“Ela aperta com força, e começa a machucar. Você não entende; não entende de uma forma tão profunda a ponto de seu cérebro deslizar, saltar, voltar atrás. Você solta um arquejo, o menor arquejo possível. É a primeira vez que ela encosta em você de um jeito no qual não há amor, e você não sabe o que fazer. Não é normal, não é normal, não é normal. Sua cabeça faz o que pode para encontrar uma explicação, e ela te machuca cada vez mais, e tudo ao redor para de se mover. Seus pensamentos chegam acompanhados de um espasmo de pavor, e você fica tão concentrada nele que não ouve a resposta dela. (…) “Precisamos conversar”, você diz. “Hoje, quando você apertou meu braço… Aquilo me assustou muito. Você pegou em mim de um jeito que não demonstrava preocupação nem amor. Você pegou em mim com raiva.” Você se sente uma hippie de merda, mas não conhece outra linguagem que dê conta disso, da palpitação desesperada do seu coração. “Você apertou sem parar e…” Você ergue o braço, onde um leve hematoma começou a se formar, para fora da água. “Por que você fez isso?” Ela fica com o olhar vazio por uma fração de segundo, e logo em seguida seu queixo começa a tremer. “Me desculpe”, ela diz. “Não foi por querer. Você sabe que eu te amo, né?” Este pedaço de “Na Casa dos Sonhos”, – li a versão brasileira – demonstra como os livros sobre relações abusivas e violência nas relações amorosas são sempre “murros no estômago”. Pelo menos assim o é para mim enquanto pessoa (e leitor).
“Na casa dos sonhos” de Carmen Maria Machado foi mais uma leitura difícil, e dura, pois se centra numa relação abusiva entre duas mulheres, colocando assim visível a existência de formas de abuso e de violência doméstica em casais de pessoas do mesmo sexo. Assim a autora coloca no centro desta obra personagens fortemente marcadas por processos de marginalização e, muitas vezes, invisíveis nas narrativas colectivas. Um dos elementos mais interessantes destas obra é o modo como o território da casa, aquele que é um terroir de segurança, de acolhimento, de paixão e amor se transforma num espaço de insegurança, medo e violência.
E esse processo de problematização da casa (do lar) como espaço de segurança/violência que a autora nos apresenta deste intenso livro. A autora faz o caminho de escrita desta obra partindo de uma experiência (aparentemente pessoal) quase como um processo terapêutico, em constante diálogo com um interlocutor possível na pessoa de nós enquanto leitores. Inovando muitas vezes na construção narrativa – tem mesmo surpresas várias ao longo do livro – Carmen Maria Machado escreveu uma obra de fundo que prende o leitor intenso. Faz da escrita um processo complexo de narrativa da vida, ou como afirma: “Na escrita, um lugar nunca é só um lugar. Quando é, o autor ou autora fracassou. O cenário não é inerte. Ele é ativado pelo foco narrativo. Mais tarde, você descobrirá que uma característica comum da violência doméstica é a “deslocação”. Em outras palavras, a vítima acaba de se mudar para um lugar novo, ou está num lugar cujo idioma não fala, ou de alguma forma foi retirada de sua rede de apoio, seus amigos ou família, ou roubada de sua habilidade de comunicação. As circunstâncias em que vive e seu isolamento a tornam vulnerável. Seu único aliado é seu agressor ou agressora, o que equivale a dizer que ela não tem nenhum aliado. E assim ela tem de lutar contra uma paisagem inalterável que foi criada à força por nada menos que o próprio tempo; uma casa grande demais para se demolir com as próprias mãos; uma situação muito complexa ou muito opressora para que ela a domine sozinha. O cenário cumpre sua função.” Lido no âmbito da iniciativa #leradoença da @pickashelf .
Following
a great response to this years CFP we are extending the deadline to
give more people the opportunity to be part of this brilliant event. The
theme for the 2019 Lesbian Lives Conference is The Politics of (In)
Visibility. The 24th edition of this conference is hosted by the
University of Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender in
conjunction with feminist scholars from University College Dublin and
Maynooth University. The organisers of this two-day international and
interdisciplinary conference now welcome proposals from academics,
scholars, students, activists, documentary and film-makers, writers and
artists.
