BAYARD RUSTIN: A Legacy of Protest and Politics surveys a life lived in resistance, & LOST PROPHET: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, biography of his gayness

BAYARD RUSTIN: A Legacy of Protest and Politics
MICHAEL G. LONG (editor)
NYU Press
$27.95 harcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Celebrates the life and legacy of Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

While we can all recall images of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin.

This was far from Rustin’s first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King by helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolent resistance. Rustin’s legacy touches many areas of contemporary life—from civil resistance to violent uprisings, democracy to socialism, and criminal justice reform to war resistance.

Despite these achievements, Rustin was often relegated to the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. With expansive, searching, and sometimes critical essays from a range of esteemed writers—including Rustin’s own partner, Walter Naegle—this volume draws a full picture of Bayard a gay, pacifist, socialist political radical who changed the course of US history and set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from LGBTQ+ Pride to Black Lives Matter.

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My Review: Too long ignored for being queer and open about it, the life of a Quaker resistor of Wrong and Wickedness was a complicated one. I wish this collection of essays had been edited to reduce the repetition of basic information about him, but appreciate that it was done at all.

I imagine the experience of being friends with Bayard Rustin was pretty fraught...his stadards were very high and his judgments usually spot-on, which combination is uncomfortable for himself and others. This reality played itself out in his double invisibility in gay-rights circles: Blackness and religious belief. He felt he wasn't needed or wanted in that world so, until he fell in love with Walter Naegle at 65, he focused on Black liberation and didn't involve himself in gay rights. The sad part to me is that the man was ahead of his time in his politics, his morals, and his social beliefs, and still deeply internalized both homophobia and misogyny.

If you're utterly unfamiliar with Rustin, this collection of essays will fill you in. Read the way any collection should be, piece by piece over time, the cumulative effect is to bring an unjustly underknown man's contributions to the best things that happened in the era of Civil Rights expansion to light. He is, be aware, not critically examined in these essays. Part three of the collection, "What Rustin Means to Me," is probably my favorite to read because the legacy of this upright, intelligent, unsparing actor on the public stage is dealt with by those whom he has inspired. I suppose anyone who stood up for an unpopular belief because it was right to do so can't hope for a better legacy.

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LOST PROPHET: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
JOHN D'EMILIO
The Free Press
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Bayard Rustin is one of the most important figures in the history of the American civil rights movement. Before Martin Luther King, before Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America's consciousness. A teacher to King, an international apostle of peace, and the organizer of the famous 1963 March on Washington, he brought Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence to America and helped launch the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has been largely erased by history, in part because he was an African American homosexual. Acclaimed historian John D'Emilio tells the full and remarkable story of Rustin's intertwined lives: his pioneering and public person and his oblique and stigmatized private self.

It was in the tumultuous 1930s that Bayard Rustin came of age, getting his first lessons in politics through the Communist Party and the unrest of the Great Depression. A Quaker and a radical pacifist, he went to prison for refusing to serve in World War II, only to suffer a sexual scandal. His mentor, the great pacifist A. J. Muste, wrote to him, "You were capable of making the 'mistake' of thinking that you could be the leader in a revolution...at the same time that you were a weakling in an extreme degree and engaged in practices for which there was no justification."

Freed from prison after the war, Rustin threw himself into the early campaigns of the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements until an arrest for sodomy nearly destroyed his career. Many close colleagues and friends abandoned him. For years after, Rustin assumed a less public role even though his influence was everywhere. Rustin mentored a young and inexperienced Martin Luther King in the use of nonviolence. He planned strategy for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until Congressman Adam Clayton Powell threatened to spread a rumor that King and Rustin were lovers. Not until Rustin's crowning achievement as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington would he finally emerge from the shadows that homophobia cast over his career. Rustin remained until his death in 1987 committed to the causes of world peace, racial equality, and economic justice.

Based on more than a decade of archival research and interviews with dozens of surviving friends and colleagues of Rustin's, Lost Prophet is a triumph. Rustin emerges as a hero of the black freedom struggle and a singularly important figure in the lost gay history of the mid-twentieth century. John D'Emilio's compelling narrative rescues a forgotten figure and brings alive a time of great hope and great tragedy in the not-so-distant past.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: So, after deciding that I wanted a biography of the complex gay man Bayard Rustin while reading essays about him, I found this hefty tome. I love library lending because I couldn't justify spending full price on a book I expected to admire not like when my $12 investment represents 5% of my total monthly spending power.

