AN ENEMY OF LIARS

Mr. Rustin in his office at the A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1972 (Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Bayard Rustin)

The worthwhile documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin had exactly one screening this month as part of the “Naked Eye” series at Seattle Art Museum before returning to limbo. This nearly 90-minute film might re-surface on the PBS Point of View program, or it could be brought back this fall for the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Whether on large screen or small, catch it.

Both charismatically salty and genuinely warm, Rustin makes such a natural hero on cinematic terms alone that it’s almost unfathomable why his life story has taken so long to reach the movies. Where are all the liberal Hollywood producers when our multiplexes and our culture cry out for a politically left-of-center, openly gay black man who fights the good fight? In the hands of co-directors Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, this examination of Rustin’s victories and setbacks for civil rights gives off a thrillingly epic charge.

Refusing to forego his seat on a bus long before Rosa Parks made history, and being the seminal influence in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy of social change through non-violent means, Rustin seemed poised to assume a major leadership role. Yet he worked stealthily in the shadows most of his 75 years. His lovers were a political liability, and brethren as dissimilar as Adam Clayton Powell and Amiri Baraka publicly vilified Rustin for his homosexuality. And Rustin’s refusal to speak out against the Vietnam War—he held the vain hope that a close alliance with the Johnson administration would further combat racism—cost him many admirers. In the era of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, the aging Rustin came across as outmoded, conservative, no longer the path-blazing innovator of the 1940s and 50s. (The movie shows Rustin debating the two younger activists; it doesn’t show that he was more of a mentor than a rival to them.)

Alongside tragedies and losses, Kates and Singer wisely allow life’s humor in the film. There’s footage of a 1971 cocktail party where Rustin zestily, cheekily proclaims his place on Richard M. Nixon’s “enemies list.” He takes it as a great honor to be so designated. Brother Outsider also boasts a superb jazz score composed by Quincy Griffin that sounds like the cream of 1950s Blue Note burnished by the flame of Miles Davis's muted trumpet: a delectable accessory to the images. – NPT

May 2003

Movies into Film

© N.P. Thompson, 2004

npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

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