Tom Kahn was "very good looking, a very attractive guy" according to longtime socialist David McReynolds, who was also an openly gay New Yorker. discusses both McReynolds and Kahn on the same page, in his discussion of the culture of young socialists in the 1950s. Kahn accepted his homosexuality in 1956, the year that Kahn and Horowitz volunteered to help Bayard Rustin with his work in the civil-rights movement. "Once he met Bayard [Rustin], then Kahn knew that he was gay and had this long-term relationship with Bayard, which went through many stages", according to Horowitz, who quoted Kahn's remembrance of Rustin:
