The Mayor of Castro Street (27 page)

“I knew we were going to win the minute this old lady came to me and told me she voted for repeal.” Briggs relished the chance to affect a vaudevillian Jewish accent. “She said, ‘I voted vor repeal becuss I haf grandchildren.'” The parody was nothing less than an inspiration to the state senator. A lot of the people voting in the Republican gubernatorial race have children and grandchildren too, he added. California didn't have a gay rights law to repeal on a statewide level, so when he got back to Sacramento, Briggs said he would get right to the heart of the matter: He would introduce a measure in the state senate to ban homosexuals from teaching in public schools. If that law didn't make it out of the legislature, he would simply take the issue directly to the people with a statewide ballot initiative.

Briggs later learned that the reporter to whom he had so excitedly poured this all out was a homosexual. But that did not dampen the relationship. In fact, it seemed highly doubtful from the start that John Briggs ever really had anything personal against gays. He was just running for governor. “It's politics,” he confided to the reporter later, “just politics.”

*   *   *

Love rekindled on a warm San Francisco night.
It was just like starting over for Robert Hillsborough and Jerry Taylor. They had spent a hot night at the disco; Jerry remembered the reasons he had moved in with Bob in the first place. They decided to spend the night together at Robert's place and stopped at the Whizburger stand in the Mission to pick up some cheeseburgers and fries on the way back.

The usual number of Latino teenagers sauntered around the parking lot. Gays had been slowly filtering into the neighborhood, just east of Castro Street, so the sight of two young white men together in a pickup brought the usual comments about faggots and fruits. Once safely ensconced in Robert's car, Jerry Taylor shouted “fuck off” as they pulled from the lot. A few of the kids pounded on the hood, shouting more epithets, but the couple made their escape and headed toward Hillsborough's apartment. Neither saw the car that quietly followed them.

*   *   *

Dressed nattily in slacks, blazer, and tie, Al Asmussen was his old self when he made one of his irregular appearances at the monthly meeting of the San Francisco Young Republicans. Few men seemed as married to their jobs as this thirty-four-year-old deputy. He rarely was without his handcuffs, gun, and tales of excitement. None of his friends imagined that his job entailed nothing more glamorous than “till tapping,” standing by a business' cash register to make sure sometimes-reluctant merchants followed court-ordered liens of funds; Al instead dropped hints that he was embroiled in vague investigations with shady implications. Since Sheriff Hongisto's trip to Dade County, more controversy had come down on the department. The right-wing San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs Association, always looking for a reason to snipe at the liberal Hongisto, voted its support of Anita Bryant. Asmussen, the YR chapter's former president, regaled his Young Republican cohorts that night with warnings about his boss's radical beliefs. At one point in the conversation, he even pulled out his Smith & Wesson to show his friends, passing it around the room.

At about the same time Hillsborough and Taylor were pulling out of the Whizburgers parking lot, the YR meeting broke up. As usual, Asmussen turned down the invitation to go drinking with some of the guys, saying he had to go home and give some medication to his mother. He left and, somewhere, slipped into his tight blue jeans and plaid shirt. He cruised over to gay bars in the South of Market area.

*   *   *

“We are your children. We are your children.”

Their chants echoed through the streets of the Castro neighborhood as news of Bryant's stunning victory galvanized San Francisco gays. In Miami, homosexuals were disconsolately singing “We Shall Overcome” in a grand hotel's ballroom; in San Francisco, they were taking to the streets. A crowd of 200 grew to 500, then 1,000 and then 3,000 on Castro Street, shouting, “We are your children,” and “Two, four, six, eight, separate the church and state.”

