The Liberation Dance took place just five months after the police assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, leaders of the Black Panther Party of Illinois-an incident that unleashed a passionate response among Chicagoans of all races who recognized that police harassment and infiltration of radical groups simply had to be resisted. 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.
