_
The Civil Rights movement in America had a huge influence
on the shape of the Gay Rights movement
as it grew through the 1950s and '60s.
The man who believes in nonviolence
is prepared to be crushed, but he will never crush others.
Lorraine Hansberry, who became famous
for her groundbreaking play "A Raisin in the Sun,"
was a queer revolutionary hiding in plain sight.
She was a radical voice for Civil Rights
who passionately confronted a society
that oppressed her by race, gender, and sexuality.
Every human being is in enormous conflict
about something.
Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin was openly gay,
yet his openness was a source of conflict within the movement.
Much like today,
it was dangerous to be both black and gay.
From the world stage to the small, local stage,
activist José Sarria used humor and song
to create community and build unity.
And when our community is attacked
on a festive New Year's Eve,
we look to our brothers and sisters who came before us.
Say it loud and say it proud.
Black is beautiful!
Gay is good!
What do you say?
CREDITS
The highest gift that man has is art,
and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist.
But there is both joy and beauty
and illumination and communion
between people to be achieved
through the dissection of personality.
That's what I want to do.
I want to reach a little closer to the world
and see if we can share some illuminations together
about each other.
_
It was opening night,
and Lorraine Hansberry had decided to go for glamour.
What does the public intellectual wear
when she's ready for her close-up?
The vivacious 28-year-old writer
usually zipped around New York's Greenwich Village
in chinos or corduroys,
button-down shirts and cardigans,
white sneakers and socks.
But for the Broadway debut of her play "A Raisin in the Sun,"
she set and styled her hair
and did herself up in a black dress with bejeweled earrings.
I sat in the third row with my husband of six years,
Bobby Nemiroff, who bankrolled my writing
and endured my tantrums and fits.
A few aisles over, with a male date, sat Helen Leeds,
an earnest New York University law student
and my point of entry into a circle of Village gay girls.
Helen gabbed with Renee Kaplan,
a dapper young woman on whom I harbored a crush.
My girlfriends speculated on their intellectual pal,
the only black woman in their white lesbian circle.
"What was that marriage about, anyway?" they wondered.
Who knew?
Maybe they would get a peek at the couple's dynamic
at the dinner party at Sardi's later.
The lights dimmed.
-I don't have the right to be very personal
about the reception to this play.
I think what it reflects at this particular moment
in our country, there's a new mood,
and, uh, the American people are feeling like, "Make new sounds."
And I'm glad I was here to make them.
"A Raisin in the Sun,"
the first play written by an African-American woman
to ever be performed on Broadway,
tells the story of a black family on Chicago's south side
as they struggle to improve their lives.
It was a powerful indictment
of racism and segregation in America.
It was universally acclaimed, and Lorraine Hansberry...
young, gifted, and black... became a literary star.
"A Raisin in the Sun" has just taken
the theatrical season by storm.
It's sold out.
It's a raging commercial hit.
It's won the Drama Critics' prize.
It's acknowledged to be one
of the really important plays of the season.
Frankly, I think we did a good play.
It's a respectable script.
And I like to think that it's art,
but a certain that in terms of the question of time,
I think there exists in American life at this moment
some sort of hunger
and that part of the response to this play
undoubtedly has to do with the fact
that people are feeling very warm towards anything
that says man has a little dignity.
He's very complicated. He's very mixed up.
Chairman of the board!
I look at you and I see the final triumph
of stupidity in this world.
And a very charming and alive little sister.
Is this slightly autobiographical?
Oh, she's very autobiographical.
My brother would tell you that.
I enjoyed making fun of her
because I have that kind of confidence
about what she represents.
She's precocious.
She's over outspoken,
but I also feel that she doesn't have a word in the play
that I don't agree with still today.
Many prominent Black figures at the time
were surveilled by the FBI,
and Lorraine Hansberry was no different.
While never actively hunted or arrested,
agents would keep a watchful eye
soon after she moved to New York City.
Their constant scrutiny of her work
allowed more subtle aspects of her private life
to go unnoticed.
Security matter... Lorraine Hansberry,
born 5-19-30, daughter of wealthy family
with considerable real-estate holdings.
Attended University of Wisconsin but did not graduate.
Moved to New York City in early '50s
and has pursued writing career since that time.