I'm going to buy it for myself now because I want to support this historian whose stylish writing and tireless researching of a crucial figure in gay and Black history has enriched my life.


Rustin's Quaker upbringing strongly influenced his social-justice compass and his anti-violence stance. He refused to serve any military or enabling function in World War II, serving instead jail time for following his conscience. He was consistently anti-war and anti-colonialist in his world view, modeling his resistance to them on Mohandas K. Gandhi's successful anti-British actions in India. Rustin, and mentor A. Philip Randolph, founder and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, planned a mass march on Washington in 1941 for the same goals that the 1963 event had (Jobs and Justice) but called it off because President Roosevelt asked them to. The brink of war was used as an excuse to delay urgent public action...as always...but both men were active in making sure the March on Washington took place, at last, in 1963. We remember it mostly for assassinated leader Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s rousing and glorious "I Have A Dream" speech. If, like most, you've only ever seen the highlight reel version, go treat yourself to the entire seventeen and a half minutes at the link. But Randolph, responding to ongoing scurrilous efforts to paint MLK and Rustin as sexual lovers not friends, really shone in his ringing defense of Rustin's involvement as the leader and backstage manager of this titanic event that kickstarted so many changes in US society: "Bayard Rustin IS the March on Washington." He faced down, on behalf of his gay friend and fellow life-long resistor of social and political injustice, the President of the USA, J. Edgar Hoover ofthe FBI...arguably the more powerful of the two men...and Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem's immensely influential Congressman, who coveted Rustin's control and directive roles.

The over five hundred pages of this story aren't a chore to read. The reason is that Author D'Emilio made the effort to make it a story. Many, if not most, biographers are excellent researchers and fans of their subjects; fewer wre storytellers with an eye for the illustrative anecdote. My best example is the moment when, during a public meeting after the Montgomery, Ala., church bombing killed four little girls, Rustin took those loudly calling for a violent response to task by accusing them of proposing to accomplish nothing.

That is some kind of drama, folks, and it perfectly encapsulates a lifetime of Rustin's moral and political learning.
What leads me to talk about this lost prophet, buried in homophobic judgment, in connection with the essays just published about him, is the fact that Rustin had so much internal-to-the-struggle opposition to cope with that his never hidden, never centered homosexuality was never the focus of his resistance to power's abuses. Bear in mind that a known, avowed homosexual Black man was principally responsible for the community activism model and playbooks that succeeded in achieving the end of the legal fig-leaf of Jim Crow laws in the US. Could he have done the same had he set his sights on axhieving the same for queer folk, when the DSM-II of NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT still defined homosexuality as a mental illness, and the Feds led by Hoover had barely stopped the Lavender Scare? During the latter events, do not ignore, Rustin was a victim and STILL LED THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON!

Sorry. The awfulness of his treatment during his life by his fellow Quakers and Christians, and after his death by literally everyone simply forgetting he existed, lead me to the shouting.

The man himself noted that liberals couldn't hate Blacks and Latinos anymore, but they sure could—and did—hate fags. Realist that he was, he spent his life of organizing, resisting, and inspiring in the fields where he could do the most good. Admirably clear-sighted and honestly, to me at least, movingly generous of spirit of him not to insist on perfection but work for better. Events have proven his approach was effective for QUILTBAG folk as much as for ethnic minorities.

I salute author D'Emilio for putting in the hard labor and the gigantic energy to create this readable, enjoyable story of an important and ignored man, his life and his loves and his legacy. A perfect accompaniment to Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics.

BI: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Genderqueer Youth & THE TRAGEDY OF HETEROSEXUALTY & BI: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

BI: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Genderqueer Youth
RITCH C. SAVIN-WILLIAMS
NYU Press
$28.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3* of five

Support Isaac! watch Heartstopper season 2 and read along on his journey into asexuality/aromantic selfhood.

The Publisher Says: What bisexual youth can tell us about today’s gender and sexual identities

Despite the increasing visibility of LGBTQ people in American culture, our understanding of bisexuality—perhaps one of the least visible sexual orientations—remains superficial at best. Yet five times as many people identify as bisexual than as gay or lesbian, and, if we were to include the many bisexual people who remain hidden from sight, including those who simultaneously identify as pansexual, fluid, genderqueer, and no label, as much as 25 percent of the population is estimated to be bisexual.

