Zapping the New York Academy of Medicine, April 6, 1976
"Some of us have decided to revolt"
On April 6, 1976, two gay liberation organizations "zapped" (demonstrated) at the New York Academy of Medicine, in New York City, which was hosting a panel on homosexuality sponsored by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine, and featuring three anti-homosexual psychiatrists, Irving Bieber, Charles Socarides, and Lionel Ovesey.
A member of the Gay Socialist Action Project, a graduate student at Columbia University, had heard about the upcoming panel and had alerted the Gay Activist Alliance, which organized a demonstration outside of the Academy on the evening of the panel.
On the evening of the event, members of the Gay Socialist Action Project dressed up in their best clothes and infiltrated the meeting. When the panel began, they interrupted the proceedings from different places in the audience, and each proceeded to read parts of the following statement, written by Jonathan Ned Katz. Before the statement could be read in its entirety, the meeting was shut down. The psychiatrists refused to listen to the homosexuals.
Here is the entire statement:
