Documenting Contempt Faced by Some Gays ‘Out at Work’

“If you don’t like someone’s religion, you don’t call them names. If you don’t like their race, you’re not supposed to call them names,” says Ron Woods, who left a Chrysler plant in Michigan after being harassed for his sexuality. “But it’s still acceptable, in the . . . environments that I work for . . . to say. . . .” And here he repeats some of the anti-gay epithets that have been hurled his way.

Woods is one of three subjects profiled in “Out at Work,” an hourlong documentary exploring the harsh realities faced by some gay employees. The HBO documentary debuting tonight also chronicles the experiences of Cheryl Summerville, who was fired from a rural Georgia Cracker Barrel restaurant in 1991, and Mark Anderson, who left the Century City branch of a securities trading firm in the mid-’90s after a chain of harassing incidents.

The stories are compellingly told, mostly in the subjects’ own voices, with supporting documentation, company responses and other interviews deftly woven in.

Emotions crackling behind his stoic exterior, Woods speaks of verbal and physical pummelings. Summerville, who challenged a restaurant hiring policy excluding gays, is interviewed with her partner of 16 years, describing the firing’s spiraling impact on their relationship and on Summerville’s teenage son.

Anderson’s segment includes outtakes of a mocking video he says was made by superiors at Cantor Fitzgerald. In it, masked men enact racial and sexual stereotypes while absconding with Anderson’s car and having it painted as a police “cruiser” covered with anti-gay epithets.

Viewers are left to imagine the bigger picture: If these events could occur at three very different jobs in different parts of the country, then untold numbers of similar incidents must be unfolding every day.

This would be easier to envision, however, if filmmakers Tami Gold and Kelly Anderson had provided more context--a national tally of on-the-job harassment, perhaps, or analysis from legal-aid or rights groups.

What context the filmmakers do provide comes largely through man-on-the-street interviews in which ordinary people share their feelings about gays and lesbians. For the most part, though, the filmmakers include only the most outrageous anti-gay responses, reducing a segment of society to broad negative stereotypes--the very behavior the profile subjects are decrying.

Because we are led to expect the worst from people, we’re steeling ourselves for more ugliness when, in the final profile, we visit some of Woods’ former auto-plant co-workers. Instead, we hear a couple of these sturdily built guys describe how you deal with someone like Woods, someone who’s different: You get to know him.

* “Out at Work” debuts tonight at 10:30 on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under 17).