The Mayor of Castro Street (55 page)

Newspeople scurried to try to find a gay leader who would apologize. They had a tough time. “Political and cultural leaders haven't apologized for creating a jury where Dan White is a hero and for creating a jury where Dan White can be found a moral man incapable of cold-blooded murder,” snorted Bill Kraus, the new president of the Harvey Milk Club. “They have a lot more to apologize for than we do.”

Graffiti around Castro Street took an even more strident tone. Slogans filled all available walls:

Gay Riots Now

Feinstein Will Die

Death Dan White

Islamic Justice—An Eye for an Eye

Dan White & Co. You will not escape, for violent fairies will visit you even in your dreams.

On a wall a few doors down from the old Castro Camera site was a tribute to the man who was becoming legend: Happy Birthday Harvey—At Least We Love You. Across the street from the devastated Elephant Walk, a spray-painter had scrawled a variation on the dramatic sentence from Harvey's taped political will: Let the Bullets that Rip Through My Brain Smash Through Every Closet Door in the Country.

The only person remotely aligned with Harvey to denounce the riots was his estranged brother Robert, who pleaded that gays should “respect and honor his feelings and my feelings by not demonstrating.”

Down the Long Island Railroad tracks from Robert Milk's Rockville Centre home, Harvey's old basketball teammate from Bayshore High, Dick Brown, read the news of the riot that day with considerably less antipathy. When blacks have a riot, they burn their own neighborhoods, Brown thought. At least when gays riot, they have the sense to get out of their own neighborhood.

Officials from the Police Officers Association spent much of that day in press conferences angrily denouncing the restraint which Chief Gain had ordered during the early hours of the City Hall fracas. Gain defended himself by saying he had avoided a bloodbath; POA leaders said that sixty-one injured officers was, by their standards, a bloodbath. Cops also flayed at Gain for ordering the withdrawal from the Castro. One police officer even filed charges of “inciting a riot” against Harry Britt because of the supervisor's insistance that police did not belong on Castro Street.

The newspaper editorials and columnists, of course, condemned the gay rioting, but the news coverage of the night worked to balance the public's perceptions of the events. Spot news, after all, demands simplification of even the heaviest news events, so on the day after the riots, only two stories emerged: the story of the gay brutality against police at City Hall and the story of police brutality against gays on Castro Street. The police attack on the Elephant Walk was something of a lucky break, not only because it balanced the homosexual excesses at City Hall, but because media people were crawling all over the Castro before police arrived, permitting every police abuse to be fastidiously documented in both print and film. The fact that police had beaten reporters at both City Hall and Castro Street did little to engender journalistic sympathy for the SFPD.

Still, gay activists fretted about the political fallout from the rioting. The elections for mayor, D.A., sheriff, and six of the eleven supervisors were to be held less than six months away. They could provide a likely platform for any politician who decided to fan the flames of conservative voter discontent. As in the militant days after the Anita Bryant vote and again during the Briggs Initiative, the specter of an anti-gay backlash haunted the politicos who had worked so long to achieve gay political power.

*   *   *

By the afternoon newspaper editions, stories of the tense hours of jury deliberations began to emerge. Only one juror had voted for a charge of first-degree murder, and that was only on the first of many ballots. The jury had then spent hours trying to decide whether White might be guilty of second-degree murder, but arrived at the dual manslaughter verdicts, because, as one seventy-five-year-old woman juror put it, “It just all came together as if God were watching over us, as if God brought us together.” She had hoped that the decision would be best for San Francisco. “We didn't want to give the city a worse name,” she said. “We wanted things to just quiet down and be over with.”

Another juror said that Dan White certainly was a “moral man” and was particularly impressed by the psychiatric testimony that said White had shot Moscone because he was too moral to punch him in the nose. “Many of us were praying for guidance,” said a Catholic juror who maintained that the verdict “must be God's will or it would not have turned out this way.” Virtually all the jurors made the same point—for all the evidence the prosecution presented about the facts of the killing, they never had a sense that the prosecution had done anything to show that Dan White harbored any malice or motive to kill Milk and Moscone. They were amazed that prosecuter Norman thought he had had such an open-and-shut case of first-degree murder.

