In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'; NPR, January 6, 2019

Michel Martin and Emma Bowman, NPR; In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'

"He was an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and the organizer behind the 1963 March on Washington.

Still, Bayard Rustin's legacy as a leading figure in the civil rights movement is little known today, even among many history buffs and within the LGBTQ community. His homosexuality cost him that visibility and was considered by some as a hindrance to the movement's success. 

Rustin died in 1987, but his silenced voice was recently resurrected in previously unaired audio from an interview with the Washington Blade in the mid-1980s. The audio will air this week in an episode of the podcast Making Gay History. It was discovered by Sara Burningham, the podcast's executive producer...

To Rustin, asserting his identity as an African-American went hand-in-hand with identifying as a gay man. "It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn't I was a part of the prejudice," he said. "I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me.""