Sabrina Sojourner, former Congresswoman, was the first open lesbian to be elected to the United States Congress. In this interview, Sojourner talks about the future of freedom movements and the responsibilities that gay leaders have to their community and to the larger world. Read more »
Barney Frank, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, was the first openly gay U.S. Congressperson, and has served in Congress since 1981.
Here Frank explains his decision to come out publicly in 1987, and the role models who helped shape his career in public service. Read more »
Kenneth Reeves, City Council Member and former Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1992-1995, was the first openly gay African-American to head a major U.S. city.
Reeves talks about what Bayard Rustin's story means to him, and shares his perspective on the major advances and setbacks for the gay community over the past twenty years. Read more »
Sabrina Sojourner: I'm very familiar with Bayard Rustin's story. I'm honored that I twice have been given an award in his name and I also was asked to speak to a group in Boston at a luncheon in his honor, so I'm very familiar with him.
POV: How long have you known about his life? And how is it meaningful to you?
Sojourner: I feel like I've known his story forever. It's been more than twenty years since I first heard of him, and I knew his name long before I knew he was a gay man, having grown up in the civil rights era. I knew he was really the principal architect behind the March on Washington, and I also knew that he was principal organizer and that a lot of people had a lot of respect for him. And I think I was in college, or even after college, that I found out that he was gay.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Sojourner: Interestingly enough my role model was Harvey Milk, because he, like myself, started out in drama and theater. And when I moved from Santa Barbara back to the Bay Area, I met Harvey at a political event, no, I take that back, I met him at a theater event. And we got into a long discussion about theater and politics, and that really was my initial role model.
POV: What was it particularly about him other than that shared interest?
Sojourner: His bravery... well, yes, it is bravery. The fact that for him, being a gay man was natural. And he didn't take on other people's stuff about that. And that's what really caught my attention. And the fact that he was clear about what it meant to be a politician and what it meant to be a gay man who was a politician.
POV: So you're saying he was oriented to his own sense of himself, regardless of what that meant to other people?
Sojourner: No, I think it was bigger than that, because Harvey had something that continues to be missed, by a lot of gay politicians and a lot of gay people in general... in that he understood that he was a part of a community, and that he had something to offer the community, in terms of the larger San Francisco community, and that yes, he was a gay man, and he was going to be out about that because he was not going to let that get in the way in what he had to offer the community.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics?
Sojourner: I think that I was afraid that it would be more of an issue than it was. I was clear that I was going to take basically the Harvey Milk approach, which was I have a lot to offer my community, in terms of the District of Columbia, and that I was going to be out about my orientation so as to not make it an issue. When I encountered reporters who wanted to always talk to me about my orientation I started asking them how much do they ask my straight counterparts? About their orientation. The first time that one said "lesbian activist" I called him on it. I said, you know, you don't say this about heterosexual activists, and I am much, much more than that. I am a published writer, I am a director, a singer, a mother, there's lots of things you can put there, why are you just focusing on my orientation?
POV: What did he say?
Sojourner: Well, after that he dropped it. And he never did it again.
POV: So you found that strategy to be successful, as well as the only one you could take?
Sojourner: Yes. The challenges I continue to have are, as on a wide range of acceptance in the political establishment in Washington DC -- and the Washington DC I'm talking about is my hometown, not the capitol -- the struggle that I continue to encounter has much more to do with the white gay community than with the black heterosexual community. There are struggles that exist within the African-American community, and they're on a different level. They are much more with some, and not all, the ministers, and with some, and not all, congregations. And with some, and not all, religious black people. However, the struggles I encounter, and the place where I find myself most often under attack is from the white gay male community.
POV: Do you think that's something you experience particularly in the DC area, or do you think that's certainly something that's being struggled with across the country?
Sojourner: Absolutely. This whole thing with Trent Lott is interesting in terms of all the different discussions of race that it is bringing up. And race and racism within the, for lack of a better phrase, "mainstream gay community" is still very prevalent.
POV: And unquestioned?
Sojourner: And absolutely unquestioned.
POV: So what do you think Bayard would say about these issues today? Do you think it's a different landscape today than it was then?
Sojourner: Well, I think that Bayard has much more to say for African-Americans who are out as being gay or lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, than he does for probably other people. I think he's a model for everyone. The thing I love dearly about Barney Frank is he gets that he's a citizen of the world who is a gay man. And that he has a responsibility to the gay community, however, that's not the only place that he has a responsibility. And that's certainly, when I look at the people who I consider my contemporaries, Barney, Phil Wilson in L.A., even Ken Reeves, we get that we are out as gay people, we are out as African-American gay people, however we are also citizens of a larger world, a larger universe than the mainstream gay community. And I also think that's been the tension between us and the mainstream gay community.
POV: Well, to ask you where you see the gay rights movement headed, it sounds like, I could ask you that and I could also ask you where you see many other movements headed, because that's equally relevant to you! But for this feature, do you want to speak to that?
Sojourner: I would like to speak to that, because I think they are interrelated, and that's something I've been puzzling out for myself. I believe right now that all of the "freedom movements" have boxed themselves into a type of orthodoxy that is not serving them. To only look at things from a gay perspective, to only look at things from a black perspective or a Latino perspective, it feeds into a kind of monolithic thinking that doesn't exist in any of these communities. The African-American community continues to be described as a monolithic community but it is so incredibly diverse. That same kind of diversity exists in the women's movement, the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender movement, we are not monolithic in terms of our approach. So I think that there needs to continue to be opportunities to have autonomous ways in which we work, and there needs to be a group of people, and do I think it needs to be a group of people, who are willing to say that this is part of a larger scheme of what we want our country and our world to be. That it's not about freedom for any one group, it's about freedom for all groups.
I know a lot of people have a lot of problems with Bill Clinton, but the truth of the matter is that he was one of the few people who truly got that idea. Really, it was because he did have such humble beginnings, so he understood that intrinsically, that we either all float together or we sink together. Yes, there were times where he didn't have whatever we would have liked him to have to be more courageous, but he did a lot better than a lot of his predecessors, so to not honor him for at least what he did is also to dishonor people like Bayard Rustin, because there would not have been an opportunity for someone like a Bill Clinton if there had not been a Bayard Rustin.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics? Are openly gay politicians held to a different level of scrutiny than heterosexual public figures?
Barney Frank: Having been born in 1940, and having first gone to work in the public sector in the sixties, being out was not only a challenge to a career in politics, but an absolute bar. That is, when I first went to work for the Mayor of Boston in 1967, I was sure that if I had come out, I would have had no chance at a public career. Indeed, the sense I had that even as a closeted gay man I would find great obstacles in getting ahead politically, helped persuade me when I graduated from college in 1962 to go to graduate school for a PhD rather than a law degree, since I thought life in academia would be an easier place in which to deal with my being gay. When I had to conclude that I was simply temperamentally not suited to be an academic and was much better in a line of work where a short attention span was an asset and not a handicap, I assumed I had to keep my homosexuality secret. That remained my assumption through my first elected office in 1972, and on into my second elective office to Congress in 1980. In fact, in the late seventies, I had begun to come out to friends because I thought then my political career was ending, but when a surprising decision -- by the Pope of all people -- opened a Congressional seat for me in 1980, I slammed the closet door shut again because I was sure I could never be elected had I been honest about my sexuality. I am still as sure of that as in 1980.
After a few years in Washington, however, trying to live half out and half in, I concluded that I was making myself too crazy and decided to come out even though I thought it would have some negative impact on my career. I did not think I would lose, having been elected at that time to Congress four times, but I assumed it would have some negative effects on my influence. In fact, many of my straight liberal friends who had heard that I was planning to come out urged me not to do so, because they were convinced that it would lead to a diminution of my influence in areas other than gay and lesbian rights. I could not disagree with them, but I did argue that me sanity required this. Fortunately, they and I were wrong. I did fear that coming out in 1987 would hurt my career, but it has not. Indeed, the fact that I had come out voluntarily in view of 1987 helped me survive an unpleasant set of accusations two and a half years later from a hustler with whom I had been involved during my closeted period. A little of what he said was true, most of what he said was false, but all of it turned out ot be survivable because I could put it in the context of having once been closeted and having subsequently voluntarily come out.
POV: Did you have any role models as you grew into your career in the public sector? What influence did Bayard Rustin have on you?
Frank: I had several role models in my career, and I divide them into two categories -- those who were important in my deciding how to be an effective advocate for liberal causes, and those who were role models in my dealing with my own position as an openly gay official.
