After he moved to New York City in 1937, the great civil rights and peace activist Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) joined the same Quaker meeting where the CRC clinic first operated.[1] Rustin was a nationally recognized Quaker who was known for his work with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). He was a powerful public speaker, an advocate for demilitarization, and a community organizer for racial justice years before the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s. He taught Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about Christian and Gandhian approaches to nonviolence, developed many of the civil disobedience tactics that were deployed in some of the most effective civil rights actions of the twentieth century, and was the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin was also open about his sexuality for most of his adult life. Indeed, Rustin’s openness about his homosexuality as a public figure in the 1950s should be understood as a bold, courageous form of activism in itself.

A.J. Muste, Rustin’s immediate supervisor at the Fellowship of Reconciliation and a Quaker minister, frequently expressed concerns to Rustin about his sexuality and at times tried to convince Rustin to end his relationship with men, because “it could destroy him and hurt the movement.”[2] He told Rustin that gay relationships were shallow and fleeting, “practices for which there was no justification.” In 1944, while imprisoned for refusing to report to a war draft board, Rustin was disciplined by the warden for having sexual encounters with other prisoners. When information about his sexual behavior in prison became public, Muste scolded Rustin harshly. Letters to Rustin written by other Quakers at this time reveal that they did not think that the physical act of gay sex was wrong or sinful, but rather that gay romantic and sexual relationships were inherently inferior because (in their view) they lacked substance and were susceptible to moral corruption.

In January 1953, after speaking to audiences on behalf of AFSC, Rustin visited the streets of downtown Pasadena. At around 3:00 A.M. a police officer arrested him for allegedly performing oral sex on two men in the back seat of their car.[3] From the police station, Rustin contacted an AFSC staffer, who produced bail and found him a lawyer. After his release, Quakers debated with one another about how to respond, and voices in favor of condemning Rustin eventually prevailed. Lewis Hoskins, the Executive Secretary of the AFSC, complained in a letter to one of his colleagues that Rustin’s arrest had resulted in “a great setback to our [AFSC] work in peace and race relations.”[4]

In 1955, two years after his arrest, Rustin played a pivotal role in writing Speak Truth to Power, an AFSC report that urged nonviolent responses to international conflicts involving the United States. Speak Truth to Power popularized this phrase and uplifted the power of love to solve interpersonal and international conflicts. In the days and weeks leading up to its publication, the AFSC leadership feared that Rustin’s sexuality would compromise the impact of the report and hinder its effectiveness in changing public opinion and influencing foreign policy. After many tense and lengthy discussions, Rustin supported a decision to omit his name from the list of the report’s authors. It was not until 2010 that the AFSC Board restored his name to the list and lamented the “failure” of AFSC to not give Rustin the credit he was due.[5]

Muste’s and the AFSC’s responses to Rustin’s arrest do not speak for all Quakers at this time, of course, but they represent the limits of Quaker acceptance of gay sex in the 1950s. Rather than challenging the notion that gay sex was a crime, protecting Rustin, or expressing sympathies–as Marvel might have done–the Quakers who loved and worked with Rustin most closely chose to shame and punish him. Thus, in the decade immediately following the closure of the CRC clinic, liberal Quaker attitudes towards gay and lesbian people did not evolve in a positive direction. Instead, Friends seemed increasingly disinterested in protecting gay and lesbian people from criminalization. A change in attitudes, however, was instigated by a group of British Friends who would propel liberal Quakerism into a new era of activism and put pressure on Friends to protect gay people from state-sanctioned harm and cultural prejudice.

Notes