The latest book by retired NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, is getting a loud HISSSSS from Frank Kameny, often referred to as one of the founding fathers of the modern gay rights movement.

The book focuses on the baby boomer generation. It is a follow up to Brokaw's earlier, highly successful volume, The Greatest Generation, which focused on those who had fought in World War II.

In a November 26 letter to Brokaw and his publisher, Random House, Kameny wrote "with no little indignation at the total absence of any slightest allusion to the gay movement for civil equality. ... You have 'de-gayed' the entire decade."

"Your book simply deletes the momentous events of that decade which led to the vastly altered and improved status of gays in our culture today," he wrote. "... 'Voices of the Sixties'??? One does not hear even one single gay voice in your book. The silence is complete and deafening."

Kameny, 82, recounted numerous events throughout the decade that were not mentioned in Brokaw's book – from the lawsuits against U.S. Civil Service policy that banned gays from federal employment to pickets at the White House to the slow repeal of state sodomy statutes to efforts to get the American Psychiatric Association to reclassify homosexuality as a mental illness to the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 – many of which Kameny participated in and often led.

Kameny's contribution to that era was recognized by the Smithsonian Institution earlier this fall when picket signs from a White House protest in the 1960s were put on display.

The three-page epistle closed with, "Mr. Brokaw, I could go on, but this should be sufficient to make my point. The whole thing is deeply insulting. As I said, you have de-gayed an entire generation. For shame, for shame, for shame. You owe an abject public apology to the entire gay community. I demand it; we expect it."

"Gay is Good. You are not."

A spokeswoman for Random House did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

In an interview with CNN's Howard Kurtz this week, Brokaw defended his decision, maintaining that the gay rights movement started "slightly later."

"It lifted off during that time and I had to make some choices about what I was going to concentrate on. The big issues were the anti-war movement, the counterculture."