Stonewall 3.0: as protesters continue to hit the street in favor of marriage equality, they're struck by a realization that could be the key to their strength: this could be the first generation of gay activists that doesn't have to fight a backlash from the people who came before them.

WHEN THE GAY LIBERATION MOVEMENT first burst into the streets of New York City's Greenwich Village in 1969, older gay folks reacted with horror. To all those who'd spent their lives thinking that the closet was essential to their survival, these sudden displays of "gay power" in the streets were deeply unsettling. The Village Voice reported that summer that the "older boys had strained looks on their faces and talked in concerned whispers as they watched the up-and-coming generation take being gay and flaunt it before the masses."

The activism of the early '70s featured street theater and "zaps" of places like Harper's Magazine and other publications that published homophobic trash. The new activists barely had any gay role models (they relied instead on activists from the civil rights and antiwar movements), and their protests gradually dissipated until the movement was reborn with a more aggressive edge in 1987-the year ACT UP was founded.

This second wave of activism was born out of desperation instead of celebration, as hundreds of thousands of young gay men suddenly confronted a mysterious and lethal disease with no medical weapons to fight it.

Like its predecessors, ACT UP offended certain older gay people with some of its more extreme tactics, including its invasion of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. But within 10 years the group had revolutionized the way new drugs were tested and introduced to save the lives of the desperately ill. These street fighters deserved much of the credit for the swift arrival of protease inhibitors and a host of other miracle drugs.

As new medications transformed AIDS into more of a chronic disease than a fatal one, gay activism took what some people considered a more socially acceptable (and less spontaneous) turn, focused primarily through the efforts of national organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Given this history, one might assume that the 20- and 30-somethings who've been taking to the streets since last November in protest of California's Proposition 8 have more standing in their way than just marriage inequality. Surely they're being told by their gay and lesbian elders to go home, cool their rhetoric, and let politicians and political groups do what they do best. But that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, more than any others in gay history, these protests are benefiting from the expertise of the people who took to the streets decades before.

Steven Goldstein, the 46-year-old chair of New Jersey's Garden State Equality, says he immediately saw potential in the Prop. 8 protests when they began to pop up across the country: "We were thrilled, not threatened, that the young people were doing this." And when a demonstration was planned for Montclair, Goldstein suggested to organizers that, rather than end the day with a candlelight vigil, they direct everyone to Garden State Equality's offices, where they were able to make calls to state legislators.

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"Listen," Goldstein says, "the new wave of activism is fantastic. Any infusion of youth in the battle for equality is something to be celebrated. Our community needs to use all the tools of the past, and it needs to integrate the best of each of its historic eras. We need the vibrant taking of the streets of the ACT UP era, combined with the inside lobbying of the HRC era. We need all the tools at our disposal."

A key figure in the latest revival of gay activism is 26-year-old Amy Balliett, whose group Join the Impact played a central role in mobilizing the masses, especially for the protests around the nation November 15. Balliett's day job is in search engine marketing, but she's also a serious student of gay history, which she studied in college. And although most of her overnight success was made possible by up-to-the minute Internet tools like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, Balliett says an older gay activist has become a vital part of her brain trust.

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"I've gotten a lot of advice from a man here in Seattle named Dan Borroff," she says. "He was my age when Stonewall happened and was part of Chicago gay liberation, starting in the fall of 1969. He'll e-mail me these stories and they just floor me--the things that so many people of the Stonewall era did for us."

Borroff, a 59-year-old landscape architect, first got in touch with Balliett after reading about her plans for Join the Impact on Andrew Sullivan's blog. Phone calls and e-mails between the two quickly led to a brunch at Borroff's house, where the two shared their different perspectives on activism.

"There's a lot of lessons that those of us who went through Stonewall have to share," says Borroff, who is a strong proponent of building alliances with straight progressive groups. There are clearly echoes of his way of thinking on Join the Impact's website, where the group's mission statement declares, "We stand for reaching out across all communities. We do not stand for bigotry, for scapegoating, or using anger as our driving force. Our mission is to encourage our community to engage our opposition in a conversation about full equality and to do this with respect, dignity, and an attitude of outreach and education." And one of Join the Impact's first initiatives is a National Food Drive for Equality, which, according to the group's site, is an effort "to reach out not only to those who have worked alongside us, but to organizations and individuals that fear us and oppose our cause by donating to faith-based food pantries."

In Manhattan, veteran activist and Gay USA news anchor Ann Northrop echoes Goldstein's and Borroff's sentiment. "I'm delighted that there is a new generation coming along that wants to do things," she says. "The fact that something has gotten them energized and excited and interested is terrific, and I long for this to grow and be successful. The younger people have terrific ambition--that's terrific and necessary. But there are things they don't know they don't know." So Northrop is doing everything she can to share her experiences with the new generation of activists, including how to make street demonstrations both theatrical and effective.

Ethan Geto is another New York veteran of the movement who sees reflections of the '70s in the newest wave of activism. Back in '77, Geto was on the losing side of the movement to stop Anita Bryant's campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Fla. Bryant won that battle, but Geto is convinced that Dade helped gay people win a much more important war.

"It wasn't until that battle in Florida, which received intense national media coverage, that the gay community suddenly was galvanized," Geto says. "It was the major development eight years after Stonewall that really galvanized the gay movement."

Geto sees a "real analogy" between the events of 1977 and 2008: "California is one of the two or three most liberal states. It's got a very large gay community and sophisticated gay activists and leadership and so forth, so people were shocked by the victory of Prop. 8; and there's been a tremendous amount of new mobilizing, fund-raising, and strategizing that has gone on just since Prop. 8 was enacted.

"I think this will lead to a resurgence of a genuine national gay movement," Geto adds. "Like any movement, our movement needs watershed moments. And I think Prop. 8 was probably the jolt we need to galvanize the gay community across the country."