Rustin (2023): the queer man behind the March on Washington

We usually hear that behind every great man there is always a great woman. But there are cases in which, behind a great man, there are other great men, whose names were almost completely erased from History. When we talk about the huge march in the context of the Civil Rights movement in Washington in 1963, we quickly think about its leader, Martin Luther King. But what evades us is the name Bayard Rustin, the real man behind the march. A new Netflix movie has arrived to shine a light on Rustin’s story — and the true history of a milestone moment.

A long time adept of protesting without the use of violence, Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo) imagines in 1963 the biggest peaceful protest ever seen in the USA. Advised by his friend Ella Baker (Audra McDonald), he goes after Martin Luther King (Aml Ameen), an old friend with whom he had a misunderstanding three years before because of a rumor. Together again, they will have two months to make the mythical march a reality.

The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Collored People), having as its head at the time Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock, wrongly cast in a role for a much older man), prefers not to use marches to fight for black people’s rights. Their focus is conquering rights through courtroom arguments, including one that was successful, almost a decade earlier, at the Supreme Court. They also prefer to wait for the Congress and the president to move towards introducing bills to guarantee more rights, ignoring the fact that to wait for the system to change from the inside without fighting is the secret for the failure of any movement.

One of Rustin’s workmates affirms, convinced of it, that he “became” homosexual because he was mad at his parents, who had abandoned him. “To choose” to love someone from the same gender would be a way for Rustin to hurt and punish his absent parents. The work there doesn’t last long, because Rustin knows the truth, a truth he makes clear to his friend Martin: “On the day that I was born black, I was also born a homosexual.”

The fact that Rustin was a homosexual didn’t escape from his enemies, who say he is a communist and a pervert. The “perversion” was even condemned by the police, in 1952, when Rustin was arrested for engaging in oral sex in a car with other two men. It could be an hypothesis that Rustin preferred to do his work backstage in the movements he took part in because he was afraid he could be persecuted because of his sexual orientation.

Doctor Anna Hedgeman (CCH Pounder) complains, and she is right to do this, that there aren’t any women among the leaders chosen to make speeches at the march. Beyond the always remembered Rosa Parks and the now-recognized Mamie Till-Bradley — whose name became more well-known after the film “Till”, from 2022 — there were many women who, like Bayard Rustin, worked backstage organizing marches and other protests in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of them were harassed and suffered prejudice, but didn’t stop their important work.

Colman Domingo was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for playing Bayard Rustin. His work in biopics doesn’t stop here: besides playing Joe Jackson in an upcoming film about Michael Jackson’s life, Colman Domingo also intends to direct and star in a Nat King Cole biopic.

“Rustin” has as producers Barack and Michelle Obama. It was Obama who awarded, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bayard Rustin in 2013, fifty years after the march. Since he left the presidency, Obama has concentrated his efforts on the production company Higher Ground, responsible for podcasts, movies, TV shows and several documentaries, including one that won the Oscar.

The hypothesis that Bayard Rustin’s name was almost erased from history because of his sexual orientation is a valid one. But in the past decades he has been rediscovered and recognized. There are already several schools in the USA called Bayard Rustin, and luckily for us there is now a good movie about him, a movie that, although following the regular pathway of biopics about only a part of the subject’s life, still inspires and informs.