Four years ago, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York sponsored a conference on the state of gay and lesbian history. I was one of several presenters in a session on biography. None of us on the panel had consulted beforehand. But by the beginning of the third or fourth presentation, a common pattern had emerged, and the audience erupted with laughter. Each one of us had opened our remarks with a mixture of apology and denial: we each were not, we assured the audience, writing a biography!
At the time the motives behind the denial seemed pretty obvious to me. Most of us on the panel would have defined ourselves as activist-scholars. We saw the work we did as intellectual endeavors closely tied to a project of social change. In writing about Bayard Rustin, for instance, I was much less interested in recounting the life of an individual than I was in exploring a period of radical social movements. To see my purpose as the telling of one man’s life story seemed unworthy of the years of effort that a biography takes. Beyond that, gay and lesbian scholarship in the ’90s was falling under the sign of the queer. Its methods were those of the intellectual avant-garde while biography was as traditional and boring a genre as one could imagine. From the obligatory opening about the grandparents of the subject to the closing at the memorial service, biographies unfold in a fashion too linear and predictable for the end of the millennium.
Some time after the conference, I began to have dreams about Rustin. This invasion of my psyche gave me another angle for understanding the refusal to own up to my status as a biographer. I have cared passionately about everything that I have researched and written, but for the most part, I have been able to write history from a comfortable emotional distance. Yes, I can remember feelings of disgust as conservative gay men in the McCarthy era stole the Mattachine Society from my beloved Communist founders. But this was a short-term encounter with characters and episodes that I left behind quickly as I moved on to the next chapter in the story. Not so with Rustin. We have been living together now for most of this decade. He’s there when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. We have a long-term committed relationship, and I haven’t been able to treat his life and his experience with the kind of detachment that I’ve brought to the study of history.
In our postmodern world, where fractured selves and fluid identities somehow keep peskily asserting themselves, it is hardly original to acknowledge that biography is never just about the life whose story gets told. The experience, the concerns, the identities—the subjectivity—of the author are also always present, weaving their way into the structure, presentation, and content of the biography, even when invisible. Biography fails when this dual subjectivity goes unacknowledged—when we delude ourselves into believing that we can reconstruct another life uncontaminated by our own. But it can succeed amazingly well when the passions of the biographer are thoughtfully mobilized, when identity and difference, empathy and incomprehension, work dynamically with and against each other to produce flashes of insight and sparks of tension on the page.
Last spring, when CLAGS’s director Jill Dolan let me know that I had been selected to give this year’s Kessler lecture, it came not only as an honor, but as an opportunity. I don’t want to go so far as to claim that Rustin and I had been engaged in mortal combat. But the easy part of his life—easy at least for me—was over. As I approached the period that had most drawn me to the project in the first place, I found myself stuck in a way that is unusual for me. I was trapped in a place for which “writer’s block” is not an accurate description.
My dreams about Rustin, which had stopped long before this, offered something of a clue to what was going on. The setting was always a rattily furnished, frenetically busy activist office. The emotional tone was one of urgency. The plot line was always the same. Bayard and I were both there, he was engaged with something, and I was desperately trying to get his attention.
My reaction to the first dream was something like “Oh, Jesus. What kind of biography will I write if I’m this obsessed with pleasing my subject?” But by the third or fourth replay, it became clear that approval was not the issue. Rustin and I were in struggle. I am trying to force him to stop and pay attention to me. The urgency, the desperation is about my perception that something is terribly wrong.
All of the research I’ve done has grown from very immediate concerns. My projects have mixed political and personal interests that have struck close to home. I decided to write about the pre-Stonewall movement because of the experience of being an activist here, in New York City, in the early and mid-1970s. Those days were thrilling, but also bewildering. The excitement of reimagining and, in the process, reinventing our lives was balanced at times by a sense of being rudderless, of having not a clue as to what we were doing or where we were going, of having no history or tradition in which to anchor our activities.
Bayard Rustin captured my interest because of how his life and his career seemed to speak to issues that were absorbing me at the turn of the last decade. At the end of the 1980s, something fairly remarkable—and almost never commented upon—was happening in the lesbian and gay movement. The executive directors, the key staff, and sometimes the board leadership of many major organizations were men and women who, if asked, would have identified themselves as of the left. Yet there they were, running large community centers that provided social services and were dependent on government contracts, or at the helm of organizations that lobbied legislatures and worked through the courts.
