John D'Emilio, a member of the Gay Socialist Action Project, and a graduate student at Columbia University, had heard about the upcoming panel and had alerted the Gay Activist Alliance, which organized a demonstration outside of the Academy on the evening of the panel. Here is the Gay Activists Alliance flyer calling people to demonstrate. (To see the document larger click on it, then click on the next image again.)

On the evening of the event, D'Emilio, I, and other members of the Gay Socialist Action Project dressed up in our best clothes and infiltrated the meeting. When the panel began we interrupted the proceedings from different places in the audience, and began to read the following statement, written by me with input from Project members -- an appeal to hear the voices of homosexuals. We made it clear we wanted to talk, not shut down the meeting.  But, after just a bit of this appeal was read, the meeting was shut down by its organizers. The psychiatrists refused to listen to the homosexuals. Years later, D'Emilio recalled this "perfectly executed disruption" as his group's "most emotionally gratifying action."[1]

Here is the entire statement in its original format, as I typed it out (to see each document larger, click on it and then click again on the next image):

The last document is the text of the news report that John D'Emilio prepared and delivered on a gay radio show on WBAI, two weeks after the event.

Notes

1. Documents from the personal collection of Jonathan Ned Katz. John D'Emilio, "By Way of Introduction" inMaking Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. xxxii-xxxiii.