In Bi, Ritch C. Savin-Williams brings bisexuality out of the shadows, particularly as Gen Z and millennial youth and young adults increasingly reject traditional sexual labels altogether. Drawing on interviews with bisexual youth from a range of racial, ethnic, and social class groups, he reveals to us how bisexuals define their own sexual orientation and experiences—in their own words. Savin-Williams shows how and why people might identify as bisexual as a result of their biology or upbringing; as a bridge or transition to something else; as a consequence of their curiosity; or for a range of other equally valid reasons.

Savin-Williams provides an important new understanding of bisexuality as an orientation, behavior, and identity. Bi shows us that bisexuality is seen and embraced as a valid sexual identity more than ever before, giving us timely and much-needed insight into the complex, fascinating experiences of bisexual youth themselves.

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My Review: I'm not sure that the author is clear on some things that strongly impact the efficacy of this read. It seems, at some points, as though Author Savin-Williams is using "genderqueer" as a sexual orientation; at others, he clearly shows that he understands this (and nonbinary) are genders which might or might not impact another person's sexual interest in the person whose gender is expressed that way. Also, bisexuality is treated as a binary of sex, not in any way impacted by gender expression. I do not think this is the case, or at least it hasn't been in my own experience.

These are not small matters. But, in reading the case studies and interviews of young people who identify in many and various ways, these aren't issues on which they experience any doubt or confusion. I suppose this is understandable, as the author's prose isn't hugely dry or eye-wateringly dense; it is, nonetheless, presenting the author's understanding of the topic. That can get tangled in a reader's mind unless the very greatest possible care is taken to express distinctions with an absolute minimum of ambiguity. This editorial care felt inadequate to this reader, admittedly quite old and joyously binary. I might simply have missed something.

I asked for this DRC because I wanted a book to share with my grands. I was hoping, because it's focused on the youth of the twenty-first century, that it would be readable by those youth. It's not a great choice, I'm sad to say. I wouldn't give it to any of them, especially not my transmasc grandchild, because too often I felt Savin-Williams was dismissing the profiled person's self-definition by bringing all focus off gender and placing the emphasis on biological sex.

A completely-outside-the-author's-control cavil is that the DRC is a BEAR to navigate. I am entirely sure this is an issue with the vile, satanic PDF interfacing with my Kindle, but it required me to do a lot of fancy footwork to follow along as people were interviewed, or as points were made, and they happened to coincide with a page break. I'm not willing to ignore the issues but I've taken extra care to think about my rating of 3* of five very carefully. Am I blaming the story for the book's issues? Hence those three shiny stars when I started out with two.

All in all, I felt more disappointment due to my desired focus being unavailable in this project than I did with every other presentation issue. The author and/or publisher's title gave me to understand that all the identities listed in the subtitle would be more than touched on, and the groups mentioned would be the audience as well as the topic. I was incorrect in my assumption. The groups of young people were not, in my observation, treated with the respect they earned by taking part in the various studies. People, of all ages, are who they say they are; and lumping everyone from an enby/aro person to a cisqueer woman as "bisexual" did nothing for inclusion. It fostered confusion, and it did so avoidably.
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THE TRAGEDY OF HETEROSEXUALITY
JANE WARD
NYU Press
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness.

In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships.

Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”

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My Review: I grew up in a wealthy white suburban area, with parents whose last child I was. They had long since ended the honeymoon phase of marriage; they had two daughters they each pretty thoroughly disliked at least one of; their feelings about each other were still in flux. Along I came; everything changed in their middle-aged world and my sisters' teens. Absolutely no one came out of that pressure cooker unmangled.

I am, in other words, very much in sympathy with the author's thesis that heterosexuals aren't happier than we are.

The author puts the blame for the unhappiness squarely on men and their misogyny. The institutions men have built are designed to reinforce straight white male supremacy. Gay men, too, if white, participate in the male-designed system of woman-degrading misogyny. To their detriment, of course; to all male beings' detriment.