To paraphrase a nineteenth-century homosexual emancipationist, they were radical souls trapped within the bodies of reformers. At a time when American civic culture left little room for an oppositional politics, here was a serendipitously creative effort by an assortment of movement types to experiment strategically. Women and men committed to a transformative social vision were engaging institutional structures in ways that seemed, at quick glance, as traditional as one could imagine. But look more closely, and you would have noticed a more complicated scenario. For instance, in the context of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, whose board I chaired, it seemed that insider and outsider tactics were intentionally being played off one another. Street activists and lobbyists, the Stonewall generation and its successor, were in dialogue, and were choreographing a new kind of social movement dance. They were mobilizing and insinuating, rabble-rousing and negotiating, dreaming boldly and plodding methodically, simultaneously. And it seemed to me that there weren’t many models for this kind of movement activism. Instead, the history of social movements more often reflected the tensions that erupted when self-defined radicals and reformers squared off against one another.
Meanwhile, my teaching had been evolving so that half of what I was doing was connected to the 1960s. If any of you have worked with students on the ’60s, you know how exciting the classroom can become. Undergraduates who gravitate toward these courses tend to be young women and men who are in some way at war with contemporary America. They are struggling to resist the conservative times in which we live. They are looking for any handle they can grasp to support their desire to care. They love the optimism, passion, and hopefulness of the ’60s. They love the sense of community. They love the idea that students like themselves were making history.
But pedagogy alone wasn’t drawing me to the ’60s. The trajectory of my own life was forever altered by those times. The personal transformations set in motion by the radical politics and culture of the ’60s were what made me receptive later to the message of gay liberation.
My awakening happened here at Columbia. I arrived on Morningside Heights in 1966, an overly intellectual boy from the Bronx soaked in the patriotism of Cold War Catholicism. My first week here I learned from the Protestant campus minister that God was dead. The senior who was assigned to orient me to campus life turned out to be a Dorothy Day-style Catholic who took me on retreats filled with renegade priests and nuns contemplating marriage and agonizing over the war in Vietnam. Before long I was booing Selective Service representatives who visited the campus, and had eggs thrown at me by campus jocks who were angry for different reasons. In this building I learned conversational Italian with an instructor who had us talking about student strikes in Rome and factory takeovers in Turin. Meanwhile, late at night in what passed for the campus coffeehouse, I met and talked with men who wanted men. In the corridors of Butler Library I cruised the man who became my first lover. I made my first gay friends on the sixth-floor corridor of John Jay Hall where I was living. When students shut down the university for several weeks in 1968, I divided my time between heated political discussions in the dorms, and equally heated explorations of the West Village, which I was discovering for the first time. Becoming gay and becoming a political radical are inseparably linked in my experience—and completely bound up for me with the 1960s.
If my imagination presents the’60s to me as a moment of awakening, the classroom exposed a different subterranean emotional drama. No matter how I planned the course, somehow what emerged was a story of loss and devastation, a declension narrative that took my students through the rise—and then fall—of hope and optimism. The “good ’60s” of sit-ins, freedom rides, and a war to end poverty were followed by the “bad ’60s” of burning cities, Watergate, and a war in Asia. The good ’60s are uplifting, while the bad ’60s are wrenchingly demoralizing—even as they also thrill.
This is not a narrative that I invented. It defines much of the historical writing on the 1960s, and is the story that a subset of my generation has spun out over and over and over. In my work on gay history I have certainly proven that I can disrupt other “traditional” or well-established narratives. But the means to disrupt this one was eluding me.
And so I came upon Rustin with a set of hopes and expectations. At the time I began researching his life, almost nothing historical had been written about him. Mostly he had a brief walk-on part as the man who organized the historic 1963 March on Washington. But he was the centerpiece of one chapter in a journalistic account of protest in the ’60s, and what was there intrigued me. Rustin’s life looked to be the ideal material for constructing a different narrative of the ’60s at the same time that his career resonated with the contemporary concerns of the queer movement. Rustin bridged two generations of radicalism in the United States. To the new youth activists of the late ‘50s and early ’60s, he brought the experience of having organized during the heady years of the 1930s. His activism was suffused by deep moral conviction. He wove Quaker traditions and Gandhian principles into a seamless ethical system that shaped his dealings with Southern sheriffs, American military officers, and restaurant owners in northern cities. Rustin, more than anyone, brought Gandhi to the United States. He presided over the transformation of direct action tactics from the cherished possession of a few initiates to its embrace by masses of Americans.
