The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  The novel alliance between neighborhoods, gays, and unions created no small fuss in political circles. Jim Elliot picked up his newspaper one afternoon to read the one quote that summarized the improbable coalition, his quip about “fruits and kooks.” He felt like shit. Sure they were fruits, but he’d gotten to know some of them at Castro Camera and they were nice guys, he thought. That night, he screwed up his courage, knowing what he had to do.

  Gays were throwing a fund raiser for district elections at a gay bar on Castro Street. Elliot figured he’d probably get punched out if he showed up, or at least yelled at, but he had to go there and let the guys know he really didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out in the papers. He’d never walked into a gay bar in his life. Timidly, the machinist slid in the door and saw a drag queen leading a raucous auction. He ran into some of the gay men he had met earlier; they just patted him on the back and bought him a drink as if nothing had happened. In a gesture of conciliation, he bid on a cake.

  “I’ll bid four dollars on it,” shouted Elliot, then, spotting the plain-speaking man from Texas he’d gotten to know at Castro Camera, he added, “And I want the cake to go to Harry Britt.”

  “Four dollars, sold.”

  “By the way,” Elliot asked as he moved up to give the money. “What kinda cake is that?”

  The auctioneer wrinkled his nose. “Why, a fruitcake, of course.”

  The crowd roared and Jim Elliot, the guy who fixed tractors and lawn mowers at Golden Gate Park, knew everything was all right.

  George Moscone campaigned vigorously around the city for the district elections. Though the old-line leftists who had long pushed for district elections had little use for gays, Harvey and a nearly united front of gay activists organized efforts to get gay precincts behind the new plan.

  On election day, San Francisco voters threw the bums out. District elections passed, forcing the entire board to run in the new districts in November 1977. The city split along east-west, liberal-conservative lines and, once again, without the massive tallies from the voter-rich Castro, the coup might not have succeeded.

  “I think I’m going to run Medora Payne,” John Ryckman teased Harvey soon after. “She can be the first openly child supervisor.”

  “Better not,” Harvey shot back. “She’d probably end up beating me.”

  Harvey had a new color-coded map to show anyone who dropped by Castro Camera. The results of the 1976 assembly race were shaded into each precinct and Jim Rivaldo had drawn a thick black line around the perimeters of the new District 5, the district around Castro Street. “The map says it all,” Harvey offered cheerfully. It did. Milk had carried most of District 5’s 16 A.D. precincts handily, with margins approaching 70 percent in many precincts. “You tell me who is going to win in this district,” Harvey said confidently.

  The ward politician finally had his ward.

  ten

  Orange Tuesday

  Each student had neatly chalked his name below the office they sought. There was only one problem, and the fifth grade teacher strode purposefully to the blackboard to take care of it. Grabbing the eraser, she quickly wiped away the offending name of little Johnny Briggs. He was the son of Jessie Rae Briggs, that Okie waitress at Whitey’s truck stop outside town, the one whose husband had run off to be a Pentacostal minister. Just more white trash from the Dust Bowl, come here in their mattress-covered station wagons like they owned Orange County. No, Johnny Briggs can’t run for class vice-president; his mom’s divorced.

  As a California assemblyman and later a state senator, John Vern Briggs frequently told the story of this first attempt for public office in the early 1940s. The memory never seemed far from his political libido. Even after his impressive track record as a staunch defender of the Orange County conservative faith, John Briggs was always the outsider, taken seriously by neither his Democrat nor Republican colleagues, having the allegiance of only his constituents, who had faithfully elected him to five terms in the assembly and now his first term in the senate. He kept his message to them simple. The way Republicans could win was to hammer away at the Democrats as the party of the three G’s—gays, grass, and Godlessness.

  Finally, on this sultry June day in 1977, John Briggs had found understanding peers in the bustling North Miami office of Save Our Children (From Homosexuality), Inc. The busy housewives shook their back-combed, frosted hairdos in shock as he regaled them with stories of the “San Francisco influence” in California politics. “The land of fruits and nuts,” chirped one volunteer. The election on the repeal of the Dade County gay rights law—or the “sin and immorality law,” as it was branded by opponents—would be the next day and pundits predicted a close race. California State Senator John Briggs knew better, however, and saw the election less as a contest over one law than the unleashing of a new potent force in American politics. He knew he was at the starting gate.

  * * *

  The first warm night of summer, Tuesday, June 21. It was 8 P.M. and husky thirty-one-year-old Robert Hillsborough was getting ready for his date with Jerry Taylor. An affable, soft-spoken man, known as Mr. Greenjeans to the children at the playground where he worked as a city gardener, Hillsborough wanted only two things when he moved to California from Oregon: to live and work in San Francisco, and to be in love, settling down with another man into a quiet domestic life.

  If Robert Hillsborough had any political ideas he kept them to himself. Like so many gays, he had registered to vote at Harvey Milk’s camera store, but now that he had a job, most of his thoughts were on getting a boyfriend. Hillsborough’s determination for an old-fashioned marriage had somewhat intimidated Jerry Taylor, who had moved out of Robert’s apartment only two weeks earlier. Tonight was their first date since Jerry had moved out. Robert gave himself one last going over in the mirror, brushed his hair, stroked his beard, decided he looked his macho best, and went to pick up Jerry.

  At about the same time, San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy Al Asmussen was kissing his mother good-bye in the comfortable suburban home they had shared since Al’s dad died. He had already quietly slipped into the garage and put his blue jeans, plaid shirt, and construction boots in the trunk, as he had so many other Tuesday nights. Now it was off to his weekly Young Republican meeting in San Francisco. No, he didn’t want his mom to stay up late and wait. As usual, he would be out late drinking with his YR buddies.

