(clicking)

(light instrumental music)

- To me, diversity means inclusion,

and when I say that I mean full inclusion.

Because with full inclusion,

you're gonna get the best quality of output from

anything that you're dealing with.

- A friend of mine says, “You know Michael,

you weren't the first homosexual at P&G,

but you sure did put a public face to it in the '80s.

And it's true.

You know, I think that description's right.

I look back on this whole thing,

I think, God, you are one crazy queen.

What drove me?

I'm a fighter, and, um, certainly the time that I've been gay,

it has not been easy.

- [Man] Get rid of 'em!

- [Man] Yeah, get rid of 'em!

(cheering)

- [Group] Deport gays.

Deport gays.

Deport them.

(people screaming)

- Don't make me fight you.

- [Man] We die, they do nothing.

We die, they do nothing.

(chanting)

- If you don't know the history,

you're gonna repeat,

you know the famous line,

you're gonna repeat it.

So I think that that's the key.

It's important to understand the struggle

because the truth is, we're always in the struggle.

- Feel the power of this moment

and carry the message to the Capitol

that we will have full human rights,

civil rights for lesbian and gay people.

And we will not be denied.

(suspenseful music)

- [Man] OK, marker.

- So someone came to me about

six months ago and they said, “Hey,

“you know, the 25th anniversary of P&G

“including sexual orientation into

“its diversity statement's coming,

“and we'd like to make a big deal of it.”

I started thinking about it.

Over the past 25 years we've made

an incredible amount of progress towards inclusion,

but our current times remind us it can be lost very quickly.

And so a little light bulb went off in my head.

I thought, well, something had to happen in 1992.

Companies just don't make that shift,

as particularly at that time.

I reached out to the LGBT employees

and asked, “Does anybody remember what happened?”

One person wrote back and said,

“I think it had something to do with

“a mouthwash called Peridex.”

I called our archivist and said, “Peridex.”

“What is it?”

“How would it possibly connect?”

They came back and they said, “Well, we owned it.”

“We can't find any connection;

“we don't have much on it at all.”

So, a dead end.

I emailed back again:

“Who knows something about Peridex?”

And one guy wrote back and said, a friend of mine

may have been involved in it;

his name is Michael Chanak.

(click)

- Oh boy, Cincinnati in the '80s.

(sighs) I got there in '78.

Conservative, I mean, you know, (chuckles) Cincinnati's roots,

yeah, it's really a large cowtown.

- If the world were coming to an end,

you'd wanna be in Cincinnati,

because it wouldn't happen here for seven years

after it happened everywhere else.

Progress and moving things forward

wasn't something that the community

as a whole seemed interested in.

(whistling and cheering)

- I didn't go to Pride until about '85,

because going to Pride was in fact coming out.

You know, that's like going to the cotillion,

your coming out party.

- [Reporter] The parade wound on for hours.

A spectacle even Barnum and Bailey might envy.

- Because there was so much discrimination,

and there were so many problems,

you had to make friendships,

and they had to be good friendships.

And so I met some of the old-timers

and got involved in different political groups.

I started at P&G in April of '85,

and I really was a lab tech in

the old-fashioned sense of the world.

I was an A and T person,

administrative technical.

You know, there's a lot of things in the workplace then,

everything you saw …

There was a lot of homophobia,

there was a lot of sexism,

but that's how most people thought then.

It was kind of a risky thing being known as gay then.

I mean, in those days it was kind of a “friend of a friend” sort of thing,

like an old secret society.

- It was isolating

because we couldn't talk to each other.

There was that fear,

there was that isolation.

And then the rest of the people you could talk to,

there was potential judgment.

- I went to that Pride Parade in '86.

I ran into my friend, Bob McNee.

I liked Bob,

it was great to see him,

it was a celebration.

In those days you didn't see gay people,

you know what I mean?

Two hundred people in a town the size of Cincinnati,

gay pride 1986.

These are like your brothers and sisters here,

this is a homecoming week.

(light instrumental music)

Bob and I kissed.

And when the local TV station caught that,

it was on Saturday and it was on Sunday night.

And then it was even damn on Monday night.

And that was really my coming out at work.

A lot of people stopped by that morning,

about 30 people really,

and the message was clearly: You have to be careful, Michael.

You have to be careful.

After being in that picture with

Bob McNee at the Pride thing,

I think something snapped.

You just finally say to yourself, screw it.

I was the authentic Michael,

I was gonna be who I was.

It's either gonna take you or you're gonna take it.

I had made up my mind.

- And our guest today is Mike Chanak.

Noted interviewer and leader in the gay community.

- [Delaine] He was willing to be an outlier.

- [Ed] He wanted change for the better.

He was willing to put it on the line,

he didn't sugarcoat things.

- I've often been a target of a lot

of nasty stuff over the years.

I'm not here to justify or not justify it,

but I do feel that I've heard

a lot of stuff about a lot of people.

And I think it's our own hatred of ourselves

that keeps us at each other so much.

And we're so smart and yet so willing

to believe some very strange things.

And sometimes that's disappointing.

I guess we all come out,

we look for community.

And we find out that that's a very difficult concept.

I had my debut in June of '86

on the local TV station.

And by the end of the year,

I'm transferred to the Peridex brand.

Once I understood what they were trying to do,

I thought, well, I got something to offer here.

- I was 23 years old and they put me on

this tiny little brand called Peridex

that was on no one's radar screen.

It's a prescription mouthwash

and it was prescribed by dentists,