by Randy Shilts
10. Don’t stop.
Harvey’s new friendship with Amador gave him rare chances to escape the tensions of home and office to stay in what became his own room in Don’s comfortable home. One day, Amador and his lover returned to find the house covered with orange juice promotional signs. “Orange Juice Just Isn’t for Breakfast Anymore” posters hung from the chandeliers while o.j. cardboard table tents covered all counters and promotional bumper stickers graced the windows. Harvey had a new boyfriend, an employee of Anita Bryant’s boss, the Florida Citrus Commission. Bob Tuttle had seen Harvey standing alone after speaking at a Los Angeles gay rally. It seemed funny to see somebody that important standing all by himself, Tuttle thought, like a lost little boy. “I just want to tell you that I appreciate what you’re doing because if this ever turns against us, you’ll be the first one they go after,” Tuttle impulsively told him. Milk beamed back, “Yeah, I know.”
Tuttle was twenty-eight, but looked all of twenty-one, an appearance that put him in Harvey’s favored age bracket, so the pair started a long-distance romance. During a four-day stay at Tuttle’s Venice Beach apartment, Harvey confided he was then having his longest vacation in six years.
* * *
During another visit to Amador’s, the phone rang. A young voice said he had read about Don in a People magazine story about Amador’s gay courses. He was seventeen years old, in Richmond, Minnesota, he explained—and about to kill himself because his parents were going to institutionalize him for being gay. Harvey took the call, confident he could do some crash counseling; the young man was, after all, the lonely teenage constituent for whom Harvey had tailored all his candidacies. “Run away from home,” Harvey urged. “Get on the bus, go to the next biggest city—New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, even Minneapolis, it doesn’t matter. Just leave.”
The young man started crying. He was confined to a wheelchair and couldn’t get on any bus he said. That moment marked one of the only times Amador would ever see tears come to Harvey’s eyes. Everything was so much more goddamn complex than he could say in his hope speech.
thirteen
Willkommen Castro
“On this spot, four days ago, a young citizen was murdered because he was a homosexual”
Ribbons in the colors of the Catalonian province, yellow and orange, laid silently on the street next to the cardboard flowers by the hand-scrawled epitaph. It had been years since Cleve Jones fulfilled his adolescent dream and come to San Francisco for his first San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Like most of his friends, he too had been swept up in the tide of militance after the Anita Bryant controversy. Weeks after Orange Tuesday, he had left his Castro Street apartment to take a hitchihiking tour of Europe. In Barcelona, he had heard there would be a rally, here, where the blood of a gay man had spilled just four days before. The fledgling Spanish gay activists were cautious as they first approached the spot. This was the first gay demonstration since the death of Francisco Franco, they explained to Cleve; that meant the first gay demonstration in Spanish history. Ever.
Slowly, the momentum grew as Jones and a cadre of the braver gays marched down Los Ramblos from the waterfront to the Catalonian provincial capitol. From nowhere, La Guardia Civil appeared, firing rubber bullets into the crowd. Jones turned to see bullets tear off the scalp of the woman marching at his side. Blood, broken glass, and tear gas filled the streets. Rather than surrender, the gay protestors launched into an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the police through the winding alleys and lanes of Barcelona. They took the chairs and tables from sidewalk cafés and built barricades, taunting the police to fire on. Cleve threw his first rock. The street fighting in Barcelona excited his long latent anger even more than the frenzied chanting of the San Francisco demonstrations after Orange Tuesday. When the days’ fighting waned, he wrote a long letter enthusiastically recounting the day to a friend; the letter was widely reprinted in gay papers across the country. When Jones returned to Castro Street that fall to work in Harvey Milk’s supervisorial campaign, he still talked ecstatically of that day in Barcelona. He had suddenly realized that the gay movement meant more than an annual parade and that it would soon be bigger than anyone imagined; too much anger simmered beneath the surface, all over the world.