  A warm Tuesday night in San Francisco. Robert Hillsborough and Al Asmussen shared a tenuous connection with the Castro: Hillsborough had moved to the neighboring Mission neighborhood five blocks east of Castro Street and freely took part in the Castro’s social life; Asmussen was born and raised in the Castro, part of the stolid ethnic community that had long churned out lawmen for the police and sheriff’s departments. Other than that, they shared little, except that both were dynamic young men and that before the night was over, both would be dead.

  * * *

  The year of the gay. That was the way 1977 was supposed to turn out. The year started on an upbeat when the Dade County Commission voted 5–3 in January to enact a broad gay civil rights ordinance banning discrimination against gays in employment, housing, and public accommodations. The ordinance marked the first time any southern city had passed a gay rights law. Now some forty cities had guaranteed rights for homosexuals, including such major metropolitan areas as St. Paul, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Seattle. Of course, a few Bible thumpers were on hand to talk about immorality and Revelations’ warnings of the Final Days, but their presence was predictable and most activists expected them to go back to their tents once the voting was over.

  Momentum for gay rights picked up. By late spring, gay-related bills had surfaced in twenty-eight state legislatures. Wyoming decriminalized gay sexual acts in late February, making it the nineteenth state to legalize sex between consenting adults. Five other legislatures were considering similar reforms. Lawmakers in eleven state houses had introduced statewide gay rights bills; gay activists were privately
placing bets on which state would be the first to enact a rights law—a long-awaited breakthrough for the gay movement—while national gay leaders picked up even more sponsors on the national gay bill.

  The homosexual cause got a further boost in early 1977 when a dozen gay leaders met at the White House with presidential aide Midge Costanza, the first time a gay delegation was ever officially received at the executive mansion. The meeting produced more style than substance, and gay insiders whispered privately that the invitation came only because a nationally prominent gay leader was having an affair with a White House staffer. To a movement seeking a place on the agenda of the nation’s social issues, however, the White House meeting marked a significant event all the same. The year, it seemed, surely would show that the gay movement had reached the juggernaut status; nothing could stop this idea whose time had come.

  * * *

  “Homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit.”

  Gay activists snickered over the assertion made by Anita Bryant the day she announced she would lead a campaign against the Dade County gay rights ordinance. Bryant’s background as a former Miss America runner-up, a mediocre pop singer, and an orange juice promoter hardly gave her credentials as an authority on homosexuality, they thought. Unfortunately, gay activists had little knowledge about how the media works. Bryant was pretty; she had a penchant for making outrageous comments; if baited too far, she did marvelously telegenic things like break into the chorus of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That was all she needed. As far as the media and her backers were concerned, she was an authority on homosexuality. She became a national media star and her statements were equally balanced, as journalistic ethics demand, against those of psychologists and sociologists who had long ago decried the “recruiting” theories. The fight was on—on a battleground few expected, to be sure, but five weeks after the Dade County ordinance passed, Bryant’s Save Our Children group collected 65,000 signatures on petitions calling for the law’s repeal, more than six times what she needed to put the measure on the June ballot.

  Like feudal barons, the two wealthiest gay leaders, David Goodstein of the Advocate and Jack Campbell, an owner of the nation’s largest gay bathhouse chain, divided the turf for the gay rights battle, said gay leaders in both San Francisco and Miami. Both would put their considerable resources behind the gay effort if each got to name one of the two co-equal leaders to head the fight. Campbell wanted the prestige of a victory to bolster his own political ambitions in Miami. Goodstein wanted to use his role in the victory to build a rival to the National Gay Task Force, with which he had long been feuding. Goodstein sent Jim Foster to Dade County to oversee his end of the deal. Foster’s strategy reflected the tactics gay moderates had long used in San Francisco, currying favor with liberal friends, raising a substantial campaign chest, and garnering a wide range of labor and political endorsements. They worked furiously to discourage volunteers—hundreds from San Francisco alone were itching to come to be new “Freedom Riders”—fearing the street-level, Harvey Milk-style campaign which they had opposed so often in San Francisco. Instead of grass-roots volunteers, they brought liberal politicians, like Sheriff Hongisto and Assemblyman Willie Brown, to campaign. That San Francisco’s gay moderates worked so hard for Dade County’s gay rights law was no small irony. In all their years in San Francisco, they had never pushed the board of supervisors to enact a measure nearly as sweeping; they were fighting in Miami for something they had never even tried to get in San Francisco. And ironically, some of the Miami gay activists who had gotten the law enacted in the first place felt they had been frozen out by the moneyed gay interests.

  The gay moderates’ strategy backfired disastrously. The appearance of Foster, Hongisto, and Willie Brown had anti-gay rights campaigners complaining about carpetbaggers. The cultivating of liberal leaders, at the expense of grass-roots work, did not filter down to the alleged followers. On June 7—Orange Tuesday, as it was later called—Dade County voters repealed their gay rights law by a better than two-to-one margin.

  “Tonight, the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated,” Anita Bryant said in even tones at her victory press conference. “The people of Dade County—the normal majority—have said, ‘Enough, enough, enough.’”

  In the back of the press conference, State Senator John Briggs, who had just flown in the day before, was overjoyed. “We won, we won.” He candidly recounted the statistics that made the win so personally intriguing. He was a candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, he explained, noting that in the last governor’s race only half the voters had bothered to go to the polls to elect Jerry Brown. “And today you got half the voters of Dade County at the polls just to vote for this,” he said. The arithmetic was downright stirring.

  “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.”