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

[HiPointDem]

104. Where did i ask them to? OTOH, being gay was just as illegal in 1969 as in 1963, yet they made

a movement. (Don't know why they bothered, since multiple posters have assured me that "lots" of people were "openly gay" at that time.)

Did gay people take part in the civil rights movement? Yes, as I acknowledged.

Did they take part as self-consciously "gay" people? Nope. For obvious reasons.

Was Bayard Rustin "openly gay"? No, not in the sense that we use the phrase today.

There is, in the emerging and more public narrative about him, a tendency to describe Rustin as an "out gay man." But the truth is more complex.

In 1986, the writer Joseph Beam invited Rustin to contribute to what would become a key work, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Rustin's response was thoughtful and clear: "I was not involved in the struggle for gay rights as a youth. ... I did not 'come out of the closet' voluntarily—circumstances (his arrest) forced me out.

While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual, it would be dishonest of me to present myself as one who was in the forefront of the struggle for gay rights. ... I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter. As such, it has not been a factor which has greatly influenced my role as an activist."

http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Bayard-Rustin-A-complex-legacy/36990.html

He didn't contribute.

I was told in this thread I was offensive & didn't know anything about gay history. I was told I just looked up bullshit on wikipedia.

I was told in another thread that a poster's family knew lots of gay people and had no problem with it because their parents raised them right; all people have to do is raise their kids right and there's no discrimination.

I think that's bullshit. It disappears the entire mechanism of the state and the pressures that are put on people by society, their peers, the state, that cause them to go along to get along, zip their lips even when things are happening they feel uncomfortable with, so they can be safe. It's not just about people raising their kids not to discriminate. I'd warrant if a new version of the Nazis rose to power today we'd see a hell of a lot of people who currently fancy themselves to be non-prejudiced acting the role of good Germans. Because I see people doing it every bloody day in smaller ways.

And Bayard Rustin wasn't "openly gay"; that's revisionism that transposes today's language onto yesterday's life. The only way you could be "openly gay" in those times was if you were prepared to endure harrassment, job loss, imprisonment & possible death. Very few people were willing. Some people were "openly gay' within a sympathetic community or subculture with a code of silence toward the larger world, but few were "openly gay"
to the world, which is what "openly gay" means today. Rustin wasn't, and moreover, he didn't want to be.