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.