The
Lesbian Lives Conference is not just the world’s most longstanding
academic conference in Lesbian Studies, it is a large international
event that draws speakers and participants from all continents and hosts
the best-known as well as emerging scholars in the field. In the past
we have hosted Emma Donoghue, Jackie Kay, Joan Nestle, Sarah Schulman,
Cherry Smyth, Del La Grace Volcano, Sarah Waters, Campbell X and
academics such as Sara Ahmed, Terry Castle, Laura Doan, Lisa Downing,
Lillian Faderman, Sarah Franklin, Claire Hemmings, Alison Hennegan,
Sally R. Munt, Helena Whitbread, Bonnie Zimmerman among many others.
Moving
beyond the notion of the politics of visibility as meaning only the
politics of being ‘out’ or being about erasure from cultural
representation, the conference seeks to further probe what the politics
of (in)visibility means to the LGBTQ community and individuals today.
With celebrity culture and new media is visibility still a burning
issue? Although visibility has increased, there are still media
representations drawing predominantly on limiting stereotypes; lesbians,
bisexual women and trans folks continue to be marginalised; yet visual
activism and expression; from painting, photography, and documentary
making to romcoms, comics, YouTube serials, and slasher fiction are at
the heart of LBTQ culture.
The
conference also would like to invite delegates to think about the
politics of (In) visibility beyond visual culture and media
representations, to include broader notions of public life and spaces.
Gay culture may be increasingly visible in some metropolitan areas but
lesbian spaces and places continue to be invisible. Similarly, Pride may
be considered a moment of public visibility for the whole of the LGBTQ
spectrum, but also in this case visibility is shaped by commercial
interests and this again marginalises LBT and other non normative
perspectives and experiences. Beyond these particular examples it is
also important to consider intersectionality in relation to societal
aspects of power that potentially render identities either or both in-
and hyper visible.
Proposals are welcomed on (though are by no means limited to) the following:
· The relation of queer to lesbian visibility
· Visual activism
· Revisiting debates about LGBTQ visibility and its discontent
· (In)visibility and intersectionality
· (Bi) invisibility in LGBT communities
· Visibility in mainstream media
· Fake news and tablodisation of sexual identities
· Social media and visibility
· Lesbian YouTube culture
· Sexuality and Instagram
· Dating apps
· Film and screen studies
· Comics
· Photography
· LGBTQ domestic photography and home movies
· Lesbians in the archives
· The visual imprint of subcultures
· The lesbian lens
· The lesbian gaze
· LBTQ looks
· Youth and (in)visibility
· Visibility and social class / disability/ race/gender
· Visibility and invisibility of LGBT in museums
The
conference organisers welcome proposals for (A) individual papers, (B)
sessions, (C) round table discussions, (D) workshops and (E) visual
presentations. We encourage submissions across all genres, both fact
and fiction which align to the conference theme, and which have been
produced between 2015-2018.
Lesbian
Lives aims to build bridges across disciplines and explore less
traditional forms of critical engagement with the politics of
(in)visibility. In 2019, this underlying ethos of inclusiveness and
dialogue will materialize in a fundraiser exhibition. Under the remit of
“The Lesbian Lens”, we invite artists to digitally submit visual work:
drawing, painting, photography and video. The exhibition opening will
take place on the 15th of March and it will close a week after.
For papers, panels or workshops, please submit proposals of no more than 300 words to: sexgencentre@brighton.ac.uk clearly the information required as per the guidelines below, by the 18 January 2019. For submissions to the exhibition, please send your work to: J.Keane@brighton.ac.uk
The
Lesbian Lives Conference is open to all genders and any political and
sexual orientations. There is an ethos of welcome and accessibility.
We particularly want to extend a welcome to bi and trans communities.
We
look forward to welcoming you to the conference and to hearing the
exciting papers, participating in the enlivening workshops, watching the
phenomenal films and engaging in a process of learning and growth.
For regular conference updates follow us on twitter: @CTSG_Brighton
(cfp) Here Versus There: Beyond Comparison in Queer and Sexuality Politics
National University of Ireland Maynooth, 18th June 2019
In sexual and gender politics, the Global North can be seen as ‘won’ and ‘sorted’, in contrast to a Global South that needs support to achieve Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and other sexual/gendered rights. This has specific effects both in places such as Ireland and the UK, where the politicisation of sexual and gendered lives moves ‘elsewhere’, and also for these ‘elsewheres’ marked as ‘unsafe’, ‘unfriendly’ and ‘backward’. This conference is seeking papers, provocations and discussions that investigate both the creation of the binaries of here/there, Global North/Global South in terms of sexual and gender politics, legalities and geographies.