Of most interest to me was the way Rustin’s concerns shifted in the 1960s. He had spent almost two decades refining direct action tactics until they perfectly comported with a moral philosophy of how human beings should be treated. Now he was turning his attention to questions of strategy: how to make the tactics of protest serve a grander design of political, economic, and social revolution. At the moment when the “good ’60s” were at a crossroads, Rustin was addressing to his comrades in the peace, civil rights, and economic justice struggles a strategic manifesto that broke dramatically with the orthodoxy of these social movements.
If an interest in the 1960s drew me to Rustin, his early life is what captivated me. A biographer—or at least this biographer—could not ask for a more compelling subject. His story is heroic and harrowing. It abounds with triumphs and trials. It combines the narrative contours of the saint and the sinner.
Many young white boys today are coming of age immersed in the fictional world of Harry Potter. The stuff of prepubescent fantasies of masculine courage and strength are wizards and potions and magic wands, and broomsticks that race through the air. I, on the other hand, was nurtured on the lives of the saints. I ingested the stories of Francis of Assisi, of Ignatius Loyola, of Xavier and Augustine. They were men of passion, talent, and intellect, and they all led oversized lives. They perfectly embodied a Catholic plot line that inverted the Puritan declension narrative. These were accounts of a fall and then a rise. In Catholic storytelling, even the grisliest deaths transmuted into heroic events, victories in a cosmic struggle.
Of course, a good Catholic—and believe me, I was a good Catholic boy—reads these stories not with a sense of identification, but with yearning. The reader of these lives does not get to claim sainthood, but instead must pray and wish for the moment when the power of temptation yields to an almost gentle decision to follow a path of goodness. Though Rustin came from a different religious tradition, through the first four decades of his life one can see played out a grand struggle—between a desire for greatness and the troubles brought upon him by his sexual yearnings.
His desire for greatness was not conventional. It was not for fame or fortune or success as American society normally measures such things. It emerged and took shape gradually, as a Black adolescent of extraordinary talents came face to face with the constraints of white racism. A personal, individual decision to resist gradually evolved into something larger—to be like an Old Testament prophet leading his people to freedom.
Southeastern Pennsylvania, where Rustin grew up, resembled much of the North in the first third of this century. While it lacked the South’s solidly built edifice of Jim Crow laws and customs, it practiced segregation nonetheless. Many times the racist practices of the North must have seemed even more infuriating because of the inconsistency of their application. In Rustin’s hometown of West Chester, the elementary school was segregated, but the high school was not. The public library was open to everyone, but the gymnasium at the YMCA and the downtown soda fountain were for whites only.
Rustin excelled in high school. He won just about every honor the school offered—prizes for essays and oratory, his poetry in the school magazine, county and state honors in football, track, and tennis. His grandmother reminded readers of the local press that he was “the first colored youth to have won [the school oratory prize] in forty years.” The town’s newspaper often featured on its front page his exploits on the football field. When Bayard graduated, he was a speaker at commencement, and his yearbook shows him with a longer list of awards and activities than any other senior. But while his best friend, who was white, graduated with a scholarship to an Ivy League college, Bayard closed his triumphal high school career with no college prospects.
Despite the fame that Rustin later achieved, reconstructing the early life of an African American from a working-class family in a provincial town is not easy. The Chester County Historical Society flows over with meticulously accumulated files about white Quaker families whose doings were significant only to themselves. Not so for the Rustin clan.
And yet, despite the paucity of evidence, I know that sometime in high school, a decision formed, a moral resolve was made, never to accept from white America the restrictions it sought to impose on his person. Rustin would go where he pleased. He would claim any one he chose as his friend and intimate. He would have access to the intellectual traditions and the cultural resources that the world had to offer. In high school he enacted this determination through the friendships he formed, through his refusal to leave a restaurant that denied him service, through his challenge to the authority of his athletic coach.
