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

[HiPointDem]

45. of course individuals may have known gay people. that doesn't mean they were "openly gay".

openly gay doesn;t mean out to your friends or your little clique or other gay people. openly gay means out to the world.

if i didn't know what the mattachine society was already, how would i know where to find it in a discussion about bayard rustin and the civil rights movement?

i repeat, if it was so fucking easy to be openly gay, then why was a movement necessary?

no, it's revisionism to say rustin was openly gay. and it's revisionism to say that "lots" of people were openly gay in 1963.

and gay history is history, as black history is history.

to be perfectly clear, here's an example of revisionist history:

In 1956, Bayard Rustin was hidden in the trunk of a car and snuck out of Montgomery during the Montgomery Bus Boycott because it was feared that having an openly-gay man as an advisor would discredit the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King and the other leaders of the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/bayard-rustin-martin-luther-king-jr-s-gay-strategist-deserves-better/politics/2011/08/23/25730

doesn't it seem odd that an "openly gay" man would have to hide in the trunk of a car?

the truth is that rustin wasn't openly gay (except that he wasn't celibate), but enemies of the movement knew he was gay because of his arrest for having gay sex, which was illegal at the time, which was why his participation had to be hidden -- because the fact that he was gay could be used to discredit the movement.

i have no idea what this kind of "open gayness" even means. he's hiding in the trunk of a car *because* he's gay.