Tom Brokaw on leaving gay rights movement out of book: "Obviously I feel bad..."

In Tom Brokaw’s latest book, "Boom! Voices of the Sixties," there is nary a mention of the gay rights movement in this an epic exploration of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic events of 1963 to 1974.
The former NBC anchorman has taken some heavy hits from critics because of that and Brokaw recently talked to The Advocate's Rachel Dowd about the controversy:

Dowd: Let’s cut to the chase. Why is the gay rights movement missing from Boom?

Brokaw: 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. There were a number of important movements that also grew out of the ‘60s and certainly gay liberation was important among them. I struggled with the absence of any real reference to Hispanic political power. In California, for example, there was, what we used to call in those days, the Chicano movement, which organized a big anti-war demonstration and that was kind of the foundation of what became a considerable Hispanic political situation. 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. ...My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, and especially in the ‘90s. Roy Aarons was a very good friend of mine in California, and when I left there in 1973, Roy was not yet out. A couple of years later he was in touch with me about the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, which he didn’t start until 1990. It was not an attempt to slight what became a very important movement, but I just had to make some tough choices. I feel bad that people feel that I deliberately slighted them—that was not my intention.

To read the entire article, go to Advocate.com...