked at the FBI. Nichols sat with Wallace for the sixty-minute interview. Later, he recalled:

After we finished and the camera was turned off, Mike Wallace sat down with me and talked for about half an hour. He said, “You know, you answered all of my questions capably, but I have a feeling you don’t really believe that homosexuality is as acceptable as you make it sound.” I asked him why he would say that. “Because,” he said, “In your heart I think you know it’s wrong.” It was infuriating. I told him I thought being gay was fine, but that in his heart he thought it was wrong.

Larson had a similar experience. “Mike Wallace had his own agenda,” he later said, “and it was not necessarily kind to gays. On the other hand, he had integrity and honesty so he came straight to the point. At the end of it he said he had never met a homosexual that was as well adjusted.”

Nichols told Kameny his misgivings about the interview, and about one other alarming development. Nichols had learned that Morgan intended to include material about the so-called “homosexual mafia” in the arts.  Since Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lavender scare of the 1950s, there was widespread belief in secret cabals of homosexuals — “Homintern” was one word that was bandied about  — whose solemn task was to wreck American culture and its institutions. Four months before “The Homosexuals” went on the air, Kameny wrote to Morgan, trying to persuade him to drop the idea.

I feel that this is a bit of sensationalism which can only degrade your presentation. … That there are homosexuals in the arts is, of course true. … people who are generally discriminated against will tend to move into areas of endeavor where — for whatever reason — discrimination is less. … But the idea of a “mafia” implies conspiracy, organization, coordination of activity, direction, goals. Certainly there is not the slightest indication that these are present in any degree whatsoever. … I am sure that you see the similarity between the charges of “homosexual mafia” and the charges of a “Jewish Conspiracy” … Both charges are a discredit only to those making them and to those believing them.

Ten O’Clock, Tuesday Night

On March 7, 1967, not long after Petticoat Junction’s closing credits flashed across the screen, viewers across America saw their first three homosexuals, in rapid succession. The first, Lars Larson is blonde, good-looking, in his mid-twenties, college educated. He described his first experience of gay bars in New Orleans. “The whole atmosphere was furtive,” he said. “It was ugly” He also described his first sexual experience while in the Navy. “It was just a grand, grand experience. It was the first moment in my life where I was open, where I didn’t have to hide, where I could lower all my barriers, where I could be absolutely me without worrying about it. I had all the freedom in the world to be Lars Larson.”

The second homosexual was sitting on his psychiatrist’s couch. He held one hand to his forehead and the other covering his mouth, while he described his coming out to his parents. “They were sorry for me,” he said, “as if I were some kind of a wounded animal they were going to send to the vet.”

Then came Jack Nichols. He was handsome, well-groomed, conservatively dressed, articulate and confident. But not threatening. This is important: it’s much too early in the program to scare off the heterosexuals.

Before the interview took place, Nichols had spent hours practicing answers to possible questions with Kameny. So when Wallace asked Nichols what he thought caused his homosexuality, Nichols was ready. “I have thought about it,” he answered, “but it really doesn’t concern me very much. I never would imagine that if I had blond hair that I would worry about what genes and what chromosomes caused blond hair.” What’s more, he told Wallace that he didn’t feel at all guilty about it. Nichols also talked about his coming out to his family when he was fourteen, and how “heroically” they responded by treating him with warmth and acceptance. He contrasted this with a friend, whose father beat him “savagely… He beat him, in fact, with bricks.” Nichols added, “I was one of the lucky ones.”

The Man Behind the Potted Palm

So far, so good. Heterosexuals haven’t encountered anything too scary, and those gay men tuning in probably thought the program was promising. If so, that feeling wouldn’t last. The producers, remember, felt that the first cut of “The Homosexuals” was “too positive.” They wanted balance. That balance came in the form of a man hidden behind a large plant. This gives rise to the ultimate irony, that the most memorable homosexual on “The Homosexuals” was a closeted one.

