, street people, and bar boys who confronted the police first with jeers and then with a hail of coins, paving stones, and parking meters. By the end of the weekend, the Stonewall bar had been burned out, but a new form of collective resistance was afoot: gay liberation. Gay liberation never thought of itself as a civil rights movement for a particular minority but as a revolutionary struggle to free the homosexuality in everyone, challenging the conventional arrangements that confined sexuality to heterosexual monogamous families (Adam, 1987). Within two years from the Stonewall Rebellion, gay liberation groups emerged in every major city and campus in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (Dannemeyer, 1989). On three continents, gay movement in the early 1970s developed along a similar course, with parallel Left-oriented gay liberation groups forming along with more liberal civil rights organizations. From the beginning of gay liberation, lesbians often found themselves vastly outnumbered by men who were, not surprisingly, preoccupied with their own issues and ignorant of the concerns of women. Many women became increasingly frustrated as gay liberation men set up task groups to counter police entrapment, work for sodomy law reform, or organized dances that turned out to be 90 percent male (Dannemeyer, 1989). Men took for granted many of the social conditions that made it possible for them to be gay. But lesbians needed to address fundamental problems facing all women-such as equal opportunity in employment and violence against women-in order to have sufficient independence to become lesbian. Most men had at least the financial independence of wage labor and a well-developed commercial scene to fall back on, whereas many women were struggling to gain a foothold in employment and create places where lesbians could be together. In a movement that was supposed to forward their cause, lesbians grew...
