A Quote by Bayard Rustin

Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I think the gay community has a moral obligation to continue the fight.
There are tons of gay issues that are important, from gay marriage to adoption rights to work-place discrimination and more... but I think the biggest gay issue is the level of involvement of the gay community to demand change. So many gays think that other gays will take care of it. To fix this, people need to realize that they CAN make a change, but no one person can do it alone.
I was on a panel with light skinned Blacks and a famous gay science fiction writer, who were complaining about how Blacks are against gays and light skinned Blacks and how intolerant Blacks are of different groups. My position was that Blacks were among the most humanistic, tolerant groups in the country and that across the street from my house in Oakland was one inhabited by White gays.
• The key to fighting is never to fight unless the cause is so great that you couldn’t bear not to defend it and the losses you are going to suffer are things that you could afford to lose. If you do fight, the thing to remember is that it is going to hurt because that is what happens in a fight and you might as well reconcile yourself to it in the beginning and then it will not matter when it happens
I think that drive to fight the fight day in and day out, I think that can go away. You can lose that. As long as you continue to be consumed and overwhelmed with the desire to get better and find another way and keep competing to figure out what you can do to help make this guy be better than he was a day ago, as long as that's there, I don't agree.
The more gays and lesbians come out - the more people realize that they have a friend who's gay, which they may not have known before, and they realize this person has the same aspirations and desires and need to be committed and to be part of a community - then they become more accepting.
I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.
If we want to do away with the injustice to gays it will not be done because we get rid of the injustice to gays. It will be done because we are forwarding the effort for the elimination of injustice to all. And we will win the rights for gays, or blacks, or Hispanics, or women within the context of whether we are fighting for all.
Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new ‘niggers’ are gays. It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.
And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?
Liberals claim to love gays when it allows them to vent their spleen at Republicans. But disagree with liberals and their first response is to call you gay. Liberals are gays' biggest champions on issues most gays couldn't care less about, like gay marriage or taxpayer funding of photos of men with bullwhips up their derrieres. But who has done more to out, embarrass, and destroy the lives of gay men who prefer to keep their orientation private than Democrats? Who is more intolerant of gays in the Republican Party than gays in the Democratic Party?
If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.
A lot of times I've reached my hand out to people in the gay community that just didn't have nobody to help them when they were down and out.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
America is off-the-hook gay. I will not go all Ann Coulter on you and say, 'Our gays are better than their gays,' but as far as countries go, we are in-your-face gay.
Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting.
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