In 1960, Rustin and MLK were preparing to lead a boycott of blacks outside the Democratic National Convention. This would have deeply embarrassed the leading elected black politician of the day, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell. Powell threatened to spread a rumor that Rustin was having a sexual relationship with King.

King canceled the protest, and Rustin resigned from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

That year was not the first time Rustin was forced to negotiate how much sex could be a part of his life. After his 1953 arrest, in which he'd been picked up with two men in the back seat of a car in Pasadena, California, he wrote, "Sex must be sublimated if I am to live in this world longer."

Did that mean he'd ever considered living a celibate life?

"Not Bayard!" Naegle says, roaring with laughter. "Maybe for five minutes." The Pasadena incident meant that Rustin knew "he had to be more careful." When Naegle talks about Rustin having sex in public, he admits that it's not that "I've never done that — I mean, I haven't gotten arrested. I was just too quick for them!"

But, he adds, "At the time I did those things, I was not in a position with an organization. He made some bad choices. Now, in all fairness to him, at the time the Pasadena incident happened, straight people were having sex in cars! Having sex outside of marriage was not supposed to happen, and in some places it was illegal …[and] I am sure that straight people who were — caught having sex in cars were told to go home. Gay people were vilified and demonized."

Naegle says that Rustin "had an extraordinarily strong sense of himself and of who he was," but that "when you live in a society in which you're constantly being told that you're less than or that you're not as good as, for being black or a Jew or gay or anything, a certain amount does get internalized. You can't help that."

Rustin's sexual arrest record terrorized him again in 1963, when segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond read its entire contents into the congressional record, in an attempt to make the march lose its best organizer. It backfired. Civil rights leaders, taking an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach, were not supporters of Thurmond and backed Rustin.

Still, no matter how careful a homosexual was about not putting himself in a position in which he could be easily arrested again, there was nothing Rustin could do to stop rumors or new information being picked up by federal eavesdropping (JFK signed off on Rustin's phone being tapped, Naegle says, which LBJ and Nixon continued) in the hands of someone like Adam Clayton Powell.

And yet, Rustin was not one to hold a grudge, even against Powell. "They were never at war," Naegle says of Rustin and Powell's relationship. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and Powell had to stay in bed with Rustin for years after blackmailing him for being gay.

"I think [Powell's] power was threatened," Naegle says. "He'd been the most powerful black man in the political world for a long time," and then along came King, Ralph Abernathy, and a bunch of black Southerners encroaching on his turf.

Even still, Rustin "defended Adam when he was being censured by the House, for all that hanky-panky going on in Bimini." Just a couple of years after he guided the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through the House of Representatives, Powell was accused of missing too much work and taking two women on vacation to the Bahamas at taxpayers' expense. In January 1967, the House Democratic Caucus stripped Powell of a committee chairmanship; in March, the full House voted not to seat him.

Rustin, he says, believed Powell "was being singled out because he was black. He wasn't saying he was a choirboy, but there were plenty of white politicians doing the same thing, and this was racist." Despite not being seated, Powell was reelected to his seat in 1968 and filed suit about being kicked out of Congress. In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that Powell's colleagues had unseated him unconstitutionally.

Naegle's voice cracks and he tears up when he says, "Bayard was willing to stand up for people — even though they had mistreated him — if it was a matter of principle."