Tom Brokaw's history of the Sixties overlooks Gay milestones

Tom Brokaw's latest book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, claims to offer "an epic portrait of another defining era in American history" that examines "how individual lives and the national mindset were affected by a controversial era and showing how the aftershocks of the Sixties continue to resound in our lives today."

But gay activists quickly noted that gay history was sparse in the book's account of the 60's. Events like the Stonewall riots and the work of gay civil rights groups like The Council on Religion and the Homosexual and The Mattachine Society are absent from the book, which loosely defines the Sixties as 1963-1974.

Those omissions prompted gay activist Frank Kameny (who, as a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, was a part of many of the events that Brokaw skips) to write an open letter to Brokaw about the portion of the era that Brokaw misses. Kameny writes: 

The Sixties were a period of unprecedented rapid social and cultural upheaval and change. We gays were very much a part of all that. A reader of your book would never have the slightest notion of any of that. In your book, no boom; only your silence. 

At the start of the Sixties gays were completely invisible. By the end, and especially after Stonewall, we were seen everywhere: in entertainment, education, religion, politics, business, elsewhere and everywhere. In BOOM our invisibility remains total. 

The only allusions to us, in your entire book are the most shallow, superficial, brief references in connection with sundry heterosexuals. Where are the gay spokespeople? We are certainly there to speak for ourselves. But in your book, only silence.

Brokaw has yet to officially respond to Kameny, but Radar magazine notes that the former NBC News anchor discussed his exclusion of gays on CNN's Reliable Sources, where Brokaw claimed that gay equality didn't become a movement until the Seventies.

That's certainly an odd excuse, since the Sixties include several milestones in gay history that continue to affect us to this day. However, if Brokaw's history of the Sixties includes events from as far as 1974, his claim that LGBT advances came after the period he chronicled seems even more disingenuous.

After all, in 1974 a major event turning point for gays happened when the American Psychiatric Association officially changed its view of homosexuality as a mental disorder (a victory that happened, Kameny notes in his letter, because of efforts started in the Sixties). And Stonewall, widely held to have kickstarted the gay rights movement in this country, happened in 1969 (clearly in the sixties, no matter how loosely you choose to define them).

In the end, it sounds like Brokaw's book fails to fully tell the story it promises.