Zap (action)
The dress code was imposed by Mattachine Society Washington founder Frank Kameny, with the goal of portraying homosexuals as "presentable and 'employable'".
[6] On June 28, 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in New York City's Greenwich Village, resisted a police raid.
[10] GAA member Marty Robinson is credited with developing the zap following a March 7, 1970, police raid on a gay bar called the Snake Pit.
One, an Argentine national named Diego Viñales, so feared the possibility of deportation that he leapt from a second-story window of the police station, impaling himself on the spikes of an iron fence.
in 1973 and 1974 and a 1974 episode of Police Woman, were deemed especially egregious, with their presentation of homosexuality as a mental illness, gays as child molesters and lesbians as psychotic killers echoing similar portrayals that continued a trend that dated back to before 1961.
GAA co-founder Morty Manford got into scuffles with security and administration during his successful effort to found the student club Gay People at Columbia University in 1971, as well as at a famous protest against homophobia at the elite Inner Circle event in 1972 (which led Morty's mother Jeanne Manford to found PFLAG).
On one occasion activists threw eggs and firecrackers at the home of Adam Walinsky, a state official who had denounced new gay rights legislation for New York, and cut the phone lines of his house.
Although Time magazine derided them as "Gay goons", and Walinsky won an injunction against protests near his home, the actions succeeded in keeping the conservative backlash of the late-1970s out of New York state.
Some of his more successful zaps include: chaining himself to a railing at a taping of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in early March 1973;[27] handcuffing himself and a friend to a camera at a 7 May 1973 taping of The Mike Douglas Show after producers cancelled a planned discussion of gay issues;[28][29] disrupting a live broadcast of The Today Show on 26 October 1973[30] (resulting in an off-camera interview with Barbara Walters, who explained the reason for the zap);[31] and interrupting Walter Cronkite during a live newscast of the CBS Evening News on 11 December 1973 by rushing the set with a sign reading Gays Protest CBS Prejudice (after a brief interruption, Cronkite reported the zap).
Lindsay, elected as a liberal Republican, preferred quiet coalition building and also feared that publicly endorsing gay rights would damage his chances at the Presidency; he refused to speak publicly in favor of gay rights and refused to meet with GAA to discuss passing a citywide anti-discrimination ordinance.
[16] The group's first zap, on April 13, 1970,[33] involved infiltrating opening night of the 1970 Metropolitan Opera season, shouting gay slogans when the mayor and his wife made their entrance.
"[35] When Lindsay announced his candidacy for the Presidency in the 1972 election, GAA saw the opportunity to bring gay issues to national attention and demanded of each potential candidate a pledge to support anti-discrimination.
[clarification needed][36] Zapping migrated to the West Coast as early as 1970, when a coalition of several Los Angeles groups targeted Barney's Beanery.
Although there were few reports of actual anti-gay discrimination at Barney's, activists found the sign's presence galling and refused to patronize the place, even when gay gatherings were held there.
[37][note 2] Encouraged by GAA co-founder Arthur Bell, in his capacity as a columnist for The Village Voice, activists employed zaps against William Friedkin and the cast and crew of the 1980 film Cruising.
In 1979, Cruising opponents blew whistles, shined lights into camera lenses and otherwise disrupted filming to protest how the gay community and the leather sub-culture in particular were being portrayed.
Gay Activists Alliance in Adelaide zapped a variety of targets, including a gynecologist perceived to be anti-lesbian, a religious conference at Parkin-Wesley College and politicians and public figures such as Steele Hall, Ernie Sigley, John Court and Mary Whitehouse.
Some of these included: a March 24, 1987 "die-in" on Wall Street, in which 250 people demonstrated against what they saw as price gouging for anti-HIV drugs; the October 1988 attempted shut-down of the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, to protest perceived foot-dragging in approving new AIDS treatments; and perhaps most notoriously, Stop the Church, a December 12, 1989, demonstration in and around St. Patrick's Cathedral in opposition to the Catholic Church's opposition to condom use to prevent the spread of HIV.
