My post on a Yahoo! news story "Many blacks shrug off Obama's new view on gays"

[HiPointDem]

32. it's not ignorant at all. bayard rustin certainly wasn't out to the world, because those things

weren't talked about in public in 1963. The main reason he was "out" was because he'd been arrested for having sex in a car -- and word got around within the circles he worked in. he may have been out in that sense to colleagues, but he didn't chose to be (the arrest got him fired, for one thing, and affected his career negatively for a long time). He wasn't out to the world or the media generally, and he didn't organize the march on washington as a *gay* man, nor as a representative of gay people generally, but as a *black* man.

the poster is perfectly correct. gays, as a organized group, didn't support the early civil rights movement -- and that's because gays were not, for the most part, organized as a self-conscious category in 1963. There were a couple of small organized groups -- mattachine society was one -- but it was still so taboo to be gay that it was very secretive: "Because of concerns for secrecy and the founders’ leftist ideology, they adopted the cell organization being used by the Communist Party." Daughters of Bilitis was similar for women, founded 1955. The average person knew nothing of these groups, and neither did most gay people.

Individual gay people may have supported the movement, but not in solidarity as "homosexuals". Get the difference?

Anyone who thinks what the poster said was "ignorant" is ignorant. If you weren't alive then it's hard to really get how different it was and how quickly things changed. Accounts that say he was "openly gay" are engaging in sloppy language, if not revisionism.