Gay Rights 2.0

It was October 1988, the height of the AIDS crisis, and Michelangelo Signorile was organizing a protest. For six months, he and fellow ACT UP members had met weekly, strategizing and planning. The idea: storm the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, accused of dragging its feet on approving treatments for HIV. To prepare, they'd formed outreach teams to recruit people, an actions committee to coordinate exactly how the protest would go down, and a legal team to deal with possible arrests. They'd signed on graphic designers to create picket signs, and trained members in civil disobedience. As media director, Signorile was in charge of getting the word out—through phone trees, mass mailings and faxes to every reporter whose number he could find. "For months, my apartment was filled with people every single night," he recalls.

In the end, the effort paid off: nearly 1,000 people showed up at the FDA's headquarters in Rockville, Md. Demonstrators blocked entrances to the 17-story building, climbed atop doorways, heckled police and smashed windows. Some wore white lab coats splattered with red paint, with signs reading, "The government has blood on its hands." Others put on yellow rubber gloves—to remind of the protective hand-wear often worn by officers handling AIDS demonstrators. By late afternoon, more than 175 had been arrested. The event received international media coverage and is remembered as a milestone in the movement for gay rights.

A lot has changed since 1988, both in the fight for equality and the way in which that fight is being waged. Signorile is still an activist, but AIDS is no longer the silent killer it once was. There are two openly gay members of Congress, powerful gay lobbying groups and a president who, in his election night victory speech, acknowledged that the gay community as part of his winning coalition. Still some, like ACT UP founder and writer Larry Kramer, say grassroots leadership is what's missing today. "That's always been our fatal flaw," the 73-year-old says of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered population. He wonders: when faced with opposition, can today's activists muster the kind of grassroots movement that ACT UP did 20 years ago?

California's Proposition 8 could provide the answer. Since voters approved the initiative on Nov. 4, taking away same-sex marriage rights granted by the courts only a few months earlier, the gay community nationwide has mobilized in a way not seen since those harrowing days of the '80s. Protests have erupted outside Mormon temples across the country, which spent some $20 million lobbying for the ban. Residents have flocked to local protests. And as the reality sunk in that four anti-gay state measures had passed on election day, more than a million people rallied at their local City Halls in a coordinated day of demonstrations. "Prop. 8 really pushed a button in the way that many gay movements have before," says Signorile, the host of a daily talk show on Sirius.

What's different this time around is who's leading the movement—and how they're doing it. On Nov. 7, two young activists, 26-year-old Amy Balliett, a Seattle Web promoter, and Ohio educator Willow Witte, 32, were chatting over e-mail about where they could find protests in their areas. Dismayed by the lack of organizational response, they decided to launch a Web site of their own—JointheImpact.com—to urge a national day of action.

What happened next is what gay journalist Rex Wockner has dubbed Stonewall 2.0: the modern-day embodiment of the 1969 Greenwich Village riots that marked the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. Balliett and Witte sent out mass e-mails, text messages and blog posts to direct people to the site. Twenty-four hours later, close to 1,000 people had signed on to their group via Twitter. The following day, the site's Web server crashed because of the flood of traffic. Within a week, they'd received 10 million hits, and had a wiki and half a dozen Facebook groups started in their name. By Saturday, Nov. 15, more than 300 cities had signed on. "It just went completely viral," Witte says. "It was unbelievable to wake up every day and see more and more people involved."