Once settled there, she went to work for the newspaper Freedom,
the new voice of Negro liberation.
She had been a passionate political activist in college,
but now, mentored by Freedom's editor,
her political and creative power truly blossomed.
She threw herself fully into her work,
into the social and political life of Harlem,
engaging with the Civil Rights struggle at home,
as well as the fight against colonialism abroad.
Lorraine attended a protest outside New York University
for discriminatory hiring practices
and there met Robert Nemiroff, another young revolutionary.
They mutually admired each other's work.
They mutually admired each other.
And soon they were married.
They moved to Greenwich Village.
They fully immersed themselves in the cultural
and political vortex of the Village...
art, writing, activism.
You should learn everything you can in school,
then come out and use it against them.
They found friends who encouraged, challenged,
and fought alongside them as they continued to be driven
by a passionate sense of social justice.
I don't know whether you've seen some of the meetings
that go on nightly up in Harlem.
Oh, yes, I have.
- Black nationalists. - Yes.
Do you think that's a good idea?
Oh, at this moment I do, yes.
- You do, really? - Absolutely.
I think it's absolutely necessary
that, uh, people who are
just coming into their own in the world
must be as dramatic about it as they possibly can,
must embrace all causes, must embrace all methods.
Lorraine spoke truth to power in her plays and politics,
but while she never publicly discussed her own sexuality,
her affection for her husband and her love for women
were equally rich and complex realities
of her intersectional life.
It is noted that the subject and her husband
reside at two different addresses.
It is believed that the purpose for these two addresses
is for business reasons.
Husband stated his wife was unavailable
and had "retreated" to her private residence,
a customary practice of his wife
whenever she was engaged in "writing."
Robert would come to regard Lorraine's lesbianism
as an essential part of her being,
and their marriage and romantic relationship
were always on truthful and mutual terms.
She engaged with the burgeoning homosexual rights movement
through fiction and letters,
employing pseudonyms and complex arguments.
The year she quietly separated from Bob,
Lorraine wrote letters to "The Ladder,"
the newsletter published by lesbian organization
Daughters of Bilitis.
I wanted to leap into the questions
of heterosexually married lesbians.
I am one of those, incidentally,
who is going to stick to lowercase
until somebody convinces me
that what the homosexual wants and needs
is not autonomy from the human race,
but utter integration into it.
I feel, however, that I could be wrong about it.
I suspect that the problem of the married woman
who would prefer emotional-physical relationships
with other women is proportionally much higher
than a similar statistic for men.
This because the estate of woman being what it is.
James Baldwin lived eight blocks away from me
at 81 Horatio Street.
We struck up a friendship that helped mitigate the whiteness
of my homosexual world.
Our connection was explosive, fraternal.
James Baldwin has accomplished,
as he has made us want to talk to each other.
And to do that, he has had to say things that, yes, shock.
He has had to say things that even I must criticize myself.
I have hesitated to say before he led the way,
this is what he has accomplished and we should thank God for him.
While her profile as a leading figure
in the Civil Rights movement grew,
she had less time for writing,
but her fierce opinions were always in great demand.
How do you talk about 300 years in four minutes?
The whole idea of debating whether or not Negroes
should defend themselves is an insult.
If anybody comes and does ill in your home or your community,
obviously you try your best to kill 'em.
We've tried it all.
There isn't anything that hasn't been exhausted.
And now the charge of impatience is simply unbearable.
We have to find some way with these dialogues
to show and to encourage the white liberal
to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.
At 28, I finally made my debut into a small,
almost cotillion-like lesbian set.
This animated, lighthearted lesbian scene
was about the furthest I could get
from the socialist and intellectual worlds
in which my husband and I moved.
It was my husband's idea in 1960
to take some of the "Raisin" money
and invest it in a house in Greenwich Village.
Dorothy Secules, a woman 15 years my senior
who I had been going with,
had been renting there since the 1930s.
Dorothy stayed. I took the top floor.
I had found a woman I respected and needed.
The most ordinary human being has within him
elements of profundity, of profound anguish.
Every human being is in enormous conflict about something,
even if it's how you get to work in the morning and all of that.
So that I thought that it would be very interesting
in the contemporary American theatrical moment
to explore the most ordinary man...
