Matt Wolf | Bayard & Me / 2017 [documentary]

his splendor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Wolf (director) Bayard & Me / 2017 [16 minutes] [documentary]

 

27-year old Walter Naegle was on his way strolling through Times Square in New York City in 1977 to get a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, thinking strongly of leaving New York to move San Francisco, when he suddenly met Bayard Rustin in moment, as he describes it when “We were on the same corner waiting for the light to change. We looked at each other, and lightning struck.”

     Times Square, as he mentions, was kind of seedy world, filled with porno theaters, not the kind of place where you imagined meeting someone. I remember it well in this days. Some of my closest friends in the city had never been there for decades. It was terrifying for most straight folks. Even years later, when it began its gradual change and some of the old theaters were reopening, when we attended a Mac Wellman play at the New Amsterdam Theatre, I believe, they were still terrified of even being there, and a bit startled when they discovered I knew the territory well.

      He describes Rustin as rather tall with a shock of white hair. And, he admits, having worked in civil rights he knew very well who is was. As he sums it up, he was mostly known for organizing the 1963 march of Washington, D.C., where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech.

      Given the speech he gave that day, you might think Rustin was simply a harsh militant, but Neagle argues that when he spoke to you he was very loving, very engaged in what you were saying as if “you were the most important person in the world.”

       He explains that he fell in love with Bayard because he was an attractive, incredible charismatic, beautiful man. His apartment was filled with significant art objects.

      Neagle knew the man for about two years before he moved in with him. At that point the gay community and others standardly argued, “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” But Rustin loved to dance and party, Neagle arguing that he truly learned a great deal about the younger generation through him.

       When they decided to commit to their relationship, Neagle was faced with returning home to his family to explain his new lover, but this time it was not only gay, but interactional, and intergeneration, as if “taking on three taboos all at once.” But his mother, in particular, immediately identified in Rustin, who was only four years older than she use; and soon she began joining them on their vacations.

     Neagle explains, that Rustin himself came from a Quaker family, and he began his activism by organizing demonstrations to integrate small restaurants, swimming pools, and schools. In the 1940s Rustin when to India to study the issues of non-violence with the supporters of Ghandi. In 1955 he was sent to the Montgomery protests to become a mentor to a young Martin Luther King.

He propelled the movement into a much larger force in the South, “advancing the concept of violence within the Civil Rights movement.”

      But there were people simply uncomfortable with his being homosexual. But he was no willing to go back into the closet even for his major concerns. He stepped back simply for the greater good, argues Neagle, but we see what that meant personally, I feel, in the movie Rustin, the George C. Wolfe film of 2023, which I review elsewhere in these pages.

      Rustin was now concerned with the rights of his new lover, particularly to remain in his apartment. In 1982, he adopted Neagle, the only thing one might do at the time to formalize rights with regard to loving relationships, since marriage was not yet permitted. Rustin realized the need to protect Neagle rights, but also is own, if should become incapacitated, since there were simply no other protections including even hospital rights. A gay lover was not allowed to visit someone with whom he was not a relative. In order to get the adoption, Neagle’s mother had to sign paperwork that she had “dismissed” rights over her son; she agreed to do so.

     Rustin filed an application with child welfare, something not even heard of in these days. They had to send a social worker to the home to make sure this was not a case of a “dotty” old man being taken advantage of a young man after his money or an older man taking predatory advantage of a young boy.

     For all purposes, however, the couple felt they were married, even though gay marriage was inconceivable in those days. Neagle admits that if you had to circumvent society, it should be that way. “We were outsiders, we were rebels, we were not wanted by the society. There was a sense of being an outsider that people of my generation kind of thrived on.”

     In July of 1987 they went to Haiti, and both came back with stomach problems. Neagle quickly recovered, by Rustin did not. Doctors found that Bayard had been walking around with a burst appendix for at least two weeks. A couple of days later a blot clot hitting Rustin’s heart ended his life. Rustin died on August 24, 1987.

    Neagle responds that he began to call people saying “We” have lost Bayard because, as he puts it, “It was a loss to the world, to the society.”

    What Neagle misses is his humor, his love, his “splendor.” The rest of the film speaks of his continuation of Rustin’s legacy, making sure that he remains in the history of our nation, which particularly in these days is trying erase anyone who spoke out, was “woke” way before their time.

     If this is not necessarily a profound documentary, it is nonetheless extremely important in helping make Rustin’s presence and legacy part of our, both gay and straight, histories. He was a legend, a gay man who supported the LGBTQ+ community and gay marriage long before his time and needs a full biography about his contributions. This small work by Matt Wolf helps to move that forward.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).