The Mayor of Castro Street (49 page)

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Running, panting, the footsteps chasing him down,
tapping loudly on the marble hallways of City Hall. Cleve Jones would have this dream many times in the months following the City Hall assassinations, but it first came in the week after the killings. He was being chased around a dark, empty City Hall. He didn't know who was chasing him, but he knew he was in danger and he had to escape. Up the grand staircase and through the colonnaded halls Jones ran until finally he reached the door to the complex of supervisors' offices. Cleve had a key to this door. Once inside, he slammed the door resolutely behind him. He started running down the hallway, knowing he was safe now, but looking for a place to hide. Then he heard the sound of another key slipping into the lock and the door opening, the door that Dan White had used on his way to see Harvey that last time. Cleve started running hard again, running down the narrow hallway that seemed miles long in his dream, the hallway that Dan White's office was on, where Harvey had died. Running and panting and then in front of him, floating in the air, Cleve saw the pale blue dead face of Harvey Milk, rolling above him, as it had when Cleve had seen the police turning over the corpse on that dark Monday morning. The pale blue face was rolling and then Cleve woke up.

Cleve was still sobbing as he shook the sleep from his head. He grabbed a paperweight near his bed and threw it at a framed painting across the room, sending the portrait crashing to the floor. He stumbled over to his crowded desk, swept his hand across the surface, kicking and flailing at the papers that filled the air. He knocked over his bookshelf, threw the heavy volumes against the wall and hurled his bedside water glass against his door. He began to cry and pick up the room, so his roommate would not see what he had done; crying, trying to pull order out of the chaos while the grief started turning to rage.

PART IV

The Legend Begins

seventeen

Justice and Thieves

A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is justice, which is the thief?

—King Lear,
IV, vi.

 

“…
It's about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias hope.
You gotta give them hope.”

John Wahl reached over and turned his Panasonic cassette recorder off. Dianne Feinstein hadn't expected Milk's tape-recorded voice to leave such an impact on her, but the sound of a man talking about himself in the past tense shook her. She thought it was like Harvey was talking from the dead. Carl Carlson was surprised to see Feinstein lose the patina of control she seemed to maintain in every situation. Feinstein confided none of her personal anxieties to the two men who had come to play Harvey's tape and instead delved straight to the issue at hand. “Who do
you
think I should appoint?” she asked.

Both Carlson and Wahl insisted their duty as Harvey's friends was solely to relay what Harvey wanted. The responses left Feinstein facing the most bizarre political twist she had confronted in a decade of city government—a dead man was essentially dictating one of her most important decisions from the grave.

Anne had virtually eliminated herself from serious consideration in her first meeting with the mayor. Supervisor Silver had carefully coached Kronenberg that Feinstein's primary consideration in making the appointment was loyalty. Do what you want once you get on the board, Anne's supporters urged, but at least tell her now you'll be loyal. Once Feinstein raised the loyalty question, Kronenberg would only say, “I promise to give you every bit of consideration Harvey did.” Anne later defended the statement by saying Feinstein never would have believed a blanket pledge of loyalty; politicians familiar with Feinstein, however, saw Kronenberg's answer as a kamikazi flight for honesty. Harvey Milk, after all, rarely gave Feinstein's views anything resembling serious consideration; Anne's promise, therefore, did scarcely anything to assuage the fears of a politician who would be seeking reelection in a matter of months.

Feinstein easily filled Dan White's vacant seat, appointing the man Moscone had selected because, she said, the bullets from Dan White's gun should not alter planned city policy. For the seat left vacant by her elevation to the mayor's office, Feinstein had appointed a blue ribbon panel of district leaders who sifted through applications and found a replacement closely aligned with the new mayor's moderate policies. Feinstein refused to appoint such a committee for Harvey's district. Virtually every district leader had already endorsed Anne by then anyway. Feinstein still had few options, since she had publicly said she would follow Milk's wishes and appoint a gay successor. Author Frank Robinson had pulled himself out of consideration; Harry Britt had endorsed Kronenberg; Bob Ross was nixed because he had recently been elected the emperor of San Francisco, the male counterpart to the city's drag queen empress. Feinstein didn't like drag queens any more than leather. Feinstein stalled on making the decision for weeks.