Jones couldn’t have come to a time and place that could better nourish that conviction. A sense of gay manifest destiny gripped San Francisco by 1978, as if it were ordained that homosexuals should people the city from sea to shining bay. Harvey’s bold public role as Castro Street’s neighborhood supervisor—and the national publicity he garnered as the city’s gay spokesperson—certainly fueled that attitude. But the import of the San Francisco gay phenomenon had implications far beyond the pillared walls of City Hall, and the gays of San Francisco saw themselves as the avant-garde of a burgeoning national movement.
Dade County marked the beginning, not the end, of organized opposition to the gay civil rights cause; the issue moved to the forefront of the nation’s social agenda. Fundamentalists filed petitions in rapid-fire succession in St. Paul, Wichita, Seattle, and Eugene to repeal local gay-rights ordinances. Even more significantly, State Senator John Briggs was targeting his initiative for the November general election ballot, when one in ten American voters went to the polls to vote for, among other offices, California governor.
Gays seemed on the defensive around the country. The Oklahoma legislature enacted their own version of Briggs’s proposal to ban gays from teaching in public schools. From Oklahoma City soon afterward came the news that one hundred teenage boys had formed their own Klu Klux Klan chapter and had picked gay bars as their primary targets, slashing tires and beating patrons with baseball bats. In nearby Arkansas, the legislature took up a bill that not only banned gays from teaching, but denied credentials to gays in the fields of pediatrics, psychiatry, child psychology and youth counseling. Moreover, the bill empowered the state to strip existing licenses from anybody discovered to be gay and penalized gays caught lying about their sexuality by five years in prison. Adolf Hitler had started his final solution for Jews by just such methodical, restrictive legislation, and the analogy was not lost on the startled gays of San Francisco. The pink triangle, which Hitler forced gays to wear in his death camps, soon became the most prominent symbol of the San Francisco gay rights movement.
The courts provided few hopes for judicial remedies. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to even hear the case of a Tacoma teacher with a flawless record who was fired from his job not for any misdeed, but solely because his principal learned of his homosexuality. In a more extreme case, the Supreme Court refused to review the conviction of a North Carolina man guilty solely of having sex with another man, a proverbial consenting adult. The Jacksonville police admitted they had recruited the man to entice their prey, a local massage parlor owner, and that the eventual seduction was “deliberate and planned.” The man was sentenced to nine months in prison for committing a crime that according to Dr. Kinsey’s statistics, one in 10 Americans routinely indulge—and the Supreme Court would not even listen to arguments that the man’s privacy and equal protection rights might have been violated.
Given the courts’ timidity on homosexual issues, gays didn’t feel any more reassured when Anita Bryant gave a long magazine interview in which she said gays should be locked up for at least twenty years if convicted of commiting just one homosexual act. “Any time you water down the law, it just makes it easier for immorality to be tolerated,” she explained. “Why make it easier for them? I think it only helps condone it and this makes it easier for kids who wouldn’t be so concerned. If it were a felony, [it] might make them think twice, especially the younger ones.” Of course, Bryant held out hope for salvation. “They’ll have plenty of time to think in prison,” she said.
Though a few dozen congressmen bravely introduced federal gay rights legislation, hopes of any congressional action withered; few major national politicians wanted to take the risk of being tied to gays. In an effort to
recruit a big-name speaker for his San Francisco Gay Democratic Club and to get a major public figure to stand with gays against their increasingly virulent opposition, Harvey Milk sent letters to President Carter, Senator Edward Kennedy, Governor Jerry Brown, and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, imploring them to make some kind of pro-gay statement, hopefully at an S.F. Gay dinner. Each letter ended with a plea roughly like the one Harvey sent to Carter:
Sooner or later, the massive gay population will indeed win their rights, as other groups have already done. Sooner or later, the strife and anger and hatred and violence against gay people will be put aside. What we seek now is to leap over the many years and great turmoil that will take place by having the person who represents these people speak out now.
A Carter aide sent back a two-sentence reply a week later explaining the President had prior commitments, but that he “appreciates your thoughtfulness and sends his best wishes.” Julian Bond wrote to say he had forwarded the request to his booking agent.
