We were never given the option to make that division. We lived it. So we decided that people on the other side of the power structure were going to have the same thing happen to them. The wall that they had built protecting themselves from the personal consequences of their political decisions was going to be torn down and politics was going to become personal for them. Zaps typically included sudden onset against vulnerable targets, noisiness, verbal assaults and media attention. Tactics included sit-ins, disruptive actions and street confrontations. GAA founding member Arthur Bell explained the philosophy of the zap, which he described as "political theater for educating the gay masses":  Gays who have as yet no sense of gay pride see a zap on television or read about it in the press. First they are vaguely disturbed at the demonstrators for "rocking the boat"; eventually, when they see how the straight establishment responds, they feel anger. This anger gradually focuses on the heterosexual oppressors, and the gays develop a sense of class-consciousness. And the no-longer-closeted gays realize that assimilation into the heterosexual mainstream is no answer: gays must unite among themselves, organize their common resources for collective action, and resist. Thus, obtaining media coverage of the zap became more important than the subject of the zap itself. It was precisely this anti-assimilationist attitude that led some mainstream gay people and groups to oppose zapping as a strategy. The National Gay Task Force's media director, Ronald Gold, despite having been involved in early GAA zaps, came to urge GAA not to engage in the tactic. As zaps and other activism began opening doors for nascent gay organizations like NGTF and the Gay Media Task Force, these groups became more invested in negotiating with the people within the mainstream power structures rather than in maintaining a tactic they saw as being of the outsider. One area of special interest to GAA was how LGBT people were portrayed on television and on film. There were very few gay characters on television in the 1960s and early 1970s, and many of them were negative. Several in particular, including episodes of "Marcus Welby, M.D." in 1973 and 1974 and a 1974 episode of "Police Woman", were deemed especially egregious, with their presentation of homosexuality as a mental illness, gays as child molesters and lesbians as psychotic killers echoing similar portrayals that continued a trend that dated back to before 1961. In response to the 1973 "Welby" episode, "The Other Martin Loring", a GAA representative tried to negotiate with ABC, but when negotiations failed GAA zapped ABC's New York headquarters on February 16, 1973, picketing ABC's New York City headquarters and sending 30-40 members to occupy the office of ABC president Leonard Goldenson.