Rustin, the new film about civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin, serves a dual purpose. It is both a blueprint for aspiring organizers who reach for the stars and a cautionary tale for movement leaders. As a blueprint, we see Rustin in his late 40s, at the height of his powers, the ultimate auteur organizer. He argues, he charms, he coaches, he compels. As a Black gay man, I know what it’s like to move so fast, to speak so quickly, hoping that racism and homophobia will never catch me. Which is why watching Bayard Rustin on screen is such a revelation. We need not be psychic to know that fighting the machine will always come at an extraordinary cost; all we need to do is read into the ashes of history.
Never a household name, Rustin may have been left out of the textbooks, but there were those of us who always remembered. Generation after generation of Black LGBTQIA+ activists have continued to find inspiration and wisdom in his legacy, which is a testament to his continuing relevance. I first learned about his work co-organizing the 1963 March on Washington, among other accomplishments, through the scholarship of Black lesbian feminist author and activist Barbara Smith when I was in college. So it’s a bit surreal, years later, to see his story garner more widespread attention. In 2023, I believe his legacy still speaks to us, as we organize, protest, and mobilize along the path he helped pave.
Directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo in the title role, the film presents the moral strength of Rustin’s commitment to nonviolent protest without missing his political brilliance. It serves, in part, as a counter narrative, if not clapback, to the T-shirt that came out a few years ago with these words printed on it: “I am not my ancestors. Sincerely, these hands.”
Nonviolent protest wasn’t just about the silent dignity of the Black bodies under attack, but about shattering the monstrous violence of white supremacy through the shaping of public consciousness to strengthen political will. In our current social media age, there have been courageous community journalists who have documented the horrors of white supremacy at great personal risk to accomplish the same goal: The protests and resistance that erupted in the aftermath of us bearing witness to footage of the gruesome murder of George Floyd come to mind. This strategy shares a lineage with the Civil Rights era, imbuing a historical biopic like Rustin with contemporary urgency.
By nature of its star and subject, the film requires us to grapple with Bayard Rustin as a Black gay man. His line, “On the day that I was born Black, I was also born a homosexual,” can be seen as a kind of echo of James Baldwin, another great civil rights figure and writer. Baldwin was once asked: “Now, when you were starting out as a writer, you were Black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have said to yourself, ‘Gee how disadvantaged can I get?” To which Baldwin quipped, “Oh no. I thought I hit the jackpot,” going on to say, “You had to find a way to use it.” Baldwin, like Rustin, and those of us working through an intersectional racial justice lens, understand what it means to use “it.” The “it” being the structural violence we experience and the oppression we navigate, the anti-Black and anti-LGBTQIA+ hate we survive and defy.
The film also displays Rustin’s humanity, not at the expense of his identity, but because of it. We get glimpses of his romantic life: His lover, a fictional character named Elias (Johnny Ramey), is a married minister. One wonders if this morally if not politically questionable choice is in part a function of loneliness. The implication: One might be admired, but never truly loved, and if nothing else, love is survival. And Rustin needed ways to survive, as he pirouetted down a political tightrope, where his transparency was also a vulnerability.
Many leaders wore masks, yet Rustin seemed incapable of hiding in plain sight. He was a man who wore the weight of history, not just on his shoulders, but on his face, flashing his missing teeth as a kind of trophy. His openness presented a conundrum for other Civil Rights-era leaders, many of whom allied with Rustin as a pragmatic political choice. Certainly, there was always palace intrigue at play within civil rights organizations. And yet the tireless support of Rustin’s colleague A. Philip Randolph, as depicted in the film, anticipates Black gay writer Joseph Beam's bold aphorism: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the eighties,” which applies just as meaningfully to political friendship as it does to romantic and sexual love — and which holds just as true today as it did back in the ’60s or the ’80s.
A lesson that the film does not offer as clearly, however, is how to grieve. Grief, as much as joy, is connected to Black LGBTQIA+ experience, and more often than not becomes an occupational hazard for leadership. Witnessing heroic characters confront obstacles on the screen and come out victorious may be emotionally satisfying. But it starves us of the deeper meaning of resisting oppression, which is that resilience and survival always come with some level of ambivalence. When you’re under attack, and your life is on the frontlines of movement work, despair can feel more consistent than joy. Even the most resilient among us may struggle with endurance, while being radically committed to survival.
Of the many things the film gets right, and what we must extract from it most of all, is that any narrative change project worth anything must by necessity reckon with history. The story isn’t just about how Rustin, as a Black gay man against all odds, organized the March on Washington. It’s about how each generation of racial justice leaders must confront white supremacy, finding power in building, advancing, and innovating on that which came before us.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.