Wallace described this man as twenty-seven years old, college educated, and unable to hold a job “because of his inability to contain his homosexual inclinations.” Wallace added: “He’s been in jail three times for committing homosexual acts. If he is arrested once more, he faces the possibility of life in prison. He is now on probation and in psychotherapy.” The young man described himself this way:

I felt as though I had license to satisfy every need, every desire, every tension… animal sexual gratification… I use the word “sick” — I’m not taking a pot shot, I’m not attempting to judge homosexuals. I’m not a judge. I know that inside, now, that I am sick. I’m not sick just sexually, I’m sick in a lot of ways …. immature, childlike, and the sex part of it is a symptom like a stomach ache is a symptom of who knows what.”

Mr. Palmfrond claimed that he hadn’t had sex with another man for the past two years, thanks to therapy.

Every so often I’ll slip, but my regression is a small one. I may buy a dirty book…. Maybe I’ll look at someone I’m not supposed to look at. I know better than to look at him, but I’ll look.

I don’t go looking for homosexual relationships. I consciously avoid them like the plague. My life is more comfortable now. I can walk the streets and I’m not afraid I’m going to be picked up by a policeman.

For me, and only for me, being a homosexual has become to mean only spending a few minutes in a dark alley somewhere. This is not… this isn’t my way of life… it isn’t going to suffice for me.

He said he wanted “a family, a home, someplace where you belong, someplace where you’re loved, where you can love somebody…God knows, I need to love somebody…. and of course that means a heterosexual sexual position.” And yet, he admitted that he felt no sexual attraction toward women. “If I’m touched by a woman I freeze up inside.”

This man’s appearance left such an indelible mark that years later, few would remember that anyone actually showed their faces on television. Almost two decades later, famed LGBT media critic Vito Russo will write in his landmark book, The Celluloid Closet, “All the homosexuals interviewed by Mike Wallace on CBS Presents: The Homosexuals (sic) in 1967 were seated behind potted palm trees, the leaves obscuring their faces.”

“The Average Homosexual”

That shadowy scene set the stage for what came next: a brief tour of a couple of gloomy gay bars, “where they can act out in the fashion that they want to,” according to Wallace. Then the camera switched to footage of a murky, late-night drive down a gritty city street. Wallace narrated this bleak scene with his most notorious commentary:

The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or 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 characteristics of the homosexual relationship. And the homosexual prostitute has become a fixture in the downtown streets at night. On street corners, at subway exits, these young men signal their availability for pay.

The Unbalanced Experts

That darkness finally gave way to light, provided by the notoriously homophobic psychotherapist, Dr. Charles Socarides. He had established himself as a self-proclaimed expert on homosexuality since the early 1960s. And here he was, in a well-lit classroom at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine,  where he pretended he was giving a routine lecture and taking spontaneous questions from the class. “Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness,” he says ponderously, “which has reached epidemiological (sic) proportions.” He loved that word — ep-id-deem-i-o-lo-gic-al. He used it all the time — his made-up eight-syllable nonsense word that sounded so much more impressive than what he really meant, epidemic.

A woman asked if there were any “happy homosexuals.” Socarides responded, “The fact that somebody’s homosexual — a true obligatory homosexual — automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long.” To acknowledge that gay people can be happy is “to create a mythology about the nature of homosexuality.” A man asked, “What is it that drives a man into a homosexual relationship?” Socarides answered: “The aim of the homosexual act, paradoxically enough, is to seek masculinity … through identification with his partner. One thinks, ordinarily, that he is becoming feminine. But in fact, he is attempting to achieve the very thing that he felt he was so lacking in childhood.”

In a voiceover, Wallace acknowledged that there was “a smaller group” that didn’t consider homosexuality a mental illness. “But the thrust of diagnosis and treatment in recent years,” he said, “has been mainly along the lines that Socarides details.” Wallace also repeated the claim — a controversial claim that was clinically unverified even then — that “as many as one-third of those who seek help eventually become heterosexual.”

