![]() ![]() A place of refuge “The Caravan Club”, gained quite the reputation during its brief existence. If you were a gay person in London in the 1930s, you faced the very real risk of arrest, prosecution and harsh punishment for expressing yourself in public-and even in private. A gay icon? Most definitely but also a deserving American Icon. African American in an interracial relationship, homosexual, socialist…Bayard pushes the boundaries of the times he lived in and even the times we live in now. Decades before gay marriage was an option, Rustin adopted Naegle to lend legal protection to their relationship. In 1970’s Bayard Rustin met and became partners with Walter Naegle and were the two were together until Rustin's death. This was big stuff! Rustin had been in a long term relationship with gay rights activist, Davis Platt, since the 1940’s who had grown up child of privilege and fell in love at age 20. Three years later he began working with King, sowing the early seeds of what would become the 1963 March On Washington and its culmination of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Originally charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pleaded guilty to a single, lesser charge of "sex perversion" (as sodomy was officially referred to in California then, even if consensual) and served 60 days in jail. Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, in 1953 for sexual activity with two men in a parked car. Finding his own voice in the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights. His life was committed to social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights but due to criticism over his sexuality, he usually acted as an influential adviser behind the scenes to civil-rights leaders. Relegated to the shadows of history because of his homosexuality, Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was a pivotal influence in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and the lasting legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. ![]()
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