The Mayor of Castro Street (33 page)

“Notice how Mickey is always the nice guy and Donald Duck is always the nasty aggressor?” Harvey asked. “Walt Disney was ahead of his time. Mickey Mouse represented black people and Donald Duck represented whites.”

Wong was stunned that Harvey would say something like that to White. Dan just smiled; Wong figured he didn't understand what Milk was saying. The trio soon turned to talk of future politics. Wong asked Dan teasingly, “Are you going to challenge our great mayor in 1979?”

White smiled and gave the politician's answer. “No,” adding pointedly, “not yet.”

After Dan left, Harvey explained that he was trying to educate his fellow freshman. “He's basically a decent person, just uneducated,” Harvey said. “He'll learn.”

*   *   *

“I said he was safe.”

“Out.”

The shortstop threw his mitt into the dirt.

“C'mon, Dan,” another player pleaded. He wanted White to let the matter slide.

“He was out,” Dan White pouted from the infield.

And that's the way the whole game went. The game was the traditional summer standoff between the board and the mayor's office. Most of the legislators dropped any pretenses of august demeanor to lay back, drink beer, and shout at Mayor Moscone, who stopped briefly to shed his jacket, roll up his sleeves, and take a few whacks at the ball. But there was Dan White, making dramatic plays, running after every ball, arguing vehemently with the umpire, throwing down his mitt and stomping around the diamond when a call went against his team. John Molinari had to admit White was the perfect kind of guy to have on his team; a guy who hated to lose.

The same temperament marked his brief service as supervisor. Board President Feinstein, who had always stayed close to police and fire issues, took the novice under her wing and became his political mentor, but even with her steady hand behind him, he proved a poor protégé. He hated to lose at anything. When Supervisor Molinari made a routine request that a street be briefly closed for a Columbus Day bike race, White fought him in committee because the police said it might cause an inconvenience. When the closure passed committee anyway, White delivered an impassioned plea to the board, again citing police objections. That the board would turn a deaf ear to the police stunned and outraged him. His colleagues were shocked that he would fight so passionately over such a minor issue. After he lost the board vote, he didn't speak to Molinari for days.

White's biggest setback, and the one that permanently soured his relationship with Milk, came over a proposed psychiatric treatment center to be placed in an empty convent in his district. Even before White was sworn in, he was eagerly lobbying against the center, echoing neighbors' fears that the center would put “arsonists, rapists and other criminals” at their doorstep. Before learning much about the issue, Harvey indicated he would probably vote with Dan. When the final vote on the center neared, White had his 6–5 majority, but, as the gay legislator learned more about the center—and of the San Francisco children sent far away to a state hospital where they were removed from any daily contact with their families—he pondered switching his vote. “They've got to be next to somebody's house,” Harvey finally decided, and tilted the majority for the center. After the vote, Supervisor Quentin Kopp reportedly saw Dan White mutter, “I see a leopard never changes his spots.”

The loss infuriated White, who had made the center a major campaign issue in his district. He had lost, and he left little doubt as to whom was responsible for his failure. For months, White would not even speak to Harvey. The smiles with which he had once greeted Anne Kronenberg stopped abruptly. Harvey had to appoint his other aide, Dick Pabich, to serve as a liaison with White. Other supervisors noticed White stopped spending much time at City Hall; he moped and pouted during the weekly board meetings.

White's immediate anger fell on Harvey's pet project, the gay rights bill. At a committee meeting before Milk's vote on the psychiatric center, Dan voted for the bill, talking at length about his experiences as a paratrooper in Vietnam. “I found a lot of the things that I had read about—that had been attributed to certain people—blacks, Chinese, gays, whites—just didn't hold up under fire, literally under fire,” he said. “I saw men I was in combat with perform as admirably as anyone else would perform from whatever background they were. I learned right there that people have many problems—we all have our problems and the sooner we leave discrimination in any form behind, the better off we'll all be.” When the gay rights law came for a vote before the entire board—a week after Milk voted against White on the psychiatric center—White had significantly changed his views. “According to the city attorney's office, if a transvestite shows up at a public school with all the qualifications for teaching, they can't refuse to hire him for an opening, even if they object to having a man dressed as a woman in their school,” White complained to one reporter.

White was not alone in his fears. Supervisor Feinstein, whose interest with the gay leather scene bordered on obsession, openly wondered if the bill would make landlords rent to S&M cultists. “One of the uncomfortable parts of San Francisco's liberalism has been the encouragement of sadism and masochism,” she said. “The gay community is going to have to face it. There's a need to set some standards. The right of an individual to live his life-style in a way he or she chooses can become offensive.”

Feinstein later regretted that she had felt obliged to publicly hold her nose while talking about gay rights, but in the end she overcame her trepidations about leathermen tenants and voted for the bill. By 1978, the political stakes were too high for any serious politician with ambitions for higher office to raise gay dander. Only Dan White voted against the measure. “A vast majority of people—I'll use the Roman Catholics for example—have very strong beliefs,” he said. “Change is counterproductive when you force it on people. I fear that's where the problem is going to start.”

White later told Dick Pabich why he had voted nay. “Harvey voted against me,” he said, “so I voted against Harvey.” White also told Pabich that he had interceded months before to persuade Board President Feinstein to appoint Harvey to the committee governing the city's bus system, a slot Milk wanted badly. He had helped Harvey; Harvey had betrayed him. That was the first time Pabich—and later Milk—ever learned of White's action on behalf of him.

Harvey would have preferred a unanimous vote for the bill, but the 10–1 margin was good enough, especially at a time when cities across the nation were taking up initiative repeals of local gay rights ordinances and as State Senator John Briggs geared up for his California anti-gay teachers initiative. On the day of the signing, Harvey presented Mayor Moscone with a powder blue felt-tipped pen to sign the bill, a camp gesture that assured the pair's photo on the cover of the afternoon paper. “I don't do this enough,” said Moscone, “taking swift and unambiguous action on a substantial move for civil rights.”

The fracas on the gay rights ordinance kicked off a public feud between White and Milk. White steadfastly opposed every street closing or permit that involved gays. When Dennis Peron's Castro Street pot supermarket got busted and both Milk and Supervisor Silver came to Peron's defense, White took to the board's floor to express his shock that Harvey would support a marijuana dealer.

Harvey, however, still maintained that White could be “educated,” as Milk liked to put it. Harvey sometimes contrasted White with Supervisor Feinstein—the “Wicked Witch of the West,” Harvey called her—whom Milk thought politicked from a sense of
noblesse oblige.
He thought Feinstein was intelligent enough to take a more progressive place in city politics, while White's conservatism stemmed from ignorance. For her part, Feinstein saw Milk as an unusual melange of characteristics. She was impressed by his tireless devotion to his job and the meticulous research he conducted on issues far beyond the realm of gay concerns. Still, the grandstanding in Milk's showmanship at board meetings frustrated her. As board president, she had to make sure the body got on with its business and Milk's theatrics did not always make her task easy. Feinstein hoped Milk would mellow with experience. Harvey, meanwhile, wrote her off and worked instead to curry favor with White. He attended the young supervisor's baby shower. He tried softening White with humor. During one exchange on gays, Harvey told Dan, “Don't knock it unless you've tried it.” Dan White was not amused.

As White withdrew further from Harvey and his other colleagues, he became closer to the sphere of interests Harvey bitterly opposed—downtown corporations and real estate developers. White had started as an angry blue-collar populist, but he quickly turned into the great white hope of the downtown interests—a politician with a future. “The guys at the Chamber of Commerce must have sat him down and started talking about God, and Dan thought, ‘Gee, these guys aren't so bad after all,'” said one sympathetic leader of a union that had endorsed White.

