Coming Out: A 50 Year History

The History of the Public Gay Identity

Transgender teen, Jazz Jennings, narrates this documentary where young people interview a host of LGBTQ elders who came out in different historical eras from the 1950s through today.

These inspiring talks give insight into the political and personal changes that shaped the modern LGBTQ movement. The young interviewers get an opportunity to compare and contrast their "coming out" experience with people who came out during McCarthy, Civil Rights, post-Stonewall, and AIDS eras. In the end, they learn that every generation of activists stands on the shoulders of those who came before and that activism needs to continue even in the light of great social strides.

Subjects include the founder of the first lesbian organization in the USA; a ROTC student who was outed and dismissed during the height of the McCarthy era, a Rhodes scholar who was arrested in Russia for having sex in a hotel; a transgender activist who led one of the first anti-police riots, a small-town girl whose activism began in the heart of the 1960s women's and anti-war movements; an activist who organized a group of young hustlers to march for change; a lesbian-feminist poet of the 1970s; a man whose politics began in discos and ended in the AIDS era; an ACT-UP activist; a man who changed views of people with AIDS in the Black churches of the South; and a young lesbian whose worldview was forever changed at the first national march on Washington DC in 1987.