Indeed, in much the same way a previous generation used phone trees and megaphones, Amy Balliet used Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about protests on Nov. 15 that drew tens of thousands of people in scores of cities and towns across the nation.

Ms. Balliet said the skills she used had been learned in her work at a search-engine marketing firm in Seattle. “I’m good at driving traffic to Web sites; that’s what I do,” said Ms. Balliet, 26, who with a friend, Willow Witte, founded a group called Join the Impact last month.

She added that their impatience with the status quo had played a part. “We said: ‘Why are we going to wait for the organizations to have a protest? They’re going to have to go through all their bureaucracies to get approval. Why don’t we just do it?’ ”

The sudden burst of energy has drawn some comparisons to demonstrations during the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. But Larry Kramer, the playwright and founder of ACT UP, which used confrontational tactics to fight for money for AIDS treatment and research, said advances in treating the disease had, somewhat incongruously, robbed the gay rights movement of broader political momentum.

“For activism to work, you have to be scared and you have to be angry,” Mr. Kramer said. “Nobody’s frightened anymore. The drugs have taken care of that.”

Still, many current activists seem to be enrolled in crash courses in protest politics, with almost daily organizational meetings in cities across California. Some also study the arc of the gay rights movement, which custom dates from the riots at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, in 1969.

“I see a lot more people reading history books now,” Mr. Palazzolo said.

Quite a few activists said they had also been inspired by the acclaimed film “Milk,” which chronicles the fight by a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), to beat back a 1978 ballot measure that would have barred gay teachers from California’s public schools.