February 5, 1986 (originally recorded); Revisited 2025 (for Making Gay History podcast)
This “Making Gay History” interview with Walter Naegle reveals the personal life behind Bayard Rustin’s activism and the resilience it took to fight for freedom while living in the shadows as a gay man - recognition that finally arrived decades later.
Walter Naegle's preservation of these recordings ensures that Bayard's voice is heard directly, not filtered through others' interpretations or erasures. For decades, Bayard Rustin's homosexuality was weaponized against him. During the civil rights era, both segregationists and some movement leaders used his sexuality as grounds for exclusion. The government surveilled him. Historians often erased his role or minimized it, uncomfortable with how to integrate a gay Black man into the dominant narratives of the movement. Bayard died on August 24, 1987, at Lenox Hill Hospital from cardiac arrest following surgery for a perforated appendix. He was 75 years old.
Walter Naegle became the keeper of Bayard's legacy at a time when there was no institutional framework for recognizing queer partnerships. By the early 1990s, as the AIDS crisis devastated gay communities, surviving partners like Walter had to fight for access to their partners' estates, for recognition of their relationships, for the right to be called anything other than "friend." Walter had adopted Rustin specifically to secure legal standing. When marriage equality arrived in 2015, Walter didn't need to dissolve the adoption. He chose to keep it as it was, a historical document of necessity and love.
The Making Gay History interview, conducted in Rustin's apartment surrounded by his collections and photographs, serves as a counter-archive. It insists that Bayard was not just a historical figure but a man who lived and loved and built a life with another person. It testifies to how Walter understood his role. Not as wife or husband, since those categories were not available, but as partner, assistant, caretaker, and ultimately as the person trusted to tell the story truthfully.
In this podcast episode of “Making Gay History”, Eric Marcus sits with Walter Naegle in the Chelsea apartment where he and Bayard lived together for 25 years. The conversation moves beyond the public Bayard Rustin, the architect of the March on Washington and the strategist behind the civil rights movement, to the private man. Someone who collected Chinese roof tiles and African art, who baked cookies for fundraisers, and who had a grandmother wise enough to understand his sexuality without needing him to name it.
Naegle reveals the texture of their daily life. He describes how Bayard was a night owl who'd arrive at the office around 10 or 11 in the morning, while Walter, the early riser, would open up the sixth-floor office on 21st Street and Park Avenue South. Walter would answer phones and handle logistics while Bayard worked behind a magnificent desk surrounded by overflow from his collection. This was the backdrop for Bayard's 1986 interview with Peg Byron of The Washington Blade, with Bayard seated behind the desk and Walter quietly recording on a cassette tape, moving in and out to keep operations running.
That recorded interview captures Bayard discussing the sexual politics of the civil rights movement with raw honesty. He describes how J. Edgar Hoover circulated rumors linking him romantically to Dr. King, rumors that terrified movement leaders. A committee was formed to determine whether Bayard's homosexuality posed a threat to King's work. After eight years working together, they asked him to leave. Yet in 1963, when Senator Strom Thurmond stood up in the Senate and attacked Bayard, calling him a draft dodger, a communist, and a homosexual, the ten leaders of the March on Washington publicly defended him. Bayard explains this was possible because he had spent his life defending prejudice against Catholics, Jews, trade unionists, and Black people. They had a historical obligation to defend him in return.
But the deeper revelation in both the archival interview and Naegle's reflections is about what it meant to navigate this alone. Bayard tells Byron that he spent 34 years before declaring his homosexuality publicly, even as he organized for freedom. He recognized his attraction to men in high school and was successful at hiding it through championships in football, track, and tennis. Yet he also understood early that his visibility in certain spaces would protect him. At a high school banquet held at the YMCA where he, a Black champion athlete, was barred from swimming, his grandmother urged him not to attend. That act of refusal became foundational: if he could refuse to celebrate in a space that excluded him as a Black person, he could later refuse the closet that sought to contain him as a gay man.
Naegle emphasizes that Bayard believed in the interconnection of all struggles. He preached to gay audiences that their liberation was bound to the liberation of Black people, of Hispanics, of all marginalized communities. Yet he also named the reality: many white gay people adopted "the worst elements of their enemy" and perpetuated racism. Some avoided Black friendships to minimize the "double jeopardy" of being both queer and implicated in solidarity with Black people. Bayard refused this bargain. He insisted that cooperation with one's own oppression only strengthened the system designed to crush you.
The formal interview trails off. Bayard begins talking about the cookies that he and Walter are baking, in truth Walter was baking, for a potluck fundraiser for children's arts. It seems that life with a civil rights legend could be totally ordinary too.
When Obama presented Bayard with the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013, Walter stood to accept it. For the first time publicly, a sitting president acknowledged that Bayard had been "denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay." Obama said, "No medal can change that," but the gesture itself shifted something. Walter sat next to Sally Ride's partner. They were the first two LGBTQ+ partners to accept a presidential medal on behalf of deceased partners. Walter describes the moment as feeling "monumental," a recognition and affirmation after decades of erasure.
Marcus, Eric, host. "Bayard Rustin." Making Gay History, produced by Pineapple Street Media in co-production with the New York Public Library and One Archives at USC Libraries, episode originally aired 2025. Podcast audio and transcript. https://makinggayhistory.org.
Rustin, Bayard. Interview by Peg Byron. The Washington Blade, February 5, 1986. Audio recording preserved by Walter Naegle and digitized by Metropolitan New York Library Council. Featured in Making Gay History podcast. Making Gay History
