[14] The Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee was formed in New York City to commemorate the first anniversary of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, the beginning of the international tradition of a late-June event to celebrate gay pride.

[20] The homophile movement has been described as "politically conservative", although its calls for social acceptance of same-sex love were seen as radical fringe views by the dominant culture of the time.

By 1965, influenced by Frank Kameny's addresses in the early 1960s, Dick Leitsch, the president of the New York Mattachine Society, advocated direct action, and the group staged the first public homosexual demonstrations and picket lines in the 1960s.

[22] Kameny, founder of Mattachine Washington in 1961, had advocated militant action reminiscent of the black civil rights campaign, while also arguing for the morality of homosexuality.

Leitsch informed the press that three members of Mattachine New York would turn up at a restaurant on the Lower East Side, announce their homosexuality and, upon the refusal of service, make a complaint to the SLA.

The "Sip-In", though, did gain extensive media attention and the resultant legal action against the SLA eventually prevented the agency from revoking licenses on the basis of homosexual solicitation in 1967.

Lindsay would later gain a reputation for placing much focus on quelling social troubles in the city and his mayorship coinciding with the end of entrapment should be seen as significant.

The 1960s was a time of social upheaval in the West, and the sexual revolution and counterculture influenced changes in the homosexual subculture, which in the U.S. included bookshops, publicly sold newspapers and magazines, and a community center.

Refusing to hide their homosexuality, they were brutalized, rebellious tearaways who took drugs, fought, shoplifted and hustled older gay men in order to survive.

Their age, behavior, feminine attire and conduct left them isolated from the rest of the gay scene, but living close to the streets, they made the perfect warriors for the imminent Stonewall Riots.

After the Stonewall riots in New York City in late June 1969, many within the emerging gay liberation movement in the U.S. saw themselves as connected with the New Left rather than the established homophile groups of the time.

Former members reorganized as The Gay and Lesbian Center and Glide re-directed the EOC funds intended for Vanguard to form a service agency and new non-profit The Hospitality House.

[33] On March 28, 1969, in San Francisco, Leo Laurence (the editor of Vector, magazine of the United States' largest homophile organization, the Society for Individual Rights) called for "the Homosexual Revolution of 1969", exhorting gay men and lesbians to join the Black Panthers and other left-wing groups and to "come out" en masse.

Laurence then co-founded a militant group the Committee for Homosexual Freedom with Gale Whittington, Mother Boats, Morris Kight and others.

Whittington had been fired from States Steamship Company for being openly gay, after a photo of him by Mother Boats appeared in the Berkley Barb, next to the headline "HOMOS, DON'T HIDE IT!

It was first published in the San Francisco Free Press and distributed nationwide, all the way to New York City, as was the Berkeley Barb with Laurence's stories on CHF's gay guerrilla militant initiatives and Mother Boats' photographs.

"[36] In December 1969 the Gay Liberation Front made a cash donation to the Black Panthers, some of whose leaders had expressed homophobic sentiments.

These actions cost GLF, a numerically small group, popular support in New York City, and some of its members left to form the Gay Activists' Alliance.

[citation needed] In 1973 Segal disrupted the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, an event covered in newspapers across the country and viewed by 60% of American households, many seeing or hearing about homosexuality for the first time.

The trade newspaper Variety claimed that Segal had cost the industry $750,000 in production, tape delays, and lost advertising revenue.

"[citation needed] By the summer of 1970, groups in at least eight American cities were sufficiently organized to schedule simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots for the last Sunday in June.

Although a short-lived group, the Comite Pederastique de la Sorbonne, had meetings during the student uprising of May 1968, the real public debut of the modern gay liberation movement in France occurred on 10 March 1971, when a group of lesbians from the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) disrupted a live radio broadcast entitled: "Homosexuality, This Painful Problem".

[39] The expert guests, including Ira C. Kleinberg, Herman Kleinstein, a Catholic priest, and a dwarf, were suddenly interrupted by a group of lesbians from the audience, yelling, "It's not true, we're not suffering!

[42]: 116  Similarly, Allen Young's 1972 manifesto "Out of the Closet, into the Streets" envisions gay liberation as the recognition of humanity's innate bisexuality and androgyny within relationships that are free, expressive, and equal.