Remembering Walter Cronkite and LGBT Rights

It must say something about a person when at your death, people who weren't even born during they heyday of your career feel remorse at having lost someone trustworthy.  Such is the case with Walter Cronkite, who passed away last week at the age of 92.  A number of touching tributes have come in for the man who ended each newscast with a "And that's the way it is."

One of the coolest we've seen is over at Philebrity, where Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal weighs in with his first interaction with Walter Cronkite, and how it perhaps changed the way that CBS News covered the issue of LGBT rights from the mid-1970s onward. In the years immediately following Stonewall, Segal was a part of an LGBT rights group that practiced a lot of direct action, staging demonstrations and public confrontations on everything from the Mike Douglas Show to the Tonight Show.

As Segal notes, one of his direct action moments in the spotlight occurred on the CBS Evening News in 1973.  Here's Segal's story:

Segal was the leader of an activist group called the Gay Raiders, who, during that year, staged disruptions designed to draw attention to the cause of gay rights on The Today Show, The Tonight Show, The Mike Douglas Show and perhaps most notably, the CBS Evening News....In the case of Cronkite’s CBS broadcast, the gambit worked; within a week, Cronkite was doing stories on gay rights legislation nationwide.

We didn't think of this before reading Segal's story, but now that it's mentioned, does anyone remember the archive news footage from the movie "Milk," which covers the epidemic of Anita Bryant ballot initiatives throughout the country in the late 1970s?  It's a Walter Cronkite story they flashback to in the movie.  Would that story have been covered by Cronkite if it weren't for the direct action of groups like the Gay Raiders?  It's tough to say.

Segal notes that in Cronkite's later years, well after his retirement from the news business, the former anchor came out in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," of funding HIV/AIDS initiatives, and for marrriage equality. Cronkite even wanted to reflect the importance of LGBT rights in his memoirs, according to Segal, who noted that Cronkite showed a clip of the Gay Raiders disruption to show how the news affected one particular community.

Given Segal's piece, and a really excellent reflection from Karen Ocamb over at The Bilerico Project, it's pretty clear that Cronkite wore two hats: that of a journalist reporting news, and that of a humanitarian, concerned about the dignity and self-worth of the people he reported on.  Which may be one reason why everyone seems sad that he's passed: there's just too few characters in the news media today that do a good enough job melding the mind with the heart.