Feinstein helped connect White to Warren Simmons, a major real estate developer who was opening a tourist development at Pier 39. The Pier 39 project had all the trappings of old-fashioned political corruption and kept the city's muckrakers churning out reams of copy, since a number of commissioners, supervisors, and other public officials who were involved in securing approval for the project also ended up with concessions for lucrative businesses there. Simmons gave White a concession for a fried potato stand to help augment the sparse $800 monthly salary supervisors earned. According to documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI had started a probe into Dan White's connections with Simmons to see if the concession was a payoff for political favors. Before the probe turned up any substantive information, however, Dan White had been charged with far more serious crimes and the FBI files noted that the investigation “should not be discussed outside the bureau.”

*   *   *

“How do you like Feinstein for mayor?”

Margo St. James had gained national fame as the organizer of Coyote, an organization representing the interests of prostitutes. She had also gained frequent phone calls from a police officer she nicknamed Joe the Pig. She had gone to San Francisco City College with him twenty years before; now, he seemed to take pleasure in reaffirming her worst fears about the city's police. A year before, in 1977, Joe had called to explain gleefully that the most right-wing police officers planned on murdering Police Chief Charles Gain. It would be easy, he said. Gain led an active social life, remained unarmed when he was off duty, and would not keep a bodyguard. St. James warned Gain who, hearing similar rumors on his own, started taking such precautions as never sitting with his back toward the door when in a restaurant. Now, Joe the Pig had called Margo to pass on the advice that he thought Dianne Feinstein might be mayor before the year was out.

“But Feinstein just said that she wasn't going to run in 1979, that George was bound to get reelected,” Margo answered.

“What if George died?” the policeman asked.

“He's young and healthy,” said Margo. “He's not going to die.”

“Remember what they were gonna do to the chief last year?” Joe asked. “They couldn't get him, so they'll do the next best thing and get the guy who put him there.”

St. James was incredulous.

“He'll be dead by Christmas,” the police officer concluded.

Margo was surprised by the chipper attitude the officer took toward the topic of political assassination, but she was not taken aback by the hard feelings police rank and file held against Gain and his boss, George Moscone. The mayor was pressing hard for settlement of an old discrimination suit filed by the Officers For Justice (OFJ), a minority policeman's organization. The suit alleged that the nepotic department discriminated wildly against blacks in promotion and hiring; the SFPD was, according to one study, more racially segregated than the police force of Montgomery, Alabama. The OFJ wanted a multimillion-dollar settlement from the city and rigid enforcement of hiring and promotion quotas for minorities. Courts had long ago ordered that all hiring and promotion in the department be frozen, pending a settlement of the suit. Mayor Moscone had worked out a settlement that the Police Officers' Association detested. Both White and Feinstein spearheaded opposition on the board. Dan White fretted to a right-wing
Examiner
columnist, “Once they've taken over the law-enforcement mechanism of San Francisco, they've got the city cold.” The settlement went down to a characteristic 6–5 defeat on the board. That was a precarious margin, as far as the POA was concerned. Even worse, both the mayor and the Civil Service Commission in 1978 announced that the new police recruitment drive would include a push to get openly gay cops on the police force. The POA monthly newsletter was filled with letters from members complaining about the development. No single police officer had made the decision to follow Chief Gain's advice and step forward as gay; now, gays would be forced on the department. One sergeant wrote that any gay officers should be given separate shower rooms, a solution which, he conceded, got sticky when the matter of showering locations for possible bisexual officers had to be sorted out. Even Gain's critics gave him credit for modernizing training and promotion procedures, but the rank-and-file discontent had seethed since Gain's first days in office and nearly every week brought new items in gossip columns that Gain was on the way out.

St. James forwarded a warning to Mayor Moscone's office. In August, she heard that Moscone had gotten a bodyguard.

*   *   *

“I can't believe it,”
sputtered an aide to another supervisor as he tossed the morning
Chronicle
across a table in the City Hall lunchroom. “Every time you pick up the paper, there's Harvey doing something new. How in the the hell does that guy do it?”