Next came Dr. Irving Bieber, who was among the forefront of psychoanalysts claiming a one-third success rate in turning gay people straight. And with his cure, he had a cause: he blamed homosexual kids on their parents. The poor mother gets the brunt of it. “She’s over-close, over-intimate. She frequently prefers this son to her other children… She often prefers this son to her husband, explicitly and openly.” But he didn’t let fathers off the hook either. “I do not believe that it is possible to produce a homosexual if the father is a warm, good, supportive, constructive father to his son.”

The producers were deeply concerned about balancing the few healthy homosexuals like Nichols with others like the man behind the potted palm. But not so with their chosen experts. Missing from the program was any mental health professional to counter Socarides or Bieber — and their numbers were plenty, even then. This left viewers with the impression that virtually the entire psychiatric and psychological professions stood behind these two men.

“This Will Ruin Me!”

This led to perhaps the most heart-wrenching segment of the program. “The Homosexuals” follows a nineteen-year-old serviceman as police arrest him at a public men’s room near a beach. We can’t see his face, but we can hear his anguish. “Is anybody going to hear about this, like my parents?” The officer says that his parents won’t know, but his commanding officer “will probably find out through routines channels”

“Oh, God!” he exclaimed. “I can get kicked out for this … I… I couldn’t take a record like that! … For life, I’ll be wrecked by this record, see? I mean, I’m only nineteen! This will ruin me. I couldn’t take for anybody to know about this. What will it do to my family and everything? … It just… It just happened. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. But I’m just nineteen, and… I don’t know. It… I just know this will ruin my life.”

Gay Advocates Finally Allowed Their Say… Briefly

Gay activists were allowed to make a few points here and there, but their screen time was very short. Hal Call, of the San Francisco-based remnant of the original Mattachine Society, took great pains to stress: “In our view, the enforcement of laws which forbid public sexual behavior or demonstrations of affection and so on that lead to a sexual stimulus in public views, laws against that are appropriate and maintained.” He then went called for repealing laws prohibiting private consensual behavior among adults.

The program also included footage of a Fourth of July picket at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, film of the May 29, 1965 picket at the White House and the August 28, 1965 picket at the State Department. All three pickets called for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians. These historic images are among the earliest available moving pictures of the gay rights movement in America. Franklin Kameny, of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., appeared in front of the State Department reading a statement. “Every citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit as an individual,” he said.

But a tourist, watching the picket in front of the White House, was perplexed by what he saw.  Viewers at home probably shared his reaction: “I couldn’t believe this. I didn’t know this was a problem over here. At least I didn’t think anybody would have a sign out about it. But I just don’t understand! It’s kinda weird! … Let’s face it. Homosexuality is a problem and these people are really advocating that we don’t try to solve it. They’re advocating that we tolerate the problem. And I think these people are a fit subject for a mental health program.”

A Masturbatory Dance

But homosexuals “committing their crude acts in public places,” as a Los Angeles police inspector put it, is just one one of many stereotypes “The Homosexuals” promoted. Kameny’s fears were realized when Wallace intoned:

There is even talk about the “homosexual mafia” in the arts, dominating various fields: theatre, music, dance, fashion. In painting, there is the commonly-expressed notion that the homosexuals’ influence has been corrupting. That Pop Art, for example, is a trivial vulgarization that goes hand-in-hand with camp, half hoax, half hostile, a means by which the homosexual, forced to live between two worlds, strikes back at an antagonistic society. In the fashion industry, many observers see an effort to blend the sexes, to de-feminize women, to replace curve and contour with sexless geometric sterility.

That set up a back-and-forth exchange between the prickly author and playwright Gore Vidal, and doom-and-gloom social critic Professor Albert Goldman of Columbia University. Vidal’s and Goldman’s separate interviews were inter-cut with each other to create an artificial back-and-forth debate between the two. To our eyes today, this segment is probably the most remarkable for the advanced ideas Vidal was trying to present. But fifty years ago, his ideas were so out there that his role was little more than a foil for Goldman, as far as the average viewer was concerned. It went something like this:

Vidal: I don’t think there is any greater incidence of homosexual novelists, homosexual tailors, homosexual musicians than there ever were. … What does it mean? It is as natural to be homosexual as it is to be heterosexual.” An incredulous voice off-camera asks, “Who says so?” “I say so! It is a completely natural act from the beginning of time.”