Interestingly, two of those whom I considered when I was in my twenties to be role models because of their general effective advocacy on behalf of social justice, I later learned were definitely in one case and probably in the other dealing with some of the sexuality issues that I was also dealing with at the time. The two role models in question were Allard Lowenstein, the murdered civil rights, peace and human rights activist, and Bayard Rustin. I had no idea at the time that I first became aware of them that either was anything but heterosexual. I realize that this was not always a great secret regarding Bayard, but I have never claimed to be exceptionally perceptive in personal matters of this sort and was certainly not before I came out myself. Both men impressed me bacause of their passionate combination of idealism and pragmatism. Lowenstein and Rustin were both zealots in their dedication to fairness in the world, and they were equally zealous in their determination to be effective in that advocacy. Both were embattled primarily on their right, against people who were promulgating racism, social injustice, and oppression. But neither shied away from debating critics to the left who advocated tactics which Lowenstein and Rustin -- almost always rightly in my view -- believed to be ineffective and self-defeating. Their willingness to be tough advocates of their principles even when some on their own putative side disagreed impressed me, and they were both extraordinarily effective. The fact that Rustin was gay and that Lowenstien was very probably struggling with some gay feelings himself now strikes me as a great irony because I saw both men as important role models without realizing exactly how much we had in common.
With regard to dealing with me being gay as a part of an effective political career, there are two other role models. One was not only straight, but militantly so -- the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell. Powell was an extraordinarily effective liberal member of Congress for years, until personal difficulties undid him, and he also had to deal with the issue of being the first African American member of Congress to confront the racism of the Congress itself. He became my role model when I publicly adknowledged being gay in 1987. I then had to decide how to deal with the institutionalized homophobia in Congress. My decision -- based on my reading of Powell's life -- was to insist on being treated like anyone else, to bring the man in my life to events whenever any other member of Congress would have brought his spouse or companion, and to fight for equal treatment in every relevant respect, whether as an individual or as a member of a couple. I sought out a biography of Powell because I was aware that he had faced similar issues and I have tried to model myself on his dignified but militant refusal to be discriminated against in Congress in the early forties. The other model was the late Steve Endean, who tragically died of AIDS. Steve was the first openly gay man I knew to revel in calling himsef a political hack, and to breach as an openly gay man the roles of organized liberal political activity. He became a member of the board of the Americans For Democratic Action -- the first openly gay person to do so I believe -- and led the way in insisting that he as an openly gay man be accepted as a sole ally of liberal politicians. Today the kinds of things Steve fought for are taken for granted, but they were hardly gimmes at the time and he was a very important role model for me in how to integrate effective political liberalism with openness about one's sexuality.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Kenneth Reeves: I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan, and I've been here in Cambridge for over 30 years. Growing up as a kid, and knowing I was gay, we had a black State Representative who my mother, who was a very innocent lady, knew was gay, and I kind of knew from the fact of him that I could be gay and in politics, that it didn't foreclose that possibility... I also had a wonderful, wonderful gay Sunday School teacher for much of my high school time. He also led our church youth group, and I think really, if I had a role model, it's him... Because he made it very clear that you have a special gift, and as long as you lead your life with dignity, and are a human being of your word, and you have good character, the world cannot deny you. I had the best "coming out" I ever heard of, and to have that involve one's Sunday School teacher in a positive way — given all this scandal in the Catholic church, I in the Episcopal church had just a very different experience.
You've opened the box of role models; there are probably two other people who, for me, define what is a good life and who I have tried to emulate. One is certainly James Baldwin, who was black and gay. This is a much longer conversation... but being black and gay is sometimes different, and I think Baldwin was able to articulate it in a way that no one else had, that it's a peculiar walk even within the realities of being gay or lesbian. James Baldwin was one of the truly brilliant Americans, and he was one of the first people in this country's intellectual history who had a global view in the 50s, and an inclusive view in the 50s. And you know, he articulated these things like, "How can there be a 'white'?" There is so much difference between the Russian, the Canadian, the Englishman and the Pole. How do you make that "white"? Baldwin was brilliant, brilliantly gay, gifted as a writer, and often in my times of trial I pick up any of his books and there is something there that is lucid. The other person is not someone who is gay -- W.E.B. DuBois, who I think is our preeminent man in American intellectual history. He is a role model mostly because he was a black person who said at the beginning of this century that if you say we have no history and no accomplishments, I will go and write down what they were and tell you the story back. He was the founder of the NAACP, a magnificent, magnificent man in many ways, and I think he also grappled with this status issue and tried to find his way in America and ended up in Ghana...
POV: And what did Bayard Rustin's story mean to you?
Reeves: Bayard Rustin was unusual in many ways. He was a Quaker, which was quite unusual for an African American, and a pacifist, again, unusual enough, and he was a marvelous first example of how you could be black, gay, involved with a church-based movement and succeed, because the talent that you have could not be denied. That's very important — Martin Luther King was aware of his talent and he knew he needed his particular skill set to make this "civil rights" move. And he knew that he could not do without him, and when the leading-the-way-backwards preachers attempted to oust Bayard, Martin found a way for that not to be. Even today, the black church is a magnificent institution, but it has to wrestle with the question of gays and lesbians within it. I think it is still wrestling in many instances. The example of what happened with Bayard Rustin within the context of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an important milestone in this journey, for how the church will get to love all of the kinds of people that God has made.
It's funny to me that Bayard Rustin has an uncertain place in history, in a way. He is not talked about enough, in either black or white history. So that's why I think your program is important at a time that's not Black History Month. There are not a lot of black gay leaders within even the "gay pantheon." I'm, again, glad that we all know James Baldwin, and we all know Audre Lorde, but we should all know Bayard Rustin. Here in Boston we have an annual Bayard Rustin Breakfast. Our AIDS Action Committee has done this for, oh, I don't know, approaching more than 15 years. It's an annual occasion where we all get together and celebrate the black gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities and it's an occasion to explain who he was, and what he did, and on a couple of occasions the speaker has been someone who actually knew Bayard Rustin, and that has made the event even more special.
POV: What's your view of the major advances and setbacks in the past twenty years?
Reeves: The major advances are obviously that the gay civil rights movement rose up. It has become very strong, without completely being successful yet, but I am amazed at the way this movement has been able to mainstream itself and become a part of the national consciousness. Now, that's an advance, but let me say a bit about some of the missteps along the way... I do feel that white gays and lesbians who make more than $50,000 a year seem to be doing real good. The people who can put on a tuxedo and go to the HRC (Human Rights Committee) dinner, I'm not so worried about them. White working class gays and lesbians haven't been heard from at all. I'm thinking of people from our traditional Dorchester and North End. The basic working-class ethnic Italian or Irish experience within the gay and lesbian experience isn't discussed. That has been a mistake -- reality for everyone isn't a $250 ticket and a tuxedo. I lived long enough where I've been to my early HRC dinners and I would be the only black person and there would be a half a table of women. So things have been coming along slowly. Now you have men and women and I'm not sure you have a full table of black people, but you have some. I have recently come back from a wedding of my good friend Professor E. Nathaniel Gates in Montreal, where they do have a form of gay civil union which is a part of the law in Canada. And rights, in this case, citizenship rights, are in fact affected by it. In the North American context, and I realize that here and there in Europe you can do something in Sweden or Denmark or Holland, it is an advance to sincerely see that marriage or something substantially similar will come. A setback, in my own city, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that we had a domestic-partnership ordinance which covered also the employees of the city, and based on a ten tax-payer suit that was prompted largely by people not from this city, it was questioned and now those benefits have gone away. I find that extraordinary because those benefits covered so many not only spouses but children! Bad people would be against health benefits. At least I can say that. So that is a setback that will be addressed.
When I see the future, I see this marriage possibility. I came to it very reluctantly. I have had a wonderful partner for now 33 years, my college roommate, and we've never been sure if marriage is what we need. Now that I've become smarter I realize that the fact that we can't get married means that somebody has a comment on the quality of our love, which is, for me, unbearable. I reject that comment and I would like to be equally treated. The thing that we've got to address is this canceling of pension rights amongst GLBT couples. It is absolutely ridiculous that I or anyone else would labor next to somebody in a corporate or public setting and when someone else passes away there's a pension that can go to his survivors but there is not the same in my instance. This isn't much discussed because there's talk that "well, insurance would have to be re-rated," and my response is "so what?" As gays and lesbians increasingly have families that are with children, I think that is a societal malfunction to be addressed. I really see a future where people will understand that love makes a family, and families have many different definitions, and the most recent census has shown some real evolution in family patterns. I'm not saying it's good in all ways, but the African American family is becoming rarer with each decade. The Ozzie and Harriet white family is too. We seem to be evolving in part away from that structure, I don't know to what, and I'm traditional enough to wonder if it's possible. But if you play sociologists at all you'll see that family structures have changed drastically, partly due to work but partly due to mobility and what else? I don't know but I can see the results. I would hope that there is a stronger emergence of the Black lesbian and gay voice along with the Latino and Asian voices. This is not a monolithic community. All these sets of experiences are important, and in the most global sense if we include everyone in the conversations we'll probably have the best conversation.
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Sabrina Sojourner, former Congresswoman, was the first open lesbian to be elected to the United States Congress. In this interview, Sojourner talks about the future of freedom movements and the responsibilities that gay leaders have to their community and to the larger world. Read more »
Barney Frank, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, was the first openly gay U.S. Congressperson, and has served in Congress since 1981.
