It was in this more politicized and culturally permissive atmosphere that the Stonewall Rebellion occurred in Greenwich Village on June 27, 1969. The Stonewall Inn, a private GLBT club, was raided shortly before midnight by local police, who were ostensibly checking to see if liquor was being served without a license. After being questioned, the two hundred “working-class patrons—drag queens, third world gay men, and a handful of butch lesbians—congregated in front of the Stonewall and, as blacks and other oppressed groups had done before them in the course of a decade, commenced to stage a riot” (Faderman, 1991, p. 194). The rioting continued the next night, with hundreds of rioters, gay power graffiti, and condemnation of police. Though not the first bar raid to be protested, nor the first riot after a raid of a GLBT bar, it was an event that occurred in the midst of an organized homophile movement, in a city with a large GLBT population, during a time when “rebellion was the rhetoric of the day” (D’Emilio, 1983, pp. 231–232).

The effects of Stonewall as a watershed event were clear. The Gay Liberation Front, a New York City activist organization that used the confrontational tactics of the new left, was formed within a month of the Stonewall Rebellion. The first march to commemorate the uprising, held in 1970 in New York City, was attended by five thousand people, with similar marches occurring throughout the country over the next ten years. D’Emilio (1983) notes that, before Stonewall, fewer than fifty lesbian or gay groups existed nationwide. By 1973 more than seven hundred lesbian and gay organizations and groups had emerged, including the National Gay Task Force (NGTF, which added “lesbian” in 1985 to become NGLTF) and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (now known as Lambda Legal). The National Gay Task Force was established to organize the social movement for gay and lesbian equality. In its first year, the NGTF worked to change the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and worked with psychiatrist allies to defeat a proposed association-wide referendum to stop the declassification (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2003). Lambda Legal, a national legal organization dedicated to achieving full equality for gay and lesbian people, complemented its local, state, and national legal work with educational programs for the general public and the GLBT communities (Lambda Legal, 2003).

The face of GLBT organizing was also changed in the 1970s by the emergence of a new group: lesbian feminists—young, college-educated, politically aware, and more militant and activist organizers. Lesbian feminist groups, such as the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) in Georgia, were established because feminist groups were “too straight and the Gay Liberation Front was too male” (Sears, 2001, p. 110). Lesbians were being excluded from the women’s liberation groups, many of which they had helped to found, and they found little place for lesbian leadership or issues in gay groups. This rejection of lesbians by the mainstream feminists was most blatant when, in 1970, Betty Friedan, the executive director of the feminist National Organization for Women (NOW), urged the defeat of a NOW resolution supporting lesbian rights, labeling lesbians “the Lavender Menace” (Bedford & Wilson, 1999). Some of these lesbian feminist groups were separatist in nature, advocating a purposive separation from men and coed political and social organizations as a way to evade and overcome patriarchal institutions.

Lesbian feminists were involved in creating battered women’s shelters and rape crisis programs, as well as other social services programs for women. They also created new lesbian cultures through the establishment of presses for lesbian literature, magazines, and newsletters; lesbian communes; women’s bookstores; and “women’s music” companies and music festivals for lesbian singers and songwriters. Popular lesbian authors included Rita Mae Brown, Elana Nachman, Bertha Harris, June Arnold, Ann Allen Shockley, and Pat Parker, while new singers included Chris Williamson, Meg Christian, Teresa Trull, Marge Adams, Linda Tillery, Alex Dobkin, and the gospel-influenced group Sweet Honey in the Rock (Morris, 1999; Sears, 2001). These cultural icons helped shape the development of new lesbian feminist communities.

The lesbian feminists, and their young gay male and transgender counterparts, organized against anti-gay legislative attacks led by entertainer and Christian fundamentalist Anita Bryant in Florida and California state representative John Briggs (Faderman, 1991, pp. 199–201). Gay liberation activists in Miami were winning court rulings allowing gay men and lesbians the right to congregate in bars, and soon after, the Florida Supreme Court struck down the state’s “crimes against nature” laws. Transgender activism was also emerging in the 1970s, when Reneé Richards was “outed” as a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual and barred from competition when she attempted to enter a women’s tennis tournament. Her subsequent legal battle established that transsexuals are fully, legally, recognized in the United States in their new identity after sex reassignment (Transhistory, 1998). This legal victory was offset by losses in federal appellate courts that ruled that discrimination against postsurgical transsexuals was not discrimination based on sex (Frye, 2000).

