‘He never hid himself’: the incredible life of gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin

‘He understood that history is like a pendulum: it swings back and forth and you’re going to have some defeats but it doesn’t mean you give up and walk away’ … Bayard Rustin in 1963. Photograph: Eddie Adams/AP

Most of you probably did not read about Bayard Rustin in school, the former US president Barack Obama observed at a recent film screening in Washington DC. Why? Rustin lived openly and unapologetically gay in the 1950s.

“Imagine that, think about that,” Obama implored an audience at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “This is someone who was courageous enough to be who he was despite the fact that he was most certainly going to be ostracised, fired from jobs, pushed aside. And that’s what happened most of the time.”