Hansberry's death at age 34 of pancreatic cancer
provided no resolution to the absurd divisions
that partitioned her life...
the fissures between intellect and emotion,
art and activism, love and autonomy.
Everywhere she went, she felt like she'd left
a part of herself behind somewhere,
but she was determined to be whole.
The deathbed can be a theater, a place to stage a resolution.
Hansberry apparently told Dorothy she loved her there.
But usually it brings fear and pain,
not what could be or should be...
but what is.
Feminist, Marxist, radical, lesbian...
just some of Lorraine Hansberry's
ever-evolving identities.
If only she were still here to see that her words and work
are more relevant now than ever before.
Another Civil Rights leader of the time was Bayard Rustin,
associate and adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Like Lorraine, Bayard was also gay but lived more openly,
even as his homosexuality would keep him in King's shadow.
His enemies, outside and inside the movement,
would weaponize his sexuality against him,
but he would still choose to live his life his way.
_
I don't know if you know, but I was an associate
of Dr. Martin Luther King's for a number of years.
_
The man who organized this whole thing,
Mr. Bayard Rustin.
Ladies and gentlemen...
_
When I was 20, I happened to go to a conference
at Bryn Mawr College on the subject of race
because there was a man who was going to speak there
who was extraordinarily brilliant
and fascinating speaker.
I was just enormously attracted to this guy,
and he seemed to be the same.
He was an extraordinary person to me.
He had such intelligence,
such a love of life and humor, really a lot of wisdom.
And he had absolutely no shame about being gay.
I am a Quaker, and as everyone knows,
Quakers for 300 years have, on conscientious grounds,
been against participating in war.
Do you think Uncle Sam respected Rustin's objection
to his war?
Of course not!
He was tossed in jail in 1944 for 28 months
for refusing to participate in World War II,
but he would remain a rebel behind bars.
Yes, my disciplinary reports are a good read.
"He has a following among the fanatical few
and continues to be an institutional problem.
And while Inmate has no prior criminal record,
it is believed that he will continue to bring up
racial problems in this institution,
and he is already engaged in the practice
of agitating other inmates on the race problem.
Additionally, information has been furnished by five inmates
stating they have knowledge of unnatural sexual relations
attempted or performed by Rustin."
Some years later,
after a lecture he gave on world peace in Pasadena,
he was walking the empty streets quite late at night,
never thinking that everything he had been working towards
was about to come crashing down.
I was arrested in Pasadena, California,
on January 21, 1953,
on the charge of sex perversion.
I pleaded guilty to propositioning two males
to engage in sodomy.
I was sentenced to 60 days.
_
Have you ready my FBI file?
"Considerable investigation
has been conducted concerning Rustin."
Rustin, a self-proclaimed pacifist
and civil rights activist,
was born March 17, 1912, in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
He joined the Young Communist League in 1936
and claims he broke with the organization in June 1941.
In addition to the above, Rustin has also been arrested
on a number of occasions in connection
with his activities of an "agitational nature"
concerned with civil rights and pacifist programs.
Two years after Bayard's arrest in Pasadena,
the Civil Rights movement still wasn't ready to embrace a leader
who was unapologetically gay.
The arrest made his sexuality public knowledge,
and it became a weapon wielded by his critics
and enemies of the movement.
Looking for help in harmonizing his private life
with his very public life,
he began visiting psychiatrist Dr. Robert Ascher.
Bayard was quite depressed and utterly humiliated.
Psychiatrists, of course, never talk about their patients,
living or dead.
In this case, Bayard Rustin asked me please to do so.
He wanted his story to come out.
The main point of my work with him
was to have him understand being homosexual, that was just fine,
but the society around him couldn't deal with that.
There are three ways to deal with injustice.
One is to accept it slavishly,
or one can resist it with arms, or one can use nonviolence.
Rustin had been a longtime advocate
of nonviolent resistance.
He spent time in India studying Gandhi's methods.
The man who believes in nonviolence
is prepared to be harmed,
to be crushed, but he will never crush others.
And when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat
on the bus to a white man,
Rustin joined a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in Alabama in 1956.
By adopting Rustin's pacifist tactics,
King prevented the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott
from turning into a violent confrontation,
and Bayard would become his trusted mentor and adviser
from then on.