Pabich and Rivaldo first hoped that the mayor was postponing the appointment to let Anne creep in under the thirty-day residency requirement. When word leaked that the mayor opposed Anne, they decided to try to intimidate Feinstein. “Kronenberg For Supervisor” posters appeared throughout District 5, pointedly employing the same colors and typeface of Harvey's campaign posters. Over two thousand district residents signed petitions endorsing her. But Feinstein would not be bullied and as other hopefuls began submitting their names for the seat, the contest to succeed Harvey Milk became the city's major political circus. Former Air Force Sergeant Lenny Matlovich announced his availability for the seat, even though he had lived in San Francisco only six months. One heterosexual woman aspirant said she “would don leathers or chains or do whatever is necessary to meet the qualifications” Feinstein had set for the gay seat.

Local reporters' favorite candidate was a man who had done nothing in gay politics, since he had only come out on the day of the Moscone-Milk killings. Scott Beach, a local radio personality, had long hung out on the fringes of San Francisco's haute crowd, frequenting singles bars and journalists' watering holes. Once Milk's seat became open, however, Beach announced he had been gay all along and that Milk's murder had inspired him to come out of the closet. To advance his candidacy, he wrote a song based on the Milk poem Anne had read at the opera house—“Our Time Is Now”—and played it for every approving reporter who showed up at his house. After singing the jingle, Beach would piously insist he was the man to carry on Milk's legacy. When one gay reporter pointed out that Beach had tape-recorded commercials for Terrance Hallinan's campaign against Harvey in 1977, Beach confided, “Well I did that for Terry as a favor, but when I went into the voting booth, I pulled the lever for Harvey Milk.”

Newspaper columnists proclaimed Beach the best candidate for supervisor. He may not have taken part in any gay political activity, but the newspaper people had never considered such activity to be serious in the first place. Beach had never bothered them with uncomfortable prattle about homosexuals' rights. Besides, Beach made great copy. He even played his song on network television, garnering more air time than any of the serious gay candidates. Gay politicos complained that once again the media were trivializing a serious issue, but these activists never understood that few reporters thought the gay movement was anything but trivial.

All the while, Feinstein pondered and delayed the decision, impressing Harvey's aides by her sincerity in really wanting to replace Milk with a politician in tune with Harvey's populist views, and yet frustrating them by her apparent conclusion that none of the candidates acceptable to Milk were qualified to sit on the board. The indecision left gays feeling leaderless and angry. “If it took the Roman Catholic cardinals less than two days to choose a pope,” the Bay Area Reporter wrote after a month of waiting, “surely the mayor could have come up with a qualified supervisor in like time.”

“Free Dan White.”

Reporter Mike Weiss instantly recognized the slogan as the battle cry policemen had taken up after the assassinations. Still, he was taken aback when he unexpectedly saw the quote that surrounded this slogan on the t-shirt beneath the unbuttoned uniform of a police officer in the Hall of Justice. Encircled around “Free Dan White” was the John Donne quote: “No man is an island entire to himself.”

Within a week of the killings, Dan White had become a cause célèbre for police officers who never had much use for either Harvey Milk or his liberal ally, George Moscone, the man who had appointed Chief Gain. Gays were enraged at the news that police and firemen had raised a reported $100,000 for White's defense fund. Graffiti soon appeared throughout the city with such slogans as “Kill Fags: Dan White for Mayor” and “Dan White Showed You Can Fight City Hall.” An Irish Catholic friend of the White family joked with Weiss: “Why did Harvey Milk die a faggot's death? Because he got blown away.”

Feinstein had spent much of Mayor Moscone's term lambasting Chief Gain, so rumors spread swiftly that Feinstein would soon can the controversial chief and replace him with a man from the ranks. Sensing a shift in the wind, some policemen removed the “lavender glove” which, they complained, Gain had insisted they don when dealing with gays. When a hotel manager objected to police beating several transvestite tenants, a police sergeant explained, “Well, they're only fruits.” When the manager turned out to be a radical gay activist who filed charges against the sergeant, the police officer returned to casually ask, “How is your health? How is your life expectancy?”