As far as it goes, this is pretty inarguably like the world one sees outside one's doors and windows, so am I going to beef with that? Hm. I'm not sure it counts as a beef, but allow me to assure you, Author Ward, that women whether heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian, or any combination thereof, are perfectly capable of being horribly racist, sexist, and abusive. Allow me to tell you about my mother's incestuous sexual abuse of my ephebe self; her phony "christian conversion" that enabled her to use a whole new vocabulary of hateful, denigrating, destructive invective aimed at making sure I was eternally off-balance and unsure of my male self's worth...the aforementioned sisters and their litany of belittling and insulting characterizations of me...so, yeah, about those awful and abusive men: they had mothers whose actions were, if examined carefully, pretty awful. Was that solely and entirely the mothers' response to patriarchy and heteronormativity? I beg to differ. Some people are just not very nice and should be not be encouraged to spread that by having children!

Yet now our QUILTBAG brethren and sistern are falling over themselves to get married and have kids! We're equal, we can do the same things straight people do! And here, Author Ward, you and I agree: Shouldn't we be liberating our straight family from this structure designed to control and contain women, not rushing into it for ourselves? Isn't that a better project all the way around? Allow people to design their own lives, and stay away from prescribed identities like "husband" or "wife" or "parent" if those aren't appealing.

Suddenly the blind panic of the red-meat right to clamp down on abortion first, then come after the rest of the bodily and spiritual autonomy that so threatens their control, makes all the sense in the world. Heterosexuality is, from a QUILTBAG person's perspective, a terrible tragedy indeed. It's conflated with heteronormativity. Demoting "heterosexuality" to a sexual behavior is a darn good project. I myownself have engaged in heterosexuality (didn't much like it). In heteronormativity, even, and I REALLY didn't like that. Stopped it a long time ago.

So Author Ward, standing outside the institution and hollering at the guards, is onto a winner for all of me. She wouldn't be if she hadn't decoupled "heterosexuality" to the straight version of "homosexuality"...that simply describes what sexual behaviors one engages in. Now the problem, the enemy, is identified as "heteronormativity" or the cultural monolith of patriarchal abuse and control. The inmates in the institution need freeing! They need it badly and now. This moment in history is an inflection point. We can see that because every single facet of the progressive social and economic agendas are being fought by the social-control freaks using every tool and trick the centuries of their ruthlessly enforced dominance have given them. Because they know that, given freedom to choose, people aren't going to choose their way in majority numbers.

Racists fear being made into a minority...why? Heteronormatives fear living in a world with people who love in different ways...why? Because they fear the repression they're nakedly, openly enacting against us. "Sucks to be you" is their silent, though getting less and less so, taunt.

So there's value in this exercise for me, a cis white American male, a scion of almost godlike privilege.

The problems with a lesbian-only critique of straightness are clear, including a lack of critical straight participants in this exercise and the exclusion of all Y-chromosome bearers. I refuse to believe not one male has ever made a critique of heteronormative culture that is valid, that does not wholly or partially exemplify the misogynistic mode of control. But there's another beam in the author's eye: TERFs like Adrienne Rich and Cherie Moraga. Of all the marginalized groups that need a voice in this chorus, the trans community is top of my list...not one word. I'm poking at the author's lack of inclusiveness because inclusion is what the author's demanding. But only for XXwomen...? I thought biological determinism was among the patriarchy's tools of control....

So I don't think the read is perfect. I do think it enlightened me and brought thoughts to the surface of my mind that I really enjoy having there. Yes, we need to educate our heteronormative society's mainstream about the costs to them all of the horrible system that's in place. But let's stop excluding people as part of that, and Author Ward's presentation of trenchant and valuable arguments does that regrettable thing.

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BI: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality
JULIA SHAW
Abrams Press
$26.00 hardcover , available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Despite all the welcome changes that have happened in our culture and laws over the past few decades in regards to sexuality, the subject remains one of the most influential but least understood aspects of our lives. For psychologist and bestselling author Julia Shaw, this is both professional and personal—Shaw studies the science of sexuality and she herself is proudly and vocally bisexual.

It’s an admission, she writes, that usually causes people’s pupils to dilate, their cheeks to flush, and their questions to start flowing. Ask people to name famous bisexual actors, politicians, writers, or scientists, and they draw a blank. Despite statistics that show bisexuality is more common than homosexuality, bisexuality is often invisible.

