Former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw’s new book, BOOM! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today, goes on sale tomorrow. A reflection on, well, the 1960’s, Brokaw attempts to give a personal view into America’s tumultuous past. And, judging from the NY Times review, Brokaw didn’t come across any queers in his travels.
Mr. Brokaw’s own history is also part of his panorama. He intersperses autobiographical anecdotes sparingly and chooses them well. He and his wife, Meredith, were married in 1962; girdles were part of her wedding trousseau, and they received five cigarette lighters as presents. Five years later he was in San Francisco being asked, “Mister, do you know what’s going on over on Haight Street?” and meeting a young woman who claimed to have slept with all of the Byrds.
“My ambitions were counter to the counterculture,” says Mr. Brokaw, who was born in 1940, had a family and an established career by 1968 and did not experience the full impact of the baby boom in his personal life. (The emergence of gay culture is notably absent from this book’s panorama.)
Poor Tom Brokaw: can you imagine a life lived without getting down with the gays. Sad…
Dawster
one of my really good friends who lived in the sixties (even got gassed in the 1968 Chicago Riot) hung around a lot of hippies and protesters.
he made it very clears that, at that time in the 60’s, there was no “gay rights”, “coming out” or anything pro-homosexual. it was NOT accepted (even with the peace-loving hippies) and it was something very few people discussed because it was considered so very wrong.
the war was going on, people were in constant fear… the culture and the counter culture were at a remarkable impasse. it was not a good time for any civil rights, much less gay progress… which could be why it was notably absent from his book.
(but really, what do i know… i wasn’t even born yet!)
leomoore
I was born in 1954 and you are quite right. I don’t think I learned the word homosexual until 1968 in a letter to Dear Abby from a distraught mother who found a gay magazine under her son’s mattress. That is when I actually knew what I was called. The response from Abby involved a psychiatrist, which scared the bejesus out of me. I was afraid I would be sent to the state mental hospital if I was found out.
Regardless of Stonewall, which didn’t receive much coverage outside of New York, I didn’t hear much about gay rights until around 1972. In all honesty, it was the feminist movement that seemed to provide much of the impetus because the involvement of lesbians.
Leland Frances
Thanks for the article link. As I watched Brokaw being interviewed by fellow superstar hack Tim Russert yesterday, I wondered if the public flowering of the movement for gay equality in America would be included. Of course, once again, Brokaw has demonstrated how “white†he is, by which I mean not just Caucasian, but male, heterosexual, and privileged to whom we remain almost always invisible and always irrelevant.
At first glance, someone so “white†could be forgiven for not being aware of gay activism in the U.S. that goes back to the ‘50s. Many, possibly even most, modern gays are unaware of it, too. And some might excuse him for ignoring the Stonewall riots as they were in 1969 and didn’t begin to permeate public consciousness beyond NY until the next year, but, as the Times indicates, he “loosely defines the ‘60s as the period from 1963 to 1974.†That would include not just the period involving Stonewall but four years of growing pride events across the country celebrating its anniversary, and the development of gay groups on countless college campuses. His ignoring that [versus being ignorant of it], and their continued, even larger and broader existence today is irreponsible, and, yes, homophobic.
What about Jose Sarria in 1961, the first out gay to run for public office? He could have made note of the fact that the organizer of the still famous 1963 March on Washington for Black civil rights was organized by an out gay Black man, Bayard Rustin. The White House was first picketed by gays in 1965. Demonstrations in the ‘60s against antigay military policies [which he could have linked to the number of medal-winning gay vets who have since come out and bills in Congress today to admit gays to the military] predate that as does the first statewide decriminalization of sodomy in Illinois—a MAJOR change in American culture and jurisprudence that he could have linked to the Supreme Court decision “legalizing†sodomy nationwide in 2003. In 1971, Frank Kameny is the first out gay to run for Congress, and was a major player in our first great national triumph [with international influence] that occurred in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association ruled that gays are not inherently mentally ill. A decision that got wide mainstream media coverage.
And 1974 was a watershed year for us as Kathy Kozachenko and Elaine Noble, became the first out gays elected to public office, and already elected Allan Spear came out. Along with Sarria’s and Kameny’s attempts, he could have linked that to the number of out gay office holders today.
Employing the “where are they now?†angle so much, he could have included David Mixner who, while closeted then, played a key role in the challenge of Eugene McCarthy to LBJ and was one of the organizers of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in 1969 that had tens of thousands descending upon Washington and millions of participants across the country and Europe. That was when Mixner became friends with student Bill Clinton, who organized a parallel demonstration at Oxford [used against him by Bush pere when they ran against each other]. Years later after coming out, Mixner was instrumental in many gay rights campaigns, including helping engineer Ronald Reagan coming out against Prop 6 which would have banned gays from teaching in California, and, more famously, helped elect Clinton [and then fell out with him over DADTDP].
And, as mentioned, there was the huge role lesbians played in the women’s movement [as well as a scandalous effort to drive them out led by feminist matriarch Betty Friedan]. But, hey, just because gays were major players in that and the other two main subjects of Brokaw’s solipsistic book, as well as being one of two issues that gave rise to the extremely powerful and rich “Religious Right,†why should he “see†us any more now than he did forty years ago? Being gay is not a choice but ignoring us is, just as not “hearing” the many LGBT voices and issues that have boomed across those decades.
Tell me again, please, what HRC, NGLTF, and GLAAD have accomplished?
Mr. B
When I came out to my father (who is very accepting and has never been anything but supportive of me), he told me, “When I was in school, no one was gay. Not the other kids, no teachers, no one.” I rebutted with, “Yeah, because if they said anything they’d be lobotomized!” But that was kind of his point–he was trying to tell me to be careful about being out. Incidentally, my mom went to a completely different college and fell for queer guys and had queer girls falling for her, so her perspective was a little different. And naturally I had to figure things out for myself, and I was never anything but out. But my dad was more like Brokaw–a straight white guy with a business-oriented mindset, and it makes sense that neither of them was ever very gay-aware.
John
Certainly gay history needs to be filled in and made mainstream, but I hardly blame Brokaw. I was born in 1950, and was considered a hippy by most people I know. I was extremely disappointed by the sexism and homophobia of the “summer of love”. I definitely felt left out. When I found the Beats I felt a bit better, but I wondered what happened when it went mainstream. I came from a liberal region of Quebec, and we knew some of our teachers were gay. Going to the US was a bit of an eye-opener with the sexual repression there. Maybe sexual liberation had to be heterosexual first, and male at that. The US is still a pretty macho country on the world scale (I live in Zululand right now — don’t ask!).