Academics, activists, policy makers and all who are interested are invited to submit a proposal to contribute to this one-day event. Contributions can take multiple forms, including presentations, films and artistic expressions.
It is anticipated that the day will be used to create a proposal for a special issue.
Accessible buildings will be used and there will be a sliding scale for registrations, including a free option for those who cannot pay. For any other support needs, please let get in touch.
A FPCEUP – Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto acolhe o Seminário Internacional “Trabalho Sexual, Políticas e Direitos Humanos”, em antecipação do Dia Internacional contra a Violência sobre Trabalhadorxs do Sexo.
O seminário acontece no dia 13 de dezembro de 2017, entre as 14h30 e as 18h30, no Auditório 1.
Inscrição
A entrada é gratuita, mas exige inscrição aqui.
Será atribuído um certificado de presença aos participantes inscritos.
Programa
14h30 Abertura
15h00 Conferência com Pye Jakobsson (Rose Alliance, Estocolmo)
16h00 Intervalo
16h15 Exibição do filme “Normal: Real stories from the sex industry” de Nicola Mai (2012)
Apresentação e comentário por Mara Clemente (ISCTE/IUL)
17h25 Pausa
17h30 Apresentação do GIITS – Grupo Interdisciplinar de Investigadores sobre o Trabalho Sexual
18h00 Encerramento
This colloquium aims to bring together the study of sexual practices and desires and critical studies of men and masculinities. We are explicitly interested in returning to some of the provocations of sexology in the twentieth century to think through men’s sexuality today. For Kinsey there is an inherent paradox in “man’s absorbing interest in sex and his astounding ignorance of it; his desire to know and his unwillingness to face the facts.” Whilst we can see some of the failings and problematics in Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, and other Sexologists, it is critical to reflect not simply as criticism of these, but also of what they are suggestive and enlightening.
Today, nearly seventy years after the publication of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, after the sexual revolution, after the censorship trials, after the rise of feminism, queer theory, increased visibility of trans* and genderqueer identities, and LGBT activism, we wish to ask: what are men doing sexually? Men’s sexual practices, more often than not, are pathologized, diagnosed, managed, treated. Whilst productive and valuable work has been undertaken in the areas of rape culture and sexual violence, this symposium aims to explore the diversity and scope of male sexual practices. More specifically, current discussions on masculinity and sexuality tend to marginalize the fear, the excitement, the shame, the pleasure and the embarrassment that men experience when doingsex. This symposium addresses this by focusing on men doingsex.
International Conference on Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality: Places, Identities and Knowledges
Department of Geography Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
14-16 July 2016
Organised by:
Grup de Recerca de Geografia i Gènere
Departament de Geografia – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Sponsored by:
Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR), Generalitat de Catalunya
Departament de Geografia (UAB)
With the support of:
Commission on Gender and Geography, International Geographical Union
Institut Interuniversitari d’Estudis de Dones i de Gènere
This International Conference is addressed to researchers working from feminist perspectives on gender as well as other identities that play a role in the experience of place: age, social class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and others. Taking these power structures alone or in mutual constitution, we want to gather as many experiences as possible to account for the current dynamics of power relations and the role of places where they occur. Papers on diverse issues of everyday experiences in different contexts and spatial scales, in urban and rural areas, will be welcomed. All of them should illustrate the relationship between spaces and power structures in a global society that face relevant challenges from an economic, social, political and environmental sense. Theoretical, methodological or case studies papers are of interest.
The Conference seeks to build a stimulating forum to exchange ideas and forge new and fruitful international collaborations among researchers interested in gender geographies with an intersectional perspective.
The official language of the Conference will be English. Abstracts (in English, maximum 200 words) and keywords (in English, maximum 5) will be sent to 2016GenderBarcelona@gmail.comup to 11th March 2016.
Registration fee: 180 euro (90 euro students) (includes lunch and coffee break of 14 and 15 July). The acceptation of papers will be announced from 1 to 15 April 2016 and the Registration period will be open from 18th April to 31st May 2016.
