John O’Brien recalls the New York Gay Liberation Front discussion: Shall we take the $500 we earned from our Alternate U dances and give it to the Committee to Defend the Black Panthers? “We wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the black civil rights movement. We owe it to them!” O’Brien rose to say.1
Of course, the $500 should be given to the Panthers defense fund, Bob Kohler agreed passionately. Kohler had come to the gay movement after being a Freedom Rider with the Congress for Racial Equality. He often told with relish about the time he, a young black woman, and a young black man jumped into an all-white public swimming pool in the South. The fifty whites who’d been enjoying a swim emptied out as though alligators had just dived in—and then the lifeguards rushed to drain the pool while the trio stood there, bathing suits dripping, arms clasped, singing emphatically “We Shall Overcome.” Kohler had left CORE when it became clear that it was time for black people to handle the race battle by themselves, but he brought his intense convictions about political struggles with him into GLF. The Gay Liberation Front was not intended to be only about gay people, he preached to the converted. “Our fight is a people’s movement, a class struggle with the rights of every oppressed person linked to one another.”2
There was overwhelming consensus: the dance money would be given to the Black Panthers. When members of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group in Spanish Harlem, were jailed for actions such as piling up garbage and setting it ablaze in busy intersections to protest the scantiness of East Harlem social services, Gay Liberation Front members met, and again there was consensus: of course the group must dip into the kitty and this time bail the Young Lords out of jail.3
But a few New York GLF-ers, such as the group’s treasurer, twenty-two-year-old Jim Owles, thought it was a crazy decision. The money needed to be going toward things like opening a gay community center, for instance—and not toward supporting organizations that were “viciously antihomosexual,” he objected loudly.4 Owles considered himself a “Eugene McCarthy liberal,”5 not a radical leftist—though he’d had good credentials in thumbing his nose at the powers that be. He’d joined the air force in 1966 to avoid the draft and was assigned to Air Intelligence; but he was soon handing out antiwar leaflets to his fellow airmen, which got him a summary court-martial, a downgrade, and a transfer to a base in remote eastern Montana, a sort of “little Siberia,” he called it. There he was assigned to the typing pool, though he could only type with two fingers. When he put those two fingers to use by typing letters to newspapers protesting the Vietnam War, his military career came to an abrupt end with a less-than-honorable discharge.6 Most of Owles’s fellow GLF-ers had liked that story very much, and they’d trusted him with the group’s meager funds.
But Owles, unlike O’Brien and Kohler, hadn’t been a founding member of GLF. He joined after its guiding principles were already established—and obviously he needed to be educated. Another one of the founders, Lois Hart, the former nun and Timothy Leary follower, waxed poetic about GLF’s responsibilities to all suffering minorities: “Oppression is like a large tree with many branches, each branch being part of the whole,” she pointed out. “They cannot be separated; they draw from each other.”7
The faith that O’Brien, Kohler, and Hart had in making common cause with all the oppressed was richly rewarded by a “Letter from Huey [Newton] to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters on the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” in which the Black Panther leader admonished fellow Panthers: “Homosexuals might be the most oppressed people in the society. Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality, we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.”8 But Newton’s letter—and his caveats about “personal opinions”—were hardly sufficient to placate Owles and a few other GLF dissenters who were disgusted that the group was putting gay pennies and power into nongay organizations that were at best lukewarm about gay people.
