Bayard Rustin film sees the light of day again

By Chris Lombardi

“We are all one. And if we don’t know it, we will learn the hard way.”

On Tuesday night, that sentence boomed across a party on West 17th Street, delivered in a high-pitched, aristocratic voice that seemed to match the décor of the floor-through apartment, the grand piano, the champagne glasses. Applauding was a true cross-section of Chelsea, from its host, Deutsche Bank attorney Philip Gallo, to retired teacher Millie Glaberman, a member of Community Board 4.

But the voice was that of someone not physically in the room, of one of Chelsea’s most famous former residents: Bayard Rustin, the renowned civil rights leader and chief organizer of the 1962 March on Washington, who died in 1987. Rustin’s voice emanated from an LCD TV screen as the captive audience watched portions of “Brother Outsider,” the acclaimed documentary that tells the story of Rustin’s life with interviews and archival news clips.

“I knew him,” said Glaberman, a resident of Penn South, where Rustin also called home. “And seeing him in the film—it’s very emotional.”

Glaberman and the other partygoers had come to celebrate a seminal moment: After years of languishing in film vaults since its PBS premiere in 2003—with the exception of school and nonprofit film festival showings—“Brother Outsider” will now be available to the general public for the very first time, starting with a Jan. 19 premiere on the cable channel Logo. In addition, the film can now be purchased for home video on the project’s Website (www.rustin.org), both Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the LGBT Community Center will host screenings in the next few months, and by spring Netflix rentals will be possible.

Walter Naegle, Rustin’s widower, addressed the crowd gently on Tuesday.

“Some of you may know that for years, the film was not able to be shown on TV because the rights to show all that news footage is very expensive,” he said. The “expensive” clips include newsreels from the 1940s, footage of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Strom Thurmond, and many of Rustin himself—visiting Africa and India in the 1950s, being arrested during the 1954 Freedom Rides, and speaking at the 1963 March and 20 years later at a gay-rights rally in New York City.

When the film was released in 2003, Bennett Singer, who conceived of “Brother Outsider” while he was working on the monumental PBS series “Eyes on the Prize,” and co-director Nancy Kates initially obtained three-year licenses to show the film, but only on public TV and in schools and libraries, Singer told Chelsea Now on Wednesday.

But that was before it won more than 25 awards at film festivals around the world, before it was shown at the United Nations, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, for members of Congress and around the globe, from Europe to South Korea to India, where Rustin first learned the principles of nonviolent resistance that he would teach to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As acclaim for the film grew, however, the clock was running out on even its limited permissions.

“We faced the prospect of never being able to show it—not only on TV but to schools and community groups,” said Singer at the party. “And that seemed wrong.”

Singer, Kates and the Bayard Rustin Fund “went back to our donors,” said Naegle—including supporters like Gallo, “who hosted diversity screenings of the film at both Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.” They raised the funds to renew all the current permissions and buy some commercial rights.

Now, in addition to opening Logo’s documentary season and releasing the film for home video, the team is developing an “enhanced” DVD for rental via Netflix, with “tons of extras,” including “the 10,000-plus pages of Bayard’s FBI file,” added Singer.

Meanwhile, the film will be seen in even more schools through the Human Rights Watch Film Festival’s high school program. So far, said Singer, 3,500 students in New York City have learned about Rustin’s very personal story during a very heated time.

According to HRW’s Jennifer Nedbalsky, the students who see the film have strong, very individual responses, whether from smaller, newer schools like Downtown’s Millennium High School or from behemoths like the High School for Human Rights in Crown Heights.

“They’re learning about civil rights in school,” said Nedbalsky, whose program nationwide reaches 350 schools in 11 states. “But this makes it real. When Bennett talked to them about housing discrimination, and how it’s legal in so many states, they really get it. And it shows them this new hero that they didn’t have before.”

Nedbalsky added that students are impressed by Rustin’s physical and emotional courage, and are not deterred by unfamiliar concepts such as Gandhian nonviolence. “Most of them are against the Iraq war to start with,” she said.

Comments collected after high school screenings testify to the impact of those ideas: “Seeing this film made me realize that violence cannot do away with violence,” said one, while another added, “The only weapon we have is our bodies.”

In addition, said both Singer and Nedbalsky, the film has proved a forum for young people to discuss intimate issues. One screening, held shortly after some students had come out of the closet, allowed others to share who and what they knew about homosexuality: “My cousin’s gay, but he’s cool! He’s just like you and me!” Nedbalsky quoted one teen who, she said, had previously acted too tough to care.

“I used to think gay people were people to stay away from. Now I think they are people to protect,” read another of the comments collected by HRW.

What the students have more trouble understanding, for the most part, is how Rustin was forced to the sidelines because of his sexual orientation. “I can’t believe that the civil rights movement made him stay in the shadows like that,” one student told Singer.

Contemplating that question on Tuesday, Millie Glaberman sighed. “It was a different time,” she said. In the 1960s, she said, the surprisingly uncloseted Rustin “sometimes had to run home, because he was being pursued by gangs that wanted to beat him up. Now— in some ways it’s worse, because of everything that’s going on in the world. But about this it’s better.”

Tuesday’s party was certainly evidence of big changes, featuring both the head of a new gay cable channel and a pioneer in diversity issues at corporations in the financial sector.

Logo Senior Vice President Marc Leonard, whose network is now one of two national gay cable channels, said after the party that his network was thrilled to be showing the film. “There’s a serious shortage of documentaries about gay and lesbian historical figures,” said Leonard, “unless you’re talking about pop culture, like the Pet Shop Boys. Now, we love those, but this—this is our history.” he added.

Host Gallo, who bought the apartment six years ago, told Chelsea Now that he has nonetheless been part of the neighborhood’s evolution: “I remember the 1980s when I was going to ACT-UP meetings and there were all these muscle guys moving into Chelsea.” Gallo’s own activism prodded him to focus on diversity issues at his workplaces: He founded the diversity task force at former employer Goldman Sachs and is now advising a similar task force at Deutsche Bank. He said he sees in Rustin’s story, which merges and thus combusts issues of race and sexual orientation, a way of “going beyond all that. It wasn’t about sex, it wasn’t about race—it was this extraordinary person.”

Scott Klein, a former president of the Lambda Independent Democrats, agreed with Gallo in a Wednesday phone conversation. “He was someone who suffered for his identity, who was not appreciated when he was alive,” said Klein, adding the film’s release was especially important since the struggles it depicts “are still so much with us.”

In this election year, said Klein, when so many political voices warn against making too strong a connection between the movements for civil rights for African-Americans and the LGBT community, Rustin’s story adds clarity. “He is a bridge between these two movements,” he said.

Speaking of elections, Bennett Singer’s newest untitled project is “about the way we vote in this country—not just current issues like voting machines, but how the whole, screwed-up system was developed.” But that doesn’t mean he’ll stop bringing the Rustin story to schools. And when the film finally screens at Chelsea’s Bayard Rustin Educational Complex, which is already in the works, he can’t wait to bring what he calls “Rustin’s visionary message of peace, nonviolence and equality” to the large urban school that bears his name.

“It’s so overdue. We should have a panel discussion and everything,” said Singer.” “That’d be newsworthy, huh?”