by Randy Shilts
A startled prostitute, working a nearby corner, shook her head in shock. “All those guys are faggots?” she asked a reporter. “This is crazy. All these men are taking my business away!”
After the rally, the crowd made a silent march back to Castro Street, where a thousand of the still-angry protestors decided to simply sit down in the middle of Market and Castro, blocking one of the city’s busiest intersections. The police wanted to move in with a show of force, but, talking over a police loudspeaker, Milk cleared the street with the promise of still another demonstration the next night. Even Harvey’s most adamant detractors conceded that only his presence had averted a riot that night. The photo of Milk with the bullhorn made the front page.
The next night, five thousand marched in Greenwich Village, four hundred in Denver, and another crowd surged from Castro Street past City Hall and through the city’s wealthy neighborhoods. Thousands more took to the streets on Thursday and Friday nights, shocked and angry, as if for the first time they realized that somebody out there really didn’t like them. It had been easy to forget that most of them had not been attracted to Castro Street, they had been driven there; the forces that had driven them to seek sanctuary were finally getting organized. On Friday night, after a City Hall rally, one thousand sat stubbornly at Castro and Market, unable to think of any other way to vent their growing rage. And three thousand marched again on Saturday night. The next morning, as Catholic worshipers went to St. Mary’s Cathedral, they faced five hundred silent demonstrators lining the long wide plaza to the church entrance, standing in vigil to protest the Dade County archbishop’s support of Anita Bryant’s campaign.
A day later Assemblyman Art Agnos shelved his gay civil rights bill pending in the California legislature. The support, he said, had evaporated with Bryant’s unexpectedly overwhelming triumph. The next day, a politician of whom few Californians outside Orange County had ever heard, State Senator John Briggs, stood on the wide granite steps of San Francisco City Hall to announce his campaign to remove all gay school teachers from California classrooms. According to some reports, his staff had taken the precaution of calling gay groups so they knew that Senator Briggs would appear. The confrontation between the pugnacious senator and the angry gay demonstrators ensured lead-story coverage around the state, as Briggs insisted San Francisco should be granted “captured nation status” because of the gay influx there.
The gay movement experienced an explosion unprecedented since the first days of gay liberation fronts following the Stonewall riots. Gays who had come to San Francisco just to disco amid the hot pectorals of humpy men became politicized and fell into new organizations with names like Save Our Human Rights and Coalition for Human Rights. No longer was the gay movement the realm of offbeat liberation fairies—as David Goodstein had long called militant gay activists—but a necessary response to a clear and present danger. These young gays might have taken their locker-room beatings at home, because they knew they could always go to San Francisco one day, but once in San Francisco, there was no place else to turn. They wanted more than mild assurances of “tolerance,” the word liberals most frequently used toward gays; they wanted more than social cachét and press coverage.
Ten days after Orange Tuesday, the leaders of the militant San Francisco Gay Democratic Club moved to take decisive action. Vice President Walter Mondale came to Golden Gate Park to address a local Democratic fund raiser on the subject of human rights. Surrounded by pickets, Milk lectured the Democrats entering the event with his trusty bullhorn from a flatbed truck. Dozens of S.F. Gay members, meanwhile, filtered inside the crowd for what was planned to be a silent protest. When Mondale started discussing the finer points of human rights policy in Latin America, dozens of demonstrators silently held up signs asking for a statement on human rights in the United States. A man with little use for such trivial causes as homosexuals, Vice President Mondale clearly was miffed at the sight of gays at his rally, and he turned awkwardly to get support from the Democratic leaders who shared the stage.
“When are you going to speak out on gay rights?” a demonstrator shouted.
With that, a furious Mondale spun on his heel and walked off the stage and out of the rally. The state Democratic chairman turned red when he went to the podium. “Are you glad you disturbed the meeting?” he shouted. “Well, you’re not going to win your fight.”