Although I am framing this resolve in racial terms, because this was the context in which it evolved, Rustin was an equal opportunity flayer of tradition. “He did not suffer fools gladly,” more than one of his associates told me. Anyone or anything could become his target. Many who encountered this side of Rustin have spoken to me of his arrogance, a quality that does not sit well with a Quaker or Gandhian. I prefer to think of it as a suit of armor that protected him against the racist and, later, the homophobic assaults, that came at him early and often.
Let’s jump ahead a decade and change our locale. In the early 1940s, Rustin was living in Harlem, socializing in the Village, attending Quaker meetings on the East Side, and working on the Upper West Side. As a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian-pacifist organization whose office was located three blocks from here on Broadway, he traveled from coast to coast. He lectured and organized not only in large cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, but in the small towns of the plains, the mountain states, and the south. He was an apostle of world peace in the midst of a global war, and of racial justice before the civil rights movement commanded national headlines.
There is something about beginnings that entrances me: the beginnings of a life before its direction is firmly set, of a career before it peaks, of a social movement before it can claim many successes. How else can I explain the fact that I devoted seven years of my life to studying a homophile movement whose adherents barely exceeded in number the audience in this room! So it is with the Rustin biography. I could rummage through the 1940s forever, turning up another memory, another set of notes from one of his lectures, another clipping from a small-town newspaper.
The Rustin of those years is extraordinary. The folks who knew him then, no matter what happened in later years, recall him with awe. Norman Whitney, one of his Quaker mentors from this era, was reported to have said of Rustin that “if ever he doubted the existence of God, he always thought of Bayard.” “An electrifying presence,” another informant told me. “Such charisma that you cannot imagine,” said a third. “A prophetic type.” “There was a magic about Bayard.”
Above all, in stories that tumbled from their mouths, they talk about his courage. A courage called forth because of the decision never to collude with racism by acquiescing to its demands. Courage on a bus trip through Tennessee when he refused to sit in the back, and was dragged off alone and beaten by police. Courage as he walked down the main street of a Montana town with a white pregnant woman. Courage when he was trapped in a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, surrounded by cars filled with angry white men who were armed with clubs and throwing rocks. Courage as he stood eyeball to eyeball with a screaming Cold Warrior on Times Square during the height of the Korean War, and displayed not an impulse to defend his person.
These stories circulated through the peace and Northern civil rights movement, making Rustin seem larger than life. Meeting him, one woman told me, “was like being in the presence of history.” Young activist wannabes encountering Rustin for the first time would imitate his speech, his gait, his gestures, as if by doing so they could absorb some of his powers. And yet in all these stories is the unmistakable sense that he always remained eminently reachable—especially to the young students whom he mentored. Rustin made a commitment to social justice seem natural, an understanding of political economy accessible, and courage as something to be found inside everyone.
Twenty-plus years ago, when I interviewed Harry Hay and corresponded with Chuck Rowland about the founding of the Mattachine Society, I fell in love with each of them. As a young gay man trying, somehow, to be a gay socialist, I was touched beyond words to know that, a generation earlier, gay Communists in Los Angeles were plotting the liberation of a little boy in the Bronx who would one day be gay. Now I encounter the Rustin of the 1940s, and I yearn for him. I want him in my life. But not in the life of a fifty-something man who gives Kessler lectures, writes books, and teaches gay studies.
As I work on this biography I find myself time traveling emotionally to an earlier me. I want Rustin in the life of the fragile adolescent who came to this campus more than a generation ago and found himself confronted by unexpected challenges, without any of the usual moorings. An adolescent who needed a mentor and needed, badly, to borrow someone’s courage. I want him with me at the one and only meeting of SDS that I ever attended, across the street in Fayerweather Hall, and that I fled feeling stupid and inadequate. I want him with me as I sat down in the middle of West Forty-seventh Street, protesting a speech by the Secretary of State, praying that the charging police horses will stop before they reach me. I want him with me as I leafletted army recruits in front of the Whitehall Induction Center and an angry crowd gathered across the street. I want him as a reassuring presence during the hair-raising, ear-splitting fights with my god-and-country, Cardinal Spellman-–style Catholic parents over my decision to file as a conscientious objector. I want him near as I sat quivering in front of the members of my draft board on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, trying to persuade them to grant me CO status while they signed induction orders.