(clarificando, ou apenas questionando. um pedaço de um belo texto de Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick a que volta e meia regresso. faz-me bem.)
Here are a few things theory knows today.
Or, to phrase it more fairly, here are a few broad assumptions that shape the heuristic habits and positing procedures of theory today (theory not in the primary theoretical texts, but in the routinizing critical projects of ‘‘applied theory’’; theory as a broad project that now spans the humanities and extends into history and anthropology; theory after Foucault and Greenblatt, after Freud and Lacan, after Lévi-Strauss, after Derrida, after feminism) when it offers any account of human beings or cultures:
1. The distance of any such account from a biological basis is assumed to correlate near precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference (individual, historical, and cross-cultural), to contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change.
2. Human language is assumed to offer the most productive, if not the only possible, model for understanding representation.
3. The bipolar, transitive relations of subject to object, self to other, and active to passive, and the physical sense (sight) understood to correspond most closely to these relations are dominant organizing tropes to the extent that their dismantling as such is framed as both an urgent and an interminable task. This preoccupation extends tosuch processes as subjectification, self-fashioning, objectification, and Othering; to the gaze; to the core of selfhood whether considered as a developmental telos or as a dangerous illusion requiring vigilant deconstruction.
4. Correspondingly, the structuralist reliance on symbolization through binary pairings of elements, defined in a diacritical relation to one another and no more than arbitrarily associated with the things symbolized, has not only survived the structuralist moment but, if anything, has been propagated ever more broadly through varied and unresting critique—critique that reproduces and popularizes the structure, even as it may complicate an understanding of the workings, of the binarisms mentioned above along with such others as presence/absence, lack/plenitude, nature/culture, repression/liberation, and subversive/hegemonic.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick “Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins (Written with Adam Frank)” in “Touching Feeling – Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity”, pp. 93-94
Hosted by CEVI – Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2
9000 Ghent – Belgium
Earlier this year Laura Kipnis caused a controversy with her article on ‘sexual paranoia’ in the academy in which she commented on university policies regulating student-faculty sexual relationships. Some called her intervention a melodrama – melodramatic or not, ensuing events did take on epic proportions. She met with vehement opposition and was even under investigation from her own university. Discussions on social media quickly widened to encompass feminism/postfeminism controversies. Sex in the academy has always been a controversial issue – not only between faculty and students, but within the student population as well. Plenty are the studies documenting the alleged rise of a student hook-up culture and the highly sexualized liminal zone of student life.
Sex and the academy is not without controversies either. Researching and teaching sex has often generated heated debate. To name but a few
examples: from Kinsey’s research and ‘marriage course’ in the forties and fifties; over the impact of the ‘second sexual revolution’ in the sixties and seventies; the rise of gender studies, women’s studies and feminist research, lesbian and gay studies and programs in the late seventies and eighties; the burgeoning of queer & LGBTI studies in the nineties; to more recent controversies concerning agency, choice and empowerment in the feminism/postfeminism debates, porn studies and work on sex work/prostitution/trafficking – the ‘powers of desire’ and the sexual politics of higher education have always caused tensions, controversies and opportunities.
Higher education is shaped by wider social and cultural sexual politics and dynamics. The masculine and gendered character of the institution, e.g., is still holding back the career development of women in academia.
More recently, the neoliberalisation of higher education has had an enduring impact on class, gender and sexuality structurings, subjectivities and normativities in academia.
Higher education has often played a crucial role in shaping sexual politics as well. By their very nature universities and colleges are highly sexualized and gendered places and spaces. Teaching, according to some, has an intimate link with desire and generates tensions and intimacies between teachers and students. The curriculum is not detached from the wider social context and is as such gendered and sexualized.
Higher education also provides a liminal zone and timeframe which enables young people to discover, develop and experiment with sexual relationships, identities and repertoires. As places of scholarship and research, universities shape knowledges and future research and pedagogical agendas.
In this two-day workshop we would like to bring together researchers, teachers and students to reflect on the sexual politics of higher education. It is a first instalment of a series of meetings in which the wide array of issues related to the sexualized and gendered nature of higher education will be explored.
We invite proposals for papers and pre-organized panels addressing historical and contemporary aspects of the following themes:
HE as Gendered and Sexualized Institutions
• Political/Sexual/Gender correctness on campus, in teaching and research • Sexual harassment and assault – rape & date/acquaintance-rape • Sexual correctness, harassment and assault regulations and policies • Student reproductive and sexual health issues and promotion, facilities & access • Campus tolerance, solidarity & sexual identity and orientation • Cultural and sexual diversities • HE institutions as loci and agents of change – sexual revolutions & backlashes • Women, careers and the academy – gender mainstreaming policies & challenges • HE and masculinity • The sexual politics of the neoliberal university
Researching & Teaching Sexuality
• Researching and teaching sexuality studies & sexuality-related topics • Gendered curricula & research agendas • HE as a critical/disciplinary space and regime • Feminist, queer and critical pedagogies • Sexual identities, orientations and academic careers • Libraries, erotica & pornography • Researching student sexualities • Research ethics and sexuality research • Women’s, feminist and (post)gender studies and their relation with sexuality studies • Feminism(s)/Postfeminism(s) and the agency & empowerment debates in HE • The place of queer studies in HE • Sexology and its place in HE • Freedom of speech, academic freedom and censorship • The erotics of teaching and education
Student Sexual Relations and Explorations in HE
• Liminality – student life as a liminal zone of sexual opportunities, discovery & experimentation • Student-Faculty Sexual Relations – Authority & Power (im)balances; consent, choice, responsibilities, vulnerabilities & harm • The sexual imperative and peer conformity pressures • Hook-up Culture, Friends with benefits & Casual Sex • Technologies of dating & sexualised social media • Hetero & homonormativities – Inclusions and exclusions • Student gender identities, ambiguities and sexual orientations • Sexual reputations and double standards • (International) Student mobility: opportunities and challenges • Student unions as sexualised and/or sexuality/identity-based organisations • Student events – parties, upper dare’s, … • Student sex work • Sexual activism & feminist mobilisation on and off campus
Submission & Timeline
Abstracts for presentations (300 words) or for panels of up to three speakers (please submit a 500-600 overview and set of abstracts) should reach us by 15 November 2015 at the latest, with notification of acceptance 22 November 2015. To facilitate funding applications you can submit an abstract in advance of the regular deadline – our turnaround time for refereeing in this case is 10 days and we can provide documentation where it is required to facilitate funding.
The fee for the two-day workshop is 100 Euro. A concessionary rate of 50 Euro is available to students and postgraduates.
INSEP publishes a journal and a book series with Barbara Budrich Publishers. We would anticipate commissioning publications from the conference and, dependent on quality and coherence, may publish a collection based on themes emerging from the conference. INSEP also welcomes submissions to the journal and proposals to the Book Series.
For more info on INSEP & the Sex and the Academy initiative please visit:
Foi publicada recentemente uma nova edição da revista Configurações editada pelo Centro de Investigação em Ciências Sociais (da Universidade do Minho). Desta feita estamos perante um número monográfico intitulado Género Sexualidade e Afetos (organizado por Ana Maria Brandão e José Manuel Resende) que torna público um conjunto interessante de textos (ver índice abaixo). Como habitual em muitas das publicações periódicas académcias os textos estão publicado on line e podem ser acedido aqui.
Entre os seus textos destacaria o artigo de Tânia Machado “À vista (des)armada: casais de mulheres e expressão pública dos afetos” sobre expressões de carinho de casais lésbicos em espaço público que nos abre portas de reflexão e investigação sobre uma temática que vale uma maior atenção por parte de cientistas sociais.
Destaco igualmente a densidade e a problematização acerta (diria eu) que António Fernando Cascais nos dá no texto “O malogro da beleza, ou uma incapacitação crítica da homonormatividade” em que a problematização sobre a “imposição” de determinados modelos estético-eróticos na população “gay” se desmonta e problematiza de um modo premente neste texto.