This is a nonviolent protest.
We are depending on moral and spiritual forces
using the method of passive resistance.
_
That we're asking...
black and white together.
Rustin's achievements in the movement finally started
to overshadow his 1953 arrest in Pasadena.
But while his sexuality was not central
to his civil rights work,
it was still not fully accepted.
At a given point, there was a lot of pressure
on Dr. King about my being gay
and particularly because I would not deny it.
Eventually he set up a committee
to explore whether it would be dangerous for me
to continue working with him.
After having already worked with Dr. King for five years,
that committee came to the decision,
given the nature of some of my past arrests,
that, yes, it would be dangerous.
And in 1960, Dr. King turned his back on me.
I was banished from the movement for a time.
But his time would soon come.
A. Philip Randolph,
the influential civil and labor rights leader,
tasked Bayard with developing
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Of course, segregationist politicians
would try and discredit the march.
Senator Strom Thurmond attacked Bayard
on the floor of the Senate,
trying to drag him for being a commie,
a draft dodger, and a homosexual.
The senator is not interested in me if I were a murderer,
a thief, a liar, or a pervert.
The senator is interested in attacking me
because he is interested in destroying the movement.
He will not get away with this.
Thinking back, one of the reasons
that I decided that I should no longer remain in the closet
came from an experience I had one day
way back as far as 1947.
I walked into a bus in the South,
all prepared to do what I had always done in the South...
take a seat in the rear.
As I was going by the second seat to go to the rear,
a white child reached out for the red necktie
I was wearing and pulled it.
Whereupon its mother said, "Don't touch a nigger."
Something happened, and I said to myself,
"If I go and sit quietly in the back of that bus now,
that child who was so innocent of race relations
that it was going to play with me
will have seen so many blacks go in the back
and sit down quietly that it's going to end up saying,
'They like it back there.
I've never seen anybody protest against it.'"
So I said, I owe it to that child,
not only to my own dignity,
but I owe it to that child that it should be educated
to know that blacks do not want to sit in the back,
and therefore I should be arrested
letting all these white people in the bus know
that I do not accept that.
Now, it occurred to me shortly after that
that it was an absolute necessity
for me to declare my homosexuality,
because if I didn't, I would be aiding
and abetting the very prejudice
that was part of the effort to destroy me.
And that in the long run, the only way
I could be a free whole person was to face the shit!
Bayard Rustin, the deputy director
of the national march committee.
He is giving instructions to the crowd for the pledge.
The first demand is
that we have effective Civil Rights legislation,
no compromise, no filibuster,
and that it includes public accommodations, decent housing,
integrated education, FEPC, and the right to vote.
What do you say?
Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin
each set powerful examples
for challenging oppressive systems,
pushing the movement forward in their own ways,
facing different struggles within themselves
and with the world at large.
But sometimes the world is a small stage in a small club,
and the struggle for equality is fought hand to hand,
arm in arm, with high style and a song.
_
An inside look at the life of San Francisco's homosexuals.
They move in all walks of life.
Except for hairdressing and a few other occupations,
their presence is unnoticed.
They work to conceal their sexual orientation by day
and only at night do they show their true colors
as they gather together in bookstores,
restaurants, nightclubs, bars, and steam baths,
all catering exclusively
to gay San Francisco's numerous homosexuals
that make up a bigger chunk of the population
than in any other metropolitan area of America.
I took a Greyhound bus for San Francisco
with $30 in my pocket.
I came to town, wandered around.
I ran into a police officer, and I said, "Where's a gay bar?"
And the police officer told me
about this bar called The Black Cat.
-? Hello, hello, everybody ?
? I'm glad to see you are here ?
? To sing and dance and entertain you ?
? And bring you lots of cheer ?
I went Sundays and I found they had an entertainer named José.
He did satirical operas done in a comical way.
And he used to put on crazy outfits
and he had a pianist who played.
But the best thing about it was he very deliberately did them
with a spirit of unity.
Maybe 200 people would fill this bar,
and they would all cheer his satire,
which was sort of gay liberation.
My name is José, José Sarria.
I started to say that gay was good.
There was nothing to be ashamed of.
