They also found themselves depending on the same local community of radical attorneys because they shared a common enemy: the police. After all, in those days the Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, was known for propagating strictly defined roles for men and women-the very roles that gay liberationists were committed to defying.īut as I dug further, I realized the two groups were linked by more than an insurance agent. In my work as an historian of gay American life, nothing I had read about gay liberation prepared me for this story.