Aqui fica uma das passagem mais interessantes da crítica de Cascais:
“Alguns contributos podem ser de imprescindível utilidade para aparelhar aquilo que gostaríamos de chamar uma incapacitação crítica dos efeitos homonormativos do modelo estético-erótico de beleza/juventude. Antes de mais, impõe-se reconhecer que a dominância e a autoridade social dele, que não uma real hegemonia a que faltam condições suficientes que permitam perfazê-la, se encontram eficazmente limitadas pelo crescimento de identidades que definitivamente não se regem por parâmetros eugenistas e melhoristas, tais como, e tão-só a título de exemplo, as comunidades dos “ursos”, BDSM, leather, girth and mirth, transgénero e transsexual, bem como a comunidade lésbica inteira que sempre foi fortemente refratária a qualquer infl uência do modelo geracionista gay. A sua simples existência deve constituir um óbice à pretensão de representarem de forma universalizante a diversidade intrínseca das comunidades LGBTQ, ou, se assim quisermos, das “multitudes queer” (Preciado, 2003: 24), exclusivamente através das imagens uniformizadoramente “apresentáveis” do modelo estético-erótico, ao preço da anulação de todos os affreux que são delas excluídos. Genericamente, pode dizer-se que estes grupos se encontram nas melhores condições para desenvolver práticas de desidentificação, as quais se traduzem por outras tantas estratégias de sobrevivência que lhes permitem resistir a modelos de identificação socialmente prescritivos que têm por efeito a homogeneização e a assimilação de identidades queer, mas que, na mesma base teórico-política, podem ser aplicadas às forças homonormativas atuantes no interior das comunidades gay sempre que elas têm idêntico efeito homogeneizador e assimilador, como pode ser o caso do modelo estético-erótico.”
When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him. Bayard Rustin
The first time I heard of Bayard Rustin was the week after Martin Luther King Day. 2015. I was a young child during the civil rights movement. Whatever other faults my upbringing had, one of the good of was being taught a firm belief in civil rights and strong belief that racism needed to be addressed and hopefully abolished. The hows to do so were constant dinner table conversation.
In the early 1980s when I was first working for gay rights, I spent a great deal of time reading up on the civil rights movement of the ’60s to see what could be learned from it. And yet, immersed as I was in this, it has taken until now to hear of this important and influential man.
Strange, as I have had a deep interest in lbgtq history and a deep interest in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. I was looking for someone like him. Actively looking for him.
But it is not strange because Bayard Rustin’s place in history and in the Civil Rights movement and the strategies embraced by Dr. King have all but been erased due to homophobia. For Bayard Rustin was an out gay man. The bravery of this man, who understood deeply what racism was and who understood homophobia just as deeply, brings me to my knees in gratitude that he was alive and so very, very brave.
I have the odd understanding of the affects of homophobia from the place of being someone who could stay completely closeted. I can pass, whether I wish to or not. Queer people aren’t a shade of lavender, for many of us, there is no visual announcement made to the world that we’re here and queer. (Those who are not gender-conforming face terrible homophobia.) The same, of course, is usually not true for those who deal with racism. Bayard could have made his own life easier by staying closeted. It was what most people did in the early ’60s.
But Bayard Rustin was a deeply moral and convicted man, someone who understood even better than most how important civil rights were.
This is the man who brought nonviolence to the civil rights movement, was strongly influential to Dr. King, was part of the think tank of how to guide the movement, was one of the lead organizers of many of the most impactful things done during the civil rights movement. In fact, although there were people who were equal, it is hard to imagine someone with more influence over this branch of the movement, other than Dr. King himself.
Ever wondered what the connection was between Dr. King and Ghandi, who so obviously influenced what people did during the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights movement? The connection was Bayard Rustin, who had worked in India with Ghandi.
And his gayness was used in attempts to silence Dr. King. Listen to more of the story around that on NPR’s All Things Considered, here: Bayard Rustin.
In fact, most of the important events that happened during the civil rights movement had Bayard Rustin’s work in them, often as one of the architects or lead organizers. He was one of the organizers of the very first Freedom Rides in 1947. Making him one of the fathers of the civil rights movement of the ’60s. He also worked on gay rights in the 70s. Making him one of the grandfathers of the lgbtq rights movement as well.
Any progress made towards civil rights in the last 70 years owes a great deal to Bayard Rustin.
All in all, a fascinating man and one who does deserve much better from history than he has gotten. He devoted his life to civil rights. A true hero of our time.
A documentary was made about him in 2003, Brother Outsider. On November 20, 2013, President Obama awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be awarded to a civilian, on Bayard Rustin. His surviving partner, Walter Naegle, accepted the award.
Paulo Jorge Vieira 