Some historians posit that a new era of the gay rights movement began in the 1980s with the emergence of AIDS, which decimated the leadership and shifted the focus for many. This era saw a resurgence of militancy with direct action groups like AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), formed in 1987, as well as its offshoots Queer Nation (1990) and the Lesbian Avengers (1992). Some younger activists, seeing "gay and lesbian" as increasingly normative and politically conservative, began using "queer" as a defiant statement of all sexual minorities and gender variant people—just as the earlier liberationists had done with "gay". Less confrontational terms that attempt to reunite the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people also became prominent, including various acronyms like "LGBT", "LGBTQ", and "LGBTI", where the "Q" and "I" stand for "queer" or "questioning" and "intersex", respectively.