I'm Eric Marcus and this is making gay history. Tom Cassidy was a total alpha male, athletic smart in charge and proud of the way

he'd worked his way to the top despite growing up poor in a Boston housing project.

His alcoholic abusive father abandoned the family when Tom was two and a half.

Tom earned a football scholarship to the University of Massachusetts,

and after his freshman year, muscled his way into Bowdoin,

an elite liberal arts college in Maine.

He followed four years there with joint master's degrees

in business and journalism at Columbia

University.

And then he set his sights on TV journalism.

By 1983, Tom was a rising star at the three-year-old cable news network, where he was a business anchor

and host of CNN's Pinnacle Interview Series. He had status, respect, and financial security,

and he loved his job, even though that meant hiding the fact he was gay.

Back then, almost all gay people who worked in journalism and virtually everyone who worked

in front of the camera kept their private lives, very private.

Tom's peak professional moment came on October 19, 1987 when he anchored CNN's coverage of the Black Monday crash

as stock markets around the world plummeted.

It was the single largest percentage drop for the Dow Jones Industrial Average in its history,

and Tom provided a calm steady voice on a day when both were in short supply. It was also the day he found out he was HIV positive.

So here's the scene. It's the fall of 1990. I arrive on the 20th floor of CNN's

headquarters in New York City. The newsroom is buzzing. I'm escorted to Tom's

private office by an assistant. He steps from behind his desk and shakes my hand, which disappears into his.

...