Five Questions for Tom Brokaw

This November, Tom Brokaw royally pissed off Frank Kameny. In Brokaw’s book Boom! Voices of the Sixties, an epic exploration of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic events of 1963 to 1974, the former anchor of the NBC Nightly News made nary a mention of the gay rights movement. Naturally, the man who coined “Gay Is Good” in 1968 would find that unacceptable. In a letter to Brokaw and his publishers at Random House, Kameny wrote, “I write with no little indignation at the total absence of any slightest allusion to the gay movement for civil equality in your book.… Mr. Brokaw, you have ‘de-gayed’ the entire decade.”

He’s right. There’s no mention of the Stonewall riots in 1969 or the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders in 1973. There’s no mention of Elaine Noble, Harvey Milk, or, for that matter, Frank Kameny. There are, however, reasons, as we found out when we called up Brokaw. Read on.

Let’s cut to the chase. Why is the gay rights movement missing from Boom?

Obviously I feel bad. It was not that it wasn’t on my mind, but it was not the defining history of the ‘60s. I was trying to do the five big pillars, which in my judgment were race, war, politics, women, and culture. There were a number of important movements that also grew out of the ‘60s and certainly gay liberation was important among them. I struggled with the absence of any real reference to Hispanic political power. In California, for example, there was, what we used to call in those days, the Chicano movement, which organized a big anti-war demonstration and that was kind of the foundation of what became a considerable Hispanic political situation. Having said all that, I think it was a mistake not to make reference to Stonewall. And we’re going to do that in subsequent editions.

I went back through Charlie Kaiser’s book on 1968, and he makes one reference—one—about the consequences of 1968. He makes one line referring to gay liberation and the gays who began to live more openly and honestly after the Stonewall rights of 1969. That’s it. I’m not using that as a defense, but in reference to that particular period, I think it came along a little later.

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, and especially in the ‘90s. Roy Aarons was a very good friend of mine in California, and when I left there in 1973, Roy was not yet out. A couple of years later he was in touch with me about the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, which he didn’t start until 1990. It was not an attempt to slight what became a very important movement, but I just had to make some tough choices. I feel bad that people feel that I deliberately slighted them—that was not my intention.

Okay, but nothing about gay rights?

That’s not entirely fair, it was glancing. Linda Greenhouse has quite a poignant description of not knowing anybody gay in 1968 in her class at Harvard. They had their 25th anniversary and suddenly the phone lines light up from gay members of her class she didn’t realize were gay, because Colin Powell was going be the speaker. In my passage on Dick Cheney in which he says he’d kind of like to go back to the old ways, I point out that his daughter Mary would not have been treated well at all under the old ways.

In the ‘60s did the gay movement seem more an issue of sexual liberation rather than civil rights?

On civil rights, I thought very strongly about primarily African American rights. I mean, we had institutionalized, legalized discrimination against the fundamental rights of citizenship. Gays have never been denied the right to vote. They’re not told to go to a separate drinking fountain. They were not told they couldn’t stay in a motel if they crossed the state line. The terror the blacks lived in, north and south, that really sparked the Civil Rights Movement was a different order than what happened with gay liberation. As far as the sexual liberation, it was not, it seemed to me, as inclusive as the women’s movement, which was the first to come along in terms of sexual liberation.

Do you think success is harder to come by in the women’s movement, with all its implications to sex, than the civil rights movement?

I haven’t thought about it in quite that fashion, but when it comes to women, we began to do the right thing in the ‘60s and the ‘70s and we’ve made enormous gains. I’m the father of three daughters and they’re all highly trained professionals, two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point. The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing. I’m witness to that all the time with them. These are tough times and these are very tough issues that in my judgment are not getting enough attention.