Dear Mr. Brokaw:
I write with no small indignation at the total absence of any slightest reference to the gay movement for civil equality in your bestselling book Boom! Voices of the Sixties. Your book simply deletes the momentous events of that decade that led to the vastly altered and improved status of gays in our culture today. This change would have been inconceivable at the start of the 60’s and would not have occurred at all without the events of that decade—events that are utterly ignored in your book. How can this book be subtitled “voices of the sixties” when it doesn’t include a single gay voice in 688 pages? The silence is as complete as it is deafening.
As a gay combat veteran of World War II and therefore a member of the “Greatest Generation,” I find myself and my fellow gays as absent from your narration as if we did not exist in the 1960’s. Amid all the manifold issues and the vast cultural changes of that era that appear in Boom!, the presence of gay people—and the burgeoning gay movement—seems unique in its complete omission from the book. The development of every other possible, conceivable issue and cause which came to the forefront in that period is at least mentioned, and is usually catalogued: race; sex and gender; ethnicity; the environment; and others, on and on and on—except only gays. In 1965, we began to bring gay people and our issues “out of the closet” for the first time through our daring picketing demonstrations at the White House and other government sites and our annual Fourth of July demonstrations at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The Smithsonian Institution displayed these original picket signs last month in an exhibition that also featured the desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Starting around 1963, a decade-long effort was launched aimed at reversing the psychiatric classification of homosexuals as having a mental or emotional disorder. This effort concluded in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of pathological conditions. The most momentous single event in gay liberation history occurred at the end of your decade, in late June 1969, when the Stonewall Riots took place in New York City. Almost overnight what had been a tiny, struggling gay movement exploded into the vast grass-roots movement that it soon became. Talk about a “boom”! We had five or six gay organizations in the entire country in 1961, fifty to sixty in 1969, but by the time of the first Gay Pride march in New York in 1970, we had 1500 such groups. Boom! deals with the histories of countless individuals who made a difference in the 60’s, but where are the gay and lesbian heroes of that era, people like Barbara Gittings, Jack Nichols, Harry Hay, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, Randolfe Wicker, Harvey Milk, and numerous others? Starting in 1961 a long line of court cases attacked the longstanding ban on gays in the U.S. Civil Service. Success came in 1975 when the ban on employment of gays by the federal government was rescinded. Meanwhile, also starting in 1961 we began a concerted effort to repeal anti-sodomy laws, which made de facto criminals of us all. Indeed these laws banned many forms of heterosexual contact as well, but it was gays that bore the brunt of an ongoing campaign of terror against the gay community through arrests of gay people and raids of gay venues that proceeded throughout the 60’s in many parts of the country. The result of these efforts: in 1972, the first anti-discrimination law protecting sexual orientation was enacted in East Lansing, Michigan, to be followed by a more comprehensive law in Washington, D.C., in 1973, starting a trend that now encompasses twenty states and countless counties and cities. The 60’s was a period of unprecedented social and cultural upheaval and change. Gay people were very much a part of all that. At the start of the 60’s gays were completely invisible, but by the end of the decade, and especially after Stonewall, we were seen everywhere: in entertainment, education, religion, politics, business, and so on. But in Boom! we are nowhere to be seen. The only references to gay people are brief references in connection with sundry heterosexuals, but never to discuss their gay activism. This is deeply insulting. You owe a public apology to the entire gay community. Sincerely,
Franklin E. Kameny, Ph.D. November 26, 2007
