Out director George C. Wolfe calls gay Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin “the ultimate American”

Out director George C. Wolfe says that Bayard Rustin represents “the ultimate American.”

The three-time Tony Award winner’s upcoming biopic of the gay Civil Rights icon, Rustin, is set to have its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival next month, before arriving in theaters November 3 and on Netflix on November 17. The film, written by Julian Breece and Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black, stars Euphoria’s Colman Domingo as Rustin, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic “I Have a Dream” speech before a crowd of around 250,000 people.

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Ahead of Rustin’s premiere, Wolfe attended the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival earlier this month, where he previewed clips from the film and participated in a Q&A with out journalist Jonathan Capehart.

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“My definition of the ultimate American is somebody who does service, someone is of service, someone who has an expansive curiosity, because we live in a country of all different kinds of people,” Wolfe explained. “We all have a responsibility to do something, whatever it is, for those who are in need, and I think [Rustin] embodied that.”

Wolfe went on to lament the fact that despite Rustin’s pivotal role in organizing perhaps the signature moment in the Civil Rights Movement, his legacy has largely been forgotten.

“This was a man whose ferocity and sense of justice and correctness…seemed to be embedded in every fiber of his being,” Wolfe told Capehart. “History… it forgot him. It in point of fact erased him.”  

Wolfe went on to concede that Rustin may have simply been overshadowed by King’s electrifying rise, but also suggested that there may have been a more “aggressive” effort to downplay his role. As Ron Johnson wrote in his remembrance of Rustin for LGBTQ Nation in 2018, other leaders in the Civil Right movement took issue with his identity as a gay man, which may have kept him from receiving the recognition he deserved in his lifetime. (Rustin died in 1987.)

In recent years, however, there have been efforts to resurrect Rustin’s legacy. In 2013, President Barack Obama—whose Higher Ground Productions is a producer on Wolfe’s biopic—awarded Rustin a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pardoned Rustin for a 1953 “sex perversion” conviction.