The lessons of Bayard Rustin.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin By John D'Emilio Free Press. 352 pages. $35. O0

Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Edited by Devon Carbado and Donald Weise Cleis Press. 350 pages. $16.95

Here's a good candidate for the civil rights movements ugliest moment: Martin Luther King Jr. was at a Baptist World Alliance meeting in Brazil, slowly becoming comfortable with his ever-growing profile. Bayard Rustin, a trusted adviser who had helped orchestrate King's explosion onto the national stage, was in New York planning demonstrations for the 1960 political conventions and working in part on King's behalf. Rustin had screwed up: He tried to hasten the reluctant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's buy-in by publicly declaring it a co-sponsor before getting a final sign-off.

NAACP head Roy Wilkins, who jealously guarded his role as the movement's Beltway strategist, was already unnerved by King's ability to upstage him. So he decided Rustin's brash machination would be his final indignity, and he recruited Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to defend

his turf.

Powell--a Rustin foe not known for fretting over ethics--called King in Brazil and threatened to publicly charge that King and Rustin were lovers. King promptly backed out of the event and severed his ties to the openly gay Rustin, temporarily ending a relationship that produced some of American history's most innovative and effective mass mobilizations.

Historian John D'Emilio recounts this episode in his new biography Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. He also notes how King, a few years later, while reflecting on Rustin's triumph as architect of the 1963 March on Washington, blamed their years apart on Rustin's supposed harassment of college boys. "He would approach these students, and they started talking with people about it, and there was something of a reflection on me," he told a colleague, in a conversation ironically documented by an FBI wiretap looking for dirt on King's philandering. "So that was the main problem."

Rustin, meanwhile, apologizes for King's betrayal. In a 1987 interview republished in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Rustin assists King in redrafting history. Characterizing the still young minister as a naive leader, Rustin says King was vulnerable to bad advice from homophobic colleagues.

Rustin's reluctance to hold accountable a man who was no less an icon to him than to the rest of the world is understandable. But he and King's collective mythmaking surrounding uncomfortable truths is nevertheless a prototypical scenario in the black gay experience. And the incident is one of many--deftly drawn out by D'Emilio--that make Rustin's such an instructive story.

Bayard Rustin made one of the greatest impacts on American protest politics in the twentieth century. He was, as a State Department cable on his overseas pacifist work put it, the "foremost Negro exponent in U.S. of doctrine of 'passive resistance.'" Today, the once-radical strategies Rustin perfected have become cliches, invoked in some form by nearly every social movement since.

More than a decade before college students began sitting in at Southern diners, Rustin led the Fellowship of Reconciliation's 1946 nonviolent protest of Jim Crow buses, occupying white-only seating in an attempt to force the local laws hand on the Supreme Court's desegregation order. In a famous incident that predated even that demonstration, Rustin, traveling alone, refused to give up a seat in the white section of a Tennessee bus. As police beat him, he calmly recited the reasons their actions were unjust. By the time the ordeal ended, a handful of white passengers had come to his aid. The district attorney dismissed the case, remarkably replacing "nigger" with the honorific "mister" as he addressed Rustin. "I left the courthouse," Rustin writes in a 1942 essay reprinted in the collection, "believing all the more strongly in the nonviolent approach."

So by the time Rosa Parks held her own ground on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Rustin was well prepared to mentor the resulting movement's inexperienced spokesperson. King had studied Gandhian ideas, but he had no experience putting them into practice. Until Rustin intervened, he allowed a large number of guns to remain around his home. This was the nature of Rustin's contribution throughout the civil rights movement: turning its visionary leaders' appreciation for nonviolence into a usable strategy for confronting the nation's moral equivocation on race.

But Rustin's roots were in the postwar era's pacifist campaigns. Just as he brought nonviolence to civil rights, he brought the urgency of race politics to pacifism. D'Emilio's biography makes a strong case for Rustin's central role in transforming American pacifism. Through his insistence that peace groups engage in civil rights battles, Rustin helped reshape pacifism from something defined by individual acts of "witness"--in which its adherents simply live their own lives peaceably--into a proactive movement that directly challenged all forms of injustice as acts of war.