• • •
Arthur Evans had been a radical activist since he was a teenager marching for black civil rights in York, Pennsylvania. At Brown University he made national news by leading a protest over compulsory chapel attendance; and when the devout Christian owner of a Pennsylvania paper company who’d funded Evans’s four-year scholarship tried to withdraw it, twenty-one-year-old Evans got the Freethinkers Society of America to threaten legal action on his behalf.9 The scholarship donor backed down, but Evans left Brown on his own. He’d been politically rambunctious but sexually timid and closeted, and he felt isolated in Providence, Rhode Island. When he read an article in a national magazine that said many homosexuals lived in Greenwich Village, it didn’t take him long to pack his bags. In New York, Evans grew a beard and mustache, found a lover, finished his undergraduate work in political science at CCNY, started wearing the wire-rimmed glasses that stamped him as an intellectual, and in 1967 entered a PhD program in philosophy at Columbia University. But he dropped out before completing his degree: he’d realized he was far more excited by the 1968 student riots on campus than by his studies.10
In October 1969, four months after the Stonewall events (to which he’d paid no attention), Evans had been walking in Greenwich Village with his lover, Arthur Bell, when the two were handed a leaflet by a Little Orphan Annie–haired kid on Christopher Street.11 It announced a meeting of a group they’d never heard of—the Gay Liberation Front. He and Bell casually thought they’d go see who would turn up in a group with such a name. Bell, a publicity director for Random House and later an out Village Voice columnist, was awed by the number of “hunky, chunky, big-basketed beauties dressed in radical motley” who squeezed into the upstairs meeting room at Alternate U.12 Evans didn’t mind the sight of the “beauties” either, but he also felt that he’d come home politically. Here was a roomful of homosexuals as passionate about radical politics as he, using familiar words such as oppression, consciousness raising, liberation, pigs. He hadn’t known before that such homosexual beings existed, and he was soon swept up in the heady excitement of organizing a GLF Radical Study Group to examine the historical roots of homophobia and sexism. But his awe didn’t last long. GLF members were “hysterical,”13 he concluded; they were totally incapable of putting their passion to use. He was tired of listening to endless wishful thinking and jaw clapping about radical change, when what was needed was street activism, and the focus and discipline to make street activism effective.
• • •
Marty Robinson, who’d been GLF’s chosen speaker at the Washington Square rally a month after the Stonewall riots, was also unhappy with the way things were going with the group he’d helped found. Robinson had been willing to give up a lot for the gay movement. The son of a successful medical doctor, who’d once wanted to be a doctor himself, he lived in a tub-in-the-kitchen apartment so he could work less at his job as a carpenter and spend more time on gay causes. “We’ve got to get organized. We’ve got to stand up. This is our chance!” he’d cried at the rally. But now he quit the Gay Liberation Front because he concluded that GLF-ers hadn’t a clue about how to get organized or stand up for gays. He agreed with Owles that most of them were willing to make gay people cannon fodder for the revolution, and gay causes be damned.14
They weren’t the only ones who were disillusioned. Kay Tobin was turned off when people in the Gay Liberation Front called her a fascist for wearing a John Lindsay button, and she loathed their sympathies with “every far-out radical cause that came along.”15 Others were turned off by the weekly character assassinations and the leaderless bedlam of the meetings where everyone could speak his or her mind at great length, no matter how confused or disputatious or inconsequential, and finally nothing was decided and nothing would get done.16
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in early November 1969, Jim Owles, dressed in a Prussian army jacket as though ready for battle, showed up at Arthur Evans’s apartment. He was furious about the latest GLF debacle. The Sunday before, a general GLF meeting was broken up when “some crazy” announced that the Electric Circus was discriminating against women, and half the people rushed out of the meeting to demonstrate against the Greenwich Village discotheque and show their outrage. Owles wanted to start a gay organization that would be an alternative to GLF—one that would focus just on gay and lesbian problems. One that would have some order and sanity. He’d already talked to Marty Robinson about it, and Marty had agreed. Evans and Arthur Bell wanted to be counted in.17
Just before Thanksgiving 1969, a dozen of the disillusioned New York GLF-ers met secretly in Jim Owles’s apartment. Their new group’s aim would be less about promoting gay “liberation” than about promoting gay rights. What to call it? “A name that really sings and says something,” somebody suggested. They rejected “Homosexual Activist Movement,” “Sexual Freedom Front,” “Gay Scouts of America.” They settled for “Gay Activists Alliance.” It didn’t sing, but at least its initials, GAA, said “Gay.”18 When Bob Kohler got wind of the new organization, he tarred it with the greatest insult he could think of: “It’s a branch of the John Birch Society.”19
But, in fact, all the founding Gay Activists Alliance members had been liberal to radical.20 Several had participated in civil rights actions on behalf of blacks. All had been against the war, some even refusing to pay income tax to protest. Some had demonstrated at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and taken knocks on the head from the Illinois National Guard. Now, though, most agreed that fighting for gay and lesbian rights didn’t require tearing down the American system. They wanted only to open it up to gay people. They would fight for decriminalization by getting the state to repeal sodomy laws and getting the police to acknowledge that gays had the same rights to the pursuit of happiness as did other American citizens. They would fight for fair employment. They would fight for fair housing legislation.
