The
New People
A monthly publication of the Thomas
Merton Center
Table of Contents -- June 2002
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The
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June 27 – the birthday of Gay Pride
On Friday evening, June 27, 1969, the New York City tactical police force raided a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. Raids were not unusual in 1969; in fact, they were conducted regularly without much resistance. However, that night the street erupted into violent protest as the crowds in the bar fought back. The backlash and several nights of protest that followed have come to be known as the Stonewall Riots.
Prior to that summer there was little public expression of the lives and experiences of gays and lesbians. The Stonewall Riots marked the beginning of the gay liberation movement that has transformed the oppression of gays and lesbians into calls for pride and action. In the past 33 years we have all been witness to an astonishing flowering of gay culture that has changed this country and beyond, forever. June has been celebrated as Gay Pride Month throughout the world. In Pittsburgh, celebrations of Gay Pride Month will center on the Pridefest Parade, Saturday, June 15, on Ellsworth Avenue in Shadyside. The parade begins at noon, with assembly at 11 a.m.
This issue of The NewPeople profiles three queer activists whose stories have often gone untold, due to the racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism still present in the world today. These stories are provided by Technicolor Unity, a new project of the Thomas Merton Center.
Three who made a difference
Bayard Rustin Most folks would readily associate the famous 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with Dr. Martin Luther King. Others, armed with more facts, might associate the march with The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founder, A. Philip Randolph.
It was Randolph who tirelessly pushed for this march. But the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington was a fellow named Bayard Rustin.
This is no accident. Bayard Rustin, who devoted his entire life to the struggle for human rights and economic justice, was usually relegated to a behind-the-scenes role in public events because he was gay. It is a fact that A. Philip Randolph agreed to have his name listed as the Director of the 1963 March only after there was uproar about having an active homosexual listed as the march’s director.
Bayard Rustin was a pacifist and a socialist. In the late 1930s he joined the Young Communist League, but he quit in 1941 when the party abandoned its progressive anti-racist organizing due to Hitler’s invasion of Russia.
About this time Rustin met Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph and embraced democratic socialism. Also in 1941 Rustin joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and served it as Race Relations Director. In 1943 Rustin was imprisoned for three years at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary as a conscientious objector during World War II.
After the war, Rustin was active as a member of FOR and the Congress of Racial Equality confronting Jim Crow laws and practices across the country.
Perhaps it was a set up, but Bayard was arrested while having sex with another man in 1953. This lost him his position at Fellowship of Reconciliation. The War Resisters League, however, took Rustin on as an organizer after FOR let him go.
Leaders in the Civil Rights and peace movements considered Rustin’s relative openness about his sexual identity a liability. They deliberately kept him at the margins of these movements. One person who refused to abandon Rustin was A. Philip Randolph.
In 1956 at Mr. Randolph’s request, Bayard went to Montgomery, Alabama, to serve as an aide to Dr. King in the early days of the bus boycott. Still it did not take long for Dr. King’s lieutenants to insist that Rustin be sent away. Rustin was considered a liability: He was homosexual.
Though he died in 1987, Bayard Rustin remains for queer folk a true shining star.
Audre Lorde
"Liberation is not the private province of any one particular group."
"Every woman has the militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health. . .for silence and invisibility go hand-in-hand with powerlessness."
Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, activist, novelist and teacher. She was also a black, feminist lesbian. In her writing, she shares the experience of seeing her black culture endangered by the predominant white one, her queer lifestyle unrecognized as valid, and her status as a woman constantly relegated to that of a second-class citizen.
She was born in New York City on February 18, 1934 to parents of West Indian heritage. She grew up in Manhattan where she attended Catholic school. She loved to read poetry, often reciting whole poems or individual lines to communicate with people. When she could no longer find poems that expressed her feelings, she started writing her own poetry. She attended Hunter College, graduating in 1959, pursued a Masters degree in library science from Columbia University, and eventually became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City.
In 1968, Lorde received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. She has published numerous books of inspiring poetry, has written powerful essays and has taught and lectured at colleges and universities around the country. Her work has been translated into seven foreign languages.
Lorde faced another struggle in her lifetime – that of breast cancer. She chronicled her battle with the disease in works like The Cancer Journals. It ultimately led to her death in 1992.
As an activist, in the traditional sense of the word, Lorde formed coalitions between Afro-German and Afro-Dutch women, founded a sisterhood in South Africa, began Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and established the St. Croix Women’s Coalition.
And as an activist in a more creative sense, Lorde used her talent to work for change.
"So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest."
Harvey Milk
Time Magazine has identified Harvey Milk, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, as the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet.
It is difficult for many young queer folk to relate to a time when it was impossible for people — straight or gay — even to imagine a Harvey Milk. That was a time when many psychiatrists still called homosexuality a mental illness. To be young and openly gay in the 1970’s meant dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows. The amazing thing about Harvey Milk is that he didn’t seem to care.
Harvey Milk was one of those powerful individuals who could give gay individuals the confidence they needed to stop lying and living in a closet in a fiercely heterosexist world. Milk knew that the root cause of violence and discrimination against queers was (and often, still is) invisibility. Other gay "leaders" of his day — obedient folks who toiled quietly for the Democratic Party — thought it more important to work with straight allies who could more effectively push for equal rights.
While his first three tries for office failed, they lent Milk the credibility and positive media focus that no openly gay person ever had. Not everyone cheered, of course, and death threats multiplied. Milk often spoke of his likely assassination. In his recorded will, he wrote the famous line, "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."
It was on November 27, 1978, in city hall, when Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were killed by supervisor Dan White, a troubled anti-gay conservative. White, using the infamous "Twinkie Defense," was sentenced to only five years with parole. The city erupted in violence as so many saw that in the eyes of the criminal justice system, queer life was worth little and did not deserve justice.
Harvey Milk’s life has been an inspiration to not only the queer movement, but to the progressive movement as a whole. Milk knew that the queer struggle for dignity and justice was intimately tied in with the struggle for justice and human rights of all oppressed peoples. He won the admiration of San Francisco’s labor movement by getting Coors beer out of the gay bars during labor’s boycott of Coors. He remained a staunch advocate for all the racial, ethnic and other minorities that made up much of the city.