The Democratic leaders turned to Jim Foster. Why couldn’t he keep his troops under control? Foster knew this new generation of gays were not his troops; he didn’t even try to exert control. Harvey was particularly ecstatic at Foster’s humiliation. “You should’ve seen the bastard squirm,” he told Michael Wong. “You would’ve loved it. Those stupid elected officials were so embarrassed that these usually docile queens were now loud and demanding. I loved it. Maybe now, they’ll realize that Foster and the whole group are frauds. They got what they deserved.”
The liberal establishment was aghast. What happened to all the polite homosexuals these politicians had seen every election year at courteous candidates’ nights and chic cocktail parties? “Their conduct is not only unacceptable in that it violates the right of all to be heard,” George Moscone announced, “but it is also deeply counterproductive.” Counterproductive proved the key word. The Mondale demonstration, the endless marches, and all the new angry rhetoric; toleration is one thing, liberals warned, but all this could lead to a backlash. They had no paucity of evidence to buttress their contention that a backlash could indeed fall on San Francisco.
Random beatings of gays increased sharply in the Castro after Bryant’s win. Not robberies or muggings, just violent attacks. Gays started carrying police whistles and organized street patrols. Harvey and Tom Randol heard a whistle one night and rushed to a beating. While Randol tended the victim, Harvey chased down the attacker.
“Don’t beat me,” the youth pleaded when Milk tackled him.
“No, I’m not going to beat you,” Harvey taunted. “I’m going to take you down to Toad Hall and tell everybody what you tried to do and just let them take care of you.”
Harvey dragged the punk to the victim who, as afraid of the police as he was of the attacker, said he wouldn’t press charges. Milk reluctantly let the kid go, warning, “Tell all your friends we’re down here waiting for them.”
Conservatives had organized their own political backlash against the city’s liberal direction in the form of successful petition drives to put two measures on a special election ballot in August. One measure simply repealed the hard-fought district elections scheme and would keep the election of supervisors on a citywide basis. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein soon emerged as this propostion’s spokesperson. The second, more sweeping measure, not only repealed district elections but in effect recalled Mayor Moscone, District Attorney Joe Freitas, and Sheriff Richard Hongisto. Proponents of this initiative made no small issue of the close connections all three politicians had to the increasingly raucous gays while promoting the proposition in the conservative west side. Were these officials letting homosexuals take over San Francisco?
Liberals also warned that anyone who needed proof of a backlash need go no further than the heavily Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood two miles south of Castro Street, where a police officer-cum-firefighter was making waves as an unorthodox supervisorial candidate out to restore traditional values to San Francisco government. “I am not going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals, social deviates and incorrigibles,” the candidate wrote in his campaign literature. “You must realize there are thousands upon thousands of frustrated angry people such as yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignancies which blight our beautiful city.”
The candidate’s slogan: “Unite and Fight—For Dan White!”
* * *
“Faggot, faggot, faggot.”
No sooner had Robert Hillsborough and Jerry Taylor climbed from their car on that warm night of June 21 than the four attackers
were upon them. The slight, thin Taylor scrambled over an eight-foot fence and hid behind garbage cans, convinced the huskier Hillsborough could handle himself.
Then came the screams: “Faggot, faggot, faggot.” A Latino youth, later identified as John Cordova, was kneeling over the prostrate body of Robert Hillsborough, stabbing him passionately, thrusting the fishing knife again and again into the gardener’s chest, then into his face. Blood stained his hand, spurted into the streets and still he sank his blade into the fallen man; fifteen times he lashed out, sinking the steel into flesh, shouting “Faggot, faggot, faggot.”
* * *
About two hours later, Police Sergeant George Kowalski answered a panicked phone call from the heavily gay Polk Street area. The caller was standing nervously by the pay phone on a street corner when Kowalski found him. He had picked up this guy at a South of Market bar, he told Kowalski, and they were starting to make out at his apartment, but he could swear he felt a gun under this guy’s coat during the first hugs. Fearing his trick was one of the homophobes preying on gays, he had slipped from the apartment to call the police.