* * *
Fear and anger dominated many street-corner conversations among the young women and men who had moved to Castro Street. Though representing the entire spectrum of American life, most of the migrants—like most Americans—came from typical middle-class, mid-American backgrounds, so they were not prepared to have their backs shoved up against the wall for any reason. They may have grown up being called queers and getting beat up in locker rooms, but the attacks were so pervasive in the broad psychological and physical scope that the enemy barely seemed tangible. Now the threats could be defined as flesh and blood religious activists mounting concrete political efforts for specific election days. It was all so … so real. Cleve Jones started spreading word among his many street friends in the neighborhood as the day of the first post-Miami referendum vote neared in St. Paul. “Now is the time for us to get our army together,” he said.
* * *
A preternatural smile spreads slowly, tremulously across Pat’s lips while she speaks, as if the forty-six-year-old southern California housewife can almost see the Sunday School picture of Jesus Christ drifting into sight. “And the Bible says that just before Jesus comes to take all Christians to heaven, there will be times when men will have unnatural affections toward other men,” she says calmly, her smile never losing its benevolence. “Then, God says He will visit great wrath upon the earth.”
A few hours earlier, Pat had sat in the front pew of the Central Baptist Church of Pomona and filled out the three-by-five index cards on which newly saved Pomonans recorded their vital statistics before wading toward the promise of ever-lasting life in Central Baptist’s plastic-walled baptismal font. Last Tuesday, Pat had had her first day of work in a different kind of heavenly project, though she saw it as no less essential to her salvation than her daily prayer studies. That’s when Pat had folded fliers for the California Defend Our Children Committee, the political arm of State Senator John Briggs’s efforts to ban gay teachers from public schools. Like Cleve, Pat saw herself as part of an army, one of the “foot soldiers of God” that Anita Bryant talked so glowingly about. Pat had never taken part in politics before, but this was clearly different. “This isn’t politics,” she insisted, “it’s the Lord’s work.”
Gay leaders had made a vast mistake in 1977 by underestimating the intense dedication of the legions of born-again Christians because of the ease with which their spokespeople could be dismissed. John Briggs, for example, scarcely made a secret of the fact that he viewed his anti-gay teachers’ drive as little more than a publicity stunt for his gubernatorial bid. Anita Bryant’s later confessions about her own love life also made it unlikely that she would be God’s number one draft choice to throw the first stone. Behind these foppish leaders, however, were an ardent corps of true believers who were only beginning to flex their political muscle in 1978—and the issue that initially motivated them was fighting against homosexual rights.
Religious revivals have swept America at fairly regular intervals since the nineteenth century, and throughout the mid-seventies a substantial revival of evangelical fundamentalism had swept the country’s heartland. Thousands of generally sincere born-again Christians echoed Pat’s fears about the Final Days in the early months of 1978 and went on to stir up the most frenzied fundamentalist politicking since Prohibition. In St. Paul, fifty couples from the Temple Baptist Church spent weekends going door to door with the provocative question: “Would you want your children taught by an overt homosexual?” Without much problem, the couples quickly collected enough signatures to put that city’s four-year-old gay rights law up for a repeal vote in late April. In Wichita, like-minded parishioners of Glenville Bible Baptist Church had circulated petitions to put that city’s new gay rights law up for a referendum vote two weeks after the St. Paul election. A similar movement of fundamentalists in the mellowed-out college town of Eugene, Oregon, followed suit and petitioned to have that city’s gay rights law on a special election ballot just two weeks after Wichita’s. A Seattle coalition of fundamentalists, Mormons, and members of the John Birch Society successfully put another repeal measure on the Queen City’s general election ballot in November.