Throughout this work, Rustin struggled to reconcile his sexuality with the mores of the two decidedly Christian movements to which he had dedicated his life. Modern historians, finally willing to point out homophobia's ugly grip on our nation's past, have well documented the external aspects of this balancing act. King's 1960 betrayal was but one of many he faced. Years earlier, when he was arrested in Pasadena, California, on a "morals" charge, Rustin's father-figure A. J. Muste was chief among the peace activists who shoved him temporarily out of the movement--and, worse, out of their personal lives.

D'Emilio's Lost Prophet and Cleis Press's 75'me on Two Crosses, edited by Devon Carbado and Donald Weise, bring Rustin to life by reconstructing the tortured internal conversation Rustin's balancing act required.

D'Emilio shows that Rustin refused to live a lie surrounding his sexuality. Perhaps inadvertently, he was actively challenging sexual and gender norms long before there was a concerted queer movement.

During World War II, Rustin was among the crop of conscientious objectors who voluntarily went to prison rather than cooperate with military mobilization. Once there, he and others coordinated campaigns to organize prisoners around myriad social justice issues. But sex soon got Rustin into trouble. Prison authorities reacted not so much to his sexual relationships with fellow inmates as to his flaunting of them. Deliberately or not (D'Emilio avoids a conclusion on the question), Rustin was refusing to comply with gender rules in the same way he refused to comply with those that organized race relations.

When authorities punished him for his exploits, and then used them to undermine months of work he'd done on integrating the facility, Muste and other pacifists reacted with revulsion. Muste's anger over Rustin's tactical error became entangled with his frustration over the young activist's refusal to repress his homosexuality. D'Emilio quotes from a devastating letter Muste sent Rustin, who was then in solitary confinement. "You are still far from facing reality in yourself," Muste wrote, ironically insisting that Rustin's acceptance of his sexuality was standing in the way of inner peace. "In the self that has been and still is you, there is nothing to respect, and you must cast out everything in you which prevents you from facing that. Only so can your true self come to birth."

That episode prompted Rustin's first exploration of the dilemma his homosexuality and work presented: He could lead a frustrated personal life but thrive in the movement or give up his professional passion in order to attain a greater degree of personal freedom. Muste and his fellow Christian pacifists articulated an early version of admonitions still heard today, explaining that they did not object to homosexuality per se, but rather to Rustin's promiscuity, and counseled that the only way he could control his urges was to abstain. In correspondence with his boyfriend of the time, a torn Rustin thrashed about, acknowledging that his actions had been reckless but arguing that society's restrictions left him few safe sexual outlets.

Over the years, Rustin ultimately settled on a compromise position evident in his relationship with King: live honestly and accept the limitations that decision creates. He refused to alter or obscure his sexual expression. Indeed, all accounts describe him as playing up personality traits that caricature the mid-century gay man--aesthete, artistic, effeminate. He maintained homes with long-term boyfriends. And, King's scapegoating aside, he did openly cruise Times Square and regularly pick up (often much younger) men he met on speaking tours or while planning campaigns. As a result, whenever his colleagues publicly distanced themselves, he blamed no one. If he sensed his affiliation with a particular campaign would get in the way, he'd step aside without being asked.

This posture made Rustin an odd sort of exile--often positioned at the civil rights movement's center but never having the security to call it home. Rustin could not bring himself to relinquish his membership in the black community's political circles--after all, where else was there for him to go? Neither did the community ever wish him to do so. His homosexuality was readily accepted as long as that required only a passive tolerance. Trouble arose only when Rustin's colleagues were forced to choose between defending him and tossing him aside. And that's a second-class membership that remains all too familiar to black queers today.

Kai Wright is a senior editor for City Limits, New York City's urban affairs newsmagazine. Check out more of his work at www.kaiwright.com.