The gays-in-the-military debate of the ‘90s has obscured a different kind of military drama of a generation ago, when many young men were searching for ways to stay out of the military. Desperation was rife, and a cottage industry of draft counseling grew up to help them. I remember one teenager I counseled at the center here on campus asking me without blinking an eye how many knuckles he needed to lose in order to be draft-exempt.
Most conscientious objectors and draft resisters in those years, sexually speaking, were straight as an arrow. And my own relationship to the draft certainly had roots in a Catholicism that was getting reconfigured because of my experiences on Morningside Heights. But it was also being shaped, in ways that were both cliché-ridden and not, by my rapidly accumulating gay experiences. Warfare was revolting to the emotional sensibilities that drove me toward men. But it was also petrifying to imagine myself in the military’s domain during wartime. I couldn’t tell if it was more terrifying to imagine doing what they wanted me to do, which was to kill, or doing what I knew they didn’t want me to do. Then there were the terrors of being denied CO status—the prospect of jail, the overheated melodramatic visions of prison: not the fantasies of Jean Genet, but the violence of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which was playing in New York in those years.
A generation earlier, Rustin had embraced terrors of a magnitude that made mine seem inconsequential. Early in 1944, he surrendered himself to federal marshals to begin serving twenty-seven months for refusing to cooperate with the Selective Service system. This was in the middle of “the good war.” There was no mass movement to support his resistance. As a Quaker, he could easily have qualified for alternative service as a religious pacifist, but he chose instead to have no truck with military authority at all.
For Rustin, as a Black man, to choose prison flew in the face of the logic of African American experience. After emancipation, incarceration became the successor institution to slavery. If the plantation could no longer serve as a prison-without-walls, the prison could become a forced labor camp. State legislatures revised their criminal codes to make it easier to lock up Black men for petty offenses, and then used them on forced labor gangs. Jails were also places that Black men sometimes did not leave alive. They were institutions where racist brutality could be enacted with almost no constraints. Rustin was sent to a federal prison in Kentucky, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, at a time when the penal system enforced racial segregation.
And, of course, he was also a gay man. “Triple jeopardy” barely suggests how dynamics of race, sexuality, and political identity played themselves out during Rustin’s incarceration. He was physically attacked by white Southern inmates for his challenge to prison segregation. He was resented by guards because of the perceived moral superiority he projected. He was despised by just about everyone—including himself—for the sexual desires he could not suppress and which brought him disgrace.
Rustin’s time in prison was a nightmare of harrowing proportions. He spent long stretches in solitary confinement. He suffered through hunger strikes and forced feedings. He fought with guards. He faced the humiliation of confinement in a psychiatric prison facility. He felt the shame of his exposure as a deceitful homosexual before the community of pacifist militants. The photographic evidence from these years is striking. A picture of him taken before the start of his sentence records a sweet tranquillity which is captivating. Another taken midway through his ordeals reveals him bitter, resentful, and sullen.
Yet he came out of prison not broken but toughened, not weakened but determined, the courage he displayed earlier now so magnified that he knew he could face anything. He would have to summon up this fortitude often over the succeeding years. Cold War America was not a propitious time for a Black Gandhian militant, publicly branded a sex pervert, to be agitating for world peace, racial justice, and a socialist vision of economic democracy.
Let’s jump ahead again, this time to the mid-1960s, the moment of my awakening to a radical politics of dissent, and the historical moment that has led me to Rustin’s life in the hope that it will illuminate the mysteries of how to make change.
In the years between his wartime incarceration and the flowering of ’60s protest, Rustin and his political comrades had lived through what, for shorthand, we can call McCarthyism. The isolation that they experienced politically was compounded for Rustin by the controversies that kept erupting around his sexuality. From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, Rustin’s homosexuality rarely receded from the consciousness of the peace movement and the civil rights struggle. He was jailed for it once, and arrested a number of other times. He lost one job, and had his services rejected by organizations he loved. He found himself abandoned by one mentor, A. J. Muste, and by a man whom he had mentored, Martin Luther King, Jr. Politicians as different as Adam Clayton Powell and Strom Thurmond deployed Rustin’s sexuality to discredit him. Right-wing organizations like the American Legion, the Minutemen, and the John Birch Society seemed at times to be trailing him, making his speaking engagements flash points for homophobic panics.