Here Frank explains his decision to come out publicly in 1987, and the role models who helped shape his career in public service. Read more »
Kenneth Reeves, City Council Member and former Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1992-1995, was the first openly gay African-American to head a major U.S. city.
Reeves talks about what Bayard Rustin's story means to him, and shares his perspective on the major advances and setbacks for the gay community over the past twenty years. Read more »
Sabrina Sojourner: I'm very familiar with Bayard Rustin's story. I'm honored that I twice have been given an award in his name and I also was asked to speak to a group in Boston at a luncheon in his honor, so I'm very familiar with him.
POV: How long have you known about his life? And how is it meaningful to you?
Sojourner: I feel like I've known his story forever. It's been more than twenty years since I first heard of him, and I knew his name long before I knew he was a gay man, having grown up in the civil rights era. I knew he was really the principal architect behind the March on Washington, and I also knew that he was principal organizer and that a lot of people had a lot of respect for him. And I think I was in college, or even after college, that I found out that he was gay.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Sojourner: Interestingly enough my role model was Harvey Milk, because he, like myself, started out in drama and theater. And when I moved from Santa Barbara back to the Bay Area, I met Harvey at a political event, no, I take that back, I met him at a theater event. And we got into a long discussion about theater and politics, and that really was my initial role model.
POV: What was it particularly about him other than that shared interest?
Sojourner: His bravery... well, yes, it is bravery. The fact that for him, being a gay man was natural. And he didn't take on other people's stuff about that. And that's what really caught my attention. And the fact that he was clear about what it meant to be a politician and what it meant to be a gay man who was a politician.
POV: So you're saying he was oriented to his own sense of himself, regardless of what that meant to other people?
Sojourner: No, I think it was bigger than that, because Harvey had something that continues to be missed, by a lot of gay politicians and a lot of gay people in general... in that he understood that he was a part of a community, and that he had something to offer the community, in terms of the larger San Francisco community, and that yes, he was a gay man, and he was going to be out about that because he was not going to let that get in the way in what he had to offer the community.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics?
Sojourner: I think that I was afraid that it would be more of an issue than it was. I was clear that I was going to take basically the Harvey Milk approach, which was I have a lot to offer my community, in terms of the District of Columbia, and that I was going to be out about my orientation so as to not make it an issue. When I encountered reporters who wanted to always talk to me about my orientation I started asking them how much do they ask my straight counterparts? About their orientation. The first time that one said "lesbian activist" I called him on it. I said, you know, you don't say this about heterosexual activists, and I am much, much more than that. I am a published writer, I am a director, a singer, a mother, there's lots of things you can put there, why are you just focusing on my orientation?
POV: What did he say?
Sojourner: Well, after that he dropped it. And he never did it again.
POV: So you found that strategy to be successful, as well as the only one you could take?
Sojourner: Yes. The challenges I continue to have are, as on a wide range of acceptance in the political establishment in Washington DC -- and the Washington DC I'm talking about is my hometown, not the capitol -- the struggle that I continue to encounter has much more to do with the white gay community than with the black heterosexual community. There are struggles that exist within the African-American community, and they're on a different level. They are much more with some, and not all, the ministers, and with some, and not all, congregations. And with some, and not all, religious black people. However, the struggles I encounter, and the place where I find myself most often under attack is from the white gay male community.
POV: Do you think that's something you experience particularly in the DC area, or do you think that's certainly something that's being struggled with across the country?
Sojourner: Absolutely. This whole thing with Trent Lott is interesting in terms of all the different discussions of race that it is bringing up. And race and racism within the, for lack of a better phrase, "mainstream gay community" is still very prevalent.
POV: And unquestioned?
Sojourner: And absolutely unquestioned.
POV: So what do you think Bayard would say about these issues today? Do you think it's a different landscape today than it was then?
Sojourner: Well, I think that Bayard has much more to say for African-Americans who are out as being gay or lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, than he does for probably other people. I think he's a model for everyone. The thing I love dearly about Barney Frank is he gets that he's a citizen of the world who is a gay man. And that he has a responsibility to the gay community, however, that's not the only place that he has a responsibility. And that's certainly, when I look at the people who I consider my contemporaries, Barney, Phil Wilson in L.A., even Ken Reeves, we get that we are out as gay people, we are out as African-American gay people, however we are also citizens of a larger world, a larger universe than the mainstream gay community. And I also think that's been the tension between us and the mainstream gay community.
POV: Well, to ask you where you see the gay rights movement headed, it sounds like, I could ask you that and I could also ask you where you see many other movements headed, because that's equally relevant to you! But for this feature, do you want to speak to that?
Sojourner: I would like to speak to that, because I think they are interrelated, and that's something I've been puzzling out for myself. I believe right now that all of the "freedom movements" have boxed themselves into a type of orthodoxy that is not serving them. To only look at things from a gay perspective, to only look at things from a black perspective or a Latino perspective, it feeds into a kind of monolithic thinking that doesn't exist in any of these communities. The African-American community continues to be described as a monolithic community but it is so incredibly diverse. That same kind of diversity exists in the women's movement, the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender movement, we are not monolithic in terms of our approach. So I think that there needs to continue to be opportunities to have autonomous ways in which we work, and there needs to be a group of people, and do I think it needs to be a group of people, who are willing to say that this is part of a larger scheme of what we want our country and our world to be. That it's not about freedom for any one group, it's about freedom for all groups.
I know a lot of people have a lot of problems with Bill Clinton, but the truth of the matter is that he was one of the few people who truly got that idea. Really, it was because he did have such humble beginnings, so he understood that intrinsically, that we either all float together or we sink together. Yes, there were times where he didn't have whatever we would have liked him to have to be more courageous, but he did a lot better than a lot of his predecessors, so to not honor him for at least what he did is also to dishonor people like Bayard Rustin, because there would not have been an opportunity for someone like a Bill Clinton if there had not been a Bayard Rustin.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics? Are openly gay politicians held to a different level of scrutiny than heterosexual public figures?
Barney Frank: Having been born in 1940, and having first gone to work in the public sector in the sixties, being out was not only a challenge to a career in politics, but an absolute bar. That is, when I first went to work for the Mayor of Boston in 1967, I was sure that if I had come out, I would have had no chance at a public career. Indeed, the sense I had that even as a closeted gay man I would find great obstacles in getting ahead politically, helped persuade me when I graduated from college in 1962 to go to graduate school for a PhD rather than a law degree, since I thought life in academia would be an easier place in which to deal with my being gay. When I had to conclude that I was simply temperamentally not suited to be an academic and was much better in a line of work where a short attention span was an asset and not a handicap, I assumed I had to keep my homosexuality secret. That remained my assumption through my first elected office in 1972, and on into my second elective office to Congress in 1980. In fact, in the late seventies, I had begun to come out to friends because I thought then my political career was ending, but when a surprising decision -- by the Pope of all people -- opened a Congressional seat for me in 1980, I slammed the closet door shut again because I was sure I could never be elected had I been honest about my sexuality. I am still as sure of that as in 1980.
After a few years in Washington, however, trying to live half out and half in, I concluded that I was making myself too crazy and decided to come out even though I thought it would have some negative impact on my career. I did not think I would lose, having been elected at that time to Congress four times, but I assumed it would have some negative effects on my influence. In fact, many of my straight liberal friends who had heard that I was planning to come out urged me not to do so, because they were convinced that it would lead to a diminution of my influence in areas other than gay and lesbian rights. I could not disagree with them, but I did argue that me sanity required this. Fortunately, they and I were wrong. I did fear that coming out in 1987 would hurt my career, but it has not. Indeed, the fact that I had come out voluntarily in view of 1987 helped me survive an unpleasant set of accusations two and a half years later from a hustler with whom I had been involved during my closeted period. A little of what he said was true, most of what he said was false, but all of it turned out ot be survivable because I could put it in the context of having once been closeted and having subsequently voluntarily come out.
POV: Did you have any role models as you grew into your career in the public sector? What influence did Bayard Rustin have on you?
Frank: I had several role models in my career, and I divide them into two categories -- those who were important in my deciding how to be an effective advocate for liberal causes, and those who were role models in my dealing with my own position as an openly gay official.