To avoid the endless free-for-alls that GLF meetings always were, GAA meetings would be conducted by Robert’s Rules of Order. But order would not mean timidity. They would work to become a powerful political bloc. They would be no less militant than the Gay Liberation Front, but the radical demands they would make would be for first-class American citizenship.21
“Assimilationists!” GLF-ers called them.
• • •
Arthur Evans never stopped believing that gays would need to join with other “oppressed people” to overturn what he called an “oppressive system,” and his platform when he ran for GAA president was the promise to ignite in homosexuals everywhere the buried sense of anger at oppression. First they would be made political; and then they could be made into revolutionaries.22 For most Gay Activists Alliance members, it sounded too much like Gay Liberation Front rhetoric, and Evans lost the presidency to Jim Owles.
It was Evans, though, who penned the preamble to GAA’s constitution and brought into it what he called the “rhetoric of anger.” Homosexuals have “the right to make love with anyone, anyway, anytime, provided only that such action be freely chosen by the individuals concerned.” Homosexuals have “the right to treat and express our bodies as we will [and] to display and embellish them solely in the manner we ourselves determine, independent of any external control whatsoever.”23 Such declarations sounded very different from the Frank Kameny–Barbara Gittings24 camp. And in style, GAA was very different. Unlike the super-serious Kameny and Gittings, the Gay Activists Alliance would make their demands with theatricality and a wicked sense of humor. But the primary goal of the Gay Activists Alliance was exactly what Kameny and Gittings had fought for: to claim a place at the American table as a bona fide family member, whether the rest of the family liked it or not.25
The founding members chose as the Gay Activists Alliance symbol the Greek letter lambda. “The Lacedaemonians, or Spartans, bore it on their shields, a people’s will aimed at common oppressors,” they explained bellicosely in a GAA leaflet.26 Enemies of gays and lesbians, like Sparta’s enemies, would cease to sleep peacefully in their beds at night. Homophobes in power would learn that they’d met their match. The Gay Activists Alliance would use “confrontation politics” to win civil rights: sit-ins, demonstrations, street theater, and especially meaningful monkey shines.27
The Church of the Holy Apostles on Ninth Avenue was a progressive Episcopal parish that had started in the 1840s as an outreach to immigrants who worked on the Hudson River waterfront. During the Civil War it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. In January 1970 it opened its doors as a meeting place for the Gay Activists Alliance. At the first meeting, Marty Robinson, wearing a new dark blue T-shirt with a big, bright yellow lambda insignia emblazed on the front like a Lacedaemonian shield, proposed what was to become the first step toward a place at the table. The Gay Activists Alliance would present a petition signed by thousands of people to Carol Greitzer, the New York councilwoman whose district included Greenwich Village. The petition would ask her to sponsor a bill that would add the words “sexual orientation” to a city ordinance that already prohibited discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of race, religion, and gender.