*   *   *

A radio blared in Cleve Jones's apartment as he coordinated the training of some three hundred monitors for that night's birthday party. The disc jockey was playing “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now” and dedicating it to the memory of Harvey Milk. Down the street, volunteers were hoisting a huge blowup portrait of Harvey to hang from the theater sign, which spelled out CASTRO in three stories of neon. On the marquee, the theater had written: Harvey Milk Lives. Police blocked off the street so workers could erect the huge entertainment stage, as they had so many times before at the Castro Street fairs Harvey had once masterminded. Other volunteers printed up hundreds of T-shirts for the monitors with the slogan: “PLEASE—No Violence.” Late in the afternoon, Cleve and Scott Smith made their final plans with police, helping them set up a secret command post over Cliff's Hardware. Other police officials were scouting hidden assembly points for the hundreds of uniformed police who would wait on the periphery of the Castro for any sign of trouble. Gays were making their own secret preparations too. First aid stations were covertly established in a number of neighborhood locations. Legal observers were donning green armbands so they could witness any arrests police tried to make. Though both sides had called a truce, neither trusted the other. Police felt humiliated by the gay show of strength at City Hall; gays still fumed over the unprovoked Elephant Walk bash-in. As dusk fell and thousands began descending on the Castro, Jones was enthusiastic: “We'll disco right in the police's faces.” Many of the celebrants were wearing helmets, however, and the neighborhood police captain called Jones over a special radio he had given him to say, “Don't worry, Cleve. I'm right here in front of your apartment. We'll see what happens.”

By the time the party started, twenty thousand had gathered in the Castro to hear Jones' opening words:

Thank you for being here. Last night the lesbians and gay men of San Francisco showed the rest of the city and the rest of the world that gay people are angry and on the move. And tonight we are here to show the world what we are creating out of that anger and that movement. A strong community of women and men working together to change our world.

It seems highly appropriate to celebrate Harvey's birthday in this manner, a party on the street he loved. Castro Street was Harvey's home. Where he lived, worked, and organized.

How many have moved here, to this new home from somewhere else?

How many are not native San Franciscans?

We have come here from all the old hometowns of America to reclaim our past and secure our future and replace lives of loneliness and despair with a place of joy and dignity and love.

The crowd cheered and Jones began introducing the acts. The Castro's own star, Sylvester, got the crowd dancing to his latest disco hits and before long, the street was filled with the bobbing heads of people dancing, slurping beers, and generally congratulating themselves on the unique homosexual ability to stage a stormy riot one night and then disco peacefully in the streets the next. The most disgruntled folks on hand were the plainclothes vice cops who could do nothing while the celebrants happily passed marijuana cigarettes among each other. When the late-night chill crept into the partying throng, the event's organizers assembled on stage to sing one last tribute to the man who would have been forty-nine years old that day. The words echoed by the storefronts Harvey had once organized into his business group, through the alleys where Harvey had walked precincts, and down the streets where he had cruised, demonstrated, and registered voters. Twenty thousand voices singing for a dead man who had spent most his life as an unsettled drifter with strange forebodings until six years before, when he had found a home on this obscure street in San Francisco. “Happy birthday, dear Harvey,” they sang. “Happy birthday to you.”

*   *   *

In New York City that night, several hundred gay pickets gathered in Sheridan Square, across the street from the location of the old Stonewall bar, where gays had first rioted a decade before. They knew nothing of the cheerful birthday party a continent away and were still outraged by the verdict. Some signs bore just one phrase: “We all live in San Francisco.”

Epilogue

Attempts to investigate and prosecute those involved with either the gay rioting or the police brutality largely fizzled. The anti-gay backlash some activists feared also failed to materialize. With the 1979 municipal elections only months after the White Night Riots, most concern about the city's gay community focused solely on its political clout.

By the November elections, gays wielded unprecedented power. The surprisingly strong showing of a virtually unknown gay mayoral candidate—David Scott, Rick Stokes's successor on the Board of Permit Appeals—forced Mayor Feinstein into a runoff against conservative Supervisor Quentin Kopp. Feinstein promptly apologized for her “community standards” remarks, promised a gay police commissioner, lunched nearly every day in the Castro, and ultimately gained lopsided percentages in gay precincts to win her own term as mayor.

Other incumbents had an even tougher year. Voters sent District Attorney Joe Freitas into political exile, handing him a three-to-one margin of defeat and electing novice politician Arlo Smith, the mild-mannered attorney general's staffer who had once stuffed envelopes in Castro Camera for Harvey Milk. All incumbent supervisors in contested races that year also lost their bids for reelection except one—Harry Britt.