But by 1964, Rustin’s world was very different. The grim years of the early Cold War and the witch hunts of the McCarthy era seemed to be in the past. Protests over atmospheric testing, intercontinental missile systems, and civilian defense drills had brought the peace movement out of the shadows. Dramatic events in the South—from the sit-ins of 1960 to the battle of Birmingham in 1963—had made racial equality the most insistent social and political issue of the times. Through the vehicle of the 1963 march on Washington, Rustin, too, was able to move out of the shadows. The success of the march made his place no longer seem tenuous or contingent.
In the expansive freedom that his newly found status brought him, Rustin experienced a season of strategic creativity. He was shaping ideas about politics and change that were new both to the civil rights movement and the peace movement. They grew out of his assessment of what the March on Washington and the civil rights movement meant for America. Despite the sarcasm of Malcolm X’s description of the march as the “farce on Washington,” Rustin believed that the march had legitimized mass action. Organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, which looked askance at collective action, had endorsed and supported it. The march also broadened the coalition of forces engaged in the struggle for racial equality by drawing to it white-dominated religious denominations and labor unions. At the same time, Rustin believed the civil rights movement was changing the whole political climate of the nation. The insistent demand for freedom and justice had broken the logjam to progressive change created by Cold War anticommunism. Rustin saw in the civil rights movement an engine powering the nation toward the kind of social and economic programs that the Johnson Administration was soon to propose.
Rustin’s strategic perspective, which he expounded in speeches, movement gatherings, and writing, revolved around a few simple propositions. The first was the belief that the historical moment was both propitious and transitory. For the first time since the 1930s, enough Americans were mobilized around calls for equality and justice that the possibilities for change were expansive. But moments like this were evanescent, and all around him Rustin could see the signs of incipient backlash. The second proposition, addressed to Black America, was that success in the freedom struggle would come only through espousal of a program of change far more substantial than the demand for legal equality; Rustin used the word “revolution” when he spoke of this. The third proposition was that revolutionary change will only come to Black America through a process of securing allies and building coalitions; it could not come through the efforts of African Americans alone. Rustin also urged movement activists to push beyond their reliance on protest tactics which, no matter how successful, kept them perpetually reproducing outsider status, and instead pressed them to directly engage the institutions and structures of the American political system. Finally, and most concretely, Rustin urged the elements of the progressive coalition he was calling for to see the Democratic Party as the institution they needed to transform.
Depending on the setting, Rustin’s proposals today can seem boring, controversial, or naive. For contemporary progressives, who regularly work with the Democratic Party, the only thing the party has going for it is that it is not the Republican party. The idea that it might be the vehicle to take us to a paradise of social and economic justice seems ludicrous. But 1999 is not 1964. When Rustin was writing, the Democratic Party was pushing past the edge of the centrist agendas that have typified two-party politics. He was saying: “Let’s push harder. Let’s make it ours. Let us be the ones to redefine its soul.”
For progressives today, especially those located in identity-based movements, the call for coalition politics has become normative. But that wasn’t always so. When Rustin was arguing for what we might call a multi-issue agenda, neither the NAACP, nor Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, nor the militants in SNCC and in CORE thought that minimum wage legislation, or a full employment bill, or the right of workers to bargain collectively belonged on the agenda of the civil rights movement. If multi-issue coalition politics now seems foundational to some of us, that conviction pays tribute to the power of Rustin’s historical legacy, whether we know it or not.
And yet, at the same time, these ideas are still controversial and are fought over every day. They are fought out in a gay movement that seems to have no trouble seeing that the military exclusion policy is a gay issue, but that can’t seem to grasp, for instance, that the demonization of immigrants damages to the core the well-being of our community.
