- 5 pm: Reception
- 5:30 pm: Screening: Rustin (1hr 47min)
- 7:15 pm: Post-screening discussion
The LGBTQ Policy Center at Roosevelt House is pleased to present a screening of the Netflix film Rustin, which tells the poignant and absorbing story of the largely overlooked civil rights leader Bayard Rustin—who helped Martin Luther King Jr. and others to organize the 1963 March on Washington, yet faced stigmatization and discrimination as a gay man. The screening will be followed by a discussion featuring the film’s producer Bruce Cohen, Hunter College Professor of History D’Weston Haywood, and the Director of the LGBTQ Policy Center at Roosevelt House, Erin Mayo-Adam.
Bayard Rustin challenged authority and never apologized for who he was, what he believed, or whom he desired. He made history, but in turn was all but forgotten. Executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, and directed by five-time Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe, the film stars Emmy Award winner Colman Domingo, whose portrayal of Rustin earned him an Oscar nomination. Rustin shines a long overdue spotlight on the extraordinary man who, alongside giants like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Ella Baker, dared to imagine a different world, organized an historic march toward freedom, and inspired a movement. Included in the film’s all-star cast are Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Aml Ameen, Gus Halper, CCH Pounder, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Johnny Ramey, Michael Potts, with Jeffrey Wright, and Audra McDonald.
As Manhola Davis wrote in The New York Times, Rustin is “a work of reclamation and celebration” that “seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law.”
Panelists:
Bruce Cohen (he/him) is an Oscar- and Tony Award-winning, and Emmy-nominated producer of film, television, theater and live events. He won an Academy Award for Best Picture for American Beauty and earned additional Best Picture nominations for Silver Linings Playbook and Milk, about the life of Harvey Milk. He also produced both the feature film and Broadway musical versions of Big Fish, won the Tony for Best Play in 2020 for co-producing Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, and was Tony nominated for co-producing Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play. Most recently, he is a producer of HBO’s The Great Lillian Hall, starring Jessica Lange, and Zoe Kravitz’ directorial debut, Blink Twice, for Amazon MGM. Cohen is an LGBTQ+ and human rights activist who began his film career as the DGA Trainee on Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and lives in New York City with his husband and daughter. He is currently serving, along with Lady Gaga, as co-chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
D’Weston Haywood (he/him) is a Professor of History at Hunter College, where he teaches courses in 20th century American history, including Black protest, Black power, and intersections of Black culture and politics. The author of Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement, Haywood’s work also includes an innovative scholarly and pedagogical praxis he calls “Sonic Scholarship,” which seeks to generate new ways of analyzing history, including the use of hip hop as a scholarly framework and methodology with which to bridge academic and popular discourses.
Erin Mayo-Adam (she/her), moderator, is the Director of the LGBTQ Policy Center at Roosevelt House, an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department, and a member of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Faculty and Curriculum Committee. She is the author of Queer Alliances: How Power Shapes Political Movement Formation and has published in numerous academic outlets, including the Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy. She specializes in American politics, law and society, and political theory and bridges scholarship on social movements, interest groups and public policy, intersectionality, gender and sexuality, and migration and labor politics.
This event is co-sponsored by the CUNY LGBTQ Advisory Council and made possible in part by the generous support of the New York City Council and the CUNY LGBTQ Consortium.
