Brokaw Accused of Soft-Pedaling Gay Rights

Does Tom Brokaw have a big gay blind spot?

The former NBC anchor has drawn some criticism for ignoring the gay-rights movement in his book Boom: Voices of the Sixties. Now, by trying to defend himself, he may be making it worse.

In an interview published yesterday by The Advocate, Brokaw said he feel[s] bad" about downplaying the issue of sexual orientation while devoting ample space to race and feminism. But, he added, there were good reasons for giving gay rights comparatively short shrift:

I mean, we had institutionalized, legalized discrimination against the fundamental rights of citizenship [for blacks]. 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.

Brokaw also cited gay writer Charles Kaiser's 1968 in America as evidence that he's not alone in his judgment.

That didn't sit well with Kaiser, who reviewed Boom for the Washington Post last November, and who writes a media column for Radar Online.

"I'm not sure what form of institutionalized discrimination is more fundamental than a legal prohibition to be the person that you are," Kaiser retorts in a letter to Brokaw. He continues:

Any gay man who had sex with another man in the 1950's could be and very often was deprived of every right as a citizen, since sodomy laws in every state in the 1950's made his very existence illegal.... Whatever the barriers blacks faced -- and they were huge -- they never included an outright ban on being who they were in every state of the union. In the '50's and the '60's any gay person who wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, or a journalist -- or just about anything else -- knew that he or she could only succeed by hiding his or her true identify, for life.

Here's the full letter, complete with his correction of an unrelated inaccuracy in Boom:

Tom,

It is true that I make only one reference to gays in my first book. That's because 99 percent of the book takes place in 1968. As I wrote in the preface, my goal was "to make reading the book as much as possible like living through the year." To accomplish that, I almost never jumped ahead, except to mention something as important as the impact of the '60's on gay people. You, on the other hand, were writing twenty years later than I was, and you asked everyone you interviewed to look back and explain the eventual impact of the decade.

You said to the Advocate, "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."

I'm not sure what form of institutionalized discrimination is more fundamental than a legal prohibition to be the person that you are. Any gay man who had sex with another man in the 1950's could be and very often was deprived of every right as a citizen, since sodomy laws in every state in the 1950's made his very existence illegal. Except for Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal and Frank Kameny, there were almost no openly gay people in America for that reason. Blacks were never banned from employment by the entire Federal government and all of its contractors, as gay people were in the 1950's (with the support, I might add, of the ACLU.) Whatever the barriers blacks faced--and they were huge--they never included an outright ban on being who they were in every state of the union. In the '50's and the '60's any gay person who wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, or a journalist--or just about anything else--knew that he or she could only succeed by hiding his or her true identify, for life.

I'm glad you're adding Stonewall to subsequent editions of the book. If you're making other changes, you might also want to modify your libel of the Columbia students who occupied five buildings in 1968. In Boom! you write that student demonstrators at Columbia in 1968 "occupied and trashed the library and administration building." [118] Actually, they occupied five buildings, one of which was called "Low Library." However, Low had ceased to be a library several decades earlier-when Butler Library was built and Low become the administration building. And Butler was not one of the occupied buildings. So no library was ever trashed during that protest. And after the buildings were emptied of the protestors, several professors gave affidavits asserting that it was impossible to know whether it was the students occupying four of those buildings or the New York City policemen who evicted them, who caused most of the damage that was discovered afterwards.

Charles