In any community, publications play an important role in building a sense of collective identity. As the crisis grew, the organization followed and by the mid-1990s had grown to a large social service agency with a new name in 1994, AIDS TASK FORCE of Greater Cleveland. The organization provided AIDS education and services to individuals with the disease. The gay community, hard hit by the advent of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in the early 1980s, responded swiftly by forming the Health Issues Task Force in 1982. The center has responded to a variety of issues into the 1990s, including a program combating hate crimes, outreach to the city government and police, and the AIDS crisis. The GEAR Foundation's most visible work was its community center, which in 1986 was renamed the LESBIAN/GAY COMMUNITY SERVICE CENTER OF GREATER CLEVELAND, located on Detroit Avenue in the Gordon Square neighborhood. Without the kind of provocations that stirred activism in other cities, and because cooperation and coalition-building often take much time, the development of a cohesive community has been gradual in Cleveland. Much of the emphasis of the GEAR Foundation was on advocacy and service, since harassment and discrimination were not overt, and since cooperation within the gay community was seen as a prerequisite for effective work beyond. GEAR functioned less as a political front than as a coordinating and educational organization that eventually sponsored and encouraged a variety of other groups and activities, including a telephone hotline for counseling, referral, and information, a community center, counseling, and a publication, HIGH GEAR, among its many activities. which became the Gay Educational and Awareness Resources Foundation (GEAR). Another group was formed at CLEVELAND STATE UNIV. In 1970 a short-lived chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance was formed at CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIV. The activism of the early gay movement took many forms. The movements for civil rights for blacks, women, and other groups, and the tone of liberal thought in the late 1960s and early 1970s set in motion a wave of activism that saw the formation of groups and services specifically geared to gay men and lesbians as a community of interests. Stonewall was one of the first large public events demanding equal rights and protections for homosexuals and and transgender individuals, with other notable demonstrations against police harassment occurring at Cooper Do-nut in Los Angeles in 1959 and at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966. Mattachine was the progenitor of present-day gay organizations and in a sense prepared the way for what would become the gay rights movement after the Stonewall Riot in June 1969, in which a group of homosexuals defended themselves against a police raid on a bar in Greenwich Village, New York City.
To the extent that a community is defined by its organizations and institutions, Cleveland's gay community probably dates from the founding of a local Mattachine Society group in the 1960s.