Zap (action)
Encyclopedia
A zap is a form of political direct action
that came into use in the 1970s in the United States. Popularized by the early gay liberation
group Gay Activists Alliance, a zap was a raucous public demonstration designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of LGBT rights.
Although American homophile
organizations had engaged in public demonstrations as early as 1959, these demonstrations tended to be peaceful picket lines. Following the 1969 Stonewall riots
, considered the flashpoint of the modern gay liberation movement, younger, more radical gay activists were less interested in the staid tactics of the previous generation. Zaps targeted politicians and other public figures and many addressed the portrayal of gay people in the popular media. LGBT and AIDS activist groups continued to use zap-like tactics into the 1990s and beyond.
s, and on at least two occasions riots, for the most part these were picket lines. Many of these pickets were organized by Eastern affiliates of such groups as the Mattachine Society
chapters out of New York City and Washington, D.C., Philadelphia's Janus Society
and the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis
, These groups acted under the collective name East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Organized pickets tended to be in large urban population centers because these centers were where the largest concentration of homophile activists were located. Picketers at ECHO-organized events were required to follow strict dress codes. Men had to wear ties, preferably with a jacket. Women were required to wear skirts. The dress code was imposed by Mattachine Society Washington founder Frank Kameny, with the goal of portraying homosexuals as "presentable and 'employable'".
, a gay bar
located in New York City's Greenwich Village
, resisted a police raid. LGBT people returned to the Stonewall and the surrounding neighborhood for the next several nights for additional confrontations. Although there had been two smaller riots — in Los Angeles in 1959 and San Francisco in 1966
— it is the Stonewall riots that have come to be seen as the flashpoint of a new gay liberation movement.
In the weeks and months following Stonewall, a dramatic increase in gay political organizing took place. Among the many groups that formed was the Gay Activists Alliance, which focused more exclusively on organizing around gay issues and less of the general leftist political perspective taken by such other new groups as the Gay Liberation Front
and Red Butterfly. 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. Police arrested 167 patrons. One, an Argentine national named Diego Vinales, 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. Gay journalist and activist Arthur Evans later recalled how the raid and Vinales' critical injuries inspired the technique:
Zaps typically included sudden onset against vulnerable targets, noisiness, verbal assaults and media attention. Tactics included sit-ins, disruptive actions and street confrontations.
GAA founding member Arthur Bell
explained the philosophy of the zap, which he described as "political theater for educating the gay masses":
Thus, obtaining media coverage of the zap became more important than the subject of the zap itself.
It was precisely this anti-assimilationist attitude that led some mainstream gay people and groups to oppose zapping as a strategy. The National Gay Task Force's
media director, Ronald Gold, despite having been involved in early GAA zaps, came to urge GAA not to engage in the tactic. As zaps and other activism began opening doors for nascent gay organizations like NGTF and the Gay Media Task Force, these groups became more invested in negotiating with the people within the mainstream power structures rather than in maintaining a tactic they saw as being of the outsider.
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 at least to 1961.
In response to the 1973 Welby episode, "The Other Martin Loring
", a GAA representative tried to negotiate with ABC, but when negotiations failed GAA zapped ABC's New York headquarters on February 16, 1973, picketing ABC's New York City headquarters and sending 30-40 members to occupy the office of ABC president Leonard Goldenson
. Executives offered to meet with two GAA representatives but GAA insisted that all protesters be present. The network refused. All but six of the zappers then left; the final six were arrested but charges were later dropped.
When NBC aired "Flowers of Evil
", an episode of Police Woman about a trio of lesbians murdering nursing home residents for their money, it was met with a zap by Lesbian Feminist Liberation. LFL, which had split from GAA over questions of lack of male attention to women's issues, zapped NBC's New York office on November 19, occupying the office of vice president Herminio Traviesas overnight. NBC agreed not to rerun the episode. LFL had earlier zapped an episode of The Dick Cavett Show
on which anti-feminist author George Gilder
was the guest.
Activist Mark Segal was a very active zapper, usually acting alone, sometimes with a compatriot operating under the name "Gay Raiders". His guerilla zaps frequently drew national news coverage, sometimes from the target of the zaps themselves. Some of his more successful zaps include: chaining himself to a railing at a taping of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
in 1973; handcuffing himself and a friend to a camera at a taping of The Mike Douglas Show
after producers cancelled a planned discussion of gay issues; disrupting a live 1973 broadcast of The Today Show (resulting in an off-camera interview with Barbara Walters
, who explained the reason for the zap); and interrupting Walter Cronkite
doing a 1973 live newscast by rushing the set with a sign reading Gays Protest CBS Prejudice (after a brief interruption, Cronkite reported the zap).
Politicians and other public figures were also the targets of zaps. New York Mayor John Lindsay
was an early and frequent GAA target, with GAA insisting that Lindsay take a public stance on gay rights issues. 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. The group's first zap, on April 13, 1970, involved infiltrating opening night of the 1970 Metropolitan Opera
season, shouting gay slogans when the mayor and his wife made their entrance. Lindsay was zapped again on April 19 as he taped an episode of his weekly television program, With Mayor Lindsay. Approximately 40 GAA members obtained tickets to the taping. Some GAA members rushed the stage calling for the mayor to endorse gay rights; others called out comments from the audience, booed, stomped their feet and otherwise disrupted taping. One notable exchange came when the mayor noted it was illegal to blow car horns in New York, drawing the response "It's illegal to blow a lot of things!" 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. Lindsay was among those who responded favorably.
Zapping migrated to the West Coast as early as 1970, when a coalition of several Los Angeles groups targeted Barney's Beanery
. Barney's had long displayed a wooden sign at its bar reading "FAGOTS – STAY OUT". 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. On February 7, over 100 people converged on Barney's. They engaged in picketing and leafletting outside and occupied tables for long periods inside with small orders.This tactic was employed decades later against the Cracker Barrel
restaurant chain when it instituted a policy of refusing to employ LGBT workers. It became known as a "sip-in". The owner of Barney's not only refused to take down the sign, he put up more signs made of cardboard, harassed the gay customers inside, refused service to them, ordered them out of the restaurant and eventually assaulted a customer and called the sheriff. After several hours and consultation with the sheriff's department, the original wooden sign was taken down and stored out of sight and the new cardboard signs were removed and distributed among the demonstrators.The original sign was put up and taken down several times over the next 14 years until West Hollywood, newly incorporated as a city, permanently removed the sign under a newly passed LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance in December 1984 (Kenney, p. 50).
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.
, Ernie Sigley
, John Court
and Mary Whitehouse
. British activist Peter Tatchell
has engaged in zaps for several decades, both singly and in association with such organizations as the British GLF and OutRage!
.
epidemic, the direct action group AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power
(ACT UP) formed in 1987. ACT UP adopted a zap-like form of direct action reminiscent of the earlier GAA-style zaps. 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.
Queer Nation
formed in 1990 and adopted the militant tactics of ACT UP and applied them more generally to LGBT issues. Queer Nation members were known for entering social spaces like straight bars and clubs and engaging in straight-identified behaviour like playing spin the bottle
to make the point that most public spaces were straight spaces. QN would stage "kiss-ins" in public places like shopping malls or sidewalks, both as a shock tactic directed at heterosexuals and to point out that LGBT people should be able to engage in the same public behaviours as straight people. Echoing the disruption a decade earlier during the filming of Cruising, Queer Nation and other direct action groups disrupted filming of Basic Instinct
over what they believed were negative portrayals of lesbian and bisexual women.
The kiss-in had a minor resurgence in popularity in July, 2009, when LGBT activists, angered by the support of the LDS church for initiatives to ban same-sex marriage in general and the arrest of a same-sex couple on Mormon property in Salt Lake City when they exchanged a kiss and were charged with trespassing, staged a series of kiss-ins across the country. In April 2011, a similar kiss-in was used to bring attention to a London pub after a gay couple was thrown out for kissing.
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...
that came into use in the 1970s in the United States. Popularized by the early gay liberation
Gay Liberation
Gay liberation is the name used to describe the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement of the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s in North America, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand...
group Gay Activists Alliance, a zap was a raucous public demonstration designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of LGBT rights.
Although American homophile
Homophile
The word homophile is an alternative to the word for homosexual or gay. The homophile movement also refers to the gay rights movement of the 1950s and '60s....
organizations had engaged in public demonstrations as early as 1959, these demonstrations tended to be peaceful picket lines. Following the 1969 Stonewall riots
Stonewall riots
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City...
, considered the flashpoint of the modern gay liberation movement, younger, more radical gay activists were less interested in the staid tactics of the previous generation. Zaps targeted politicians and other public figures and many addressed the portrayal of gay people in the popular media. LGBT and AIDS activist groups continued to use zap-like tactics into the 1990s and beyond.
Pre-Stonewall actions
Beginning in 1959, and continuing for the next ten years, LGBT people occasionally demonstrated against discriminatory attitudes toward and treatment of homosexuals. Although these sometimes took the form of sit-inSit-in
A sit-in or sit-down is a form of protest that involves occupying seats or sitting down on the floor of an establishment.-Process:In a sit-in, protesters remain until they are evicted, usually by force, or arrested, or until their requests have been met...
s, and on at least two occasions riots, for the most part these were picket lines. Many of these pickets were organized by Eastern affiliates of such groups as the Mattachine Society
Mattachine Society
The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was one of the earliest homophile organizations in the United States, probably second only to Chicago’s Society for Human Rights . Harry Hay and a group of Los Angeles male friends formed the group to protect and improve the rights of homosexuals...
chapters out of New York City and Washington, D.C., Philadelphia's Janus Society
Janus Society
The Janus Society was an early homophile organization based in Philadelphia. It is notable as the publisher of DRUM magazine, one of the earliest LGBT-interest publications in the United States, and for its role in organizing many of the nation's earliest LGBT rights demonstrations.-Drum:Drum was...
and the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis
Daughters of Bilitis
The Daughters of Bilitis , was the first lesbian rights organization in the United States. It was formed in San Francisco in 1955, conceived as a social alternative to lesbian bars, which were considered illegal and thus subject to raids and police harassment...
, These groups acted under the collective name East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Organized pickets tended to be in large urban population centers because these centers were where the largest concentration of homophile activists were located. Picketers at ECHO-organized events were required to follow strict dress codes. Men had to wear ties, preferably with a jacket. Women were required to wear skirts. The dress code was imposed by Mattachine Society Washington founder Frank Kameny, with the goal of portraying homosexuals as "presentable and 'employable'".
Post-Stonewall activism
On June 28, 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall InnStonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn, often shortened to Stonewall is an American bar in New York City and the site of the Stonewall riots of 1969, which are widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for gay and lesbian rights in the United...
, a gay bar
Gay bar
A gay bar is a drinking establishment that caters to an exclusively or predominantly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender clientele; the term gay is used as a broadly inclusive concept for LGBT and queer communities...
located in New York City's Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
, resisted a police raid. LGBT people returned to the Stonewall and the surrounding neighborhood for the next several nights for additional confrontations. Although there had been two smaller riots — in Los Angeles in 1959 and San Francisco in 1966
Compton's cafeteria riot
The Compton's Cafeteria Riot occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. This incident was one of the first recorded transgender riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City.A smaller-scale riot broke out in 1959 in Los...
— it is the Stonewall riots that have come to be seen as the flashpoint of a new gay liberation movement.
In the weeks and months following Stonewall, a dramatic increase in gay political organizing took place. Among the many groups that formed was the Gay Activists Alliance, which focused more exclusively on organizing around gay issues and less of the general leftist political perspective taken by such other new groups as the Gay Liberation Front
Gay Liberation Front
Gay Liberation Front was the name of a number of Gay Liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots, in which police clashed with gay demonstrators.-The Gay Liberation Front:...
and Red Butterfly. 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. Police arrested 167 patrons. One, an Argentine national named Diego Vinales, 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. Gay journalist and activist Arthur Evans later recalled how the raid and Vinales' critical injuries inspired the technique:
The Snake Pit incident truly outraged us, and we put out a leaflet saying that, in effect, regardless of how you looked at it, Diego Vinales was pushed out the window and we were determined to stop it....There was no division for us between the political and personal. We were never given the option to make that division. We lived it. So we decided that people on the other side of the power structure were going to have the same thing happen to them. The wall that they had built protecting themselves from the personal consequences of their political decisions was going to be torn down and politics was going to become personal for them.
Zaps typically included sudden onset against vulnerable targets, noisiness, verbal assaults and media attention. Tactics included sit-ins, disruptive actions and street confrontations.
GAA founding member Arthur Bell
Arthur Bell (journalist)
Arthur Bell was a journalist, author and LGBT rights activist.Bell, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front and a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance in New York City, wrote two books. Dancing the Gay Lib Blues was published in 1971 and he published Kings Don't Mean a Thing in 1978...
explained the philosophy of the zap, which he described as "political theater for educating the gay masses":
Gays who have as yet no sense of gay pride see a zap on television or read about it in the press. First they are vaguely disturbed at the demonstrators for "rocking the boat"; eventually, when they see how the straight establishment responds, they feel anger. This anger gradually focuses on the heterosexual oppressors, and the gays develop a sense of class-consciousness. And the no-longer-closeted gays realize that assimilation into the heterosexual mainstream is no answer: gays must unite among themselves, organize their common resources for collective action, and resist.
Thus, obtaining media coverage of the zap became more important than the subject of the zap itself.
It was precisely this anti-assimilationist attitude that led some mainstream gay people and groups to oppose zapping as a strategy. The National Gay Task Force's
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force builds the political power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community from the ground up. The Task Force is the country’s premier social justice organization fighting to improve the lives of LGBT people, and working to create positive, lasting...
media director, Ronald Gold, despite having been involved in early GAA zaps, came to urge GAA not to engage in the tactic. As zaps and other activism began opening doors for nascent gay organizations like NGTF and the Gay Media Task Force, these groups became more invested in negotiating with the people within the mainstream power structures rather than in maintaining a tactic they saw as being of the outsider.
Notable zaps
One area of special interest to GAA was how LGBT people were portrayed on television and on film. There were very few LGBT characters on television in the 1960s and early 1970s, and many of them were negative. Several in particular, including episodes of Marcus Welby, M.D.Marcus Welby, M.D.
Marcus Welby, M.D. is an American medical drama television program that aired on ABC from September 23, 1969, to July 29, 1976. It starred Robert Young as a family practitioner with a kind bedside manner, and was produced by David Victor and David J. O'Connell...
in 1973 and 1974 and a 1974 episode of Police Woman
Police Woman (TV series)
Police Woman is an American television police drama starring Angie Dickinson that ran on NBC for four seasons, from September 13, 1974, to March 29, 1978.-Synopsis:...
, 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 at least to 1961.
In response to the 1973 Welby episode, "The Other Martin Loring
The Other Martin Loring
"The Other Martin Loring" is a 1973 episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., an American medical drama that aired on ABC. It tells the story of a middle-aged man facing several health issues, which seem to stem from his repression of his homosexuality...
", a GAA representative tried to negotiate with ABC, but when negotiations failed GAA zapped ABC's New York headquarters on February 16, 1973, picketing ABC's New York City headquarters and sending 30-40 members to occupy the office of ABC president Leonard Goldenson
Leonard Goldenson
Leonard H. Goldenson was President of the U.S. television and radio broadcaster ABC.-Early life and career:...
. Executives offered to meet with two GAA representatives but GAA insisted that all protesters be present. The network refused. All but six of the zappers then left; the final six were arrested but charges were later dropped.
When NBC aired "Flowers of Evil
Flowers of Evil (Police Woman)
"Flowers of Evil" is a 1974 episode of the American police procedural television series Police Woman. The episode features Sgt. Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson going undercover at a nursing home to investigate a murder. She uncovers a trio of lesbians who are robbing and murdering their elderly residents...
", an episode of Police Woman about a trio of lesbians murdering nursing home residents for their money, it was met with a zap by Lesbian Feminist Liberation. LFL, which had split from GAA over questions of lack of male attention to women's issues, zapped NBC's New York office on November 19, occupying the office of vice president Herminio Traviesas overnight. NBC agreed not to rerun the episode. LFL had earlier zapped an episode of The Dick Cavett Show
The Dick Cavett Show
The Dick Cavett Show has been the title of several talk shows hosted by Dick Cavett on various television networks, including:* ABC daytime ...
on which anti-feminist author George Gilder
George Gilder
George F. Gilder is an American writer, techno-utopian intellectual, Republican Party activist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute...
was the guest.
Activist Mark Segal was a very active zapper, usually acting alone, sometimes with a compatriot operating under the name "Gay Raiders". His guerilla zaps frequently drew national news coverage, sometimes from the target of the zaps themselves. Some of his more successful zaps include: chaining himself to a railing at a taping of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson is a talk show hosted by Johnny Carson under the Tonight Show franchise from 1962 to 1992. It originally aired during late-night....
in 1973; handcuffing himself and a friend to a camera at a taping of The Mike Douglas Show
The Mike Douglas Show
The Mike Douglas Show is an American daytime television talk show hosted by Mike Douglas that aired in syndication from 1961 to 1982, distributed by Westinghouse Broadcasting and for much of its run, originated from studios of two of the company's TV stations.The program featured light banter with...
after producers cancelled a planned discussion of gay issues; disrupting a live 1973 broadcast of The Today Show (resulting in an off-camera interview with Barbara Walters
Barbara Walters
Barbara Jill Walters is an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She has hosted morning television shows , the television newsmagazine , former co-anchor of the ABC Evening News, and current contributor to ABC News.Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news...
, who explained the reason for the zap); and interrupting Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite
Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years . During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll...
doing a 1973 live newscast by rushing the set with a sign reading Gays Protest CBS Prejudice (after a brief interruption, Cronkite reported the zap).
Politicians and other public figures were also the targets of zaps. New York Mayor John Lindsay
John Lindsay
John Vliet Lindsay was an American politician, lawyer and broadcaster who was a U.S. Congressman, Mayor of New York City, candidate for U.S...
was an early and frequent GAA target, with GAA insisting that Lindsay take a public stance on gay rights issues. 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. The group's first zap, on April 13, 1970, involved infiltrating opening night of the 1970 Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center)
The Metropolitan Opera House is an opera house located on Broadway at Lincoln Square in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the theater opened in 1966. It replaced the former Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and 39th St...
season, shouting gay slogans when the mayor and his wife made their entrance. Lindsay was zapped again on April 19 as he taped an episode of his weekly television program, With Mayor Lindsay. Approximately 40 GAA members obtained tickets to the taping. Some GAA members rushed the stage calling for the mayor to endorse gay rights; others called out comments from the audience, booed, stomped their feet and otherwise disrupted taping. One notable exchange came when the mayor noted it was illegal to blow car horns in New York, drawing the response "It's illegal to blow a lot of things!" 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. Lindsay was among those who responded favorably.
Zapping migrated to the West Coast as early as 1970, when a coalition of several Los Angeles groups targeted Barney's Beanery
Barney's Beanery
Barney's Beanery is a restaurant and bar located in West Hollywood, California. It was founded by John "Barney" Anthony in 1920 along U.S. Route 66, now Santa Monica Boulevard, State Route 2, that connects Hollywood and the beach.-Summary:...
. Barney's had long displayed a wooden sign at its bar reading "FAGOTS – STAY OUT". 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. On February 7, over 100 people converged on Barney's. They engaged in picketing and leafletting outside and occupied tables for long periods inside with small orders.This tactic was employed decades later against the Cracker Barrel
Cracker Barrel
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. is an American chain of combined restaurant and gift stores with a Southern country theme. The company was founded by Dan Evins in 1969 and its first store was located in Lebanon, Tennessee, where the company is now headquartered...
restaurant chain when it instituted a policy of refusing to employ LGBT workers. It became known as a "sip-in". The owner of Barney's not only refused to take down the sign, he put up more signs made of cardboard, harassed the gay customers inside, refused service to them, ordered them out of the restaurant and eventually assaulted a customer and called the sheriff. After several hours and consultation with the sheriff's department, the original wooden sign was taken down and stored out of sight and the new cardboard signs were removed and distributed among the demonstrators.The original sign was put up and taken down several times over the next 14 years until West Hollywood, newly incorporated as a city, permanently removed the sign under a newly passed LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance in December 1984 (Kenney, p. 50).
Encouraged by GAA co-founder Arthur Bell
Arthur Bell (journalist)
Arthur Bell was a journalist, author and LGBT rights activist.Bell, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front and a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance in New York City, wrote two books. Dancing the Gay Lib Blues was published in 1971 and he published Kings Don't Mean a Thing in 1978...
, in his capacity as a columnist for The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
, activists employed zaps against William Friedkin
William Friedkin
William Friedkin is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director...
and the cast and crew of the 1980 film Cruising
Cruising (film)
Cruising is a 1980 film directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino. The film is loosely based on the novel of the same name, by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker, about a serial killer targeting gay men, in particular those associated with the S&M scene.Poorly reviewed by critics,...
