by Randy Shilts
The Briggs Initiative may have had the trappings of a moral crusade, and the fundamentalist followers believed that, but for the senator, it was just politics. John Briggs in the eyes of John Briggs was just a politician riding abreast a popular cause. Ronald Reagan had his nonsense about the Panama Canal treaty. Howard Jarvis had his property taxes to complain about. Briggs had his homosexual teachers campaign. Though his gubernatorial attempt failed against much bigger names, he did little to allay speculation that he was gearing up ambitions to seek a U.S. Senate seat in 1980 or 1982. That gays were calling him Adolf Hitler only proved their essential emotional instability, he thought. The private Briggs counted gays lucky that this public crusade was not led by a zealot but a pragmatic politician.
“Aren’t you guys glad I’m leading this and not one of those people from way out in left field?” he asked one gay reporter with whom he had struck a rapport.
The reporter wasn’t sure what Briggs meant.
“I mean, I don’t want to put you people in prison or anything. It could be a lot worse.” Briggs leaned across his desk and asked sincerely, “Aren’t you guys glad this isn’t being led by some crazy?”
If gays constantly harped about Hitler and concentration camps, Briggs had his death threats too. The FBI had caught four members of the Weather Underground crawling toward Briggs’s office with a pipe bomb. Some observers even credited an unusual clause of Briggs’s death penalty initiative to the death threats Briggs himself had received. The clause invoked an automatic death penalty for anyone convicted of murdering a public official in an effort to prevent that official from carrying out his public duties. Many people later noted the irony that Harvey Milk and George Moscone vigorously opposed Proposition 7 while Dan White supported the tough new capital punishment law.
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“I see the Christ moving always to outcasts to stand with them. My own priesthood, my own humanity, ask me to do the same. I stand there this day. I have always stood for them.
“Friends of mine have asked me, ‘Bill, we understand this. But when are you going to stop standing for them and stand honestly as one of us? Can we not see ultimate honesty in the church?’ And so this day, my beloved people, I believe I am called by God Himself not only to stand up for them, but this time, now more honestly, to stand as one of them. I, of course, am speaking about gay people. I am gay.”
A soft rustle swept through the chapel of San Francisco’s Episcopal Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. Some had suspected that the Reverend William Barcus would make such a pronouncement when they saw Supervisor Harvey Milk quietly slip into a rear pew that morning. With only two weeks until election day, many California pulpits turned their attention to Prop 6. That Sunday, fundamentalist preachers around the state recited the Levitican incantations against gays, but the parishioners of St. Mary’s heard a different message; the excesses of the Briggs campaign had gays throughout California running scared and many were fighting back.
“Those of us who have heard the debates and read statements on the subject believe the bigotry and poison spread by John Briggs need speaking to, not only by those studying the phenomenon of homosexuality, but by those of us who can give you a clear example of who we are,” the Reverend Barcus told the congregation. “We who will live with what a ‘yes’ vote on Proposition 6 will mean. Jobs are at stake, yes, but far more importantly, lives are at stake. Countless numbers of lives and professional careers already have been destroyed, and even taken in desparation. I mean suicide. The witch-hunt has already started. Teachers in this state have already been irresponsibly charged with being homosexual, and some are very happily married people. The burden falls hideously upon them now just to prove their innocence. Their innocence of what, in the name of God? The witch-hunt cannot be allowed to continue. You can help by being willing to morally put yourself on the line, not after the fact, not after November 7th, but now.”
The first statewide poll on Prop 6, released in September, showed the measure leading by a whopping 61 to 31 percent margin. Pollsters said they had rarely seen an issue with so much public opinion already galvanized with so few undecided voters. The prognosis rattled the comfortable gays who had easily assimilated their homosexuality into the California life-style. Thousands of homosexuals who had shunned politics for years stepped forward to fight the law in many ways. Frustrated that anti-Briggs campaigners were focusing their work in the heavily populated San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles regions, Frank Vel, an advertising copywriter, quit his job and walked through California’s lightly populated agricultural heartland from the Mexican border to the Oregon state line. An efficient corps of advance people lined up interviews with scores of small-town newspapers along the sweltering 1,203-mile route. News that the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce was about to endorse Prop 6 brought hundreds of angry calls from well-heeled gay shoppers, threatening to have a massive credit card burning on Beverly Hills’ chic Rodeo Drive. The chamber ended up taking a “no position” on the measure. One San Francisco gay man came out of the closet to tell gossip columnists how he had dated John Briggs’s daughter in high school. “Can you really spot one by looking at him?” reporters asked Briggs. A graphics artist created “Homosexual Identification Cards,” which were widely distributed in gay neighborhoods. The cards had boxes to designate assembly areas—Camp Bryant or Camp Briggs—where each homosexual was supposed to report in the event of a special executive order. Even punk rockers got into the act by sponsoring a “Save The Homos” fundraiser, advertised with posters featuring an appropriately tasteless drawing of a speared and bleeding whale.
Bigger guns came in to fight the Briggs Initiative as well. Republicans had long been embarrassed by Briggs’s antics in the state senate, so G.O.P. legislators lined up against Prop 6 in the hope that defeat might finally shut the senator up. Former Governor Ronald Reagan—who had promised to veto any decriminalization of gay sex during his eight-year term as governor—went on record against Prop 6, observing, “Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles.” Briggs brushed off the rebuff, saying Reagan was part of “the whole Hollywood crowd.” Gay insiders, however, credited Reagan’s help to the fact that he had no small number of gays among his top staff. Former President Ford came out against the measure, saying it represented an unconservative expansion of state power. The Catholic and Episcopal Bishops of San Francisco took firm stands against the measure. Boards of education throughout the state also voted opposition to the initiative, fretting over the considerable sums—an estimated $12,000 per teacher—it would take to hold the hearings that would determine whether teachers were guilty as charged. Many heterosexual teachers, meanwhile, promised to clog the school boards with hundreds of confessions that they had violated the “public homosexual conduct” clause. The California Teachers Association, California Federation of Teachers, American Federations of Teachers and the National Education Association, as well as the state AFL-CIO, which sent out 2.3 million slate cards, also took a firm No-on-6 posture. From show business came a panoply of stars who helped raise considerable sums to fight the measure. They ranged from the expected entertainers-cum-politicos like Shirley MacLaine, Ed Asner, and Joan Baez to such normally apolitical figures as Cher, Carol Burnett, Helen Reddy, Donna Summer, Sandy Duncan, Shelly Winters, James Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Natalie Wood. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward sent out a fund raising appeal on their personal letterhead. Ironically enough, it was stars with huge gay followings like Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli who would not take a stand on the issue, following the old Hollywood dictum that taking positions on controversial issues can hurt audience appeal and, therefore, cut profits.
Liberal politicians were often more reticent to take a stand against the measure than the conservatives. Governor Jerry Brown waited until the last minute to state his opposition to the proposal. President Carter said nothing, even after Milk telegrammed repeated pleas for a statement—any statement. “How many lives must be destroy
ed before you speak out?” he asked. What angered Harvey most was that the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce pointedly turned a deaf ear to gay pleas for a “no” stance on Prop 6, saying it had “studied” the issue and would release no position. More proof that the Chamber thought homosexuals were bad for business, Milk complained.
The lack of gut liberal outrage at the Briggs campaign provided more fodder for Harvey’s contention that the future of the gay movement lay not with nurturing liberal friends through high-level politicking, but in forging strong power for gays at the grass roots. “It’s not enough to have friends represent us, no matter how good friends they might be,” he told a statewide caucus of gay Democrats. “If we remain invisible, we will be in limbo, people with no brothers, no sisters, no parents, no positions of respectability. The anger and frustration some of us feel because we are misunderstood—friends cannot feel that anger and frustration. They can sense it in us, but they cannot feel it.… It’s time we have many legislators who are gay, proud of that and do not remain in the closet.”
Such pleas were always followed by Harvey’s insistance that all gays should come out of the closet to show the world that gays indeed were everywhere and not an exotic tribe beamed to San Francisco from Mars. Harvey’s call to come out became as adamant as his protestations that everyone should register to vote. Coming out represented the assertion of personal power, of the personal belief that one person can make a difference and play a role in changing the world. To surrender the opportunity to make a dent in history was to Milk like surrendering the point of one’s very existence. “All human beings have power,” Harvey had said in his 1973 campaign. “You are just one person, but you have power. That makes power so significant.” Harvey’s basic campaign theme hadn’t changed in the five years since then.
Polls, meanwhile, confirmed the political value of gays being up front with friends and relatives. Voters who knew gays personally were twice as likely to support gay rights than those who said they had never known a homosexual. On a fundamental level, however, Harvey was more concerned with what coming out meant to gays themselves than to heterosexuals.
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Miraculously enough, gay factionalism submerged during the campaign, partly because of the steadying hand of the no-nonsense veteran Don Bradley at CVC, and the radicals and moderates coordinated their efforts with a unity previously unknown in the gay movement. In an attempt to head off competition for scarce funds, Milk started the United Fund Against the Briggs Initiative to dole out money to various groups around the state—and, some politicos sniped, to give Harvey’s new protégé, Cleve Jones, a job as its director. The grass-roots politicking at the San Franciscans Against Prop 6 headquarters was also creating a cadre of activists well trained in Harvey’s own brand of meet-the-people campaigning. Once these new volunteers learned the political ropes, Harry Britt took them aside to sign them up as members of Harvey’s San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. By the closing week of the campaign, the club had surpassed the older Toklas club in its ability to get large numbers of volunteers out to the precincts on short notice.
