[5] Peters interviewed men in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Charlotte and New York City, accumulating 30 hours of footage.

Interspersed with these interview segments was footage, described as being in the cinéma vérité style, of the inside of a gay bar along with shots of hustlers working a street corner and a teenager being arrested in a public sex sting.

[3] While the documentary was still in production, Friendly was promoted to the presidency of CBS News but left soon after over a disagreement over the network's coverage of the Vietnam War.

He was replaced by Richard S. Salant, who was known for his cost-consciousness, which put the future of the documentary and the CBS Reports series in question.

Salant did try to kill the documentary, but stories about it began appearing in the trade press, putting CBS into a potentially embarrassing situation were it not to air.

Peters worked with the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society to secure interviews with two additional gay subjects, Lars Larson and Jack Nichols, both of whom were fully accepting of their sexuality.

[9] Peters added more footage of psychiatrists espousing that model along with scenes from the 1965 convention of the East Coast Homophile Organizations.

Following his interview, Wallace gave the results of a CBS News poll that found that Americans considered homosexuality more harmful to the United States than adultery, abortion or prostitution, that two-thirds of Americans described their reaction to homosexuality as "disgust, discomfort or fear" and that one in ten described their reaction as "hatred".

"[12] Following this man was another unobscured subject Jack Nichols (who had taken on the pseudonym "Warren Adkins" for the program), co-founder of the Washington, D.C. branch of the Mattachine Society.

Federal judge James Braxton Craven, Jr. from North Carolina advocated a re-evaluation of United States law, commenting, "Is it not time to redraft a criminal statute first enacted in 1533?"

Vidal, asserting that homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality, countered by saying "The United States is living out some mad Protestant nineteenth-century dream of human behavior....I think the so-called breaking of the moral fiber of this country is one of the healthiest things that's begun to happen.

Wrapping up the hour, Wallace concluded: 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.

George Gent of the Times, however, commented on the anti-gay bias of the show, noting that it would "have been better to give the minority viewpoint that homosexuals are just as normal as anyone else a chance to speak for itself.

"[17] The Chicago Tribune titled its review "TV No Spot to Unload Garbage" and attacked CBS for presenting such material to young and impressionable viewers.

"[20] In noting that approximately 20% of television viewers in the United States saw the program, LGBT activist Wayne Besen labels the broadcast "the single most destructive hour of antigay propaganda in our nation's history.

"[21] He says that the episode "not only had a devastating effect on public opinion but also was a nuclear bomb dropped on the psyches of gay and lesbian Americans, who, prior to this show, had never been represented as a group on national television.

[25] Speaking in 1996, Wallace stated, "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.

Despite this personal knowledge, Wallace relied on the American Psychiatric Association's categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness rather than his own experience in creating the episode.