Kowalski and the caller cautiously approached the apartment where Al Asmussen sat. Asmussen became agitated and hyperactive when Kowalski asked to check his deputy identification. Kowalski assured Asmussen he would file no report; everything was over as far as he was concerned. But Asmussen still became visibly distraught and hurriedly left the apartment.
At about 3 A.M., a cab driver called police to tell of a car that was idling in the middle of a deserted city intersection, right off the freeway heading for the suburbs. The driver was slumped over the wheel, like he was drunk and passed out. That’s how the police found Deputy Sheriff Al Asmussen, his Smith & Wesson near his right hand. A homicide inspector was briefly called off the Hillsborough murder to check into the case. He didn’t need to do much sleuthing to see this was no homicide, and he went back to work on the Mission district killing. According to the coroner’s report, Al Asmussen had died of “severe laceration to the brain due to a gunshot wound of the mouth.”
* * *
The news of the Hillsborough murder leaped to the front pages. Mayor Moscone ordered the city’s flags flown at half-mast and angrily blamed the killing on the anti-gay campaigns of Anita Bryant and John Briggs. From San Diego came a slight, seventy-eight-year-old widow, Bob Hillsborough’s mother. “I didn’t think much about Anita Bryant’s campaign at first,” said Helen Hillsborough. “Now that my son’s murder has happened, I think about the Bryant campaign a lot. Anyone who wants to carry on this kind of thing must be sick. My son’s blood is on her hands.”
The weeks of spontaneous demonstrations had already made police fear a potential riot at the 1977 annual Gay Freedom Day Parade, scheduled for just five days after the murder, so they raced to solve the crime before the expected throngs took to the streets on Sunday. Though loud in their condemnations of the killing, the city’s liberal politicians started backing away from the gay community. Last-minute problems arose with parade details, for example, problems only the mayor could resolve. Suddenly, however, parade officials found that Moscone simply refused to talk to them. Fearing that association with the gay parade might later prove a liability, many of the city’s leading liberal politicians started phoning gay leaders to insist that last-minute obligations had arisen to prevent their attendance at the event.
The day before the parade, a relieved police spokesman made the announcement. They had arrested four youths—two Latinos, two whites—for the Hillsborough slaying. Two had pegged John Cordova, a nineteen-year-old car mechanic from a heavily Latino suburb, as the slayer.
Nearly 250,000 assembled the next day along the wide Market Street boulevard, more people than had come together in the city for nearly a decade. It would have been difficult for politicians like George Moscone or Joe Freitas to find a more receptive crowd, especially since they faced recall, but they and the many other liberal friends were nowhere to be seen as the quarter million solemnly marched toward the grand City Hall rotunda. Television stations had to rent helicopters to get a high enough vantage point to film the entire parade. Contingents came from as far away as Denver and Alaska. Vast crowds lined the streets. Hour after hour, the demonstrators poured into the Civic Center plaza. The largest group carried uniform placards: Save Our Human Rights. One row of picketers stretched the breadth of a street holding aloft large portraits of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, a burning cross—and the smiling face of Anita Bryant.
As the thousands passed the wide stairs of the majestic City Hall, one marcher dropped a flower over the headline announcing Robert Hillsborough’s murder. Several more followed, the flowers falling for a man few had ever heard of a week ago. A small mound grew and, by the end of the day, thousands upon thousands of blossoms rested silently at the golden-grilled doors of City Hall, all in remembrance of a mild-mannered gardener who had been falling in love all over again just a few days before, on the first warm night of the summer.
* * *
Harvey had long planned to announce his candidacy for the board during the week of festivities that surrounded Gay Freedom Day. The announcement was hardly necessary, since Milk had made no secret he would seek a slot on the board, whether through district or citywide elections. Coming the day after the Hillsborough murder hit the papers, his announcement was buried amid the deluge of other gay news. Harvey didn’t need the extra publicity, however, since virtually every new story about the rapidly changing developments featured some quotable quip from the one gay leader who seemed to echo the sentiments of the young militant gays who, in a few short weeks, had burst to the forefront of the San Francisco gay community. Harvey and Frank Robinson honed the announcement speech just the same, since it would become the standard pitch for the rest of the campaign.