Interestingly, two of those whom I considered when I was in my twenties to be role models because of their general effective advocacy on behalf of social justice, I later learned were definitely in one case and probably in the other dealing with some of the sexuality issues that I was also dealing with at the time. The two role models in question were Allard Lowenstein, the murdered civil rights, peace and human rights activist, and Bayard Rustin. I had no idea at the time that I first became aware of them that either was anything but heterosexual. I realize that this was not always a great secret regarding Bayard, but I have never claimed to be exceptionally perceptive in personal matters of this sort and was certainly not before I came out myself. Both men impressed me bacause of their passionate combination of idealism and pragmatism. Lowenstein and Rustin were both zealots in their dedication to fairness in the world, and they were equally zealous in their determination to be effective in that advocacy. Both were embattled primarily on their right, against people who were promulgating racism, social injustice, and oppression. But neither shied away from debating critics to the left who advocated tactics which Lowenstein and Rustin -- almost always rightly in my view -- believed to be ineffective and self-defeating. Their willingness to be tough advocates of their principles even when some on their own putative side disagreed impressed me, and they were both extraordinarily effective. The fact that Rustin was gay and that Lowenstien was very probably struggling with some gay feelings himself now strikes me as a great irony because I saw both men as important role models without realizing exactly how much we had in common.
With regard to dealing with me being gay as a part of an effective political career, there are two other role models. One was not only straight, but militantly so -- the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell. Powell was an extraordinarily effective liberal member of Congress for years, until personal difficulties undid him, and he also had to deal with the issue of being the first African American member of Congress to confront the racism of the Congress itself. He became my role model when I publicly adknowledged being gay in 1987. I then had to decide how to deal with the institutionalized homophobia in Congress. My decision -- based on my reading of Powell's life -- was to insist on being treated like anyone else, to bring the man in my life to events whenever any other member of Congress would have brought his spouse or companion, and to fight for equal treatment in every relevant respect, whether as an individual or as a member of a couple. I sought out a biography of Powell because I was aware that he had faced similar issues and I have tried to model myself on his dignified but militant refusal to be discriminated against in Congress in the early forties. The other model was the late Steve Endean, who tragically died of AIDS. Steve was the first openly gay man I knew to revel in calling himsef a political hack, and to breach as an openly gay man the roles of organized liberal political activity. He became a member of the board of the Americans For Democratic Action -- the first openly gay person to do so I believe -- and led the way in insisting that he as an openly gay man be accepted as a sole ally of liberal politicians. Today the kinds of things Steve fought for are taken for granted, but they were hardly gimmes at the time and he was a very important role model for me in how to integrate effective political liberalism with openness about one's sexuality.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Kenneth Reeves: I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan, and I've been here in Cambridge for over 30 years. Growing up as a kid, and knowing I was gay, we had a black State Representative who my mother, who was a very innocent lady, knew was gay, and I kind of knew from the fact of him that I could be gay and in politics, that it didn't foreclose that possibility... I also had a wonderful, wonderful gay Sunday School teacher for much of my high school time. He also led our church youth group, and I think really, if I had a role model, it's him... Because he made it very clear that you have a special gift, and as long as you lead your life with dignity, and are a human being of your word, and you have good character, the world cannot deny you. I had the best "coming out" I ever heard of, and to have that involve one's Sunday School teacher in a positive way — given all this scandal in the Catholic church, I in the Episcopal church had just a very different experience.
You've opened the box of role models; there are probably two other people who, for me, define what is a good life and who I have tried to emulate. One is certainly James Baldwin, who was black and gay. This is a much longer conversation... but being black and gay is sometimes different, and I think Baldwin was able to articulate it in a way that no one else had, that it's a peculiar walk even within the realities of being gay or lesbian. James Baldwin was one of the truly brilliant Americans, and he was one of the first people in this country's intellectual history who had a global view in the 50s, and an inclusive view in the 50s. And you know, he articulated these things like, "How can there be a 'white'?" There is so much difference between the Russian, the Canadian, the Englishman and the Pole. How do you make that "white"? Baldwin was brilliant, brilliantly gay, gifted as a writer, and often in my times of trial I pick up any of his books and there is something there that is lucid. The other person is not someone who is gay -- W.E.B. DuBois, who I think is our preeminent man in American intellectual history. He is a role model mostly because he was a black person who said at the beginning of this century that if you say we have no history and no accomplishments, I will go and write down what they were and tell you the story back. He was the founder of the NAACP, a magnificent, magnificent man in many ways, and I think he also grappled with this status issue and tried to find his way in America and ended up in Ghana...
POV: And what did Bayard Rustin's story mean to you?
Reeves: Bayard Rustin was unusual in many ways. He was a Quaker, which was quite unusual for an African American, and a pacifist, again, unusual enough, and he was a marvelous first example of how you could be black, gay, involved with a church-based movement and succeed, because the talent that you have could not be denied. That's very important — Martin Luther King was aware of his talent and he knew he needed his particular skill set to make this "civil rights" move. And he knew that he could not do without him, and when the leading-the-way-backwards preachers attempted to oust Bayard, Martin found a way for that not to be. Even today, the black church is a magnificent institution, but it has to wrestle with the question of gays and lesbians within it. I think it is still wrestling in many instances. The example of what happened with Bayard Rustin within the context of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an important milestone in this journey, for how the church will get to love all of the kinds of people that God has made.
It's funny to me that Bayard Rustin has an uncertain place in history, in a way. He is not talked about enough, in either black or white history. So that's why I think your program is important at a time that's not Black History Month. There are not a lot of black gay leaders within even the "gay pantheon." I'm, again, glad that we all know James Baldwin, and we all know Audre Lorde, but we should all know Bayard Rustin. Here in Boston we have an annual Bayard Rustin Breakfast. Our AIDS Action Committee has done this for, oh, I don't know, approaching more than 15 years. It's an annual occasion where we all get together and celebrate the black gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities and it's an occasion to explain who he was, and what he did, and on a couple of occasions the speaker has been someone who actually knew Bayard Rustin, and that has made the event even more special.
POV: What's your view of the major advances and setbacks in the past twenty years?
Reeves: The major advances are obviously that the gay civil rights movement rose up. It has become very strong, without completely being successful yet, but I am amazed at the way this movement has been able to mainstream itself and become a part of the national consciousness. Now, that's an advance, but let me say a bit about some of the missteps along the way... I do feel that white gays and lesbians who make more than $50,000 a year seem to be doing real good. The people who can put on a tuxedo and go to the HRC (Human Rights Committee) dinner, I'm not so worried about them. White working class gays and lesbians haven't been heard from at all. I'm thinking of people from our traditional Dorchester and North End. The basic working-class ethnic Italian or Irish experience within the gay and lesbian experience isn't discussed. That has been a mistake -- reality for everyone isn't a $250 ticket and a tuxedo. I lived long enough where I've been to my early HRC dinners and I would be the only black person and there would be a half a table of women. So things have been coming along slowly. Now you have men and women and I'm not sure you have a full table of black people, but you have some. I have recently come back from a wedding of my good friend Professor E. Nathaniel Gates in Montreal, where they do have a form of gay civil union which is a part of the law in Canada. And rights, in this case, citizenship rights, are in fact affected by it. In the North American context, and I realize that here and there in Europe you can do something in Sweden or Denmark or Holland, it is an advance to sincerely see that marriage or something substantially similar will come. A setback, in my own city, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that we had a domestic-partnership ordinance which covered also the employees of the city, and based on a ten tax-payer suit that was prompted largely by people not from this city, it was questioned and now those benefits have gone away. I find that extraordinary because those benefits covered so many not only spouses but children! Bad people would be against health benefits. At least I can say that. So that is a setback that will be addressed.
When I see the future, I see this marriage possibility. I came to it very reluctantly. I have had a wonderful partner for now 33 years, my college roommate, and we've never been sure if marriage is what we need. Now that I've become smarter I realize that the fact that we can't get married means that somebody has a comment on the quality of our love, which is, for me, unbearable. I reject that comment and I would like to be equally treated. The thing that we've got to address is this canceling of pension rights amongst GLBT couples. It is absolutely ridiculous that I or anyone else would labor next to somebody in a corporate or public setting and when someone else passes away there's a pension that can go to his survivors but there is not the same in my instance. This isn't much discussed because there's talk that "well, insurance would have to be re-rated," and my response is "so what?" As gays and lesbians increasingly have families that are with children, I think that is a societal malfunction to be addressed. I really see a future where people will understand that love makes a family, and families have many different definitions, and the most recent census has shown some real evolution in family patterns. I'm not saying it's good in all ways, but the African American family is becoming rarer with each decade. The Ozzie and Harriet white family is too. We seem to be evolving in part away from that structure, I don't know to what, and I'm traditional enough to wonder if it's possible. But if you play sociologists at all you'll see that family structures have changed drastically, partly due to work but partly due to mobility and what else? I don't know but I can see the results. I would hope that there is a stronger emergence of the Black lesbian and gay voice along with the Latino and Asian voices. This is not a monolithic community. All these sets of experiences are important, and in the most global sense if we include everyone in the conversations we'll probably have the best conversation.
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Sabrina Sojourner, former Congresswoman, was the first open lesbian to be elected to the United States Congress. In this interview, Sojourner talks about the future of freedom movements and the responsibilities that gay leaders have to their community and to the larger world. Read more »
Barney Frank, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, was the first openly gay U.S. Congressperson, and has served in Congress since 1981.
