According to Horowitz, Rustin thought King had two reasons for letting him go. “One was that King did not know how to handle the public part of it, but the other was that there was tremendous pressure from ministers, some of whom were gay themselves, to get rid of Rustin. So King had this double pressure on him. It was a fairly homophobic church [that King was dealing with]. And there were Northern SCLC ministers who were gay and who were in the closet, and they didn’t like the discussion [about Rustin’s homosexuality] coming out.
