Those who declare “Gay is the New Black” have angered some within the black community who are weary of gays exploiting black suffering to legitimize their own, but the originator of this idea is one of the most powerful black leaders of our past, a man who The New York Herald Tribune called the “Socrates of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) served as a leading advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and as chief organizer of both the first Freedom Ride and the March on Washington in 1963, which was the greatest public demonstration for equality that our country had ever seen. And though for many of us it is Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech that symbolizes the march, when Time magazine published its report, it was Bayard Rustin on the cover.

Even so, Rustin’s name is not featured in our history books nor prominently on the internet, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic society, and so his involvement with rights organizations was often downplayed due to fears that reports of his homosexuality would drive away support.

In 1986, Rustin gave a rather controversial speech called “The New Niggers Are Gays,” in which he said:

Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “niggers” are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.

Rustin generously shares with us the hateful legacy of the word “nigger,” not because gays share the same history as blacks, but because we, too, carry with us the pain, humiliation, and frustration of living life as the hated minority of our day. Everyone who has ever been called a nigger, a faggot, a dike, a kike, or a cunt is united in their having experienced the feeling of dignity seeping from one’s own heart and the subsequent internal struggle to retrieve it.

Gays will eventually cease to be the most vulnerable social minority, just like Jews, women, and blacks before us, but we were in 1986 and we still are today a wonderful lot of people woefully battered by society. Keep fast to Bayard Rustin’s highest vision, and continue to protest the injustices waged against us and against any other group of human beings. We are all children of the Most High, and within each of us lies dormant the power to change the world.