Here Frank explains his decision to come out publicly in 1987, and the role models who helped shape his career in public service. Read more »
Kenneth Reeves, City Council Member and former Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1992-1995, was the first openly gay African-American to head a major U.S. city.
Reeves talks about what Bayard Rustin's story means to him, and shares his perspective on the major advances and setbacks for the gay community over the past twenty years. Read more »
Sabrina Sojourner: I'm very familiar with Bayard Rustin's story. I'm honored that I twice have been given an award in his name and I also was asked to speak to a group in Boston at a luncheon in his honor, so I'm very familiar with him.
POV: How long have you known about his life? And how is it meaningful to you?
Sojourner: I feel like I've known his story forever. It's been more than twenty years since I first heard of him, and I knew his name long before I knew he was a gay man, having grown up in the civil rights era. I knew he was really the principal architect behind the March on Washington, and I also knew that he was principal organizer and that a lot of people had a lot of respect for him. And I think I was in college, or even after college, that I found out that he was gay.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Sojourner: Interestingly enough my role model was Harvey Milk, because he, like myself, started out in drama and theater. And when I moved from Santa Barbara back to the Bay Area, I met Harvey at a political event, no, I take that back, I met him at a theater event. And we got into a long discussion about theater and politics, and that really was my initial role model.
POV: What was it particularly about him other than that shared interest?
Sojourner: His bravery... well, yes, it is bravery. The fact that for him, being a gay man was natural. And he didn't take on other people's stuff about that. And that's what really caught my attention. And the fact that he was clear about what it meant to be a politician and what it meant to be a gay man who was a politician.
POV: So you're saying he was oriented to his own sense of himself, regardless of what that meant to other people?
Sojourner: No, I think it was bigger than that, because Harvey had something that continues to be missed, by a lot of gay politicians and a lot of gay people in general... in that he understood that he was a part of a community, and that he had something to offer the community, in terms of the larger San Francisco community, and that yes, he was a gay man, and he was going to be out about that because he was not going to let that get in the way in what he had to offer the community.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics?
Sojourner: I think that I was afraid that it would be more of an issue than it was. I was clear that I was going to take basically the Harvey Milk approach, which was I have a lot to offer my community, in terms of the District of Columbia, and that I was going to be out about my orientation so as to not make it an issue. When I encountered reporters who wanted to always talk to me about my orientation I started asking them how much do they ask my straight counterparts? About their orientation. The first time that one said "lesbian activist" I called him on it. I said, you know, you don't say this about heterosexual activists, and I am much, much more than that. I am a published writer, I am a director, a singer, a mother, there's lots of things you can put there, why are you just focusing on my orientation?
POV: What did he say?
Sojourner: Well, after that he dropped it. And he never did it again.
POV: So you found that strategy to be successful, as well as the only one you could take?
Sojourner: Yes. The challenges I continue to have are, as on a wide range of acceptance in the political establishment in Washington DC -- and the Washington DC I'm talking about is my hometown, not the capitol -- the struggle that I continue to encounter has much more to do with the white gay community than with the black heterosexual community. There are struggles that exist within the African-American community, and they're on a different level. They are much more with some, and not all, the ministers, and with some, and not all, congregations. And with some, and not all, religious black people. However, the struggles I encounter, and the place where I find myself most often under attack is from the white gay male community.
POV: Do you think that's something you experience particularly in the DC area, or do you think that's certainly something that's being struggled with across the country?
Sojourner: Absolutely. This whole thing with Trent Lott is interesting in terms of all the different discussions of race that it is bringing up. And race and racism within the, for lack of a better phrase, "mainstream gay community" is still very prevalent.
POV: And unquestioned?
Sojourner: And absolutely unquestioned.
POV: So what do you think Bayard would say about these issues today? Do you think it's a different landscape today than it was then?
Sojourner: Well, I think that Bayard has much more to say for African-Americans who are out as being gay or lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, than he does for probably other people. I think he's a model for everyone. The thing I love dearly about Barney Frank is he gets that he's a citizen of the world who is a gay man. And that he has a responsibility to the gay community, however, that's not the only place that he has a responsibility. And that's certainly, when I look at the people who I consider my contemporaries, Barney, Phil Wilson in L.A., even Ken Reeves, we get that we are out as gay people, we are out as African-American gay people, however we are also citizens of a larger world, a larger universe than the mainstream gay community. And I also think that's been the tension between us and the mainstream gay community.
POV: Well, to ask you where you see the gay rights movement headed, it sounds like, I could ask you that and I could also ask you where you see many other movements headed, because that's equally relevant to you! But for this feature, do you want to speak to that?
Sojourner: I would like to speak to that, because I think they are interrelated, and that's something I've been puzzling out for myself. I believe right now that all of the "freedom movements" have boxed themselves into a type of orthodoxy that is not serving them. To only look at things from a gay perspective, to only look at things from a black perspective or a Latino perspective, it feeds into a kind of monolithic thinking that doesn't exist in any of these communities. The African-American community continues to be described as a monolithic community but it is so incredibly diverse. That same kind of diversity exists in the women's movement, the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender movement, we are not monolithic in terms of our approach. So I think that there needs to continue to be opportunities to have autonomous ways in which we work, and there needs to be a group of people, and do I think it needs to be a group of people, who are willing to say that this is part of a larger scheme of what we want our country and our world to be. That it's not about freedom for any one group, it's about freedom for all groups.
I know a lot of people have a lot of problems with Bill Clinton, but the truth of the matter is that he was one of the few people who truly got that idea. Really, it was because he did have such humble beginnings, so he understood that intrinsically, that we either all float together or we sink together. Yes, there were times where he didn't have whatever we would have liked him to have to be more courageous, but he did a lot better than a lot of his predecessors, so to not honor him for at least what he did is also to dishonor people like Bayard Rustin, because there would not have been an opportunity for someone like a Bill Clinton if there had not been a Bayard Rustin.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics? Are openly gay politicians held to a different level of scrutiny than heterosexual public figures?
Barney Frank: Having been born in 1940, and having first gone to work in the public sector in the sixties, being out was not only a challenge to a career in politics, but an absolute bar. That is, when I first went to work for the Mayor of Boston in 1967, I was sure that if I had come out, I would have had no chance at a public career. Indeed, the sense I had that even as a closeted gay man I would find great obstacles in getting ahead politically, helped persuade me when I graduated from college in 1962 to go to graduate school for a PhD rather than a law degree, since I thought life in academia would be an easier place in which to deal with my being gay. When I had to conclude that I was simply temperamentally not suited to be an academic and was much better in a line of work where a short attention span was an asset and not a handicap, I assumed I had to keep my homosexuality secret. That remained my assumption through my first elected office in 1972, and on into my second elective office to Congress in 1980. In fact, in the late seventies, I had begun to come out to friends because I thought then my political career was ending, but when a surprising decision -- by the Pope of all people -- opened a Congressional seat for me in 1980, I slammed the closet door shut again because I was sure I could never be elected had I been honest about my sexuality. I am still as sure of that as in 1980.
After a few years in Washington, however, trying to live half out and half in, I concluded that I was making myself too crazy and decided to come out even though I thought it would have some negative impact on my career. I did not think I would lose, having been elected at that time to Congress four times, but I assumed it would have some negative effects on my influence. In fact, many of my straight liberal friends who had heard that I was planning to come out urged me not to do so, because they were convinced that it would lead to a diminution of my influence in areas other than gay and lesbian rights. I could not disagree with them, but I did argue that me sanity required this. Fortunately, they and I were wrong. I did fear that coming out in 1987 would hurt my career, but it has not. Indeed, the fact that I had come out voluntarily in view of 1987 helped me survive an unpleasant set of accusations two and a half years later from a hustler with whom I had been involved during my closeted period. A little of what he said was true, most of what he said was false, but all of it turned out ot be survivable because I could put it in the context of having once been closeted and having subsequently voluntarily come out.
POV: Did you have any role models as you grew into your career in the public sector? What influence did Bayard Rustin have on you?
Frank: I had several role models in my career, and I divide them into two categories -- those who were important in my deciding how to be an effective advocate for liberal causes, and those who were role models in my dealing with my own position as an openly gay official.
Interestingly, two of those whom I considered when I was in my twenties to be role models because of their general effective advocacy on behalf of social justice, I later learned were definitely in one case and probably in the other dealing with some of the sexuality issues that I was also dealing with at the time. The two role models in question were Allard Lowenstein, the murdered civil rights, peace and human rights activist, and Bayard Rustin. I had no idea at the time that I first became aware of them that either was anything but heterosexual. I realize that this was not always a great secret regarding Bayard, but I have never claimed to be exceptionally perceptive in personal matters of this sort and was certainly not before I came out myself. Both men impressed me bacause of their passionate combination of idealism and pragmatism. Lowenstein and Rustin were both zealots in their dedication to fairness in the world, and they were equally zealous in their determination to be effective in that advocacy. Both were embattled primarily on their right, against people who were promulgating racism, social injustice, and oppression. But neither shied away from debating critics to the left who advocated tactics which Lowenstein and Rustin -- almost always rightly in my view -- believed to be ineffective and self-defeating. Their willingness to be tough advocates of their principles even when some on their own putative side disagreed impressed me, and they were both extraordinarily effective. The fact that Rustin was gay and that Lowenstien was very probably struggling with some gay feelings himself now strikes me as a great irony because I saw both men as important role models without realizing exactly how much we had in common.