Goldman: Without mentioning any names, Goldman obliquely refers to the debate surrounding Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “The kind of jealousy and rage and promiscuity that is just inherent in the homosexual life, where you cannot have marriage, really, and you cannot have children, where you don’t have all the stabilizing influences, enables this writer simply by writing out of his own truth, his own experience, to enormously distort and intensify features that we recognize are inherent in our lives, too.”

Vidal:  “There is a theory that one reads all the time about a certain successful playwright of a very successful play, describes married people as… being weak and vicious and clawing at each other. This is supposed to be a story about two homosexual couples. Well …there are wicked homosexuals and there are wicked heterosexuals, and this is a playwright who deals in savage and extreme situations. I don’t see any of this as being translatable particularly as a homosexual situation posing as a heterosexual. And furthermore, if it were, then why is it popular? … So the idea that the homosexual is in some way a person that is trying to absolutely destroy the family structure in the United States — nonsense!”

Goldman: “Inevitably, these men are going to project a projection onto women based on their own fantasies, their own imaginings. And since their view of women is charged with hostile feelings, since intuitively they want to carve women into a shape that’s somewhere between  man and woman — a sort of boy-woman, let’s say — all this is going to come through in their work. Now it is notorious that the whole fashion industry, for example, is dominated by homosexuals ….”

Vidal: He does’t know how such a conspiracy would begin: “The artist is an artist first, and he’s a homosexual or a heterosexual second.  … I have not seen any sign in any of the arts of there being a ‘homintern,’ as alarmed editorialists like to write.”

Goldman: “You can have the effects of conspiracy without having a conspiracy, if you just have all of the people, essentially, in the same family, if it’s a costra nostra arrangement, ‘our thing,’ ‘our family.’ If you have a group like the homosexuals, who are extremely clannish, and who have a tradition of taking care of each other, who constitute a sort of a welfare state for each other, then you often get, without anybody intending any conspiracy, the same effect.”

Vidal: “We have a sexual ethic which is the joke of the world. … The United States is living out some mad nineteenth century Protestant dream of human behavior. … Why not begin by saying our basic values are all wrong! The ideal of marriage is obsolete in our society. Everybody knows it. There are natural monogamists… but can you imagine a man and a woman who are told that for sixty years they’re going to have to live together and have sex only with one another? This is nonsense! … I think the the breaking of the ‘moral fiber’ of the country these commentators speak of is one of the healthiest things that’s begun to happen.”

Goldman: America is turning to an “adolescent lifestyle,” of which homosexuals are just one part. We have: divorces, “non-stop promiscuity,” “a Playboy philosophy,” “fun-and-games approaches to sex,” “rampant exhibitionism in every conceivable form,” “a masochistic-sadistic vogue,” a smut industry grinding out millions of dollars worth of pornography per year. “We have a sort of masturbatory dance style that’s embraced as if it were profoundly sexual, whereas, actually, all those dances do is just grind away without any consciousness of other people or their partners.  And homosexuality is just one of a number of such things, all tending towards the subversion, towards the final erosion of our traditional cultural values.”

Goldman gets the last word in: “After all, when you’re culturally bankrupt, why you fall into the hands of receivers.”

“The Dilemma of the Homosexual”

Goldman’s dismal assessment led to another gloomy scene. This time, we see a psychiatric patient, barely, backlit against an open window, his face obscured in shadow. He is married, the father of two children, and a professor of psychology. He told his family he was gay. He also claims that love between two men is an impossibility:

I personally don’t believe in a love relationship with another man. I think this is part of the gay folklore. It’s something they try to attain. They never attain it primarily because the gay crowd is so narcissistic that the can’t establish a love relationship with another male.

