I stay fascinated at how typically white homosexual males have fueled Black political life. That is on full show in a current blink-and-miss movie produced by former US president and first woman Barack and Michelle Obama. Their manufacturing firm Increased Floor is answerable for the Oscar-nominated movie Rustin (2023), which is loosely primarily based on the lifetime of Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin.
The movie represents a uncommon probability to inform a Black queer story. Sadly, the movie misses this mark in a number of respects, significantly in its portrayal of Rustin’s relations to a white man and a Black pastor. The movie maybe unnecessarily paints an image of Rustin as entangled between a white and a Black man, denying full improvement of both relationship when he in reality had simply that in his life with a white man. However, the movie depicts the very actual makes an attempt made to blackmail Rustin about being caught with two white males in Pasadena, California. The allegation was so explosive that it practically ruined his tenure as deputy director of the March on Washington. This is without doubt one of the most essential true moments in a movie dragged down in different areas by its many problematic selections.
The movie devotes about 5 minutes in complete to the “lewd conduct” and “vagrancy” costs stemming from Rustin’s being discovered with two white men in a parked automobile in January 1953, after which Rustin would serve 60 days in jail. Nonetheless, it’s noteworthy that the movie is anxious with the aftermath of the incident however is tired of the incident itself. The movie by no means really offers with how the incident occurred. Who have been these white males? How did they know one another? What did Black folks consider the truth that Rustin was with two white males?
The filmic technique right here would appear to be certainly one of treating the incident itself as a matter of Rustin’s non-public life, focusing as a substitute on its public ramifications. However for a biopic—and, particularly, for one that may totally embrace Rustin’s queerness—we would query whether or not that distinction is cinematically defensible. Why is delving into the complexities of Rustin’s intimate relationships past the pale? At stake within the filmmaker’s choice right here isn’t just the query of whether or not the movie offers with the queer dimensions of its topic’s life with depth and nuance. What can be at stake pertains to how we perceive how the lives of Black political figures knowledgeable their political selections. Specifically, it will be fairly affordable to ask: how did Rustin’s expertise with these males contribute to Rustin’s obvious lack of concern of white males?
This latter query will not be confined to its import to Rustin. I’ve saved a rising listing of distinguished Black icons within the U.S. who loved the corporate of white males intimately. Black males credibly reported to have been intimate with white males within the Civil Rights period embody Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Richard Pryor. Such encounters have proxemic, haptic, and kinesic dimensions that would appear, a minimum of in precept, to have potential penalties for the way these Black males perceived the world and the alternatives they might make as political figures and artists about the right way to intervene in contexts dominated by white males.
How they navigated these conditions—wherein, as Black males, they might have been susceptible within the face of energy dynamics inserting the tenor of the state of affairs past their management—might inform us fairly a bit concerning the paths that they took afterward. May such encounters, as an illustration, have left these males extra fearless within the face of white male energy and extra resolute to take daring steps?
Colman Domingo has been nominated for an Oscar for taking part in Rustin within the movie. Domingo is compelling as somebody fearlessly decided to shake up the established order. Nonetheless, he’s additionally removed from convincing in his portrayal of a queer man with an open thoughts. In 2024, it doesn’t take a lot braveness to kiss a person of the identical colour on digicam, but it surely does require boldness for a Black man to kiss a white man on display. In any case, we’ve got seen extremely acclaimed movies documenting Black-on-Black queerness, as within the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016). We would ask, although, whether or not concern of interracial queer intercourse and intimacy is, mockingly, standing in the best way right here of serving to us perceive the fearlessness of queer Black males.
In Rustin, the love between its protagonist and the fictional white character, Tom (performed by Gus Halper) is transient and underwhelming. In a single scene, there’s a cigarette between them and within the subsequent, simply as Tom wraps his arms round Rustin (presumably after they’ve had intercourse off digicam), Rustin asks Tom, “You need to be my assistant once more?” Taken within the bigger cultural context of the movie’s launch, the scene underscores how a lot this can be a commercially protected and sanitized story. That is so regardless of the movie maybe recklessly making a homosexual man’s life extra salacious than mandatory. It goals to inform a queer story, but its shying away from the intimacy of Rustin’s relationships with white males raises the query of whether or not it’s a real effort to depict Bayard Rustin’s queer story. The movie doesn’t comprise a single queer interracial intercourse scene or affectionate second, exterior of Rustin promising the fictional character Tom emotional availability someday sooner or later.
It’s talked about on the finish of the movie that Rustin settles with a white man, Walter Naegle, who accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 from the movie’s producer, Barack Obama. Obama expressed an absolute fascination with Rustin and the LGBTQ+ neighborhood on the film screening, saying: “No medal can change what occurred to Bayard, and no movie can ease the ache of generations of Individuals who’ve confronted discrimination due to who they’re and who they love.” But if who Rustin beloved is as essential as Obama suggests, one wonders why the movie didn’t search to depict Rustin’s decade-long relationship with Naegle and people males again in Florida.
The very fact is there may be nonetheless a lot left to learn about how Obama’s intimate life formed his political one, simply as there was for Rustin. This film comes as Obama has declined to confront questions by conservatives of how he wrote to a former girlfriend that he would “make love to men daily, but in the imagination.” Additional, the identical conservatives are completely happy to let you know that Obama “considered” being homosexual. There was additionally the very fact Obama was additionally raised by a transgender nanny. Maybe that is why his advisor argues that Obama was strongly advised not to make his affection for the LGBTQ movement public throughout his first presidential run.
No matter anti-gay conservatives might imagine or speculate relating to Obama in these regards, the very fact stands that even whether it is suitably acceptable for Obama the politician to rejoice an avowedly queer determine in Rustin, there could also be parts of that queerness that may nonetheless be thought of past the pale for Obama and others to embrace. If the decline of homophobia explains how a former president might produce a serious movement image a few queer Black icon, is it homophobia’s persistence or one thing else that informs that movie’s avoidance of its topic’s interracial relationships?
Robert Redding, Jr.
Robert “Rob” Redding, Jr. MA, MFA is a professor at Seton Corridor and has taught at Tempo and schools of the Metropolis College of New York. He’s the editor of ReddingNewsReview.com and host of Redding Information Assessment Unrestricted. He has authored a guide with discussions of Black queerness because it pertains to Black political life: The Professor: Witnessing White Power.
