SF: Arthur Evans is gone four years and the world still needs him.

[RandySF]

This article was printed in 2011:

Arthur Evans, who helped form and lead the movement that coalesced after gay people and their supporters protested a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar, died Sept. 11 at his home in San Francisco. He was 68.

Mr. Evans was not at the Stonewall disturbances, but they fueled in him a militant fervor and inspired him to join the Gay Liberation Front, an organization started during the wave of gay assertiveness that followed.

For Mr. Evans and other militants, however, the group was not assertive enough. They worried that it was diluting its effectiveness by taking stands on issues beyond gay rights - opposing the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, for example. So in December 1969 they split off to found the Gay Activists Alliance.

Based in New York, the alliance became a model for gay rights organizations nationwide, pushing in New York for legislation to ban discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, housing and other areas. Mr. Evans wrote its statement of purpose and much of its constitution, which began, "We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings."

To attract attention, the alliance staged what its members called "zaps," confrontations with people or institutions that they believed discriminated against gay people. Among other incidents, they went to television studios to protest shows perceived as antigay and demanded same-sex marriage rights at the city's marriage license bureau.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Arthur-Evans-gay-activist-and-author-dies-in-SF-2328597.php