When I was labeled a homosexual,
I decided that I was going to be the best.
So I put all my efforts in being a very outstanding,
parentheses, gay person.
I was more Bohemian than the Bohemian.
When I came back from the Army overseas,
I learned, which I could not understand,
how people had to live double lives.
The gentleman who was in the bank
that wore the suit and the tie and was very correct
was a cocksucker like I was.
Only he didn't advertise it in the daytime.
That was one of my prime things that I did at The Black Cat
was to show how these nelly queens
that worked in the financial district
were nobody but themselves.
Even when I began doing my shows, I never change my name.
I created a character, but I didn't change my name.
If I wore a dress, I am José.
If wear men's clothes, I am José.
And if I wear no clothes...
I am still José.
Perfect, darling, perfect.
It was the beginning of my awareness
that I was not only a gay person,
but that I should be aware
of other gay people and their rights, too.
Because José would say, "Let's unite," you know.
We must realize that the vice squad is here
because the vice squad, in the '50s,
used to park their police cars outside of gay bars.
And they used to take down
the names of people when they entered.
They used to come in and stand around
and just generally intimidate people
and make people feel that they were less than human.
It was a frightening period.
Just read what they print about gays and lesbians.
Is it any wonder we consider ourselves second-rate citizens?
We think, "I have no rights."
The police, they arrest anyone,
just for walking down the street
or for having a drink at a bar.
We pay fines because we don't want to get locked up.
The only time that you could wear a dress was Halloween,
but the dress had to come off at midnight.
That was the law, and the law reads,
"with the intent to deceive."
I circumvented this by having everybody put a sign on
saying, "I am a boy."
So when the cops would arrest you, you were not deceiving.
And as they were arresting them and hassling them,
we were singing, "Onward, Christian soldiers,
glory, glory, hallelujah,
God save the nelly queens."
It was done with high fashion.
I want to make my brothers and sisters see
that we do have rights!
And even though outlandish as I was, I was not second-rate.
I was number-one citizen.
And I preached this.
I had to make people realize
that they had to be part of San Francisco
to make it the city that it was.
And the only way you can be part of the city
is to get out and voice your opinion.
The gay people of that day
thought that they had to register with a number
that they would be identified.
And so they did not vote.
And I told them, "This is crazy."
I'll never forget, I took a leading gay person
who owns a business today,
and I made him register in front of 250 people
to show that they weren't going to arrest him.
Well, then this started a surge, and I said,
"Well, now I think I should run for office."
In 1961,
José ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,
16 years before Harvey Milk would win that seat.
He was the first openly gay candidate
for public office in the United States.
And he got close to 6,000 votes.
I ran for one reason...
to prove that gay people had the right
to run for public office, that I had the right
that anybody else had to do anything within the law.
Up until that time,
the gay community was very "I," "I."
And "I," "I" communities do not go far.
They die.
We have to become a "we" community.
We have to work together.
We have to help one another.
United we stand.
Or divided they'll catch us one by one.
Unity is the strongest thing.
Division is the fastest way that they can wedge in,
divide you, throw you into a tizzy, and win the battle.
I'm very stirred by this because at that time,
there was nowhere to go for your freedom.
And you were very much aware that there was no freedom,
that your freedom was in the gay bar,
but when you got out on the street,
you had to be mister straight.
But José would make these political comments
about our rights as homosexuals, and at the end of every concert,
he would have everybody in the room stand.
We'd put our arms around each other, and we would...
We would sing "God Save Us Nelly Queens."
? God save us nelly queens ?
And it sounds very silly,
but if you lived at that time
and you were aware of the oppression coming down
from the police department and from society
and that there was nowhere to turn...
? And lesbians, too ?
...to be able to put your arms...
...around other gay men
and be able to stand up and say "God Save Us Nelly Queens,"
we were really not saying, "God Save Us Nelly Queens."
We were saying, "We have our rights, too!"
? God save ?
? Us queens ?
For one moment, they admitted, and with pride, what they were.
I've always said it is no crime to be gay.
The crime lies in getting caught.
Gay bars in the 1960s could be considered safe havens,
welcoming ports in the storm,
a shelter from the critical and dangerous world
outside their inconspicuous doors,
but safety is never guaranteed.