Over the next two years, such shouting mobs would become a common occurrence in the city, but police were dumbfounded at the first spontaneous eruption of long-buried anger. They feared a riot and called on the one person who they knew had credibility with the militant crowd, Harvey Milk. “Keep ‘em moving,” Harvey shouted, “We've got to keep ‘em moving.” Harvey led the throng through the Castro. They stopped briefly to chant their hostile mantras on the steps of the Most Holy Redeemer Church before moving out of the Castro, down Market Street, past the grand City Hall, and up the steep streets of Nob Hill. For three hours, Harvey led the crowd over a five-mile course, worried that any pause might see that first rock hurled through a window or at a cop and then, the inevitable. Finally at midnight, the tired demonstrators assembled at Union Square for a rally. Harvey took up his bullhorn. “This is the power of the gay community,” he exhorted. “Anita's going to create a national gay force.”

A startled prostitute, working a nearby corner, shook her head in shock. “All those guys are faggots?” she asked a reporter. “This is crazy. All these men are taking my business away!”

After the rally, the crowd made a silent march back to Castro Street, where a thousand of the still-angry protestors decided to simply sit down in the middle of Market and Castro, blocking one of the city's busiest intersections. The police wanted to move in with a show of force, but, talking over a police loudspeaker, Milk cleared the street with the promise of still another demonstration the next night. Even Harvey's most adamant detractors conceded that only his presence had averted a riot that night. The photo of Milk with the bullhorn made the front page.

The next night, five thousand marched in Greenwich Village, four hundred in Denver, and another crowd surged from Castro Street past City Hall and through the city's wealthy neighborhoods. Thousands more took to the streets on Thursday and Friday nights, shocked and angry, as if for the first time they realized that somebody out there really didn't like them. It had been easy to forget that most of them had not been attracted to Castro Street, they had been driven there; the forces that had driven them to seek sanctuary were finally getting organized. On Friday night, after a City Hall rally, one thousand sat stubbornly at Castro and Market, unable to think of any other way to vent their growing rage. And three thousand marched again on Saturday night. The next morning, as Catholic worshipers went to St. Mary's Cathedral, they faced five hundred silent demonstrators lining the long wide plaza to the church entrance, standing in vigil to protest the Dade County archbishop's support of Anita Bryant's campaign.

A day later Assemblyman Art Agnos shelved his gay civil rights bill pending in the California legislature. The support, he said, had evaporated with Bryant's unexpectedly overwhelming triumph. The next day, a politician of whom few Californians outside Orange County had ever heard, State Senator John Briggs, stood on the wide granite steps of San Francisco City Hall to announce his campaign to remove all gay school teachers from California classrooms. According to some reports, his staff had taken the precaution of calling gay groups so they knew that Senator Briggs would appear. The confrontation between the pugnacious senator and the angry gay demonstrators ensured lead-story coverage around the state, as Briggs insisted San Francisco should be granted “captured nation status” because of the gay influx there.

The gay movement experienced an explosion unprecedented since the first days of gay liberation fronts following the Stonewall riots. Gays who had come to San Francisco just to disco amid the hot pectorals of humpy men became politicized and fell into new organizations with names like Save Our Human Rights and Coalition for Human Rights. No longer was the gay movement the realm of offbeat liberation fairies—as David Goodstein had long called militant gay activists—but a necessary response to a clear and present danger. These young gays might have taken their locker-room beatings at home, because they knew they could always go to San Francisco one day, but once in San Francisco, there was no place else to turn. They wanted more than mild assurances of “tolerance,” the word liberals most frequently used toward gays; they wanted more than social cachét and press coverage.

Ten days after Orange Tuesday, the leaders of the militant San Francisco Gay Democratic Club moved to take decisive action. Vice President Walter Mondale came to Golden Gate Park to address a local Democratic fund raiser on the subject of human rights. Surrounded by pickets, Milk lectured the Democrats entering the event with his trusty bullhorn from a flatbed truck. Dozens of S.F. Gay members, meanwhile, filtered inside the crowd for what was planned to be a silent protest. When Mondale started discussing the finer points of human rights policy in Latin America, dozens of demonstrators silently held up signs asking for a statement on human rights in the United States. A man with little use for such trivial causes as homosexuals, Vice President Mondale clearly was miffed at the sight of gays at
his
rally, and he turned awkwardly to get support from the Democratic leaders who shared the stage.

