But I worry. Even as I realize these thoughts and impressions are my stream, my cooling water, I worry that this place, this blog is not accessible.
We speak about the 'left', 'those on the left', 'leftists' as though this is a specific and defined point, rather than a whole region of identity.
There are many lefts, like the arms of the Hindu god Vishnu, we all swirl and blurr into one. But this is, of course, an illusion.
And when I descend into the specific, (the black, the gay, the whatever) I risk narrowing the ‘accessibility’ of this blog. ‘Accessibility’ here, as elsewhere, means the ability of this blog to be read and enjoyed by ‘everyone’ ‘everywhere.’
I have never seen how this could ever be possible but the ‘accessible’ and the ‘universal’ is what every artist is told, in one way or another, that they should strive for. The consequence of inaccessible, is people’s failure to ‘get it.’
If people don’t ‘get it’ then where would I be?
Well, in much the same place I started, silent, alone, angry and bereft of language. At least, I reason, in speaking my own language I can be understood by myself which is, at least, as important as being understood by anyone else.
So, as the adage goes, 'Everything ain’t for everybody.' And maybe this blog falls under that heading. And even if it does, that doesn’t mean it can’t do service for someone, even if that someone is me 10 years in the past, a young adult searching for meaning, a young man looking for his reflection, that would be enough.
This meditation is the preface to, perhaps, one of the most important projects in my young life: a selected bibliography of scholarly and literary work by black gay men. I take up this project because we are easy and yet hard to find, because we are spread out, because we are unique, because we are angry, self-loving and self-hating, because we straddle so many fences and borderlines and still find reasons to smile, because I have to hike way uptown, or to the Bronx, to find Joseph Beam’s In the Life, or find the time to descend into the non-circulating special collection of the Public Library on Forty-Second Street to find myself, because we are hidden, because we are silent, because we are worth knowing.
I bet you didn't know that a black gay man was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose work under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., raised the call for African-American equality to fever pitch, exemplified by King's 'I Have A Dream' speech.
His name was Bayard Rustin. Reared in western Pennsylvania and in both Quaker and AME traditions, Rustin played a fundamental role in the work of The Society of Friends, the Communist Party of the United States of America and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), all of whom had enormous stake in the struggles for equality undertaken by the African-American community in the United States in the mid-20th century.
Because Rustin was, and remained, candid about his (homo)sexuality, the establishment African-American political leadership worried Rustin's sexuality and former Communist leanings would 'undermine' the US Civil Rights movement. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African-American man elected to the US House of Representatives from New York, forced Rustin to resign from the SCLC by threatening to discuss a 'morals' charge Rustin had plead guilty to in California. This maneuver ousted Rustin from a social justice organization he was instrumental in creating.
An FBI photo of Rustin talking with Dr. King while in the tub, obtained and publicized by Senator Strom Thurmond, led to allegations that King's and Rustin's relationship was (homo)sexual. Both men vehemently denied the allegations but Roy Wilkins, then chairman of the NAACP, wanted Rustin' to receive no credit for organizing the March on Washington.
Thus Bayard Rustin's name was, has been and continues to be stricken from the course of American history.
I did no reports on him during Sunday School in February. Nor do I hear Bayard Rustin trivia announced on R&B stations during Black History Month. I did not hear about him in my US History classes. I could be paranoid but I detect a note of conspiracy between rather unlikely bedfellows.
Bayard talks with youngsters before a demonstration.
What is perhaps most remarkable of all is that Rustin continued to be a voice for African-American equality after the historic march and for gay and lesbian equality during the latter part of the 20th century until his death in 1987, despite being variously marginalized by both the African-American and gay communities.
In many ways the experience of Rustin as gay person of color presages our current difficulties discarding the fallacy of a single and fixed identities. The failure to attend various overlapping regions, border zones and pluralities, cultural, sexual, racial, political and otherwise, continues to stymie legitimate attempts to transform our societies into more just and equitable places to live.
Multiplicities nearly always encompass our blind spots, our afterthoughts: those things which are not immediately, if ever, considered in social justice thinking. In fact, these blind spots are often indexes of how we, those who be the world-changers, must also change in order to effect the healing we all desperately need and claim to want.
To those who are one thing and many things; to those do not know; to those who refuse to know; to those who take some sustenance in this profile of courage.
And to Bayard Rustin: this is for you.
For further reading by or about Bayard Rustin see the titles below:
- Down The Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1971- From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement
New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1965- Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003