Cleve Jones got a call from two friends one morning who told of how a gang of Latino thugs had chased them through the Castro the previous night, right to the door of their Mission District apartment. When the police came, they did nothing, even though the attackers still sauntered defiantly around the gays' apartment building. Once the cops left, the punks literally broke through the door, leaving the victims to fend them off with kitchen knives. Jones hadn't spent his political stewardship under Harvey Milk for nothing: He quickly issued a press release, called television stations, and instructed his friends on how to reenact the crime for the TV news cameras.

On Castro Street, police started making random identification searches. For the first time in years, uniformed officers started appearing in gay bars during peak hours to undertake such important business as checking pinball licenses. Gain no longer had control of his officers, activists feared, and the police were reverting to the harassment of years past. The stories coming from all corners of the city's gay community later had politicos terming the months after the assassinations “the winter of our discontent.”

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Nobody works on New Year's Eve.

Harry Britt glanced at his clock; it was 11:30
P.M.
on New Year's Eve. He couldn't believe Mayor Feinstein was working at that time on that day, but there she was on the phone, asking Harry if he could drop by her Pacific Heights home to discuss Harvey's replacement. By now, some five weeks after the killings, Harvey's aides were convinced that they had lost the seat to the moderates. Though they still ostensibly backed Anne, they were desperately floating trial balloons for other candidates. Harry could tell that he had impressed both Feinstein and her fiancé Richard Blum, who seemed to have a major role in the mayor's decision making. He was at Feinstein's door at what seemed a most ungodly hour the next morning. Over coffee, the mayor wondered aloud if she should appoint a caretaker replacement. A federal employee who was unknown to gay political activists had caught her favor and she was eager to appoint him. Britt counseled that it would be politically foolish to lose control of the seat by appointing someone who would never turn into a gay leader and help promote Feinstein's own election in November. Who was Britt's second choice, after Kronenberg? Feinstein asked. Harry refused to forward any other names. The mayor pressed further. “If I can't appoint Anne, who should I appoint?”

Harry suggested another name from Harvey's list—his.

As soon as news surfaced that Feinstein was seriously considering Britt for supervisor, gay moderates spread rumors that he was a communist, a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Pabich, Rivaldo, and Britt corralled all the Democratic leaders they could to make one point: Harry was a Democrat. They also struggled to fabricate a respectable image for Harry. Though he was now more apt to be found at meetings of the local Gay Atheist League than at MYF gatherings, Britt's backers highlighted Harry's background as a Methodist preacher. Though his politics indeed lay at the socialist end of the spectrum, he now was presented as a stolid Democrat. Harry was no homosexual militant, but a Texas-bred, soft-spoken minister who would bring mature leadership to the gay community. They would promise Feinstein his loyalty and support—anything to keep the seat. The strategy often stepped over the line between politicking and deception—and it worked. On Thursday, January 8—almost one year after Harvey Milk and Jack Lira had led the inaugural march from Castro Street to City Hall—Feinstein and Britt held a joint press conference to announce that Harry Britt, Jr., would be the new supervisor from District 5.

Anne went into seclusion. Her lesbian friends had long told her that in the end, the gay men would screw her over and now, she was convinced they had been right. Her original backers, who had defected to Britt, felt Anne missed the point. The necessity was not to get Anne or any specific individual in Harvey's seat, but simply to get someone committed to Harvey's progressive and militant gay politics. Anne had been plucked from obscurity and essentially created and marketed, the way a company markets a new laundry soap, they felt. She shouldn't take the defeat personally. With this analysis, the aides closest to Harvey had taken their first steps away from Milk's ward politics. They had learned that once you have power, you don't have to bother spending years to stake out a score of stands on a score of issues; candidates can be created and marketed and imbued with the power that connections and political savvy can bring. Harvey had brought them this power. Now it was theirs to use.