I remain fascinated at how often white gay men have fueled Black political life. This is on full display in a recent blink-and-miss film produced by former US president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama. Their production company Higher Ground is responsible for the Oscar-nominated film Rustin (2023), which is loosely based on the life of Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin.
The film represents a rare chance to tell a Black queer story. Unfortunately, the film misses this mark in several respects, particularly in its portrayal of Rustin’s relations to a white man and a Black pastor. The film perhaps unnecessarily paints a picture of Rustin as entangled between a white and a Black man, denying full development of either relationship when he in fact had just that in his life with a white man. On the other hand, the film depicts the very real attempts made to blackmail Rustin about being caught with two white men in Pasadena, California. The allegation was so explosive that it nearly ruined his tenure as deputy director of the March on Washington. This is one of the most important true moments in a film dragged down in other areas by its many problematic choices.
The film devotes about five minutes in total to the “lewd conduct” and “vagrancy” charges stemming from Rustin’s being found with two white men in a parked car in January 1953, after which Rustin would serve 60 days in jail. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the film is concerned with the aftermath of the incident but is uninterested in the incident itself. The film never actually deals with how the incident happened. Who were these white men? How did they know each other? What did Black people think of the fact that Rustin was with two white men?
The filmic strategy here would seem to be one of treating the incident itself as a matter of Rustin’s private life, focusing instead on its public ramifications. But for a biopic—and, especially, for one that would fully embrace Rustin’s queerness—we might question whether that distinction is cinematically defensible. Why is delving into the complexities of Rustin’s intimate relationships beyond the pale? At stake in the filmmaker’s decision here is not just the question of whether the film deals with the queer dimensions of its subject’s life with depth and nuance. What is also at stake pertains to how we understand how the lives of Black political figures informed their political choices. In particular, it would be quite reasonable to ask: how did Rustin’s experience with these men contribute to Rustin’s apparent lack of fear of white men?
This latter question is not confined to its import to Rustin. I have kept a growing list of prominent Black icons in the U.S. who enjoyed the company of white men intimately. Black men credibly reported to have been intimate with white men in the Civil Rights era include Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Richard Pryor. Such encounters have proxemic, haptic, and kinesic dimensions that would seem, at least in principle, to have potential consequences for how these Black men perceived the world and the choices they would make as political figures and artists about how to intervene in contexts dominated by white men.
How they navigated these situations—in which, as Black men, they would have been vulnerable in the face of power dynamics placing the tenor of the situation beyond their control—may tell us quite a bit about the paths that they took afterward. Could such encounters, for instance, have left these men more fearless in the face of white male power and more resolute to take bold steps?
Colman Domingo has been nominated for an Oscar for playing Rustin in the film. Domingo is compelling as someone fearlessly determined to shake up the status quo. Nonetheless, he is also far from convincing in his portrayal of a queer man with an open mind. In 2024, it does not take much courage to kiss a man of the same color on camera, but it does require boldness for a Black man to kiss a white man on screen. After all, we have seen highly acclaimed films documenting Black-on-Black queerness, as in the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016). We might ask, though, whether fear of interracial queer sex and intimacy is, ironically, standing in the way here of helping us understand the fearlessness of queer Black men.
In Rustin, the affection between its protagonist and the fictional white character, Tom (played by Gus Halper) is brief and underwhelming. In one scene, there is a cigarette between them and in the next, just as Tom wraps his arms around Rustin (presumably after they have had sex off camera), Rustin asks Tom, “You want to be my assistant again?” Taken in the larger cultural context of the film’s release, the scene underscores how much this is a commercially safe and sanitized story. This is so despite the film perhaps recklessly making a gay man’s life more salacious than necessary. It aims to tell a queer story, yet its shying away from the intimacy of Rustin’s relationships with white men raises the question of whether it is a genuine effort to depict Bayard Rustin’s queer story. The film does not contain a single queer interracial sex scene or affectionate moment, outside of Rustin promising the fictional character Tom emotional availability sometime in the future.
It is mentioned at the end of the film that Rustin settles with a white man, Walter Naegle, who accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 from the film’s producer, Barack Obama. Obama expressed an absolute fascination with Rustin and the LGBTQ+ community at the movie screening, saying: “No medal can change what happened to Bayard, and no film can ease the pain of generations of Americans who have faced discrimination because of who they are and who they love.” Yet if who Rustin loved is as important as Obama suggests, one wonders why the film didn’t seek to depict Rustin’s decade-long relationship with Naegle and those men back in California.
The fact is there is still much left to know about how Obama’s intimate life shaped his political one, just as there was for Rustin. This movie 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.” Further, the same conservatives are happy to tell you that Obama “considered” being gay. There was also the fact Obama was also raised by a transgender nanny. Perhaps this is why his advisor argues that Obama was strongly advised not to make his affection for the LGBTQ movement public during his first presidential run.
Whatever anti-gay conservatives may believe or speculate regarding Obama in these regards, the fact stands that even if it is suitably acceptable for Obama the politician to celebrate an avowedly queer figure in Rustin, there may be elements of that queerness that would still be considered beyond the pale for Obama and others to embrace. If the decline of homophobia explains how a former president could produce a major motion picture about a queer Black icon, is it homophobia’s persistence or something else that informs that film’s avoidance of its subject’s interracial relationships?
Robert Redding, Jr.
Robert “Rob” Redding, Jr. MA, MFA is a professor at Seton Hall and has taught at Pace and colleges of the City University of New York. He is the editor of ReddingNewsReview.com and host of Redding News Review Unrestricted. He has authored a book with discussions of Black queerness as it relates to Black political life: The Professor: Witnessing White Power.
