The Mayor of Castro Street (40 page)

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“
You can act right now to help protect your family from vicious
killers and defend your children from homosexual teachers.”

With a picture of a bludgeoned teenage youth lying in a pool of his own blood, the brochure read like a grisly clearance sale, advertised with a political motif. Though it was Proposition 6 that gained the nickname the Briggs Initiative, the ambitious Fullerton senator had sponsored two ballot initiatives for the election—Prop 6 and Proposition 7, enacting a tougher death penalty statute. Briggs earnestly insisted that the two issues were inexorably tied together. The fund raising letter for both Propositions 6 and 7 drew the parallels, over the picture of a victim of the odious trashbag murderer. “The ruthless killer who shot this poor young man in the face can be SET FREE TO KILL AGAIN because California does not have an effective death penalty law.” A few paragraphs later, Briggs explained that homosexual teachers represented an equally horrendous threat, what with the proliferation of gay teacher-recruiters in the classrooms. The brochure lacked subtlety, but the skillful use of direct mail techniques initially brought hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of Briggs's campaign.

Moreover, the gruesome brochure for the two initiatives was not particularly wild rhetoric compared to other fliers Briggs circulated for Prop 6. The major leaflet of his campaign featured fifteen different newspaper clippings with headlines like: “Teacher Accused of Sex Acts with Boy Students,” “Senate Shown Movie of Child Porn,” “Police Find Sexually Abused Children,” “Former Scoutmaster Convicted of Homosexual Acts with Boys,” “Why a 13-year-old Is Selling His Body,” “Ex-Teachers Indicted for Lewd Acts with Boys,” “R.I. Sex Club Lured Juveniles with Gifts.” One full-color newspaper advertising supplement featured pictures from the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on its cover with the words “Moral Decay” emblazoned across them. “Politicians Do Nothing—Decent Citizens Must Act. You Can Help! Start by Signing Up to Save Our Children from Homosexual Teachers.” Pictures of Briggs with Anita Bryant adorned the inside pages.

In September, Briggs further startled gay activists when he said he was about to publish a book entitled
Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Homosexuality But Were Afraid to Ask.
The planned 150-page opus would include pictures of victims of the trash bag murders and the Houston sex-torture ring, he said. San Francisco would dominate the booklet with lengthy discussions of the seedier sides of gay life, including fist-loving sadomasochistic cults and sexual activity in parks, beaches, bathhouses, back rooms, and private male clubs.

Briggs' speeches were similarly peppered. “If you let one homosexual teacher stay, soon there'll be two, then four, then 8, then 25—and before long, the entire school will be taught by homosexuals,” the senator said in a speech in Healdsburg, a tiny Sonoma County hamlet that gained national attention during the Prop 6 campaign when a local second grade teacher publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. In the course of that one forty-five-minute speech Briggs managed to equate homosexuals with adulterers, burglars, communists, murderers, rapists, Richard Nixon, child pornographers, and effeminate courtiers who had undermined the Greek and Roman civilizations.

The rhetoric was less startling than the fact that Briggs's law just might have passed if it were not for the brief definition of one three-word phrase in its language:
Public Homosexual Conduct.
The phrase may sound like a description of a round of fellatio on Main Street, but the initiative sweepingly defined “public homosexual conduct” as “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting of private or public homosexual activity directed at, or likely to come to the attention of, school children and/or other [school] employees.” Walking in a gay pride parade “encourages” homosexual activity, so any teacher, gay or straight, could have been fired for walking in a gay march. Having a drink in a gay bar, assigning books written by a gay author, attending a meeting where gay rights was discussed, all constituted activity that might advocate or promote homosexuality, and all were therefore punishable by termination, be the teacher gay or straight. The reason that Briggs picked Healdsburg as a showcase city was because the second grade teacher had said he was gay in a statement opposing the Briggs initiative. Opposing the Briggs Initiative might be grounds for termination.

In front of a crowded Healdsburg audience, Briggs defended the clause to teachers who worried that their stance against Prop 6 would later cost them their jobs, since a defeat for the initiative would encourage the gay movement. One teacher rose to ask if her defense of the embattled gay teacher might endanger her job in a school district twenty miles away.

