IN 1974, amid the spirit of the civil rights revolution, the goals of the gay and lesbian liberation movement seemed boundless. U.S. Representatives Ed Koch and Bella Abzug of New York filed the Equality Act of 1974, which sought full civil rights protections for “gay men, lesbians, unmarried persons and women.” The bill called for what the black community had achieved a decade earlier with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