Those 1979 supervisorial elections, however, were the last to be held under the district elections system that politicians like George Moscone and Harvey Milk had worked so hard to enact. In a special election in the summer of 1980, voters narrowly repealed district elections and reinstated citywide, at-large elections of supervisors. An attempt to repeal this repeal failed three months later. Though the new citywide board had roughly the same liberal-conservative balance of the district body, liberals saw the city rapidly shift away from the neighborhood-oriented course charted during the height of the Milk-Moscone era. In the same election, voters also rejected a proposal to raise supervisor's salaries.

Once mayor in her own right, Feinstein nudged the city back toward the pro-business polices of the pre-Moscone years. Feinstein no longer peopled planning boards with troublesome environmentalists who worried about the Manhattanization of San Francisco. Developers and business interests once again had a friendly ear in City Hall. As for Feinstein's pet city agency, the police, one of the mayor's first moves after her election was to announce the appointment of a new police chief, Cornelius Murphy, a stolid Irish Catholic from the ranks. Murphy decreed that police cars were no longer to be painted powder blue, they were again to be macho black-and-whites; and this made the men of the San Francisco Police Department happy with their leadership once again. Murphy, however, swore to keep Gain's progressive policies toward gays. One of his first appearances as chief-designate came at a fundraiser for a gay police recruitment drive. By 1980, one in seven new police recruits were either lesbians or gay men. Feinstein appointed her old friend Jo Daly, a former Alice president, to the Police Commission, fulfilling a gay demand that dated back to Jose's first campaign for supervisor. Chief Charles Gain did not leave without his own burst of glory. In one of his last appearances at a major gay function, he told a roaring crowd that he fully expected to see the day when San Francisco had both a gay mayor and police chief. Saying this, Gain retired and moved to a small town near Fresno, where he bought and managed a mobile home park.

*   *   *

By the opening of the 1980s,
San Francisco had spent a half decade in turmoil unmatched by any other American city of that period: Moscone's 1975 election coup, the 1976 enactment of district elections, the attempts to repeal district elections and recall the city's major officials in 1977, the first district-elected board, the gay unrest of Orange Tuesday and the midnight marches, Peoples Temple, the assassinations, the riots, and the ultimate reinstatement of citywide elections. All this had wearied both conservative and liberal activists, and few responsible politicos were eager to push any new initiatives as the decade opened. Wounds from the long battles may not have completely healed in subsequent years, but neither did they fester. The city remained bound together by the curious sentiment that San Franciscans of all stripes share—that San Francisco is somehow a special city. Still, when reformers sometimes talked late into the night and wearied of the gossip about contemporary politicians, their conversations often drifted into memories of the Milk-Moscone years which, in reflection, seemed a bright, magic epoch which was not likely to happen again soon.

The loss of so many liberal advances made during the brief Moscone-Milk era kept some of the more suspicious bandying conspiracy theories about the assassinations. Many of Harvey's closest friends remained convinced that George and Harvey had been the victims of a byzantine conspiracy, plotted by those who had millions of dollars to gain by taking city government out of the hands of neighborhood-oriented liberals and returning power to the more steady moderation of a Dianne Feinstein. Signs at gay demonstrations sometimes carried such mottos as, “I'd like to see Joe Freitas' Swiss bank account.”
Examiner
reporter Russ Cone, a veteran of a quarter century on the City Hall beat, took a more prosaic approach and wrote a long story tying the killings to conservative policemen's fears about Moscone's proposed settlement for the police discrimination suit. Killing Moscone effectively ended chances for the mayor's pro-minority settlement, Cone wrote, while “taking out the ever-present irritant, Milk, was insurance that six votes for the Moscone settlement would not exist” on the board. The
Examiner
declined to run the account, so it was published in a Los Angeles-based magazine. Nor was any major publication interested in Warren Hinckle's hypothesizing about the role of political chicanery and homophobia in Dan White's prosecution. Hinckle had to make a living and he soon found other subjects to fuel his ongoing fires of moral outrage. Since the San Francisco media assiduously avoided analyses of the troublesome implications of the killings and trial, the entire Dan White affair soon slipped into an uneasy niche in the public memory. Occasionally, however, spray-painted across a barren wall in the Castro, appeared the question: “Who killed Harvey Milk?”