For the next three winter months, Gay Activists Alliance members stood on street corners all over the city, collecting signatures from straights as well as gays. The collateral benefits of Robinson’s petition drive, he’d explained, was that gay people would show themselves to all New Yorkers as out and proud and willing to stand up for their rights; and straight people would see that not all gays fit the homosexual stereotype. In early April Jim Owles gathered up the stacks of petitions that had been turned into GAA headquarters, and in the capacity of the organization’s president he took them to city hall.28
“Councilwoman Greitzer, I have here between six and seven thousand signatures of New Yorkers who are asking you to sponsor a gay rights bill,” Owles formally told the freshman councilwoman in her office, proffering the huge stack. Carol Greitzer had recently been elected chair of the newly established National Abortion Rights Action League. She’d just drafted a bill to outlaw discrimination against unescorted women in New York restaurants. Owles had good reason to believe that the liberal councilwoman would take the petitions and thank him.
“I have too much to do and too much to carry, and I can’t lug those things home,” she said instead and refused to accept them. Owles offered to help her carry the petitions, but she refused that too and told him that she would not sponsor a gay rights bill.29 “Homosexuality is not my problem, so I don’t quite understand it,” she said.30
A few days later, three dozen gays and lesbians marched into a meeting of the Village Independent Democratic Club, whose members were Greitzer’s base. “Carol Greitzer is antigay!” they screamed in unison. “If you’re not,” Arthur Evans yelled at her, “make a statement supporting the gay cause. And if you don’t, we’re staging a sit-in.”
Greitzer was seated next to the Village Independent Democratic Club’s platform chair Robert Egan. She turned to him and whispered, “I don’t want to make a statement. Tell them I have a cold.”
“You’re guilty of the crime of silence!” Jim Owles shouted, and the three dozen chanted, “Guilty of the crime of silence! Guilty of the crime of silence!”31
Greitzer finally took the microphone to say, “Listen, the attorney general is the one who’s done the most this past year with civil rights legislation. I can’t get it done. There’s no way of getting this through—not even with bombs.”32
“Guilty of the crime of silence! Guilty of the crime of silence!” the three dozen kept chanting. Sylvia Rivera, the Latina drag queen, waved a menacing fist at the councilwoman.33
Greitzer surely feared that some members of the very progressive Village Independent Democratic Club would have sympathy with the homosexuals and she was being made to look bad. Not knowing what else to do, she said okay, she would accept the petitions. And, she added not too graciously, she would sponsor the bill, too.34
• • •
While Gay Activists Alliance members had been collecting signatures for the petition, GAA officers had been making numerous phone calls and sending countless letters and telegrams to New York’s most influential political figure, Mayor John Lindsay. Lindsay was a very liberal Republican who, as New York congressman to the US House of Representatives, led a group of fellow Republicans to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As mayor of New York, he was so well liked and trusted by the black community that his appearance in Harlem after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 averted race riots such as had erupted in big cities across the country. But when the Gay Activists Alliance asked Lindsay to make a public statement saying that he supported a gay rights law, he refused to dignify their request with a response.
Mattachine president Dick Leitsch continued to defend Lindsay. It was Lindsay who’d made the city “livable” for gay people by ending police entrapment, he said.35 But the Gay Activists Alliance was asking much more of the mayor than what they said was a behind-closed-doors order to plainclothes cops to stop coming on to homosexuals and arresting them if they responded.36 GAA wanted Lindsay to make clear to all of New York that he opposed discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
When the mayor was not forthcoming, he became GAA’s chief target. Leitsch and Mattachine were outraged that with all the real enemies of gays and lesbians in New York, the Gay Activists Alliance chose to pick on a liberal mayor. But the reasoning of GAA’s leaders was that conservative politicians were a lost cause—no use trying to pressure them. Liberal politicians (like Greitzer and Lindsay), who prided themselves on supporting the rights of minorities, could be made to understand that gay people were also a legitimate minority, whose rights they must champion no less than they championed the rights of black people.