I’ll never forget what it was like coming out.… I’ll never forget the looks on the faces of those who have lost hope, whether it be young gays, or seniors, or blacks looking for that almost-impossible-to-find job, or Latinos trying to explain their problems and aspirations in a tongue that’s foreign to them.
No it’s not my election I want, it’s yours. It will mean that a green light is lit that says to all who feel lost and disenfranchised that you can now go forward.
It means hope and we—no—you and you and you and, yes, you, you’ve got to give them hope.
The hope speech was getting down to its final draft, though for Milk the idea had been a fundamental tenet of his personal philosophy since he had written Joe Campbell after the suicide attempt so many years ago, insisting life was always worth living because life always held hope.
Like most of the city’s supervisorial hopefuls, Milk faced tactical problems because he would not know until after the August special elections whether he would be running citywide or in District 5. Moscone, Freitas, and Hongisto were also laying their political survival plans, which were introduced in a frank meeting with gay leaders. They would have to keep their distance from gays since their gay ties could cost them votes, their strategist told gays bluntly, but they still had to have gay votes to win, and they expected gays to rally around their liberal friends as they had before.
The duplicity angered Milk and he saw it as proof of his contention that in a pinch, liberals could be counted on to protect only themselves. “No longer should we allow any candidate, even our ‘friends,’ to evade the [gay] issue because it will hurt them with the voters,” he publicly railed. “If none appear, then none should get our votes.” Privately, however, Milk and the broad spectrum of other gay leaders had little room in which to maneuver. No acceptable alternatives stood on the horizon, especially if Moscone and Hongisto were thrown out of office. Moreover, the repeal of district elections would negate a cause for which every moderate and liberal interest group in the city had fought for years. David Goodstein broke ranks and supported repeal of district elections. Between the allies of all the city’s major politicians, however, as well as the labor an
d neighborhood activists who had worked for district elections, the Democratic establishment built a mighty political effort for the August election.
* * *
“The last dying gasp of conservatives” was how one analyst sized up the returns on the night of the special election. The proposition to recall Moscone, Freitas, and Hongisto was beaten back by a 2-1 margin, with gay voters backing their allies by a massive 7-1 ratio. District elections won by a slimmer 58-42 percent margin, of which the 3-1 support from gay precincts was a key element. A jubilant Harvey Milk ran into his labor supporter Stan Smith and Smith’s companion, Doris Silvistri, at a victory party. “We won, we won,” he shouted. He brandished an empty petition and offered Smith and Silvistri his pen. “I want you to be the first ones to sign,” he told them. In 1961, Jose had to scour the city for signers for his petition to run for supervisor; Harvey, of course, quickly qualified as a supervisorial candidate in District 5.
* * *
Though John Briggs began making regular pilgrimages to San Francisco to deliver pronouncements on this or that local vice and try to grab more media for his gubernatorial bid, his attempt to get an anti-gay teachers initiative on an early ballot fumbled on legal technicalities. The vote would be delayed until the 1978 elections. The torrid pace that had marked the weeks following Bryant’s victory eased. Many gays were convinced that the gay cause—so close, they had thought, to being a juggernaut—had suffered a massive setback. Harvey Milk, for one, was gleeful at the turn of events, insisting gays should count their blessings. Gay groups had been holding press conferences for years and gained only a trickle of publicity, while it took an Anita Bryant to get the cause on the cover of Newsweek. “No matter which way the vote in Florida went, we won,” he wrote in his column in the Bay Area Reporter, “The word homosexual has now appeared in every household in the country. More good and bad was probably written about it in the last few months than during the entire history of the world. Anita Bryant herself pushed the gay movement ahead and the subject can never be pushed back into darkness.”