“When are you going to speak out on gay rights?” a demonstrator shouted.

With that, a furious Mondale spun on his heel and walked off the stage and out of the rally. The state Democratic chairman turned red when he went to the podium. “Are you glad you disturbed the meeting?” he shouted. “Well, you're not going to win your fight.”

The Democratic leaders turned to Jim Foster. Why couldn't he keep his troops under control? Foster knew this new generation of gays were not
his
troops; he didn't even try to exert control. Harvey was particularly ecstatic at Foster's humiliation. “You should've seen the bastard squirm,” he told Michael Wong. “You would've loved it. Those stupid elected officials were so embarrassed that these usually docile queens were now loud and demanding. I loved it. Maybe now, they'll realize that Foster and the whole group are frauds. They got what they deserved.”

The liberal establishment was aghast. What happened to all the polite homosexuals these politicians had seen every election year at courteous candidates' nights and chic cocktail parties? “Their conduct is not only unacceptable in that it violates the right of all to be heard,” George Moscone announced, “but it is also deeply counterproductive.” Counterproductive proved the key word. The Mondale demonstration, the endless marches, and all the new angry rhetoric; toleration is one thing, liberals warned, but all this could lead to a backlash. They had no paucity of evidence to buttress their contention that a backlash could indeed fall on San Francisco.

Random beatings of gays increased sharply in the Castro after Bryant's win. Not robberies or muggings, just violent attacks. Gays started carrying police whistles and organized street patrols. Harvey and Tom Randol heard a whistle one night and rushed to a beating. While Randol tended the victim, Harvey chased down the attacker.

“Don't beat me,” the youth pleaded when Milk tackled him.

“No, I'm not going to beat you,” Harvey taunted. “I'm going to take you down to Toad Hall and tell everybody what you tried to do and just let them take care of you.”

Harvey dragged the punk to the victim who, as afraid of the police as he was of the attacker, said he wouldn't press charges. Milk reluctantly let the kid go, warning, “Tell all your friends we're down here waiting for them.”

Conservatives had organized their own political backlash against the city's liberal direction in the form of successful petition drives to put two measures on a special election ballot in August. One measure simply repealed the hard-fought district elections scheme and would keep the election of supervisors on a citywide basis. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein soon emerged as this propostion's spokesperson. The second, more sweeping measure, not only repealed district elections but in effect recalled Mayor Moscone, District Attorney Joe Freitas, and Sheriff Richard Hongisto. Proponents of this initiative made no small issue of the close connections all three politicians had to the increasingly raucous gays while promoting the proposition in the conservative west side. Were these officials letting homosexuals take over San Francisco?

Liberals also warned that anyone who needed proof of a backlash need go no further than the heavily Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood two miles south of Castro Street, where a police officer-cum-firefighter was making waves as an unorthodox supervisorial candidate out to restore traditional values to San Francisco government. “I am not going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals, social deviates and incorrigibles,” the candidate wrote in his campaign literature. “You must realize there are thousands upon thousands of frustrated angry people such as yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignancies which blight our beautiful city.”

The candidate's slogan: “Unite and Fight—For Dan White!”

*   *   *

“Faggot, faggot, faggot.”

No sooner had Robert Hillsborough and Jerry Taylor climbed from their car on that warm night of June 21 than the four attackers were upon them. The slight, thin Taylor scrambled over an eight-foot fence and hid behind garbage cans, convinced the huskier Hillsborough could handle himself.

Then came the screams: “Faggot, faggot, faggot.” A Latino youth, later identified as John Cordova, was kneeling over the prostrate body of Robert Hillsborough, stabbing him passionately, thrusting the fishing knife again and again into the gardener's chest, then into his face. Blood stained his hand, spurted into the streets and still he sank his blade into the fallen man; fifteen times he lashed out, sinking the steel into flesh, shouting “Faggot, faggot, faggot.”