Members included Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo,[1][2] and were mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organization for Women (NOW).
[5] Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – including omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969.
Friedan's remarks and the decision to drop DOB from the sponsor list led lesbian feminist Rita Mae Brown to angrily resign her administrative job at NOW in February 1970.
[6][7] In a New York Times Magazine article on March 15, 1970, straight radical feminist Susan Brownmiller quoted Friedan's remarks about the "lavender menace," which Brownmiller took as an allusion to Cold War era "Red Menace" rhetoric, and dismissed Friedan's worries as "A lavender herring, perhaps, but no clear and present danger.
"[9] Brown suggested to her consciousness-raising group that lesbian radical feminists organize an action in response to Brownmiller's comments, and the public airing of Friedan's complaints.
The group decided to target the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970, which they noticed featured not a single open lesbian on the program.
[10] They also created rose colored signs with slogans like "Women's Liberation IS A Lesbian Plot" and "You're Going To Love The Lavender Menace" written on them, which were then placed throughout the auditorium.
When Michela and Jesse flipped the lights back on, both aisles were lined with seventeen lesbians wearing their Lavender Menace T-shirts and holding the placards we had made.
[11] A few members of the planning committee tried to take back the stage and return to the original program, but gave up in the face of the resolute group and the audience, who used applause and boos to show their support.
[14] The "Lavender Menace" zap, and the publication of "The Woman-Identified Woman," are widely remembered by many lesbian-feminists as a turning-point in the second-wave feminist movement, and as a founding moment for lesbian feminism.
[19] In 1999, Susan Brownmiller described the impact of the protest and subsequent lesbian-feminist organizing, writing that "Lesbians would be silent no longer in the women's movement.