Frank Kameny has a big problem with Tom Brokaw‘s Boom!: Voices of the Sixties. The former NBC news anchor’s pop history of the decade includes nothing on the gay rights movement, not even the Stonewall riots, and that strikes Kameny—one of the leading activists in that movement—as sheer “passive-aggressive hostility to our history.”* In a letter to Brokaw and Random House executives Gina Centrello and Kate Medina, Kameny accuses the book of having “de-gayed the entire decade” and further charges, “One does not hear even one single gay voice in your book. The silence is complete and deafening.” (Jann Wennner is interviewed in the book, but apparently doesn’t count.) “The Sixties were a period of unprecedented rapid social and cultural upheaval and change,” Kameny continues. “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…You owe an abject public apology to the entire gay community. I demand it; we expect it.”
The attitude may be more than a little high hat—and the closing shot that “Gay is Good [and] you are not” is just plain rude—but Kameny’s not the only person to notice the massive oversight in Brokaw’s historical account. In yesterday’s Washington Post, Charles Kaiser damns the book’s vapidity on a number of different levels, but specifically notes the lack of any gay history.
*Of course, there’s plenty of room to quibble; “hostility,” after all, implies that Brokaw and the other parties involved in the book’s production gave any thought to the matter at all—it could just as easily be interpreted as indifference.