With regard to dealing with me being gay as a part of an effective political career, there are two other role models. One was not only straight, but militantly so -- the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell. Powell was an extraordinarily effective liberal member of Congress for years, until personal difficulties undid him, and he also had to deal with the issue of being the first African American member of Congress to confront the racism of the Congress itself. He became my role model when I publicly adknowledged being gay in 1987. I then had to decide how to deal with the institutionalized homophobia in Congress. My decision -- based on my reading of Powell's life -- was to insist on being treated like anyone else, to bring the man in my life to events whenever any other member of Congress would have brought his spouse or companion, and to fight for equal treatment in every relevant respect, whether as an individual or as a member of a couple. I sought out a biography of Powell because I was aware that he had faced similar issues and I have tried to model myself on his dignified but militant refusal to be discriminated against in Congress in the early forties. The other model was the late Steve Endean, who tragically died of AIDS. Steve was the first openly gay man I knew to revel in calling himsef a political hack, and to breach as an openly gay man the roles of organized liberal political activity. He became a member of the board of the Americans For Democratic Action -- the first openly gay person to do so I believe -- and led the way in insisting that he as an openly gay man be accepted as a sole ally of liberal politicians. Today the kinds of things Steve fought for are taken for granted, but they were hardly gimmes at the time and he was a very important role model for me in how to integrate effective political liberalism with openness about one's sexuality.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Kenneth Reeves: I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan, and I've been here in Cambridge for over 30 years. Growing up as a kid, and knowing I was gay, we had a black State Representative who my mother, who was a very innocent lady, knew was gay, and I kind of knew from the fact of him that I could be gay and in politics, that it didn't foreclose that possibility... I also had a wonderful, wonderful gay Sunday School teacher for much of my high school time. He also led our church youth group, and I think really, if I had a role model, it's him... Because he made it very clear that you have a special gift, and as long as you lead your life with dignity, and are a human being of your word, and you have good character, the world cannot deny you. I had the best "coming out" I ever heard of, and to have that involve one's Sunday School teacher in a positive way — given all this scandal in the Catholic church, I in the Episcopal church had just a very different experience.
You've opened the box of role models; there are probably two other people who, for me, define what is a good life and who I have tried to emulate. One is certainly James Baldwin, who was black and gay. This is a much longer conversation... but being black and gay is sometimes different, and I think Baldwin was able to articulate it in a way that no one else had, that it's a peculiar walk even within the realities of being gay or lesbian. James Baldwin was one of the truly brilliant Americans, and he was one of the first people in this country's intellectual history who had a global view in the 50s, and an inclusive view in the 50s. And you know, he articulated these things like, "How can there be a 'white'?" There is so much difference between the Russian, the Canadian, the Englishman and the Pole. How do you make that "white"? Baldwin was brilliant, brilliantly gay, gifted as a writer, and often in my times of trial I pick up any of his books and there is something there that is lucid. The other person is not someone who is gay -- W.E.B. DuBois, who I think is our preeminent man in American intellectual history. He is a role model mostly because he was a black person who said at the beginning of this century that if you say we have no history and no accomplishments, I will go and write down what they were and tell you the story back. He was the founder of the NAACP, a magnificent, magnificent man in many ways, and I think he also grappled with this status issue and tried to find his way in America and ended up in Ghana...
POV: And what did Bayard Rustin's story mean to you?
Reeves: Bayard Rustin was unusual in many ways. He was a Quaker, which was quite unusual for an African American, and a pacifist, again, unusual enough, and he was a marvelous first example of how you could be black, gay, involved with a church-based movement and succeed, because the talent that you have could not be denied. That's very important — Martin Luther King was aware of his talent and he knew he needed his particular skill set to make this "civil rights" move. And he knew that he could not do without him, and when the leading-the-way-backwards preachers attempted to oust Bayard, Martin found a way for that not to be. Even today, the black church is a magnificent institution, but it has to wrestle with the question of gays and lesbians within it. I think it is still wrestling in many instances. The example of what happened with Bayard Rustin within the context of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an important milestone in this journey, for how the church will get to love all of the kinds of people that God has made.
It's funny to me that Bayard Rustin has an uncertain place in history, in a way. He is not talked about enough, in either black or white history. So that's why I think your program is important at a time that's not Black History Month. There are not a lot of black gay leaders within even the "gay pantheon." I'm, again, glad that we all know James Baldwin, and we all know Audre Lorde, but we should all know Bayard Rustin. Here in Boston we have an annual Bayard Rustin Breakfast. Our AIDS Action Committee has done this for, oh, I don't know, approaching more than 15 years. It's an annual occasion where we all get together and celebrate the black gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities and it's an occasion to explain who he was, and what he did, and on a couple of occasions the speaker has been someone who actually knew Bayard Rustin, and that has made the event even more special.
POV: What's your view of the major advances and setbacks in the past twenty years?
Reeves: The major advances are obviously that the gay civil rights movement rose up. It has become very strong, without completely being successful yet, but I am amazed at the way this movement has been able to mainstream itself and become a part of the national consciousness. Now, that's an advance, but let me say a bit about some of the missteps along the way... I do feel that white gays and lesbians who make more than $50,000 a year seem to be doing real good. The people who can put on a tuxedo and go to the HRC (Human Rights Committee) dinner, I'm not so worried about them. White working class gays and lesbians haven't been heard from at all. I'm thinking of people from our traditional Dorchester and North End. The basic working-class ethnic Italian or Irish experience within the gay and lesbian experience isn't discussed. That has been a mistake -- reality for everyone isn't a $250 ticket and a tuxedo. I lived long enough where I've been to my early HRC dinners and I would be the only black person and there would be a half a table of women. So things have been coming along slowly. Now you have men and women and I'm not sure you have a full table of black people, but you have some. I have recently come back from a wedding of my good friend Professor E. Nathaniel Gates in Montreal, where they do have a form of gay civil union which is a part of the law in Canada. And rights, in this case, citizenship rights, are in fact affected by it. In the North American context, and I realize that here and there in Europe you can do something in Sweden or Denmark or Holland, it is an advance to sincerely see that marriage or something substantially similar will come. A setback, in my own city, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that we had a domestic-partnership ordinance which covered also the employees of the city, and based on a ten tax-payer suit that was prompted largely by people not from this city, it was questioned and now those benefits have gone away. I find that extraordinary because those benefits covered so many not only spouses but children! Bad people would be against health benefits. At least I can say that. So that is a setback that will be addressed.
When I see the future, I see this marriage possibility. I came to it very reluctantly. I have had a wonderful partner for now 33 years, my college roommate, and we've never been sure if marriage is what we need. Now that I've become smarter I realize that the fact that we can't get married means that somebody has a comment on the quality of our love, which is, for me, unbearable. I reject that comment and I would like to be equally treated. The thing that we've got to address is this canceling of pension rights amongst GLBT couples. It is absolutely ridiculous that I or anyone else would labor next to somebody in a corporate or public setting and when someone else passes away there's a pension that can go to his survivors but there is not the same in my instance. This isn't much discussed because there's talk that "well, insurance would have to be re-rated," and my response is "so what?" As gays and lesbians increasingly have families that are with children, I think that is a societal malfunction to be addressed. I really see a future where people will understand that love makes a family, and families have many different definitions, and the most recent census has shown some real evolution in family patterns. I'm not saying it's good in all ways, but the African American family is becoming rarer with each decade. The Ozzie and Harriet white family is too. We seem to be evolving in part away from that structure, I don't know to what, and I'm traditional enough to wonder if it's possible. But if you play sociologists at all you'll see that family structures have changed drastically, partly due to work but partly due to mobility and what else? I don't know but I can see the results. I would hope that there is a stronger emergence of the Black lesbian and gay voice along with the Latino and Asian voices. This is not a monolithic community. All these sets of experiences are important, and in the most global sense if we include everyone in the conversations we'll probably have the best conversation.
Sabrina Sojourner, former Congresswoman, was the first open lesbian to be elected to the United States Congress. In this interview, Sojourner talks about the future of freedom movements and the responsibilities that gay leaders have to their community and to the larger world. Read more »
Barney Frank, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, was the first openly gay U.S. Congressperson, and has served in Congress since 1981.
Here Frank explains his decision to come out publicly in 1987, and the role models who helped shape his career in public service. Read more »
Kenneth Reeves, City Council Member and former Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1992-1995, was the first openly gay African-American to head a major U.S. city.
