Eleven Gay Historical Figures Worthy of the "Milk" Treatment

Bayard Rustin

Who he was: You know the expression, “the guy behind the guy”? Bayard Rustin was the guy behind Martin Luther King, Jr., although he’s often gotten short shrift from historians because of his homosexuality as well as his membership in the Communist Party. Rustin was one of the driving forces behind the Congress for Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He organized the 1963 March on Washington — where King gave his legendary “I have a dream” speech — but Rustin often placed himself in the background because elected officials and politicians would attempt to discredit the civil rights movement by pointing out his sexual and political leanings.

Potential film plot points: Rustin’s college years in New York City in the 1930s, during which he sang in nightclubs to support himself … His split with the Communist Party in the 1940s, when the party began focusing on international issues and tried to divert Rustin’s attention away from civil rights . . . His arrest in 1953 for “lewd conduct” in a parked car with two other men in Pasadena, a charge that would follow him around for the rest of his life . . . His clashes with elected officials both black (Adam Clayton Powell) and white (Strom Thurmond) who tried to use Rustin’s sexuality as a way to discredit him . . . The 1963 march and his eventual involvement in the anti­–Vietnam War and gay rights movements before his death in 1987 . . . The movie could close with this Rustin quote filling the screen: “Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.”

Dream director: Rodney Evans, who made the literary and sexual revolutionaries of the Harlem Renaissance feel thrillingly current in Brother to Brother (2004).

Dream actor: Denzel Washington

Harveys: 3.5. With an unassailable black icon such as Denzel Washington or Will Smith in the cast, the Oscars could be all over this one, particularly given how the big screen has shied away from movies about MLK.

Harry Hay

Who he was: One of the founding fathers of the American gay rights movement, Hay helped start the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries. The Mattachine Society, considered one of the very first “homophile” groups in the U.S., was an underground organization that Hay began after World War II, although he was forced to step down from a leadership role when his Communist past drew untoward attention during the paranoid McCarthy years. The Faeries, on the other hand, favored gatherings in bucolic settings, mixing elements of New Age philosophy, genderf*ck and Native American spirituality.