In proposing this course correction, Rustin was implicitly arguing against several distinct, but powerfully related, strands of thought in the world of American dissent. He was rejecting romanticized leftist notions of a seizure of the state, a moment of dramatic crisis when control over the levers of power shifts suddenly and decisively. He was rejecting a long tradition of American perfectionism that privileged the unbending adherence to absolute moral principle, that defined being right as more important than—and at odds with—being effective. He was rejecting a culture of marginality that took pride in being on the outside, one in which radical dissenters could not imagine themselves doing anything other than protest. He was rejecting the single-issue politics that characterized much of the peace and civil rights movements in this era.
Despite the fact that historians rewrite history all the time, the trajectory of past events doesn’t shift simply because we find new ways of looking at them. But as I investigated Rustin’s life, there was something tremendously comforting about the way he was trying to rethink radical politics in the heat of struggle. Just when these times were at the cusp of shifting from the “good ’60s” to the “bad ’60s,” Rustin was proposing a strategic reevaluation that promised to build rather than fracture an inchoate progressive coalition. Rustin was challenging the orthodoxy of his political world. He was opening a door to let me revisit what happened in the ’60s. He was making his biographer happy, satisfied, and fulfilled.
But subjects can’t be counted on to cooperate so neatly with their biographer’s wishes. They especially can’t be counted on when those wishes are embedded in subterranean veins of emotion. I said at the beginning of this talk that the life of the biographer inevitably informs the biography he or she writes. Let me take that one step further. For me, the work of biography has become most difficult where my subject’s history most challenges the unexamined assumptions of my own life. I have gotten stuck in the places where Rustin’s life and mine are in conflict. And nowhere is this clearer than in relation to the war in Vietnam.
From what I’ve said earlier, it must be abundantly clear that the antiwar movement served as my coming of age ritual. It figures as powerfully in my self-definition as my sexual coming out in those same years. In the three decades since then, I have never seen a need to look with detachment at the antiwar movement and reevaluate it. It has always seemed self-evident that the only questions to ask were whether we all worked tirelessly enough to end that abomination, and whether more effort would have brought more results sooner.
Scan the key public events associated with Vietnam era protests—scan the antiwar movement’s greatest hits—and you will not see the figure of Bayard Rustin. The pacifist who chose jail as D-Day was approaching in 1944 was not on the platform in front of the United Nations in April 1967 when Martin Luther King gave an impassioned speech against the war; he was not present at the confrontation at the Pentagon in October 1967; he did not participate in the moratorium protests in 1969; he was not engaged with the turmoil unleashed by the American invasion of Cambodia.
To hear some of my informants tell it, Rustin was more than absent from these events. The pain and resentment of what long-time pacifists experienced as his apostasy during the Vietnam era have transmuted over time into a belief that he actively supported the war. With the anger over his defection has come a search for explanations. I’ve been told that he became the paid help of the AFL-CIO labor aristocracy. I’ve been told that he became a captive of the Shachtmanites, a tiny group of leftists with roots in the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s. I’ve been told that he was in the thrall of a young former lover, Tom Kahn. I’ve been told that he became a shill of the CIA.
How they’ve come to make and believe these claims is a whole other story about how the American left constructs identities and exclusions. Their claims evoke underground strands of class, race, and sexual prejudices that infected the peace movement of these decades. For now let me do the short response: it’s not true that Rustin supported the war. In fact, in 1965, as opposition to the war began to crystallize, Rustin was articulating a vigorous pacifist response. At a major rally in Madison Square Garden, Rustin gave a speech that one member of the audience described as “by far the most inspired, principled denunciation of our foreign policy. . . . It brought sharply into focus the connections between the struggle for civil rights and the need for an end to militarist actions abroad.” During that summer and fall, he worked closely with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to craft an antiwar stance for King whose stature made his voice particularly critical for the peace movement. But as the war escalated, and the antiwar movement mushroomed, Rustin distanced himself from it.
Rustin’s reservations came in a complicated package. Some of them were framed in purely moral terms. The pacifism that he and others tried to craft in the 1940s blended Gandhi and Jesus in ways that made means and ends, words and actions, inseparable. If the evil of violence was that it ruptured the wholeness of the human community, opposition to violence always had to repair the damage. Respect for the perpetrator was as important as the demand to stop the violence. Motive and process were as critical as outcome. These were the beliefs that shaped Rustin’s pacifist agitation in the ’40s, and his insinuation of nonviolence into the heart of the civil rights movement in the ‘50s.
