Born in the mountains of Southeastern Kentucky, Elijah Clarke, best known as Lige, lived in a whirlwind of adventure and excitement. Lige was exceptionally popular with his mates; he was appreciated rather than teased for his creative expressions.

A beautiful, multi-faceted pioneer of the gay liberation movement, he lived out the many paradoxes of his being with an indefatigable aliveness and zest. Fiercely passionate, Lige was also gentle, androgynous and loving. Sharply critical of heterosexist power structures and anal-retentive puritanism alike, he resisted the temptation to relapse into a cheap gay separatism.

From 1964 until his tragic 1975 murder in Mexico, Lige wrote, thought about and fought for same-sex love, for the obliteration of destructive prejudices and boundaries and for a new human being freed from the shackles of traditional conditioning and its resultant moral shackles.

The most media-noticed statement in Dr. Alfred Kinsey's famous report about sexual behavior in the human male - according to a chapter describing Kinsey in Before Stonewall - was that 1 out of 3 males we pass on the street has experienced an orgasm at least once in concert with another male during adulthood.

Lige poo-pooed the idea that same-sex love is a minority condition. He said that it was a natural human inclination, and that like the much-maligned and very universal sex act that we call masturbation, same sex love and affection has been discouraged by a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition that has harmfully turned it between men or between women into a stupid taboo.

Lige helped organize the first gay protest at the White House in 1965. As an early member of Washington Mattachine, he was also a founder of Florida's Mattachine Society during that same year. In 1968 Lige started teaching Hatha Yoga in Manhattan. From 1969 to 1973, he co-edited with his partner since 1964, Jack Nichols, (see photo on the left) America's first gay weekly newspaper, GAY and was always working to wed-in his writing and in his life-- the personal with the political.

Lige Clarke was a world explorer who visited many countries during his all-too-brief life, he toured the five continents in 1974. In his journal he kept while a steward on the liner Vista Fjord, Lige wrote of having learned to say "Good morning" in several different languages. Following his 1974 travels around the world, Lige's view of America changed radically. He used to say we must keep our passports at the ready to escape quickly should the Republican zealots get too scary.