“You don't have to worry,” Briggs assured her. “The law is not retroactive.”

Another Healdsburg teacher, an admitted heterosexual, wanted to know if she could lose her job if she continued to support the gay teacher
after
the election.

“It would depend on the limits of your support,” said Briggs.

Where did Proposition 6 end and the First Amendment begin? “That,” Briggs said, “is up to the courts to decide.” He did note, however, that the Supreme Court had recently turned down the appeal of the Tacoma schoolteacher fired solely for his homosexuality, so he had no doubts about the constitutionality of his law.

The sheer breadth of the law, as well as Briggs's own heavy-handed hyperbole, made it easy for gays to dismiss the Orange County legislator as a contemporary incarnation of Hitler. This characterization genuinely mystified Briggs, who, on his home turf in southern California, was the epitome of the backslapping, gladhanding down-home politician. Privately, he was somewhat bemused by many of his fundamentalist followers—“They really know how to whoop it up,” he said once—and he often told the Anita Bryant jokes he heard from his gay adversaries. He made it clear that he thought Bryant's propensity to burst into verses of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” put her somewhere out in “left field.” Asked if it were any more fair to compare all gay teachers to the Houston or trash bag murderers than it would be to compare all heterosexuals to Richard Speck or the Boston Strangler, Briggs would nod thoughtfully, “I believe the Good Lord is watching us, but this is a political battle—and in politics, anything is fair.”

The Briggs Initiative may have had the trappings of a moral crusade, and the fundamentalist followers believed that, but for the senator, it was just politics. John Briggs in the eyes of John Briggs was just a politician riding abreast a popular cause. Ronald Reagan had his nonsense about the Panama Canal treaty. Howard Jarvis had his property taxes to complain about. Briggs had his homosexual teachers campaign. Though his gubernatorial attempt failed against much bigger names, he did little to allay speculation that he was gearing up ambitions to seek a U.S. Senate seat in 1980 or 1982. That gays were calling him Adolf Hitler only proved their essential emotional instability, he thought. The private Briggs counted gays lucky that this public crusade was not led by a zealot but a pragmatic politician.

“Aren't you guys glad
I'm
leading this and not one of those people from way out in left field?” he asked one gay reporter with whom he had struck a rapport.

The reporter wasn't sure what Briggs meant.

“I mean, I don't want to put you people in prison or anything. It could be a lot worse.” Briggs leaned across his desk and asked sincerely, “Aren't you guys glad this isn't being led by some crazy?”

If gays constantly harped about Hitler and concentration camps, Briggs had his death threats too. The FBI had caught four members of the Weather Underground crawling toward Briggs's office with a pipe bomb. Some observers even credited an unusual clause of Briggs's death penalty initiative to the death threats Briggs himself had received. The clause invoked an automatic death penalty for anyone convicted of murdering a public official in an effort to prevent that official from carrying out his public duties. Many people later noted the irony that Harvey Milk and George Moscone vigorously opposed Proposition 7 while Dan White supported the tough new capital punishment law.

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“
I see the Christ moving always to outcasts to stand with them.
My own priesthood, my own humanity, ask me to do the same. I stand there this day. I have always stood for them.

“Friends of mine have asked me, ‘Bill, we understand this. But when are you going to stop standing for them and stand honestly as one of us? Can we not see ultimate honesty in the church?' And so this day, my beloved people, I believe I am called by God Himself not only to stand up for them, but this time, now more honestly, to stand as one of them. I, of course, am speaking about gay people. I am gay.”

A soft rustle swept through the chapel of San Francisco's Episcopal Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. Some had suspected that the Reverend William Barcus would make such a pronouncement when they saw Supervisor Harvey Milk quietly slip into a rear pew that morning. With only two weeks until election day, many California pulpits turned their attention to Prop 6. That Sunday, fundamentalist preachers around the state recited the Levitican incantations against gays, but the parishioners of St. Mary's heard a different message; the excesses of the Briggs campaign had gays throughout California running scared and many were fighting back.