Rustin looked at the antiwar movement after 1965, and saw it polluted by an anti-American rhetoric. He saw it morally corrupted by its endorsement of the violence of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam. He saw a movement compromised by the unmediated rage of its leaders and participants, a movement that had little in common with the pacifism that once made him choose jail.
Rustin had another beef with the antiwar movement. He objected mightily to its demonization of Lyndon Johnson and to its insistence that the war, and nothing else, should determine one’s stance toward the Johnson administration. Make Johnson and American liberals the enemy, Rustin warned, and support for changing the racial status quo would unravel. Support for a social and economic agenda that uprooted inequality would evaporate. Rustin was keenly attuned to history. He knew the difference it made that, under Lyndon Johnson, for the first time since Reconstruction, the power of the federal government was wielded on behalf of Black Americans. He knew how fragile and tenuous such commitments could be. And he was not willing to aid and abet a conservative backlash that was waiting for any opportunity.
Of course, these were the very arguments that got Rustin into trouble. They clinched, for his former comrades, the belief that he had sold his soul for a mess of pottage, for invitations to White House meetings and presidential pens from legislative signings. But, though Rustin himself often framed his comments in the language of pragmatic politics, his views rested on a moral basis—his insistence that one treat opponents respectfully, that criticism and support could be combined, that pathways to communication must always remain open.
I, too, react viscerally against what Rustin had to say about the antiwar movement. The emotionalism of those years was intense. A common chant at antiwar demonstrations was “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” I hear Rustin’s nitpicking criticisms of the antiwar movement and I want to tell him to get over it: “Don’t you know what’s going on over there?” I hear his call for critical support of the Johnson Administration and I want to lecture him about the police power of the state: “Don’t you know what’s going on over here?” With the self-righteous certainty of a new convert to radical politics, I want to explain the world to a man who had endured Northern and Southern racism, who had seen first hand the effects of colonization in Africa and Asia, and whose encounters with homophobia make life since Stonewall a cake walk.
Except in my dreams, these conversations can never happen. But if I had to imaginatively construct what he might have said, I can almost hear the clipped diction, tinged with the arrogance that sometimes leaked from him in political debates:
“Don’t you think it odd,” he might say, “that the American war which produced the most vigorous sustained opposition in the nation’s history, lasted longer than any other American war? Do you think that perhaps the way you opposed the war might have subverted your own goals? Do you take no responsibility for the election of Richard Nixon in 1968? Do you not see that while you were ranting and raving outside the citadels of power, while you were vilifying Lyndon Johnson, political demons you could barely imagine where plotting a slow but systematic rise to power? Do you not see that, a generation later, we are still living with the political results of your self-righteous emotionalism?”
Contrary to what you might be thinking, I’m not especially trying to demonstrate that Bayard Rustin was correct. I’m not trying to transform myself into his defender. I still don’t know what I think about all this, and I will only find out what I think as I write this period in his life.
I do know that Rustin’s career offers as much to chew on about our own times as it does about the ’60s. Rustin challenges us to scrutinize orthodoxy in whatever form we encounter, or defend, it. He challenges us to recognize the emptiness of rhetorical militancy. He challenges us to take the call for coalition seriously, and apply it in ways that make many leftists, and progressives, uncomfortable. He asks us to discipline our untamed emotions, not so that we become like unfeeling robots, but so that our politics are shaped by critical thinking. He insists that there is a universalism that can flatten the differences of identity, and that this universalism will be found on a field of justice.
I also know that the opportunity to deliver this year’s Kessler lecture has pushed the envelope for me—for which I thank you. Wrestling with this lecture has allowed me to discard emotional baggage that stood between me and an open-ended appraisal of Rustin’s life. It has made it much more likely that the biography I finish will be about him, and not about me.
And the wrestling, so far, has been very much worth it. For in this life which began obscurely in a small Pennsylvania town, almost a century ago, is a wealth of wisdom and courage and moral integrity that deserves transmission as Bayard Rustin’s legacy to us.
NOTES
1. References in this lecture to Columbia University reflect the fact that the 1999 Kessler Lecture was held on the Columbia University campus, at the Casa Italiana.