One of the patrons I became pals with was the underappreciated social justice advocate Bayard Rustin.9 Rustin—we all called him by his last name—had been a key organizer of the March on Washington. He’d sat alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at countless strategy meetings for the Civil Rights Movement, and Rustin would be a household name but for his open homosexuality, which included an arrest record for “engaging in public sex,” and his ties to communist and socialist ideologies. He was scrubbed from mainstream African American history and consigned to be a minor notable of the Gay Rights
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