first met at the Church of the Holy Apostles (9th Ave. & 28th St.) Their next New York City headquarters, the Firehouse at 99 Wooster Street in Soho, was occupied in May 1971 and burned down by arsonists on October 15, 1974. "By 1980 GAA had begun to sound like the Gay Liberation Front in 1969. After Activists met to officially disband the Alliance a year later..." GAA members performed zaps (first conceived by Marty Robinson), raucous public demonstrations designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of LGBT rights. Some of their more visible actions included protests against an anti-gay episode on the popular TV series Marcus Welby, M.D., many zaps of Mayor John Lindsay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later at Radio City Music Hall, a zap against Governor Nelson Rockefeller (the "Rockefeller 5"), a zap at the Marriage License Bureau demanding marriage rights for gays, a zap against Fidelifacts, which provided anti-gay information to employers, a zap at the NYC Taxi Commission (which required gay cab drivers to get an OK from a psychiatrist before being employed), and a zap at the New York Daily News, which printed a scurrilous editorial attacking "queers, lezzies, pansies, call them what you will." Four were arrested. Although, GAA was nominally non-violent, zaps could sometimes involve physical altercations and vandalism. GAA co-founder Morty Manford got into scuffles with security and administration during his successful effort to found the student club Gay People at Columbia University in 1971, as well as at a famous protest against homophobia at the elite Inner Circle event in 1972. GAA was associated with a series of combative zaps against homophobic politicians and anti-gay activists in the summer of 1977. Although Time magazine derided them as "Gay goons", the actions succeeded in keeping the conservative backlash of the late-1970s out of New York state. The GAA Firehouse on Wooster Street also served as a community center and had extremely popular dances that helped fund the organization. The stairwell was decorated with a photomontage agitprop mural created by the British artist Mario Dubsky (1939–85) and the American painter John Button (1929–82) both of whom were early victims of AIDS. The Mural was destroyed in the fire that destroyed the centre in 1974. The symbol of the Gay Activists Alliance was the lower case Greek letter