Credited to GAA member Marty Robinson, who became known as “Mr. Zap,” the organisation’s first zaps were aimed at New York’s then-mayor, John Lindsay. Frustrated that the mayor had refused to meet with them and had avoided commenting on gay liberation, the group took action. From opening night of the Metropolitan Opera to the taping of a TV show, the group relentlessly interrupted his speeches, heckled him during live interviews, and sprinkled sites of his appearances with pamphlets.
“We decided that every time he appeared in public or every time that we could get to him, we would make life as personally uncomfortable for him as we could and remind him of the reason why,” recalled GAA member Arthur Evans in 2004. Lindsay eventually met with the group, but the zaps continued until he announced his support for a bill that prohibited discrimination against LGBTQ people in New York in 1971.
By then, activists had realised how powerful their zaps could be. In 1971, for example, the GAA and the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian group, targeted Fidelifacts, a New York-based company that performed background checks and was accused of investigating and targeting LGBTQ employees.
The company’s president had stated that his rule of thumb for identifying gay people was that “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, associates only with ducks and quacks like a duck, he is probably a duck.” Activists—one dressed in full duck regalia—marched in front of the building, squeaking rubber duckies and handing out flyers. Others tied up the company’s phone lines for an entire day, calling to say “Stop your offensive services now!”
An electrifying legacy
Although the protests were often painted as silly by the media, they accomplished their goal by drawing attention to the cause. The most effective zaps involved embarrassing public figures over specific injustices.
One of the most memorable took place during a broadcast of the CBS Evening News in December 1973. In front of a live audience of 60 million viewers, Mark Allan Segal, a member of a small group called the Gay Raiders and an accomplished zapper, jumped in front of the camera and held up a sign that said “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice.” He was protesting major networks’ depiction of LGBTQ people and the way their coverage ignored things like gay pride parades and equality legislation.
It worked: Not only did the network begin covering LGBTQ issues, but Cronkite befriended Segal and began to report on the struggles and successes of the movement.
Zapping spread: inspired by the action on the other side of the Atlantic, in September 1971, the newly-formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF) zapped the Festival of Light, a Christian-led campaign for a church-based morality that opposed open homosexuality, amongst other things. Held at Methodist Central Hall in London and spearheaded by such figures as campaigner Mary Whitehouse and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, the zap consisted of drag performances, dancing nuns and mice released into the auditorium. The event gained a high profile for the GLF – though zapping remained a largely U.S. phenomenon.
Another noteworthy zap took place in 1977, when activist Tom Higgins hit singer and anti-gay rights campaigner Anita Bryant in the face with a strawberry-rhubarb pie during a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa. Bryant responded by kneeling in prayer and asking God to deliver Higgins from his “deviancy”; a satisfied Higgins told a Gay Community News correspondent that “There is nothing more humiliating than getting a pie in your face.”
These early gay liberation protesters didn’t just want to reach their straight oppressors. Zaps had another audience in mind, too: LGBTQ people who had not yet joined the cause. Between 1969 and 1973, groups like the GAA inspired the formation of nearly 800 gay and lesbian groups, political scientist Matthew D. Hindman notes; by the end of the 1970s, there were more than 2,000.
By then, however, zaps had mostly faded away as movement leaders, facing public criticism and infighting over militant protest tactics, began to push for LGBTQ rights on a national scale through organisations like the National Gay Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force).
Their legacy lived on, however, and the tactic was revived in the late 1980s, when participants in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) began a series of powerfully disruptive demonstrations that drew upon zap tactics. Sit-ins, die-ins, and a raucous protest in which more than 4,500 people disrupted a Catholic mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—all bore a resemblance to the zaps that had come before them.
Time and the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaged the ranks of the early gay liberation movement. Today, LGBTQ pride has entered the mainstream. But there are still battles to be fought, and LGBTQ activism persists with a wider arsenal of protest techniques, including social media campaigns. These gains can be credited in part to the scrappy tactics of those early activists.
“It’s sassy, arrogant, determined, headstrong, gonna win!” Robinson told author Kay Tobin in 1972. “Nothing happens until you make it happen.”
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Zapping: The boisterous protest tactic that ignited early LGBTQ activism - National Geographic UK
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