“The Intersection of Pride: Black LGBTQIA+ Activism”
African American activists have long been at the forefront of social movements and the LGBTQIA+ movement is no exception. In fact, many African American activists have been at the intersection of many social movements.
Bayard Rustin, an African American gay activist from West Chester, Pennsylvania was the driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recited his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. To this day, many historians fail to give him credit. Jerald Podair, Professor of History at Lawrence University, in his 2023 op-ed for The Conversation, writes, “Rustin is best remembered as the organizer and orchestrator of arguably the seminal event in American civil rights history – the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.But it almost did not happen. Rustin’s homosexuality had always been an issue, and not just to his opponents on the American right or to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Many progressive activists who were open-minded on matters relating to civil and labor rights were much less so when it came to Rustin’s sexuality.”
Podair continues by stating that despite King’s dismissal of Rustin from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, it took a referral from a friend to convince King to keep Rustin as chief organizer of the March on Washington. “King knew that only Rustin, who had spent the previous two decades leading demonstrations and walking picket lines, had the knowledge and experience to move 250,000 people in and out of Washington, D.C., on a hot summer day. King also knew that Rustin could manage everything in between, including the order of the speakers.”
Rustin was not the only gay African American figure that history has continued to erase their sexual orientation. Lorraine Hansberry, playwright famous for her seminal work A Raisin In The Sun, became the first African American woman to have a play performed on Broadway. Hansberry identified as a lesbian but kept her orientation relatively private. James Baldwin, author and activist famous for his works Go Tell It On The Mountain, The Fire Next Time, and Giovanni’s Room, was a well known gay activist who candidly spoke out on Black America’ s hypocrisy towards homophobia.
Writer Daniel Reynolds, in his 2015 article for The Advocate, “Why Can’t We Talk About Homophobia”, writes, “Hatred toward gay people is not unique to a race or culture. But are there unique factors at play in the black community in regard to attitudes toward LGBT people? Are the causes of black homophobia different? And is it helpful or harmful to consider factors like race when addressing bias in specific communities?”
These are questions the Black community tackles every year when observing their role in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights. There are so many nameless faceless figures that found themselves at the intersection of race and sexual orientation. However, history and the greater cultural narrative continues to denounce one identity over the other.
However, erasing one’s “blackness” or “gayness” does not forfeit historical or cultural relevance. But it does perpetuate the greater issue of inequality.
