Why weren't they heading up the push within their own communities?
I'll tell you why. Because many of these men were not out to their families, they knew they would be rejected.
Indeed. Bayard Rustin suffered from this kind of rejection, and was careful to keep his sexual orientation under wraps "for the good of the cause". He was candid about his sexuality, but he wasn't "openly gay". Again, from wikipedia:
Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee's task force to prepare one of the most influential and widely commented upon pacifist essays ever produced in the United States, "Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence," published in 1955. (According to the chairman of the group, Stephen Cary, Rustin's membership was repressed at his own request because he believed that his known sexual orientation would compromise the 71-page pamphlet once it appeared.)
[SNIP]
Many African-American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation and Communist past would undermine support for the civil rights movement. U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. forced Rustin's resignation from the SCLC in 1960 by threatening to discuss Rustin's morals charge in Congress. Although Rustin was open about his sexual orientation and his conviction was a matter of public record [he served 60 days for "sex perversion", as sodomy was termed by the law of the day], it had not been discussed widely outside the civil rights leadership.
When Rustin and Randolph organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual" and produced an FBI photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation of an affair, but despite King's support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not allow Rustin to receive any public recognition for his role in planning the march.
Certainly homophobia was, and is, is rampant in White, Latino, and Black communities (though, I am led to believe, it is far less common in Asian communities), but as I have been pointing out, it is more connected to the power of the Church than the power of race.