Marty Robinson came up with another key idea: GAA would do agitprop, like the radical feminists did in the 1960s, when they invaded the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City and brought with them “Freedom Trash Cans” into which they tossed bras, high heels, Playboy magazines, and cooking utensils. They held an “ogle-in” on Wall Street, dozens of women scrutinizing male butts, whistling, and catcalling. They released cages of mice at a bridal fair in Madison Square Garden. They “occupied” tables in restaurants that wouldn’t seat unaccompanied women. “Zaps,” Marty Robinson would call similarly impudent, high-spirited actions in which “the good guys publicly embarrass the bad guys.”37 They’d be mock warnings to the “bad guys,” as in “Zap! You’re dead!”
Zaps were soon GAA’s trademark form of protest38—playful, mischievous, and dead serious, all at once. Mayor Lindsay became very familiar with the zap. In one of the first ones, a half dozen Gay Activists Alliance members posed as journalism students being taken on a civics junket by their professor (played by Ron Gold, a forty-one-year-old reporter for Variety who’d quit his day job and lived on an inheritance so he could be media director of GAA).39 They went up to city hall’s second-floor, where the mayor’s office was located. Then they each whipped out a pair of handcuffs that were borrowed from GAA members who were into S&M, and they fastened themselves to the gate that blocked his office from public access. Their chants of derision and complaints against the mayor echoed in the marble halls and were heard by all the tourists and crowds of visiting school kids, until the police finally were able to sever the handcuffs from the gate and rush the zappers to the police station.40 Lindsay didn’t come out of his office to see the zap, though he undoubtedly heard it.
The next one, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, forced a confrontation. On April 13, 1970, the museum held its one-hundredth birthday party, featuring the mayor. As Lindsay stood at a podium before a couple of hundred guests, extolling the contributions of the Metropolitan Museum to the cultural life of New York, Marty Robinson, intensity writ large on his earnest, handsome face,41 ran up to Lindsay shouting, “I’m a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, Mr. Mayor. When are you going to speak out on homosexual rights?” Robinson was ungently hauled away by the mayor’s bodyguards and kicked out.
But that wasn’t the end of the zap. Gay Activists Alliance members had infiltrated the crowd, and wherever Lindsay went in the museum, they tailed him and tried to hand him a flyer that asked him to speak out about civil rights for gays and lesbians. That didn’t end the zap either. It had been announced earlier that before Lindsay left the museum he would shake the hands of the first hundred people in a receiving line. GAA members rushed to take places throughout the line. “Mr. Lindsay, you have our flyer,” each would say when the mayor got to him or her in the line and extended his hand. “Now when are you going to speak out on gay rights?” Lindsay would move his lips a bit to simulate a polite mumble; the GAA member would repeat, “When are you going to speak out on gay rights?” and wouldn’t let go of the mayoral hand. Once the mayor’s bodyguards saw what was up, they shadowed the mayor closely so they could bum-rush each activist out. It took three bodyguards to extricate Lindsay’s hand from the grip of one of the activists. The tony museum supporters were thus put on notice that gays and lesbians had become tenacious in demanding their rights.42
GAA relentlessly zapped Lindsay all through the spring and summer. In the fall, the mayor and his dignified, blue-blood wife Mary, whom he called his most trusted advisor, were to be guests of honor for the opening night of a Broadway play, Two by Two. About twenty-five GAA members were already scattered among the high-society crowd when the couple arrived at the Imperial Theater. The gays waylaid the Lindsays in the lobby, shouting, “Mr. Mayor, when are you going to speak out on gay rights?” “Lindsay must speak out!” “Gay power!” “End police harassment!” John Lindsay responded just as he had throughout the spring and summer: he fixed his gaze on the distance and smiled a plastic smile. But Mary Lindsay, after hearing zap stories for six months, lost it. She kicked one zapper in the shins, punched another in the chest, and screamed like a fishwife, “Damn you! Get the hell out of here!” as the mortified mayor struggled to restrain her.43
• • •
In 1971 Mayor Lindsay declared himself a candidate for the US presidency. Because he suspected he was too socially liberal for Republican tastes, he and his wife both changed their party affiliations to Democrat. Lindsay had still not expressed support for gay civil rights, but the Gay Activists Alliance, after realizing that Carol Greitzer had no intention of keeping her extorted, halfhearted promise to sponsor a gay civil rights bill, was able to convince four other council members to be cosponsors. The city council was set to vote on the bill in January 1972. Both the policemen’s union and the firemen’s union campaigned hard against it, and it failed.