Less than 400 miles south of The Black Cat in San Francisco,
another Black Cat purrs with nightlife.
Perhaps a dozen of Los Angeles' 80-plus homosexual bars
line the mile of Sunset Boulevard
between Sanborn Junction and Silver Lake.
Most are beer bars with pool tables, jukeboxes,
coin-operated game machines.
The buildings are shabby, the rent is cheap,
and business failures are common.
There'd been a series of counterculture demonstrations
along the strip,
with police cracking down and cracking heads.
But with the Christmas holiday approaching,
a kind of cease-fire had been called by protesters.
All was quiet until Pasadena police raid
the Catacombs Art Gallery, arresting 100 on drug charges.
Then, minutes into the new year,
LAPD vice squad rampages through the gay bars
in L.A.'s Silver Lake district.
The bar looked festive.
Colored balloons covered the ceiling.
There were three glittering Christmas trees.
There were also police officers, eight of them.
They might have been anybody.
Anonymity is a game people play in such a place.
Some witnesses claim to have spotted the officers.
The claim makes no sense, not in light of what happened.
That the room was packed full of people in drag
means they did not know the police were there,
certainly not a squad of them.
One. Happy New Year!
At this signal...
The cops!
...the uniformed officers appeared with clubs to assist.
- No! - Plainclothes men,
brandishing guns and fists as their only identification,
at the stroke of midnight
proceed to knock anyone they could reach to the floor.
Anyone fortunate enough to get up and ask who they were
received a gun to their head
and were told that was the only identification they would need.
Alarmed, a man in women's clothes ran for the front door.
The butt end of a pool cue felled him,
one ear split and bleeding.
A bartender was seized by the shoulders,
dragged bodily across the bar amid splintering glass,
and hustled outside where uniformed police waited.
Towards the rear of the room,
a patron was flung headfirst against the jukebox.
A youth in taffeta,
forced to bend across the hood of a patrol car,
tore the paper leis from his neck
and dropped them to the gutter.
A stout man in a red wig,
secondhand movie star gown, and high-heeled shoes
that were a dazzle of crushed sequins,
tried to look inconspicuous.
He woke up on his stomach on the floor.
An officer knelt on his back.
Handcuffs clicked.
The raid was over.
It had taken 10 minutes.
Inspired by the civil rights and antiwar movements,
new gay rights groups
were springing up all over the country.
One of them, PRIDE, in Los Angeles,
would form part of the community's response
to the police's violent midnight raid.
I belonged to PRIDE at the time.
And when the Black Cat had happened,
all of the leaders of the gay community came together
and to organize a demonstration we were going to have,
and we were really gonna get out
of what they were putting us through.
If you're an oppressed person,
the way gay people were at the time,
you had an empathy for the Black community.
America watches in horror
as the people of Watts, California, riot.
The burning, looting, and sniping goes on for four days.
It is the most destructive race riot in American history.
'Cause you know what it feels like to be alienated
and isolated and made not to feel a full citizen.
War demonstrators parade near the Los Angeles hotel.
On Sunset Boulevard, there were antiwar demonstrations going on.
Police scuffle with the pickets,
attempting to disperse them.
Violence breaks out several times in less than an hour.
A number of marchers are arrested.
And the police and sheriff's department attacked them
and beat them within an inch of their lives,
almost killed some of them.
And we were afraid that was going to happen to us.
Look at the faces on the people who those pictures are of.
Do you see anybody smiling?
They were terrified to be there.
But they knew they had to be there.
The mainstream press ignored the demonstration,
but it was one for the history books.
500 to 600 queer folks and their allies
massed in front of The Black Cat,
demanding an end to police brutality.
It was the largest gay demonstration of its kind
at that time, 2 1/2 years before Stonewall.
Every little demonstration
added to the freedom that we have today.
And I'm one of the few people that are left alive
that are in that demonstration.
Protest is a declaration, a challenge,
and by the end of the 1960s,
a new generation is pushing back against the laws of the land
that bind the liberties of its people,
and gay Americans are demanding a rightful place
to live and work alongside everyone else.
Our rights as citizens must be recognized
without fear or violence.
We will fight back against discrimination.
We will fight back against injustice.
The fuse is about to be lit.
Watch out!
CREDITS