And with that, Wallace brought the program to a close with this: 

The dilemma of the homosexual: told by the medical profession he is sick; by the law that he’s a criminal; shunned by employers; rejected by heterosexual society. Incapable of a fulfilling relationship with a woman, or for that matter with a man. At the center of his life he remains anonymous. A displaced person. An outsider.

Reactions

Press reactions ranged from praise to “garbage.” The New York Times’s George Gent lauded the program’s “fairness and dignity.” But he noticed the omission of the “minority viewpoint that homosexuals are just as normal as anyone else” in the psychology segment. The Washington Post called it “an enlightening and frequently moving study.”

Richard Shull, of the Indianapolis News, found the program “dull as dishwater.” He had trouble with Bieber’s blaming bad parenting for making homosexuals. “In this feminist society,” Shull wrote, “in which the male has been relegated to the role of Uncle Daddy who visits evenings and weekends, if Dr. Bieber is correct, the country can look forward to whole generations of homosexuals.”

The Baltimore Sun’s Donald Kirkley didn’t like the program’s omission of some important subjects, “such as the massive cruel intolerance of a majority of citizens toward this minority, and the reasons for this.”

Kirkley had to watch the program from Washington, D.C.’s Channel 9. WMAR, Baltimore’s CBS affiliate, refused to carry it. The same thing happened in Des Moines, where KRNT General Manager Robert Dillon canceled the program. “I think it dignifies, promotes and sensationalizes perversion,” he explained. He replaced it with an old re-run of a circus-themed variety show. And The Chicago Tribune’s Clay Gowran was livid that CBS put it on the air at all. “I say… the place for garbage is in the garbage cans. Not in the home screens of the nation.”

The gay press, such as it existed in 1967, was about as kind as Gowran, albeit for different reasons. Vector, a slick magazine published in San Francisco by the Society for Individual Rights, faulted the program for failing to portray gay people as “anything other than six, wounded animals at best, or dangerous psychotics at worst.” The Ladder, published by the Daughters of BIlitis, pointedly refused to say anything about the program. “Perhaps one of these days they will do a Report on Lesbians. That will be an event we will report in detail.”

Epilogue:

The subject matter of “The Homosexuals” was so controversial that advertisers abandoned it entirely. Public service spots from the Peace Corps and the I.R.S. filled the breaks. One other CBS Reports broadcast got the same treatment. It was about the growing popularity of marijuana.

Jack Nichols, despite appearing under an assumed name, lost his job the day after the program aired. He later wrote about his performance and his preparations with Kameny that preceded it: “I wondered if his pre-programmed tutoring had given my answers a mechanical bent? This second worry would, when I made public appearances in the future, nag at me considerably. I would have to seek and find a balance in which my own personality, unaffected by ideology, would take over in my responses.” This may explain why, after the interview was over, Mike Wallace said he didn’t really think Nichols believed that there was nothing wrong with being gay.

Lars Larson filed a formal complaint and withdrew his signed release. He said his interview had been edited to make him seem unhappy about being gay. He was also upset about the program’s overall negativity. After the program aired, he disappeared from public view, never to be seen or heard from again.

The alarmist Columbia University professor, Albert Goldman, went on to publish three best-selling biographies. Critics praised Ladies and Gentlemen — Lenny Bruce!! (1974), but Bruce’s friends attacked it for claiming Bruce had homosexual affairs. In Elvis (1981), Goldman dismissed Elvis Presley as an ignorant hick, a plagiarist, nearly insane, “a pervert, a voyeur” with latent homosexuality. The Village Voice called the book an “attempt at cultural genocide … The torrents of hate that drive this book are unrelieved.” In The Lives of John Lennon (2001), Goldman wrote that the former Beatle was “a violent, schizophrenic drug addict.” Goldman also maintained his homosexual obsession by claiming that Lennon had an affair with band manager Brian Epstein. Goldman also claimed that Lennon had something to do with the death of former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe.

