Millions of Viewers Transfixed by a Sexually Explicit Duel for the Truth : Television: Drama moved a vast electronic audience. It was perhaps the largest consciousness- raising session ever.

Watergate and Oliver North glued people to their television sets in their time, but on Friday, Anita Faye Hill and Clarence Thomas may have moved a mass electronic audience as no congressional hearing ever has before.

In what was perhaps the largest group consciousness-raising session ever, Americans were joined in a mass emotional experience. Some women relived painful memories, some men squirmed, and all were riveted by a high drama of public conflicts between the sexes.

It blared over radios on Los Angeles freeways and on televisions in Pin Point, Ga.; made people late for their jobs in Seattle; disrupted work in St. Louis, and started arguments on shop floors and in offices nationwide.

In Chicago, Vicki Shoate, who had pinned a color newspaper photograph of Hill on her bulletin board beside a photo of her son, listened intently to the small radio placed atop her desk at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

In a Torrance, Calif., telescope factory, Alan Hale found his daily production meetings dominated by discussions of the hearings. And at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, clerks and judges alike listened to the hearings broadcast on the building’s loudspeakers.

People saw themselves in these two individuals a world away, a law professor and a nominee for the highest court in the land, who had somehow become Everywoman and Everyman battling over their respective versions of sexual truth.

There was a groundswell of feeling that the sexually explicit TV drama was a watershed, a piece of instant, nationally broadcast history worth more than a thousand corporate manuals or lawsuits in getting people talking about the problem of sexual harassment.

“That woman (Hill) is the Rosa Parks for women today in the workplace,” said one diner at Washington’s Union Station, referring to the Montgomery, Ala., seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white bus passenger in 1955, sparking a year-long boycott of the city’s bus system and helping bring about the modern civil rights movement.

Clyde Johnson, president of the Black Employees’ Assn. in Los Angeles, said the last public hearing that affected him and those around him so deeply was the coroner’s inquest following the Watts riots more than 20 years ago. He said he was so hypnotized by “Anita” and “Clarence” that he couldn’t eat breakfast. All of his 12 staff members were late because they were watching the hearings.

Steve Edwards, a popular Los Angeles radio talk show host, has monitored the passions raised by the Gulf War, the Iran-Contra hearings and Rodney King in the volume and tone of calls he gets.

“This is bigger,” he said in a break from answering lines that were “lighting up like a Christmas tree. . . . There is something visceral, personal, that is striking people where they live.”

The changes in mood among men at Fire Station I in Denver as they watched the broadcast reflected a transformation in the views of many who, before the hearings, had imagined a vindictive, spurned or neurotic woman trying to get back at Thomas with 11th-hour allegations.

Instead firefighters saw a calm, articulate woman surrounded by her family describe her boss boasting to her about the size of his penis and urging her to see pornographic films.

With shades drawn, two fire crews, trim in their navy uniforms, watched a 40-inch TV screen. At first the men bantered back and forth, usually at Hill’s expense--until she began telling her story.

As Hill related her allegations, the wisecracking came to a halt. And as it became more graphic, an occasional “whew” and “whoa” could be heard in the darkened room.

“He’ll be a crashed man before the week is out,” said fireman John Webb.

“She’s pretty brave,” said fellow fireman Tony Padilla.

As Hill continued, the room became silent. An alarm sounded, and four members raced to their truck, suddenly breaking the quiet that had fallen so tightly over the group. But in just a few seconds, as the siren of their truck faded into the distance, the group’s quiet concentration on the hearing resumed.

When a committee recess was called, the men began to talk again.

“If her allegations are true, he has absolutely no right to sit on the highest court in the nation and pass judgment on women’s issues, such as abortion and issues like pornography, which comes before the court all the time,” said fireman Dave Maes. “If her allegations are true, obviously he has no respect for women.”

“I hate to say it,” said Webb, “but I think he was hitting on her.”

But not everyone was entirely persuaded by Hill, including some women. Many questioned Hill’s motivations in speaking out so late in the proceedings, and said a lawyer should have known how to take action against abuse.

But regardless of who they believed, people in their offices and homes across the country felt that the grave tone of these Senate hearings has changed forever the way people look at sexual harassment, that it had been elevated to a new level of seriousness and was no longer a trivial complaint of women.

“It’s going to make the men that have women working for them more aware. Women will be seen as more credible than before,” said Alfonso Carbajal, a quality control manager at Celestron, the telescope maker in Torrance.

After the hearings, Carbajal’s boss, Hale, told workers to take down the girlie posters that had adorned corners of the warehouse. Many viewers were moved to put themselves in the shoes of both Hill and Thomas.

Alexander Talbert, like Thomas, is 43 and a black man. He is a television salesman at Circuit City in Los Angeles. But the scene that blared on multiple screens at Talbert’s store made him feel close to Thomas. “I have sympathy,” he said.

But Talbert said he worried about something he said to a female colleague just the other day. “I told her she was a great young lady and I like her and . . . how she made a pickle in my stomach when she’s around me. I went back today and asked if that’s harassment and let’s talk about it.”

His colleague, Karen Lamotte, said she didn’t mind Talbert’s comments. But she said watching the program made her realize: “I get this stuff every day.”

“This will open people’s eyes to what is going on,”she said.

Many men watching said they felt the same kind of queasiness they experienced watching the movie “Fatal Attraction,” in which a man’s extramarital dalliance comes back in violent fashion and threatens to ruin his life.

“It completely frightens me to think that I could pick up the paper, and, God forbid, have (a woman) saying that I did (something) to her,” said San Diego-based real estate consultant Sanford Goodkin, who watched the opening hour of the hearings with Frances, his wife of 43 years.

“It’s terrifying to me,” Goodkin said. “What if it’s a woman scorned and you’re accused of something that you didn’t do? What do you say?”

For many women, the hearings brought on a nasty feeling in the pit of their stomachs of a different kind--one of memory.

“I remembered how I felt when I was working at a summer job in college and my boss, every time he walked by, would run his finger across my back. It made my hair stand on end. He used to ask me into his office and talk about his extramarital affairs,” said a lawyer at a Century City firm, where secretaries were glued to their radios Friday morning and the hearings dominated meetings that were supposed to be dedicated to business.

The lawyer didn’t say anything because the boss was a friend of her mother’s. But she turned her desk around and put filing cabinets on both sides, so it would be harder for him to touch her as he walked by.

After she went back to school he wrote letters to her describing his fantasies about her. “I was young. I was intimidated,” she said. Hill’s story “confirmed women’s feelings about how stuck you are.”

And she’s glad the hearings are happening. “I think the hearings have heightened consciousness. It’s instilled a sense of fear,” she said, noting a lot of nervous jokes around the office. “This is a very scary issue for men. I feel like the nation’s going through a massive therapy session.”

Contributors to this story include Ann Rovin in Denver; J. Michael Kennedy in Houston; Tracy Shryer in Chicago; Doug Conner in Seattle; Anna Virtue in Miami;, Janine Defao, Steven Herbert and David Lauter in Washington; Greg Johnson in San Diego; Cristina Lee, John O’Dell and Anne Michaud in Orange County, and Kevin E. Cullinane, Lorna Fernandes, Julie Tamaki and Ralph Vartabedian in Los Angeles.