Courage
BY John D'Emilio ON January 7, 2015
The Imitation Game, a film about Alan Turing and his role during World War II in deciphering Nazi Germany’s secret codes, has sparked much discussion about the history that the film covers and how accurate, or not, it is. Viewing the movie, I was so completely captured by its dramatic and emotional power that, frankly, I wasn’t concerned about whether the film got everything right.
But the film did set me thinking about the theme of courage in the experience of same-sex loving and gender-nonconforming people. Woven into the story of Turing and World War II are events that happened afterward: Turing’s arrest and conviction in 1952 on charges of engaging in sex with another man in the privacy of his own home, and his death in 1954, perhaps a suicide or perhaps an accident. His conviction and death sandwich another tragic event in LGBT history, the arrest and conviction in California in January 1953 of Bayard Rustin, a peace and civil rights activist, who was charged with lewd vagrancy after police found him having sex with two men in a parked car.
Turing’s arrest and conviction cost him his security clearance with the British government and cut him off from the computer work that allowed him to innovate so brilliantly. Rustin’s arrest lost him his central place in the Christian peace movement in the United States at a time when his inspirational talents were most needed. In both cases the criminalization and condemnation of sex between men imposed a level of public humiliation and disgrace that I can barely imagine.
Amazingly, Rustin did not slink off into a corner, never to be heard from again. He found his way back into movements for peace, racial justice, and economic equality, and the rest, as they say, is history. Rustin’s work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his role in the anti-nuclear movement of the era, his efforts to put economic justice high on the agenda of the black freedom movement, and many other initiatives of his made a big difference. We think of courage as a key feature of social justice activism, but think of the courage it took for Rustin to keep moving forward, to keep putting himself out there in the public eye, knowing that at any moment the opposition and the media had information that could be used to shame him.
Rustin is a figure deeply involved in social movements and civic affairs, so his story is more readily accessible to us. But during these decades arrests were a common fact of life in the LGBT world. Tens of thousands in the US were arrested on charges related to same-sex desire and gender-crossing. They were publicly shamed; they lost jobs; they were abandoned by family; their lives were turned upside down. And yet, many of them – most of them? – kept going and reconstructed their lives.
It took courage, amazing courage, courage that can inspire. How, in our research, do we pull this out? The life stories that we collect in oral histories are one way, of course. Sometimes it emerges in court records or in newspaper stories about arrests and trials, in which the arrestee dares to speak out and challenge the police or the district attorney or the judge. Sometimes it has to be read through the silences of the archival record. But it is there. It is something to be proud of, something to pass on to generations who, perhaps, have not experienced oppression in quite that way, or who, perhaps, are facing intense oppression and need the inspiration that the courage of earlier generations can provide.
Comments