Charles Socarides will repeatedly warn that open homosexuality was rising “to epidemiological (sic) proportions.” He later called for a national federally-funded center for the treatment of homosexuals. In 1973, he was the most prominent critic of the APA’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and he led a failed effort in 1974 to reverse that decision. In 1992, he co-founded the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an anti-gay activist group peddling “cures” for gay people. Her served as NARTH’s first president. His son, Richard Socarides, is gay, and served as principal adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay and lesbian civil rights issues.

Mike Wallace later regretted his role in the documentary. In 1996, he said, “That is — God help us — what our understanding was of the homosexual lifestyle a mere twenty-five years ago because nobody was out of the closet and because that’s what we heard from doctors — that’s what Socarides told us, it was a matter of shame.”

Related:

Sep 24, 1967: Prominent Psychiatrist Calls for National Center to Treat Homosexuality

See More:

You can see an edited version of CBS Reports’ “The Homosexuals” here. Some of the scenes and interviews have been truncated or removed from this bootleg version. The interviews of the first two gay men, Lars Larson and the man on the psychiatrist’s couch, are missing altogether.

Periscope:

Headlines for March 7, 1967: Jimmy Hoffa begins serving a prison term for bribery. Viet Cong lobs 500 mortars at Marine positions in Vietnam. Soviets promise more aid to North Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson suggests sharply curtailing student deferments in draft. More than 100 are injured in a Boston elevated train crash. GM’s Fisher Body plant in Mansfield, Ohio, is idled by pickets. At least 23 die as winter storm cripples the Northeast, and floods hit Appalachia. California Gov. Ronald Reagan asks $950 million ($7.1 billion today) in new taxes to cover the deficit. CBS bows to public pressure and renews Gunsmoke for another season after announcing the end of its twelve-year run.

On the radio: “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones, “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone” by the Supremes, “Kind of a Drag” by the Buckinghams, “Baby I Need Your Lovin'” by Johnny Rivers, “Georgy Girl” by the Seekers, “The Beat Goes On” by Sonny and Cher, “Gimme Some Lovin'” by the Spencer Davis Group, “Then You Can Tell Me Good Bye” by the Casinos, “Sock It To Me-Baby!” by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees.

On television:  Bonanza (NBC), The Red Skelton Hour (CBS), The Andy Griffith Show (CBS), The Lucy Show (CBS), The Jackie Gleason Show (CBS), Green Acres (CBS), Beverly Hillbillies (CBS), Daktari (CBS), Bewitched (ABC), The Virginian (NBC), Gomer Pyle, USMC (CBS), The Fugitive (ABC), Get Smart (NBC), Star Trek (NBC), My Three Sons (CBS), Family Affair (CBS), Gilligan’s Island (CBS).

New York Times best sellers: Fiction: The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton, Capable of Honor by Allen Drury. Non-fiction: Everything but Money by Sam Levenson, Madame Sarah: Sarah Bernhardt by Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Sources:

Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 69-73.

Wayne Besen. Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003): 127-129.

John Bradley. “CBS Remains Perplexed …So Does Its Audience.” Vector (April 1967): 20-22, 29. Vector magazine was published in San Francisco by the Society for Individual Rights. I used quotes transcribed by Bradley for portions of the program not available on YouTube.

Clay Gowran. “Repeat: TV No Spot to Unload Garbage.” The Chicago Tribune (March 8, 1967): 2A-4.

Charles Kaiser. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (New York: Grove Press, 1997): 160-171.

Lawrence Laurent. “CBS studies homosexuals.” The Washington Post (March 9, 1967): D23.

Jack Nichols, “Memoirs of Jack Nichols: unfinished and unedited,” Chapter 7. Rainbow History Project Digital Collections, accessed March 7, 2018. Available online here.

Vitto Russo. The Celluloid Closet: The Celluloid Closet (New York: Harper & Row, 1981, rev. 1987): 153

Helen Sanders (pseudonym for Helen Sandoz). Column: “Cross Currents.” The Ladder (May 1967): 24.

David Wayne. “CBS Documentary Draws Mixed Press Reaction.” The Homosexual Citizen (May 1967): 15-16.

“The Homosexuals Banned by KRNT.” The Des Moines Register (March 8, 1967): 7.