Appearing on CNN's Reliable Source with Howard Kurtz, Tom Brokaw denied trying to "downplay the rise of the gay rights movement" in his Boom. Although his book's timeline extends to August 1974, he claims the movement "came later."
KURTZ: I have heard some criticism of the book saying that you deal with civil rights, you deal with women's liberation, as it was called then, but you don't devote any time or space to the burgeoning gay rights movement. Is that something...
(CROSSTALK)
BROKAW: I don't, because the gay rights movement came slightly later. It lifted off during that time and I had to make some choices about what I was going to concentrate on. The big issues were the anti-war movement, the counterculture.
I do make some reference to it, but it is only fleeting. And it wasn't any attempt on my part to suppress it. It is just that the gay rights movement really came later after the '60s, it really began to take hold in the '70s.
I did the first television documentary on AIDS in America, and it was because my friend Larry Kramer (ph) had stopped me on the street and said, there is something going on in the gay community that you need to pay attention to. So in this book it was not an oversight on my part to try to downplay the rise of the gay rights movement, which did come later.
Kurtz did not follow up. He did not, for example, press him on his usage of "later" by pointing out that Brokaw includes the movie Dreamgirls and the Duke lacrosse team scandal, both from 2006, while he excludes the White House picketing of 1965, the Stonewall riots of 1969, and the fact that by 1974 cities coast to coast held annual gay pride parades.
Shouldn't someone ask Larry Kramer how he feels about Brokaw using him as his gay cred while deleting our history and making us invisible?
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