Rich Wandel, a former Catholic novitiate who’d jumped over the wall and come out shortly after the Stonewall riots,44 had recently succeeded Jim Owles as president of the GAA. Wandel laid the blame for the bill’s failure squarely at the mayor’s feet, and he scoffed that Lindsay was campaigning for the Democratic nomination on the basis of his strong civil rights record. “He’s touring the nation championing the rights of blacks, women, and Chicanos, which we applaud, but not one word about this country’s twenty million homosexuals. Not one word about the oppression of eight hundred thousand gay New Yorkers,” Wandel complained.45
He penned a flyer declaring that his organization was waging “Total War on John V. Lindsay.” There were now activist gay groups in cities all over America, Wandel wrote, and the New York Gay Activists Alliance would inform every one of them that Lindsay was a civil rights phony. The war on Lindsay’s presidential hopes would begin in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, at a party to raise funds for his campaign—“6,000 people at $100 apiece.”46
Allen Roskoff, chair of GAA’s Municipal Government Committee, was a main organizer of the Radio City zap. Roskoff, hair down to his shoulder blades, had been a very out antiwar activist, but as a homosexual who was set to become a teacher he’d been totally closeted—until 1971, when he read a notice in the Village Voice about a Gay Activists Alliance meeting. For what seemed like hours, Roskoff had circled the blocks around Wooster Street. (After GAA members had appeared on The David Susskind Show, attendance at general meetings grew to over three hundred, too large for Holy Apostles’s 1,800-square-foot meeting hall,47 so GAA had recently moved to SoHo, into a 10,000-square-foot abandoned nineteenth-century firehouse with a spiral staircase and art nouveau decorations.) Roskoff was working up the courage to go into the Firehouse, as it was now called, though he couldn’t stop worrying that he’d be harassed by men in high heels. When he finally entered the GAA meeting space, and saw the members and heard what they said and the smarts with which they said it, he knew that he’d found his people—and that the gay rights movement would be his life, even if it meant giving up his teaching career. The zaps he planned were labors of love.48
The afternoon before the fund-raiser, Roskoff, together with several other GAA members, bought tickets to the movie that was being shown at Radio City Music Hall that day, The Hot Rock, starring Robert Redford—coincidentally a film about an elaborate plan by good-guy outlaws who fight bad-guy policemen and break the law for a good cause. But relevant as the movie may have been, Roskoff and the others were too busy doing their job to see much of it. They were scoping out Radio City Music Hall, deciding who would sit in the balcony, who would sit in the orchestra, what the order of disruptions would be, where on the seats they might fasten their handcuffs . . . They would leave nothing to chance. Of course, they couldn’t come up with hundreds of dollars to buy tickets for Lindsay’s fund-raiser (nor would they have spent their money that way even if they’d had it). But Ron Gold had a connection: the head of the projectionist union (who never knew what Gold was up to) gave the former Variety reporter a small stack of complementary tickets to the evening’s event.49
Now, how to present themselves at such a gala? Rich Wandel had been in the news too recently as president of GAA; he’d have to be disguised. “Okay, a dark suit and an Abraham Lincoln beard,” Wandel promised. And the others would have to spiff up enough for this formal affair so they wouldn’t call attention to themselves too soon. No lambda T-shirts here.50
The event that evening began with cigar-smoking comedian Alan King, who told New Yorker jokes for ten minutes, then introduced Lindsay’s campaign manager, Richard Aurelio, with the prophetic quip, “That’s like being the navigator on the Titanic.”51 Then King grandly introduced “the next president of the United States, John Lindsay!” Thunderous applause as the tuxedoed mayor walked onstage.
