The Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) was founded in New York City on December 21, 1969, after the Stonewall riots, by dissident members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Some early members included Jim Owles, Marty Robinson, Kay Lahusen, Arthur Bell, Arthur Evans, Bill Bahlman, Vito Russo, Sylvia Rae Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Jim Coles, Brenda Howard, and David Thorstad.
The group wanted to form a "single issue, politically neutral, whose goal was to "secure basic human rights, dignity and freedom for all gay people."
The Gay Activists Alliance was most active from 1970 to 1974. They published the Gay Activist newspaper until 1980. GAA first met at the Church of the Holy Apostles (9th Ave. & 28th St.) Their next New York City headquarters, the Firehouse at 99 Wooster Street in Soho, was occupied in May 1971 and burned down by arsonists on October 15, 1974. David Eisenbach, Gay Power, page 266 "By 1980 GAA had begun to sound like the Gay Liberation Front in 1969. After Activists met to officially disband the Alliance a year later..."
GAA members performed zaps, (first conceived by Marty Robinson) public peaceful confrontations with officials to draw media attention. Their first president was Jim Owles. Some of their more visible actions included protests against an anti-gay episode on the popular TV series Marcus Welby, M.D., a zap of Mayor John Lindsay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later at Radio City Music Hall, a zap against Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (the "Rockefeller 5"), a zap at the Marriage License Bureau demanding marriage rights for gays, a zap against Fidelifacts, which provided anti-gay information to employers, a zap at the NYC Taxi Commission (which required gay cab drivers to get an OK from a psychiatrist before being employed), and a zap at the New York Daily News, which printed a scurrilous editorial attacking "queers, lezzies, pansies, call them what you will." Four were arrested.
The GAA Firehouse on Wooster Street also served as a community center and had extremely popular dances that helped fund the organization. The symbol of the Gay Activists Alliance was the lower case Greek letter lambda (λ).
Famous quotes containing the words gay and/or alliance:
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)