The quick series of repeal referenda that swept west from Miami startled gay activists, who grew convinced that they were the victims of a massive New Right conspiracy. Though this initial politicization of fundamentalists over the homosexual issue certainly went on to aid the subsequent New Right emergence, gays in 1978 were the victims of nothing more vile than a conspiracy of belief. “Look right here,” explained a housewife volunteer at the Wichita anti-gay headquarters when a San Francisco reporter asked for her ideaological impetus. She whipped out a pocket-sized Bible and started poring over the dozen fairly specific scriptural condemnations of homosexuality. “Look what happened to Sodom and to even the world of Noah’s day when they turned away from what God said,” she goaded. The fact that the nation’s gay Mecca sat smack on the nation’s most unstable earthquake fault only buttressed her case, she thought. Debating such campaigners produced negligible results. As one California fundamentalist shouted at a lesbian activist during a heated exchange at a Briggs organizing meeting, “You can argue with me, lady, but you can’t argue with God.”
Few groups were as evenly suited to battle each other as gays and fundamentalists. Both gays and evangelicals shared a profound experience that shaped their politicking; they had both been born again. For evangelical Christians, it was a theological experience, finding God in a sinful world. For gays, it was a social experience called “coming out,” expressing one’s gay sexuality and identity in a generally hostile heterosexual world. For both sides, the born-again experience usually meant breaking with the past, establishing a new social network and building a new life, one that was happier than the life left behind. Both sides also put great faith in the necessity for testifying to the born-again experience. Fundamentalists did this in their routine rounds of testimony for the Lord; gays did this by acknowledging their homosexuality to friends and relatives, a move that practically represented an article of faith for those in the gay movement. Both camps also saw themselves in an ultimate struggle. For gays, that meant the eradication of prejudice; for fundamentalists, it was the scripturally demanded battle against sinners and their sins. Most significantly, the costs for losing the struggle were incredibly high. During the fundamentalists’ anti-gay groundswell of 1978, gay activists talked ominously of how failure could lead to a Hitleresque extermination of gays. Born-again Christians needed to go no further than Revelations to see that gays were the harbingers of the Final Days, times when Christians must fight sin or go to hell. Both sides, however, stood on polar opposites of society, with fundamentalists calling for a return to the most traditional American morality while gays stood for some of the least traditional social values. The troops of both sides were also incredibly motivated—gays were fighting to keep themselves out of modern-day Dachaus while, for fundamentalists, fighting gay rights became the surest way to
keep their polyester leisure suits from melting in hell.
The rhetoric flared. Homosexuality, said Wichita’s anti-gay spokesman, the Reverend Ron Adrian, “is a sin so rotten, so low that even dogs and cats do not practice it.” The brochure from the St. Paul Citizens Alert for Morality outlined the frightening world facing fundamentalists in the Twin Cities:
They’ve opened gay rap parlors, saunas, and night clubs supported by extensive advertising obviously aimed at the “uncommited” as well as their own kind. They’ve imported gay films for public showings. Again, obviously welcoming the “uncommitted.” They’ve infiltrated state and city government offices and other activities, including the clergy, with homosexuals or sympathizers.
A Seattle anti-gay spokesperson chose more nostalgic phrases when she called on “Christian patriots” across America to help their anti-gay effort, saying, “This would be a step forward in preservation of Aryan culture and western civilization.”
The widespread attacks hit a movement that suffered from factionalism and had little national direction. Only a handful of gay groups could claim a national constituency, and they often lacked funds to carry on a meaningful effort. The leader of one national gay organization, for example, had to supplement a meager salary by illicitly running counterfeit transit tokens for organized crime. This moonlighting was even known to members of the group’s board of directors, one of whom shrugged, “I guess it shows we should pay more money.” The lack of a major national group forced each city to sink or swim on its own, while the leaders who claimed to speak for gays nationally—generally based in New York—took to calling the referenda local ‘brushfires’ that could not be tended by the national organizations.
Harvey Milk railed on about fundamentalists being the new Nazis, but privately Harvey, for one, was thrilled at the turn the gay rights fracas had taken. News about one or another initiative made the papers daily, reaching into the homes of every American family, including those of closeted teenagers who would grow up hearing of homosexuality as a civil rights issue, not just a matter of sin, crime or perversity. Liberals may have passed the laws, but in so vociferously seeking their repeal, the born-again Christians had aided the gay cause much more profoundly by making gay rights a daily conversation topic.