Reeves talks about what Bayard Rustin's story means to him, and shares his perspective on the major advances and setbacks for the gay community over the past twenty years. Read more »
Sabrina Sojourner: I'm very familiar with Bayard Rustin's story. I'm honored that I twice have been given an award in his name and I also was asked to speak to a group in Boston at a luncheon in his honor, so I'm very familiar with him.
POV: How long have you known about his life? And how is it meaningful to you?
Sojourner: I feel like I've known his story forever. It's been more than twenty years since I first heard of him, and I knew his name long before I knew he was a gay man, having grown up in the civil rights era. I knew he was really the principal architect behind the March on Washington, and I also knew that he was principal organizer and that a lot of people had a lot of respect for him. And I think I was in college, or even after college, that I found out that he was gay.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Sojourner: Interestingly enough my role model was Harvey Milk, because he, like myself, started out in drama and theater. And when I moved from Santa Barbara back to the Bay Area, I met Harvey at a political event, no, I take that back, I met him at a theater event. And we got into a long discussion about theater and politics, and that really was my initial role model.
POV: What was it particularly about him other than that shared interest?
Sojourner: His bravery... well, yes, it is bravery. The fact that for him, being a gay man was natural. And he didn't take on other people's stuff about that. And that's what really caught my attention. And the fact that he was clear about what it meant to be a politician and what it meant to be a gay man who was a politician.
POV: So you're saying he was oriented to his own sense of himself, regardless of what that meant to other people?
Sojourner: No, I think it was bigger than that, because Harvey had something that continues to be missed, by a lot of gay politicians and a lot of gay people in general... in that he understood that he was a part of a community, and that he had something to offer the community, in terms of the larger San Francisco community, and that yes, he was a gay man, and he was going to be out about that because he was not going to let that get in the way in what he had to offer the community.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics?
Sojourner: I think that I was afraid that it would be more of an issue than it was. I was clear that I was going to take basically the Harvey Milk approach, which was I have a lot to offer my community, in terms of the District of Columbia, and that I was going to be out about my orientation so as to not make it an issue. When I encountered reporters who wanted to always talk to me about my orientation I started asking them how much do they ask my straight counterparts? About their orientation. The first time that one said "lesbian activist" I called him on it. I said, you know, you don't say this about heterosexual activists, and I am much, much more than that. I am a published writer, I am a director, a singer, a mother, there's lots of things you can put there, why are you just focusing on my orientation?
POV: What did he say?
Sojourner: Well, after that he dropped it. And he never did it again.
POV: So you found that strategy to be successful, as well as the only one you could take?
Sojourner: Yes. The challenges I continue to have are, as on a wide range of acceptance in the political establishment in Washington DC -- and the Washington DC I'm talking about is my hometown, not the capitol -- the struggle that I continue to encounter has much more to do with the white gay community than with the black heterosexual community. There are struggles that exist within the African-American community, and they're on a different level. They are much more with some, and not all, the ministers, and with some, and not all, congregations. And with some, and not all, religious black people. However, the struggles I encounter, and the place where I find myself most often under attack is from the white gay male community.
POV: Do you think that's something you experience particularly in the DC area, or do you think that's certainly something that's being struggled with across the country?
Sojourner: Absolutely. This whole thing with Trent Lott is interesting in terms of all the different discussions of race that it is bringing up. And race and racism within the, for lack of a better phrase, "mainstream gay community" is still very prevalent.
POV: And unquestioned?
Sojourner: And absolutely unquestioned.
POV: So what do you think Bayard would say about these issues today? Do you think it's a different landscape today than it was then?
Sojourner: Well, I think that Bayard has much more to say for African-Americans who are out as being gay or lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, than he does for probably other people. I think he's a model for everyone. The thing I love dearly about Barney Frank is he gets that he's a citizen of the world who is a gay man. And that he has a responsibility to the gay community, however, that's not the only place that he has a responsibility. And that's certainly, when I look at the people who I consider my contemporaries, Barney, Phil Wilson in L.A., even Ken Reeves, we get that we are out as gay people, we are out as African-American gay people, however we are also citizens of a larger world, a larger universe than the mainstream gay community. And I also think that's been the tension between us and the mainstream gay community.
POV: Well, to ask you where you see the gay rights movement headed, it sounds like, I could ask you that and I could also ask you where you see many other movements headed, because that's equally relevant to you! But for this feature, do you want to speak to that?
Sojourner: I would like to speak to that, because I think they are interrelated, and that's something I've been puzzling out for myself. I believe right now that all of the "freedom movements" have boxed themselves into a type of orthodoxy that is not serving them. To only look at things from a gay perspective, to only look at things from a black perspective or a Latino perspective, it feeds into a kind of monolithic thinking that doesn't exist in any of these communities. The African-American community continues to be described as a monolithic community but it is so incredibly diverse. That same kind of diversity exists in the women's movement, the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender movement, we are not monolithic in terms of our approach. So I think that there needs to continue to be opportunities to have autonomous ways in which we work, and there needs to be a group of people, and do I think it needs to be a group of people, who are willing to say that this is part of a larger scheme of what we want our country and our world to be. That it's not about freedom for any one group, it's about freedom for all groups.
I know a lot of people have a lot of problems with Bill Clinton, but the truth of the matter is that he was one of the few people who truly got that idea. Really, it was because he did have such humble beginnings, so he understood that intrinsically, that we either all float together or we sink together. Yes, there were times where he didn't have whatever we would have liked him to have to be more courageous, but he did a lot better than a lot of his predecessors, so to not honor him for at least what he did is also to dishonor people like Bayard Rustin, because there would not have been an opportunity for someone like a Bill Clinton if there had not been a Bayard Rustin.
POV: Did you ever consider being out as a challenge to your career in politics? Are openly gay politicians held to a different level of scrutiny than heterosexual public figures?
Barney Frank: Having been born in 1940, and having first gone to work in the public sector in the sixties, being out was not only a challenge to a career in politics, but an absolute bar. That is, when I first went to work for the Mayor of Boston in 1967, I was sure that if I had come out, I would have had no chance at a public career. Indeed, the sense I had that even as a closeted gay man I would find great obstacles in getting ahead politically, helped persuade me when I graduated from college in 1962 to go to graduate school for a PhD rather than a law degree, since I thought life in academia would be an easier place in which to deal with my being gay. When I had to conclude that I was simply temperamentally not suited to be an academic and was much better in a line of work where a short attention span was an asset and not a handicap, I assumed I had to keep my homosexuality secret. That remained my assumption through my first elected office in 1972, and on into my second elective office to Congress in 1980. In fact, in the late seventies, I had begun to come out to friends because I thought then my political career was ending, but when a surprising decision -- by the Pope of all people -- opened a Congressional seat for me in 1980, I slammed the closet door shut again because I was sure I could never be elected had I been honest about my sexuality. I am still as sure of that as in 1980.
After a few years in Washington, however, trying to live half out and half in, I concluded that I was making myself too crazy and decided to come out even though I thought it would have some negative impact on my career. I did not think I would lose, having been elected at that time to Congress four times, but I assumed it would have some negative effects on my influence. In fact, many of my straight liberal friends who had heard that I was planning to come out urged me not to do so, because they were convinced that it would lead to a diminution of my influence in areas other than gay and lesbian rights. I could not disagree with them, but I did argue that me sanity required this. Fortunately, they and I were wrong. I did fear that coming out in 1987 would hurt my career, but it has not. Indeed, the fact that I had come out voluntarily in view of 1987 helped me survive an unpleasant set of accusations two and a half years later from a hustler with whom I had been involved during my closeted period. A little of what he said was true, most of what he said was false, but all of it turned out ot be survivable because I could put it in the context of having once been closeted and having subsequently voluntarily come out.
POV: Did you have any role models as you grew into your career in the public sector? What influence did Bayard Rustin have on you?
Frank: I had several role models in my career, and I divide them into two categories -- those who were important in my deciding how to be an effective advocate for liberal causes, and those who were role models in my dealing with my own position as an openly gay official.
Interestingly, two of those whom I considered when I was in my twenties to be role models because of their general effective advocacy on behalf of social justice, I later learned were definitely in one case and probably in the other dealing with some of the sexuality issues that I was also dealing with at the time. The two role models in question were Allard Lowenstein, the murdered civil rights, peace and human rights activist, and Bayard Rustin. I had no idea at the time that I first became aware of them that either was anything but heterosexual. I realize that this was not always a great secret regarding Bayard, but I have never claimed to be exceptionally perceptive in personal matters of this sort and was certainly not before I came out myself. Both men impressed me bacause of their passionate combination of idealism and pragmatism. Lowenstein and Rustin were both zealots in their dedication to fairness in the world, and they were equally zealous in their determination to be effective in that advocacy. Both were embattled primarily on their right, against people who were promulgating racism, social injustice, and oppression. But neither shied away from debating critics to the left who advocated tactics which Lowenstein and Rustin -- almost always rightly in my view -- believed to be ineffective and self-defeating. Their willingness to be tough advocates of their principles even when some on their own putative side disagreed impressed me, and they were both extraordinarily effective. The fact that Rustin was gay and that Lowenstien was very probably struggling with some gay feelings himself now strikes me as a great irony because I saw both men as important role models without realizing exactly how much we had in common.
