“At a given point, there was so much pressure on Dr. King about my being gay and particularly because I would not deny it, that he set up a committee to explore whether it would be dangerous for me to continue working with him,” Rustin says to the Blade in the interview.
He conceded, but as Eric Marcus, the host of Making Gay History, tells NPR’s Michel Martin, Rustin kept working for the cause. In the face of constant setbacks and discrimination, Marcus says, Rustin’s commitment prevailed, a quality Marcus attributes to his Quaker upbringing.
The rare tape was provided by Rustin’s surviving partner, Walter Naegle, who preserved a library of backup recordings. Those recordings have helped foster a better understanding of the gay icon — one that Marcus concedes was absent from his civil rights education.
“I feel like I was robbed of my history as a gay person,” Marcus says. “Growing up, if I’d known known about someone like him, it would’ve been transformative.”
my fave bit of black dog folklore is that in some folklore there is a belief that the first person buried in a cemetery stays there and doesn’t cross over and helps other spirits move on and protects them from evil spirits, now naturally people want to avoid this fate for their loved ones and themselves so they would sometimes bury a dog first and it would return in the shape of a big black dog and protect the newly dead from evil spirits and occasionally the living as well