He’d barely opened his mouth before Morty Manford, stationed in the balcony where he’d affixed a sturdy rope, swung on it, Errol Flynn style, down to the orchestra, screaming, “Justice for homosexuals!”52 Cora Perrotta, a petite, vivacious Puerto Rican lesbian, veteran of many GAA zaps, and used to being arrested for them,53 stood up from her seat in the orchestra and shouted, “Why are you contributing to homosexual oppression, Mr. Mayor?” She held up a siren that would sound an ear-splitting screech when the pin was pulled—and she pulled the pin. Then she threw pin and screech machine over the heads of the audience, as far as she could, and in opposite directions. She sat down again—and handcuffed herself to her chair, so that when the police arrived, there’d be an extra stir because they’d have to cut the handcuffs.
Then Roskoff stood up from his seat in the balcony, shouting, “There are twenty million gays in this country. Lindsay cannot run for president!” and he, too, held up a siren, pulled the pin, and threw siren and pin in opposite directions. He also flung hundreds of Gay Activists Alliance flyers down on the audience seated in the orchestra. “There are twenty million gays in this country. Lindsay cannot run for president!” the flyers proclaimed. Just as Perrotta had done, Roskoff quickly handcuffed himself to his chair. Then Wayne Sunday, another veteran zapper, and then Rich Wandel—one after another, they popped up from their seats in the orchestra or balcony, shouted their slogans, pulled the pins of their sirens, and chained themselves to their chairs. The noise of sirens and homosexuals barking and bellowing slogans ended Lindsay’s speech. The candidate retreated from the stage. As the bemused audience filed out, the zappers kept yelling, “There are twenty million gays in this country. Lindsay cannot run for president!” and “Justice for homosexuals!” When the police finally arrived, they cut the zappers loose from their handcuffs, ushered them into a paddy wagon, and took them to the Midtown North Precinct Station for booking.
The next day, Mayor Lindsay, understanding that Wandel and GAA really would give no quarter in the war they’d declared on him, capitulated. He signed an executive order that said that the sexual orientation of city employees and job applicants for city jobs must be considered irrelevant. The executive order was not as good as a comprehensive gay rights bill that would give gays and lesbians fair treatment in employment, housing, and public accommodations, but it was a step in the right direction.
• • •
In fall 1972, Geoffrey Swearingen, a twenty-one-year-old college student, applied for a driver’s job with the Dover Cab Company. All cab companies in New York were obliged to send their applicants to the Metropolitan Taxi Bureau to be tested for their suitability before they could be hired. Swearingen admitted under questioning that his draft classification was IV-F because the military examiners found he had “homosexual tendencies.” His examiners at the Metropolitan Taxi Bureau were almost as leery of homosexuals as the military had been. They informed Swearingen that they could not approve him for work unless he got a letter from a psychiatrist stating that his sexual orientation would not interfere with his job performance.54 Of course, Mayor Lindsay had issued an executive order six months earlier demanding that city agencies stop discriminating against homosexuals—and the bureau’s insistence that Swearingen get cleared by a psychiatrist was certainly discrimination. But clearly not all agencies were taking Lindsay’s executive order seriously.
The head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission was Michael Lazar (known as the “Taxi Czar”). He’d been in the audience at Radio City Music Hall when the Gay Activists Alliance zapped Mayor Lindsay off the stage,55 so he’d already had a demonstration of the group’s no-holds-barred tenacity. Now nine GAA members descended on his Wall Street headquarters, seven of them trailing Allen Roskoff and Arthur Bell, who carried a couch onto the freight elevator and got out on Czar Lazar’s floor.
“We didn’t order a couch!” Commissioner Lazar’s startled secretary shrieked. “Who are you?” Allen Roskoff was decked out in a doctor’s white smock, a stethoscope slung around his neck. “We are here to psychoanalyze Mr. Lazar. We must see if he is sane enough to be the taxi commissioner,” a poker-faced Roskoff told her.56
Three days later, Lazar announced that the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s policies had been reversed. Homosexual applicants would no longer be required to submit psychiatric certification, and homosexuals who had been given licenses would no longer be required to undergo semiannual psychiatric evaluations in order to keep them.57 With no further ado, Geoffrey Swearingen received an unconditional license to drive a cab.
