The first openly LGBT candidate for president of the United States will impart the lessons he gleaned from his decades of activism to a Philly audience this weekend.
David McReynolds will speak to the Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia at 11 a.m. April 1 at 1906 S. Rittenhouse Square.
In the address, themed “Looking Back: What Has Been Won, What Remains To Be Done,” McReynolds will tap into his social-justice and civil-rights activism, which began in the 1940s, to explore the challenges to freedom today’s society faces.
McReynolds, 82, has the distinction of being the first out candidate to pursue a bid for the White House: He ran as a Socialist candidate in 1980 and 2000.
A staunch pacifist, McReynolds spent several decades working with the War Resisters’ League and served as a writer and editor for its Liberation magazine.
While most of his activism focused on anti-war and other social-justice efforts, as opposed to the gay-liberation movement, one of his defining LGBT activism moments came in 1969 when he authored a Liberation column about his sexual orientation.
“We did a gay-liberation issue that year and Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman and myself wrote articles,” he said. “Mine was a coming-out article which at that time was really very rare. Almost no public intellectuals had self-identified as being homosexual.”
McReynolds was a close friend of Bayard Rustin and spent decades spearheading peace work both domestically and internationally.
Throughout his career, he said his approach to activism hasn’t wavered much.
“I still believe in the need for education, for nonviolent direct action. That all still makes sense to me,” he said, noting, however, that his brand of activism doesn’t rely on today’s technology. “I don’t take part in the whole business of texting, I don’t like Facebook and I don’t use my cell phone. There’s this cloud of electronics that floats over the heads of the young that didn’t used to be there.”
While today’s activism now includes social-media techniques, the environment for openly gay candidates is also quite different from McReynolds’ last run.
However, McReynolds said he doesn’t believe a gay person will be helming the country for some time.
“I put it in the same category as the first woman president,” he said. “The United States is unique in our reluctance to seeing a woman as the head of state. It will happen eventually but, unlike in Europe, we just aren’t up to it at this point; maybe we will be in four or eight years. It’s the same thing for a gay president: I think we could have a gay president in eight or 12 years, but even that could be a leap because that person would automatically lose the support of the entire evangelical population.”
In his discussion this weekend, McReynolds plans to examine the history and future of some of the nation’s most disenfranchised populations — including the LGBT community, women and racial minorities — to analyze the work that still needs to be undertaken to achieve equality.
“I want to look at some of the disasters that we survived and the changes that we thought would never occur. People often aren’t as aware as they should be of how recently some of these changes happened,” he said, noting that a woman’s right to vote was only secured nine years before he was born. “I think many women don’t realize how recently women were totally circumscribed in our society. And in terms of segregation, many black kids today don’t realize that it wasn’t all that long ago that if they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line on a train, they would have had to have moved to a different car or to the back of a bus. So there have been major, major changes. But we also have many new problems that we don’t have solutions for.”
The Ethical Humanist Society event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.phillyethics.org.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].