“Those of us who have heard the debates and read statements on the subject believe the bigotry and poison spread by John Briggs need speaking to, not only by those studying the phenomenon of homosexuality, but by those of us who can give you a clear example of who we are,” the Reverend Barcus told the congregation. “We who will live with what a ‘yes' vote on Proposition 6 will mean. Jobs are at stake, yes, but far more importantly, lives are at stake. Countless numbers of lives and professional careers already have been destroyed, and even taken in desparation. I mean suicide. The witch-hunt has already started. Teachers in this state have already been irresponsibly charged with being homosexual, and some are very happily married people. The burden falls hideously upon them now just to prove their innocence. Their innocence of what, in the name of God? The witch-hunt cannot be allowed to continue. You can help by being willing to morally put yourself on the line, not after the fact, not after November 7th, but now.”

The first statewide poll on Prop 6, released in September, showed the measure leading by a whopping 61 to 31 percent margin. Pollsters said they had rarely seen an issue with so much public opinion already galvanized with so few undecided voters. The prognosis rattled the comfortable gays who had easily assimilated their homosexuality into the California life-style. Thousands of homosexuals who had shunned politics for years stepped forward to fight the law in many ways. Frustrated that anti-Briggs campaigners were focusing their work in the heavily populated San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles regions, Frank Vel, an advertising copywriter, quit his job and walked through California's lightly populated agricultural heartland from the Mexican border to the Oregon state line. An efficient corps of advance people lined up interviews with scores of small-town newspapers along the sweltering 1,203-mile route. News that the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce was about to endorse Prop 6 brought hundreds of angry calls from well-heeled gay shoppers, threatening to have a massive credit card burning on Beverly Hills' chic Rodeo Drive. The chamber ended up taking a “no position” on the measure. One San Francisco gay man came out of the closet to tell gossip columnists how he had dated John Briggs's daughter in high school. “Can you
really
spot one by looking at him?” reporters asked Briggs. A graphics artist created “Homosexual Identification Cards,” which were widely distributed in gay neighborhoods. The cards had boxes to designate assembly areas—Camp Bryant or Camp Briggs—where each homosexual was supposed to report in the event of a special executive order. Even punk rockers got into the act by sponsoring a “Save The Homos” fundraiser, advertised with posters featuring an appropriately tasteless drawing of a speared and bleeding whale.

Bigger guns came in to fight the Briggs Initiative as well. Republicans had long been embarrassed by Briggs's antics in the state senate, so G.O.P. legislators lined up against Prop 6 in the hope that defeat might finally shut the senator up. Former Governor Ronald Reagan—who had promised to veto any decriminalization of gay sex during his eight-year term as governor—went on record against Prop 6, observing, “Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles.” Briggs brushed off the rebuff, saying Reagan was part of “the whole Hollywood crowd.” Gay insiders, however, credited Reagan's help to the fact that he had no small number of gays among his top staff. Former President Ford came out against the measure, saying it represented an unconservative expansion of state power. The Catholic and Episcopal Bishops of San Francisco took firm stands against the measure. Boards of education throughout the state also voted opposition to the initiative, fretting over the considerable sums—an estimated $12,000 per teacher—it would take to hold the hearings that would determine whether teachers were guilty as charged. Many heterosexual teachers, meanwhile, promised to clog the school boards with hundreds of confessions that they had violated the “public homosexual conduct” clause. The California Teachers Association, California Federation of Teachers, American Federations of Teachers and the National Education Association, as well as the state AFL-CIO, which sent out 2.3 million slate cards, also took a firm No-on-6 posture. From show business came a panoply of stars who helped raise considerable sums to fight the measure. They ranged from the expected entertainers-cum-politicos like Shirley MacLaine, Ed Asner, and Joan Baez to such normally apolitical figures as Cher, Carol Burnett, Helen Reddy, Donna Summer, Sandy Duncan, Shelly Winters, James Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Natalie Wood. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward sent out a fund raising appeal on their personal letterhead. Ironically enough, it was stars with huge gay followings like Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli who would not take a stand on the issue, following the old Hollywood dictum that taking positions on controversial issues can hurt audience appeal and, therefore, cut profits.