By the 1970s the Gay Liberation Front had appeared not only in the North, but in Southern cities from “Auburn to Austin, New Orleans to Louisville, Columbia to Richmond, Gainesville to Tallahassee” (Sears, 2001, p. 58). Yet the racial and class diversity of gay and lesbian communities, and the resultant divisions within these communities, were rarely discussed or addressed (p. 264). Tensions among and between GLBT whites and people of color were a constant undercurrent.

The tension within lesbian and gay communities regarding transgender people also emerged in strong relief in the 1970s. In 1973 Beth Elliott, an active leader in a number of feminist organizations, including the Daughters of Bilitis, was “outed” as transsexual and “driven out of the organization by lesbian separatists. Similarly, in 1977, Sandy Stone, a recording engineer at Olivia Records, was ‘outed’ as a Male-to-Female transsexual. Lesbian separatists threatened a boycott of Olivia products and concerts, forcing the record company to ask for Stone’s resignation” (Transhistory, 1998). As a result of these and other rejections, new transgender groups that advocated and educated about transgender issues emerged, such as the Society for the Second Self (Tri-Ess), Renaissance Transgender Association (RTA), and the American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) (Frye, 2000).

Tensions also arose regarding another population: bisexuals. Highleyman (1993) states that “early bisexual groups tended to focus broadly on sexual liberation (for example, the Sexual Freedom League); members of these groups were often more closely connected to heterosexual ‘swinger’ communities than to gay or lesbian communities”(¶ 1). The first formal bisexual groups developed in the 1970s in large U.S. cities: the National Bisexual Liberation Group in New York in 1972, which published a newsletter called The Bisexual Expression; New York City’s Bi Forum in 1975; the San Francisco Bisexual Center in 1976; and Chicago’s BiWays in 1978. Though these early groups were predominantly run by men, Highleyman explains that bisexual women began to establish their own groups, “experiencing alienation from lesbian communities as separatism and polarization around sexual orientation increased in the late 1970s. For many bisexual women, bisexuality was an integral part of their feminist politics and they wanted their groups to reflect this emphasis. The Boston Bisexual Women’s Network (formed in 1983) and the Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network (founded in 1986) are based on these principles”(¶ 5).

GLBT activists were not focused solely on the political; they also addressed their spiritual and religious lives. The Metropolitan Community Church, a Christian denomination that would welcome GLBT people, was founded in 1969 (Smith, 2000). The earliest GLBT religious group in a mainstream denomination, Dignity/USA, began in 1969 in San Diego under the leadership of Father Patrick Nidorf, first as a Catholic counseling group and then a support group. It became a national organization in 1973. Other GLBT religious support and advocacy groups created during this time period include American Baptists Concerned (1972); Integrity, a group for GLBT Episcopalians (1974); Lutherans Concerned (1974); Gay United Methodists (1975), which later became Affirmation and Reconciling United Methodists; More Light Presbyterians (1978); AXIOS, a GLBT organization for Eastern Orthodox people (1980); and a number of Jewish GLBT organizations.

All of this political, religious, and social activism coalesced in the first National March on Washington in October 1979. A national advisory group was established to plan the march with representatives of the various segments of the GLBT communities: youth, older people, physically challenged people, and transgender people. Interestingly, even after a protracted floor fight among planners, transgender people were not included in the official name of the march. The advisory group required a minimum of 50% women and 20% people of color to be included in all march planning and leadership. More than 100,000 participants attended the march (Smith, 2000).

It is important to remember that not all lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people were activists. Many of those who sought out and developed lesbian and gay communities were searching for social outlets and personal freedom of expression, rather than political change (Hunter, Shannon, Knox, & Martin, 1998). Bisexuality as a distinct identity had not yet been acknowledged by most of the members of these communities, and transgenderism also was not well recognized or well understood. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s would change these perspectives.