Honoring his power

An interview with the producer of ‘Rustin’

Bruce Cohen honored in San Diego for a lifetime of contributions.

By Morgan M. Hurley

On Wednesday, Feb. 28, the San Diego City Council Chambers hosted the Bayard Rustin Honors.

Founded by Nicole Murray Ramirez and local Latina activist Carolina Ramos in 2018, the annual event was established to celebrate the life of Bayard Rustin and Black History Month.

To date, all honorees have been African American, but this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to openly gay Academy Award-winning producer (Milk, American Beauty, Silver Linings Playbook) Bruce Cohen, who also co-produced the recent award-winning “Rustin,” a film about civil rights and LGBT icon, Bayard Rustin. Cohen will be presented the lifetime achievement honor by California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

Other honorees this year include National City’s Vice Mayor Marcus Bush, City of San Diego’s Chief of Race and Equity Kim Desmond, educator Myesha Jackson, transgender activist Tracie Jada O’Brien, Black Panther (San Diego Chapter) Henry Wallace, and Deputy District Attorney Dwain Woodley. National Black civil rights activist Mandy Carter of South Carolina will be a special guest speaker, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Choir of San Diego will be featured, and Mayor Todd Gloria will also be in attendance.

Rustin, who was arrested nearly two dozen times for his civil rights activism in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, and helped organize the March on Washington in 1963. 

In August of 2013, President Barack Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rustin (posthumously, as Rustin passed away in 1987), in honor of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Rustin’s lifelong partner, Walter Naegle, accepted the award on Rustin’s behalf later that year at a White House ceremony.

It was then Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, which they launched post-presidency, that co-produced the Rustin film with Cohen. The film’s star, openly gay actor Colman Domingo, is up for an Academy Award for his performance as Rustin.

LGBTQ San Diego County News interviewed Cohen; we talked about the film and his upcoming trip to San Diego.

(Morgan Hurley) As many say, telling Rustin’s story was long overdue. How and what made you get involved in telling it?

(Bruce Cohen) I had seen “Brother Outsider,” a terrific documentary about Bayard in the 1990s, so he had been on my radar as an LGBTQ icon who was in danger of being lost to history and deserved his due. Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, whom I had worked with on “Milk,” were working on a script about him and when Lance sent it to me, I absolutely loved it and told him I would be honored to try and help shepherd it to the screen.

Why do you think it took so long to get his story told?

(Cohen) Getting stories told about characters from under-represented communities is always harder than it should be and Bayard was both black and openly gay! But Hollywood has been making a concerted effort of late to present more of these stories to audiences – who are craving them, by the way – and that helped a long overdue movie about Bayard finally get made.

What was it like to work with the Obamas? 

(Cohen) Working with the Obamas was one of the great thrills of my producing career. The movie would not have gotten made without their understanding of the importance of Bayard’s contribution to history, passion for getting a movie about him completed and belief in the filmmaking team we assembled to do it.

What an incredible cast and performances the film had. What made Colman the producer’s choice for the film?

(Cohen) The legendary George C. Wolfe, our visionary director, took the lead on the decision to cast Colman, with the entire filmmaking team agreeing that he was the absolute perfect person to step into Rustin’s prodigious shoes. We loved the power of an out gay actor playing an out gay character and Colman, even before his extensive research and preparation, brought to the role a lot of the same characteristics Bayard possessed – his brilliance, charisma, sense of humor, zest for living and overall mischievous bad-assery!

What was it like for you watching the filming unfold? As a producer – I bet it can be both uplifting and nerve-wracking at the same time.

(Cohen) Every film has its challenges and our primary one was Covid. We prepared the entire Washington DC shoot at the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument twice and then had to cancel as a result and then finally, on the third try, we were able to get it done. But the nerve-wracking tension of that schedule and how it affected the budget was ultimately easily outweighed by the sheer uplifting excitement of re-creating the March on Washington on the exact spot where it actually happened… almost exactly 60 years later!

The film festival circuit can be grueling but also exhilarating – and you are absolutely no stranger to the Oscars (congrats on all your accolades, by the way) – are you excited about the upcoming Academy Awards?

(Cohen) Thank you so much for that. After months of awards events these days, the Oscars is absolutely the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! And so, yes, the thrill of attending never gets old for me – it’s an entire evening of pinch-me moments – and to get to be there this year to cheer on Colman is beyond exciting. His Best Actor Oscar nomination is a very powerful step on our quest to make sure the film helps ensure Bayard Rustin’s legacy will live on in history.

We are excited that you are coming to San Diego for the Bayard Rustin Honors. Our local icon Nicole Murray Ramirez (founder of the Honors) has been instrumental in pushing awareness for so many historical LGBT icons himself – Harvey Milk of course (we have a street named after him, the US postage stamp, the Navy ship, etc.), Matthew Shepard, and of course Bayard Rustin. When did you first meet Nicole? 

(Cohen) I met Nicole when she was working on the stamp campaign for Harvey Milk and she and I fell in activist love at first sight. It was her hope that the visibility of the film could help make the stamp for Harvey happen and now we are hoping for the same successful result for the Bayard Rustin stamp.

What do the Bayard Rustin honors mean to you?   

(Cohen) Over the 8 years I’ve been fighting to get this film made and then seeing it through to completion, I have come to be in awe of and fallen in love with Bayard, both as an activist and as a person, so it’s hard for me to imagine a more meaningful honor than to receive one in his actual name, now that the film has been in theaters, is on Netflix, and Colman is nominated for an Academy Award.

With a production company named Bold Choices, we must ask: What will be your next endeavor? 

(Cohen) My next film is Zoe Kravitz’ directorial debut, BLINK TWICE, a thriller starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum, from Amazon/MGM, in theaters on Aug. 23.

The Bayard Rustin Honors are open to the public. The City Council Chambers are located at City Hall, 202 C Street, on the 12th floor, downtown. 

Rustin is currently available for streaming on Netflix.

—Morgan M. Hurley is the editor-in-chief of this newspaper. You can reach her at editor@lgbtqsd.news.

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