Gay Activists Alliance zaps didn’t often yield such immediate payoffs, but GAA continued zapping. It was the organization’s preferred tactic. It bullied the bullies—gave them a taste of their own medicine and made them understand that the days of impunity for oppressing homosexuals were gone. Even more important, zapping got the word gay into the media better than any previous technique had. Life magazine’s December 31, 1971, issue, for example, announced to eight and a half million readers that homosexuals, a “hitherto silent majority,” were “America’s newest militants,” and demonstrated the point by featuring photos of the GAA invasion of the New York City Clerk’s office. He’d refused to issue wedding licenses to homosexuals. The zappers brought with them a big pot of coffee and a giant wedding cake that was decorated on top with two grooms and two brides in loving same-sex couples. On the side of the cake was the message “Gay Power to Gay Love,” and over that was GAA’s trademark lambda symbol. The Life article dubbed New York’s Gay Activists Alliance “homosexual liberation’s most effective organization.”58
The zaps were most often about showing why a nondiscrimination ordinance was needed or putting pressure on public figures who were opposed to the ordinance. Marty Robinson and Jim Owles realized that tedious as the ordinance battles could be, they wouldn’t be news for long unless GAA could promise the media a bit of entertainment or drama. And that it did. With as much humor as wrath, it took on Fidelifacts, for instance, a company whose obnoxious advertising come-on to corporations was, “Do you know who you are hiring?” Fidelifacts used former Secret Servicemen, IRS workers, and military intelligence officers to conduct background checks on job applicants. They examined criminal records, employment history, and military records, and then reported their findings to their client companies. They also reported whether they’d found a job applicant to be homosexual.
The Gay Activists Alliance got wind of Fidelifacts’s services when its founder, Vincent Gillen, a former FBI agent, was invited to be luncheon speaker at the Association of Stock Exchange Brokers. As the Wall Street men digested their chicken a la king, the voluble Gillen merrily admitted about his company’s tattling: “Establishing that someone is a homosexual is often difficult, but I like to go on the rule of thumb that if one looks like a duck, walks like a duck, associates only with ducks, and quacks like a duck, then he is probably a duck.”59
GAA members worked with New York Daughters of Bilitis on the Fidelifacts zap. They tied up the company’s phone lines all the next day, repeating the message, “Stop your offensive services now!” A delegation of fifteen GAA and DOB leaders also marched into Fidelifacts’s sixth-floor office on Forty-Second Street—having first invited the press and WOR-TV to come along and watch gays and lesbians stage a sit-in.
“You’re trespassing,” two Fidelifacts employees told Jim Owles when he demanded to see Vincent Gillen.
“Fidelifacts is trespassing on the human rights of homosexuals and on the privacy of all Americans,” Jim Owles solemnly lectured the employees—who shoved him hard against a wall. WOR-TV cameras caught the Fidelifacts men assaulting GAA’s president and showed it on television that night, along with news of the homosexual sit-in. But that wasn’t all the gays and lesbians provided for the media to see. As their delegation argued with Fidelifacts people upstairs, eighty more gays and lesbians picketed in the street below. Marty Robinson, dressed up in a bright yellow duck suit, led the picketers.60
The image of Marty Robinson, looking, walking, and quacking like a duck as he handed out leaflets telling why the protestors were there, was also captured in newspapers and by TV cameras, though reporters didn’t fully appreciate what was happening. They presented the incident mostly as “another one of those funny gay demonstrations that we seem to be seeing more and more of”61—but the message that “more and more” gays and lesbians were demonstrating for rights and respect was just what GAA hoped to communicate to all the gays and lesbians who hadn’t yet joined them, and to the straight world, too.