With regard to dealing with me being gay as a part of an effective political career, there are two other role models. One was not only straight, but militantly so -- the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell. Powell was an extraordinarily effective liberal member of Congress for years, until personal difficulties undid him, and he also had to deal with the issue of being the first African American member of Congress to confront the racism of the Congress itself. He became my role model when I publicly adknowledged being gay in 1987. I then had to decide how to deal with the institutionalized homophobia in Congress. My decision -- based on my reading of Powell's life -- was to insist on being treated like anyone else, to bring the man in my life to events whenever any other member of Congress would have brought his spouse or companion, and to fight for equal treatment in every relevant respect, whether as an individual or as a member of a couple. I sought out a biography of Powell because I was aware that he had faced similar issues and I have tried to model myself on his dignified but militant refusal to be discriminated against in Congress in the early forties. The other model was the late Steve Endean, who tragically died of AIDS. Steve was the first openly gay man I knew to revel in calling himsef a political hack, and to breach as an openly gay man the roles of organized liberal political activity. He became a member of the board of the Americans For Democratic Action -- the first openly gay person to do so I believe -- and led the way in insisting that he as an openly gay man be accepted as a sole ally of liberal politicians. Today the kinds of things Steve fought for are taken for granted, but they were hardly gimmes at the time and he was a very important role model for me in how to integrate effective political liberalism with openness about one's sexuality.
POV: Did you have any particular role models when you were thinking about a career in the public sector?
Kenneth Reeves: I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan, and I've been here in Cambridge for over 30 years. Growing up as a kid, and knowing I was gay, we had a black State Representative who my mother, who was a very innocent lady, knew was gay, and I kind of knew from the fact of him that I could be gay and in politics, that it didn't foreclose that possibility... I also had a wonderful, wonderful gay Sunday School teacher for much of my high school time. He also led our church youth group, and I think really, if I had a role model, it's him... Because he made it very clear that you have a special gift, and as long as you lead your life with dignity, and are a human being of your word, and you have good character, the world cannot deny you. I had the best "coming out" I ever heard of, and to have that involve one's Sunday School teacher in a positive way -- given all this scandal in the Catholic church, I in the Episcopal church had just a very different experience.
You've opened the box of role models; there are probably two other people who, for me, define what is a good life and who I have tried to emulate. One is certainly James Baldwin, who was black and gay. This is a much longer conversation... but being black and gay is sometimes different, and I think Baldwin was able to articulate it in a way that no one else had, that it's a peculiar walk even within the realities of being gay or lesbian. James Baldwin was one of the truly brilliant Americans, and he was one of the first people in this country's intellectual history who had a global view in the 50s, and an inclusive view in the 50s. And you know, he articulated these things like, "How can there be a 'white'?" There is so much difference between the Russian, the Canadian, the Englishman and the Pole. How do you make that "white"? Baldwin was brilliant, brilliantly gay, gifted as a writer, and often in my times of trial I pick up any of his books and there is something there that is lucid. The other person is not someone who is gay -- W.E.B. DuBois, who I think is our preeminent man in American intellectual history. He is a role model mostly because he was a black person who said at the beginning of this century that if you say we have no history and no accomplishments, I will go and write down what they were and tell you the story back. He was the founder of the NAACP, a magnificent, magnificent man in many ways, and I think he also grappled with this status issue and tried to find his way in America and ended up in Ghana...
POV: And what did Bayard Rustin's story mean to you?
Reeves: Bayard Rustin was unusual in many ways. He was a Quaker, which was quite unusual for an African American, and a pacifist, again, unusual enough, and he was a marvelous first example of how you could be black, gay, involved with a church-based movement and succeed, because the talent that you have could not be denied. That's very important -- Martin Luther King was aware of his talent and he knew he needed his particular skill set to make this "civil rights" move. And he knew that he could not do without him, and when the leading-the-way-backwards preachers attempted to oust Bayard, Martin found a way for that not to be. Even today, the black church is a magnificent institution, but it has to wrestle with the question of gays and lesbians within it. I think it is still wrestling in many instances. The example of what happened with Bayard Rustin within the context of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an important milestone in this journey, for how the church will get to love all of the kinds of people that God has made.
It's funny to me that Bayard Rustin has an uncertain place in history, in a way. He is not talked about enough, in either black or white history. So that's why I think your program is important at a time that's not Black History Month. There are not a lot of black gay leaders within even the "gay pantheon." I'm, again, glad that we all know James Baldwin, and we all know Audre Lorde, but we should all know Bayard Rustin. Here in Boston we have an annual Bayard Rustin Breakfast. Our AIDS Action Committee has done this for, oh, I don't know, approaching more than 15 years. It's an annual occasion where we all get together and celebrate the black gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities and it's an occasion to explain who he was, and what he did, and on a couple of occasions the speaker has been someone who actually knew Bayard Rustin, and that has made the event even more special.
POV: What's your view of the major advances and setbacks in the past twenty years?
Reeves: The major advances are obviously that the gay civil rights movement rose up. It has become very strong, without completely being successful yet, but I am amazed at the way this movement has been able to mainstream itself and become a part of the national consciousness. Now, that's an advance, but let me say a bit about some of the missteps along the way... I do feel that white gays and lesbians who make more than $50,000 a year seem to be doing real good. The people who can put on a tuxedo and go to the HRC (Human Rights Committee) dinner, I'm not so worried about them. White working class gays and lesbians haven't been heard from at all. I'm thinking of people from our traditional Dorchester and North End. The basic working-class ethnic Italian or Irish experience within the gay and lesbian experience isn't discussed. That has been a mistake -- reality for everyone isn't a $250 ticket and a tuxedo. I lived long enough where I've been to my early HRC dinners and I would be the only black person and there would be a half a table of women. So things have been coming along slowly. Now you have men and women and I'm not sure you have a full table of black people, but you have some. I have recently come back from a wedding of my good friend Professor E. Nathaniel Gates in Montreal, where they do have a form of gay civil union which is a part of the law in Canada. And rights, in this case, citizenship rights, are in fact affected by it. In the North American context, and I realize that here and there in Europe you can do something in Sweden or Denmark or Holland, it is an advance to sincerely see that marriage or something substantially similar will come. A setback, in my own city, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that we had a domestic-partnership ordinance which covered also the employees of the city, and based on a ten tax-payer suit that was prompted largely by people not from this city, it was questioned and now those benefits have gone away. I find that extraordinary because those benefits covered so many not only spouses but children! Bad people would be against health benefits. At least I can say that. So that is a setback that will be addressed.
When I see the future, I see this marriage possibility. I came to it very reluctantly. I have had a wonderful partner for now 33 years, my college roommate, and we've never been sure if marriage is what we need. Now that I've become smarter I realize that the fact that we can't get married means that somebody has a comment on the quality of our love, which is, for me, unbearable. I reject that comment and I would like to be equally treated. The thing that we've got to address is this canceling of pension rights amongst GLBT couples. It is absolutely ridiculous that I or anyone else would labor next to somebody in a corporate or public setting and when someone else passes away there's a pension that can go to his survivors but there is not the same in my instance. This isn't much discussed because there's talk that "well, insurance would have to be re-rated," and my response is "so what?" As gays and lesbians increasingly have families that are with children, I think that is a societal malfunction to be addressed. I really see a future where people will understand that love makes a family, and families have many different definitions, and the most recent census has shown some real evolution in family patterns. I'm not saying it's good in all ways, but the African American family is becoming rarer with each decade. The Ozzie and Harriet white family is too. We seem to be evolving in part away from that structure, I don't know to what, and I'm traditional enough to wonder if it's possible. But if you play sociologists at all you'll see that family structures have changed drastically, partly due to work but partly due to mobility and what else? I don't know but I can see the results. I would hope that there is a stronger emergence of the Black lesbian and gay voice along with the Latino and Asian voices. This is not a monolithic community. All these sets of experiences are important, and in the most global sense if we include everyone in the conversations we'll probably have the best conversation.
Sabrina Sojourner, former Congresswoman, was the first open lesbian to be elected to the United States Congress. In this interview, Sojourner talks about the future of freedom movements and the responsibilities that gay leaders have to their community and to the larger world. 
Barney Frank, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, was the first openly gay U.S. Congressperson, and has served in Congress since 1981.
Here Frank explains his decision to come out publicly in 1987, and the role models who helped shape his career in public service. 
Kenneth Reeves, City Council Member and former Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1992-1995, was the first openly gay African-American to head a major U.S. city.
Reeves talks about what Bayard Rustin's story means to him, and shares his perspective on the major advances and setbacks for the gay community over the past twenty years.