Brokaw's Meagerly Updated BOOM! Still Weak on Gay Rights

Not to equate Election Day with limp deliveries on old promises, but remember last year when Tom Brokaw de-gayed the entire 1960s in his book Boom! and assured everyone he'd fix it in future editions? Howard Kurtz quizzed him about it on CNN, and in Rachel Dowd's blunt interview with the Advocate, Brokaw said:

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... 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.

Now the paperback is on sale. Stonewall still does not appear anywhere in the main text of the book, and it is still omitted from the index; but it has been added to the timeline in the back matter, and Brokaw has written a thin, two-page preface. Two watery paragraphs cover gay rights:

In June 1969, gay men and women living in New York rose up against police in their favorite hangouts in Greenwich Village, including a club called the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall riots, as the came to be called, are widely credited with launching what we know today as the gay rights movement. It wasn't until the late Seventies, the Eighties, and the Nineties that gay liberation gained real traction nationally, through long-overdue changes in laws, workplace practices, and popular acceptance.

Like civil rights and women's rights, gay rights remain a work in progress, and controversial in some quarters. But indisputedly the movement began that late spring night in 1969.

"Indisputedly?" Was Brokaw always just a news reader? Because a reporter or a journalist, and certainly a historian, would see Stonewall as a culmination, not the beginning, of the growing gay rights movement in that decade. The Mattachine Society was formed in 1950, ONE splintered off and formed a separate group in 1952, The Daughters of Bilitis in 1956, and their reach was vast: Local chapters appeared in more than seven cities and each founding group sent its own magazine nationwide: ONE was published until 1967, The Ladder appeared monthly until 1970. Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings organized the public, midday protests at the White House in 1965 and at Independence Hall on every Fourth of July from 1966 through the end of the Sixties. It is precisely because so much gay heat had been simmering for so long in so many places that it could boil over at Stonewall.

For comparison, in his new preface Brokaw also writes two, meatier paragraphs about the rise of the religious right. Those are personalized with names (Robertson, Falwell); there's no mention of their being "controversial in some quarters;" and for them he breaks his strict Sixties-only rule. After discussing Liberty University's creation in 1971, Brokaw writes, "By 1979 Falwell... had formed the Moral Majority, which proved to be a powerful ally for the Republican party." Why doesn't he say it was dissolved in 1989? For that matter, why doesn't he call lgbt voters a powerful ally for the Democrats, and why are our leaders left anonymous?

Following up on another aspect of the story, Kameny wrote this letter of complaint to Random House's publisher Gina Centrello and Brokaw's editor Kate Medina last November. He never received a reply.

Comments

[Jeff]

Thanks for this post. Having been a student of Gay History since the late 60's, it has always bothered me that Stonewall became the definition of the beginning of the movement. Clearly, the movement in the U.S. began on the West coast decades earlier, but even that isn't the beginning...the West coast movement was built on a much earlier movement in Germany...and if we do a deep read of scholarly gay history we see that even as early as the 1600s many of the themes we find in the modern gay rights movement are already being defined and articulated. As one great modern writer of gay fiction aptly queried..."How Long Has This Been Going On?"