In BI: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw probes the science and culture of attraction beyond the binary. From the invention of heterosexuality to the history of the Kinsey scale, as well as asylum seekers trying to defend their bisexuality in a court of law, there is so much more to explore than most have ever realized. Drawing on her own original research—and her own experiences—this is a personal and scientific manifesto; it’s an exploration of the complexities of the human sexual experience and a declaration of love and respect for the nonconformists among us.

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My Review: I've contended publicly that bisexuality is the disrespected stepchild of the QUILTBAG community. When one says "bisexual" without the modifier "man/male" the presumption is one's referring to a woman/female. And that's what Author Shaw has set out to correct...that sense of non-inclusion that heteronormative society, whether straight or gay, attaches to labeled people. No one ever explains to you, "oh, I'm straight" because we assume they are unless they make a point of not being. And bisexuality, being by its nature focused on sexual activity, is simply not an acceptable identity in the heteronormative prescriptivist world.

Author Shaw, who also includes a lot of other identities in her discussion, corrects this misperception with an assertion that bisexuality is in fact an identity and to diminish that is to indulge in bi erasure. When that erasure comes at you from all sources and angles, including the one with a letter for your identity in its public face, that can feel disheartening and rejecting.

What Author Shaw does is build a good case, based on research and science, for the existence and validity of the identity "bisexual" as a separate thing. It's an equal to "gay" or "lesbian" or "straight" (which term I dislike because its connotation is "as opposed to 'bent'" and that doesn't thrill me) not a way-station on a road heading one way or the other. Thinking outside binaries is the great revolution in consciousness of this century. It's a giant gift to our descendants to recognize, affirm, and support their outside-our-experience identities. That does mean, however, learning what those identities are as well as what they want to be called.

Learning about bisexuality is not the challenge it was in the past. When I was a teen and wondering what to call myself ("faggot" wasn't gonna cut it for internal monologues, but it's accurate) I found a book called Loving Them Both: A Study of Bisexuality by Colin MacInnes, son of Angela Thirkell and her first husband. "Maybe that fits," I thought after reading it. It didn't, but at least I found something to help me try on an identity that just does not exist in pop culture. That book existed for me; it gave me information I'd never have found otherwise (though it was written in 1970 and was very much of its time); and the newcomers to adolescence and adulthood need the same help I found. That's Author Ward's book.

That she is a psychologist, with a special interest in criminality, makes me believe her research chops are top-notch even if I don't know what sources she's used. Consulting the Notes will disabuse anyone of the notion that she's just makin' it up. This is someone who makes a living as a psychologist, there's no way in heck she doesn't cite her sources. And they're impressively complete and diverse.

What's all this in aid of? It's a sad fact that, like most people who are bisexual, Author Ward wasn't really sure what that meant or if it, as an identity not a sexual desire, really existed. Unlike most people, she set out to do something to help people in their own searches for identity when they're feeling surer and surer that "straight" is for jackets not for them. There's always a process in developing an identity. In most cultures it's called "growing up." In modern Western culture, we're possessed of both a bewildering freedom to decide for ourselves and a grim paucity of examples for anything outside heteronormative society. Remember I said the author was a psychologist? Bet you can't guess what she did....

These are Author Ward's "Six Stages of Bidentity Development."

1. Stage 1. Loneliness: I must be the only one who feels this way, no one ever talks about it.


2. Stage 2. Euphoria: I'm NOT the only one! Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee!! Now I can start living!


3. Stage 3. Disappointment: What do you mean, I'm not queer/activist/leftist/whatever enough?! I'm just ME! What's with this judgment?


4. Stage 4. Mourning: How can anyone stand to be so cruel/ignorant/prejudiced? I'm a real person!


5. Stage 5. Anger: HOW DARE YOU?!? We are valid, real people with feelings and needs!


6. Stage 6. Peace: Wait...I am real, I have loved ones and others who accept me and are like me, and nothing the jackanapes do or say will make that different. (I call this the "It's not what you call me, it's what I answer to" stage.)

If you take no other thing away from reading this review, I hope it is that there is something out there in the world that can supporrt and guide those not satisfied with the heteronormative world's offerings towards a different, possibly more comfortable and complete, identity. If you know someone who's on that journey, if you might be yourself, or if you're just curious about what the hell all the fuss is about, read Author Ward's enjoyable, informative, and authoritative prose.

No one needs to feel alone. Not when Author Ward's here to show a new path.