. 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.
Exporting the zap
Emerging activist groups in other countries adopted the zap as a tactic. In Australia, Sydney Gay Liberation perpetrated a series of zaps beginning in 1973, including engaging in public displays of affection, leafletting and sitting in at a pub rumored to be refusing service to gay customers. 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 HallSteele Hall
Raymond Steele Hall was the 36th Premier of South Australia 1968-70, a senator for South Australia 1974-77, and federal member for the Division of Boothby 1981-96.-Biography:...
, Ernie Sigley
Ernie Sigley
Ernest William "Ernie" Sigley is an enduring Australian entertainment personality known for his square-rimmed spectacles, the gap between his front teeth and his slapstick approach to comedy.-Radio career:...
, John Court
John Court
John Court is a British slalom canoeist who competed in the early 1970s. He competed in the C-2 event at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, but did not finish.-References:*...
and Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse, CBE was a British campaigner against the permissive society particularly as the media portrayed and reflected it...
. British activist Peter Tatchell
Peter Tatchell
Peter Gary Tatchell is an Australian-born British political campaigner best known for his work with LGBT social movements...
has engaged in zaps for several decades, both singly and in association with such organizations as the British GLF and OutRage!
OutRage!
OutRage! is a British LGBT rights group that was formed to fight for equal rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in comparison to heterosexual people. It is a group which has at times been criticised for outing individuals who wanted to keep their homosexuality secret and for being...
.
ACT UP and Queer Nation
In response to the AIDSAIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
epidemic, the direct action group AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power is an international direct action advocacy group working to impact the lives of people with AIDS and the AIDS pandemic to bring about legislation, medical research and treatment and policies to ultimately bring an end to the disease by mitigating loss of health and...
(ACT UP) formed in 1987. ACT UP adopted a zap-like form of direct action reminiscent of the earlier GAA-style zaps. Some of these included: a March 24, 1987 "die-in" on Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
, 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
Rockville, Maryland
Rockville is the county seat of Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It is a major incorporated city in the central part of Montgomery County and forms part of the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area. The 2010 U.S...
to protest perceived foot-dragging in approving new AIDS treatments; and perhaps most notoriously, Stop the Church
Stop the Church
Stop the Church was a demonstration by members of ACT UP and WHAM held on December 10, 1989 at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. Approximately 4,500 protestors joined in what was the largest demonstration against a religious organization in US history...
, a December 12, 1989 demonstration in and around St. Patrick's Cathedral
St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York
The Cathedral of St. Patrick is a decorated Neo-Gothic-style Roman Catholic cathedral church in the United States...
in opposition to the Catholic Church's opposition to condom use to prevent the spread of HIV.
Queer Nation
Queer Nation
Queer Nation was an organization founded in March 1990 in New York City, USA by AIDS activists from ACT UP. The four founders were outraged at the escalation of anti-gay and lesbian violence on the streets and prejudice in the arts and media...
formed in 1990 and adopted the militant tactics of ACT UP and applied them more generally to LGBT issues. Queer Nation members were known for entering social spaces like straight bars and clubs and engaging in straight-identified behaviour like playing spin the bottle
Spin the bottle
Spin the Bottle is a party game in which several players sit/stand/kneel in a circle. One player spins a bottle and must kiss the person to whom the bottle points, who then spins the bottle in turn...
to make the point that most public spaces were straight spaces. QN would stage "kiss-ins" in public places like shopping malls or sidewalks, both as a shock tactic directed at heterosexuals and to point out that LGBT people should be able to engage in the same public behaviours as straight people. Echoing the disruption a decade earlier during the filming of Cruising, Queer Nation and other direct action groups disrupted filming of Basic Instinct
Basic Instinct
Basic Instinct is a 1992 erotic thriller directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas, and starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone....
over what they believed were negative portrayals of lesbian and bisexual women.
The kiss-in had a minor resurgence in popularity in July, 2009, when LGBT activists, angered by the support of the LDS church for initiatives to ban same-sex marriage in general and the arrest of a same-sex couple on Mormon property in Salt Lake City when they exchanged a kiss and were charged with trespassing, staged a series of kiss-ins across the country. In April 2011, a similar kiss-in was used to bring attention to a London pub after a gay couple was thrown out for kissing.