PINNICAL DAZZLE SERIES

You can read about Paul and the series here. In the same year that Tom came out about his AIDS diagnosis, a former KGO-TV reporter in San Francisco, Paul Wynne, sold his one-time employer on the idea of producing a weekly chronicle of his life as an AIDS patient. Guest lecturers have included Tom’s former boss Lou Dobbs, NPR’s Linda Wertheimer, and David Brooks of the New York Times. Tom left money in his will to Bowdoin College to establish the Tom Cassidy Lectureship in journalism, which continues to this day. Tom Cassidy at rowing regatta, Princeton, New Jersey, 1971. The New York Times published Tom’s obituary on May 29, 1991. You can find Tom Cassidy’s oral history in Eric Marcus’s book Making Gay History. Tom’s appearance in the WCBS-TV three-part television series led to many additional media interviews, including this article in People magazine. To learn more about Tom Cassidy and the AIDS epidemic, please have a look at the resources, links, and photographs that follow below. When gay people die of AIDS, the whole society is so much poorer…” I also thought that maybe I could help show people that AIDS is not just a gay problem. I wanted them to know that a favorite of theirs could get this disease-and, secondarily, that he happened to be gay.

PINNICAL DAZZLE TV

I could make the public understand that some of their TV newsmen are gay and sick… Everyone identified me as one of the good guys, and there are millions of people who have seen me on television. I really wanted to make a political statement as a gay person, as well as an AIDS patient… I thought I could make AIDS patients feel better. He decided to bring his experience into the living rooms of viewers through a three-part television series produced by journalist Mike Taibbi for WCBS-TV, New York City’s CBS affiliate.Īs Tom told MGH host Eric Marcus in his 1990 interview, “I wanted to do some good. Unlike some gay men diagnosed with AIDS whose high-profile careers led them to disappear from public when they became seriously ill, Tom Cassidy chose the opposite course. And then he found out he was going to die.

PINNICAL DAZZLE PROFESSIONAL

As he built his career from local TV reporter to CNN business news anchor and host of that network’s “Pinnacle” series, Tom kept his gay life and his professional life strictly separate.

Tom Cassidy knew the rules of the closet.

Because AIDS was inextricably tied to gay men-the vast majority of those who were struck down by the disease in the United States during this time were gay men-tens of thousands were forced out of the closet as they sickened and died. Episode Notesįor the first decade-and-a-half of the AIDS epidemic, before there were effective treatments, AIDS rewrote the unwritten rules of the closet. Tom Cassidy on the set at CNN, mid-1980s.

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