Milk proudly brought Congressman Phil Burton and Mayor Moscone down to his headquarters to show off his humming operation. Once considered a wild-eyed radical himself, Burton smiled at the sight of all these militant gays being drawn from street protests into the nuts-and-bolts politics of the system. Both George and Harvey started making regular Saturday morning visits to the headquarters to give volunteers pep talks as they set out to ring doorbells and canvass precincts. Harvey eagerly accepted invitations from around California, refusing to accept honorariums for his talks. “I’m going to speak out about what I believe in,” he told Anne. “I can’t take money for that.”
Still, many gays around California did nothing—some out of apathy, others out of terror. Every day at City Hall, Anne and Dick Pabich took fearful calls from around the state and the nation. “What happens if it passes?” fearful teachers called to ask. “What do we do—where else is there to go?” Psychiatrists with large gay clienteles reported growing caseloads not only of teachers, but of pediatricians, counselors, and child psychologists who feared that Prop 6 was merely the first step.
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“Harvey, I think there’s gonna be riots if this thing passes,” Cleve Jones warned one day.
“There goddamn better be,” Harvey snapped back.
“When are we going to fight back?” Harvey asked Chris Perry. “I can’t say it because I’m a public official, but for God’s sake, fight back.”
What Harvey did say publicly—certainly was not tepid. “At what point do we say ‘Enough?’” he wrote in his column for the gay Bay Area Reporter. “At what point do we stand up—as a total group—and say we will not allow it to happen any more? Enough is enough! Should we wait until the Bryant camps are built?”
Gay rights lawyers had suits challenging the law’s constitutionality ready to be presented in court the morning after the election. But that was not the response most gays on Castro Street were discussing. Riots. Most activists did not speak of them publicly, but with so many convinced that defeat was inevitable, the potential was never far from the minds of gay activists in the Milk camp. Already many militant gays were circulating a “Statement of Conscience,” swearing to take part in nonviolent civil disobedience if Prop 6 passed. Many were signing up, even though some objected to the inclusion of the term “nonviolent.” The news that the Atlantic-Richfield oil company had contributed to Briggs’s gubernatorial campaign had insiders warning, “If Prop 6 passes, I wouldn’t be around the Castro Street Arco Station on election night.”
Harvey relished the opportunity to caution reporters about possible rioting, always prefacing the warning with, “I’m not for violence, but…” One CBS reporter looked at Milk incredulously when the supervisor brought up the possibility of a violent reaction to the passage of Prop 6. “You mean homosexuals can be violent?” he asked. That comment, if nothing else, made Harvey actually look forward to rioting. That would show them gays weren’t a bunch of pantywaists to be pushed about like sissies in a locker room.
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“The Lord said, ‘Go find me ten righteous men.’”
The Reverend Ray Batema seemed pleased with the analogy, as he sat back in his paneled office behind his Central Pomona Baptist Church, his head silhouetted on a Mexican-made American eagle tapestry, the kind you buy in the parking lots of deserted Exxon stations in San Bernadino County. The Reverend Batema was co-chairman of the Citizens for Decency and Morality—the other co-chairman was John Briggs himself—and he saw no problem with using that Biblical quote from the story of Sodom as the basis of his campaign tactics. “That’s going to be our strategy. We’ll ask each of our people to go find ten righteous men to support morality. And they’ll find ten righteous men and they’ll find ten more.”
“That’s just why we’re going to win this campaign,” commented CVC director Don Bradley upon hearing of the plan. “The other side is a bunch of religious fanatics who won’t be able to put together a campaign.”
Even while gay activists were signing their Statement of Conscience slips, the Yes-on-6 campaigners like the Reverend Batema were sowing their own destruction. Briggs could rally few political figures to his side, so he was surrounded exclusively by fundamentalist preachers who figured that God, not campaign managers, would give them victory. Even as conservative opposition to the measure dried up the Yes campaign’s funding, the preachers were convinced that Batema’s Ten Righteous Men plan would win the election. By late fall, the campaign was broke. In the closing weeks before election day, only three well-known political organizations had endorsed the measure—the state Nazi party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriffs Association. An October poll showed support slipping drastically. In one month, the 61–31 margin for Prop 6 fell to a razor-thin 45–43 lead.
A big boost for gays came in the final weeks of the campaign when President Carter came to Califo
rnia to campaign for Governor Brown’s reelection. Carter had finished his speech and was walking away from the podium when a television microphone picked up Brown telling Carter, “Proposition 6. You’ll get your loudest applause. Ford and Reagan have both come out against it. So I think it’s perfectly safe.” Carter walked back to the mike and added, “I also ask everybody to vote no on Proposition 6.” The crowd cheered wildly, though it was never clear whether Carter actually knew anything more about Proposition 6 than that, by late October, opposing it was a “perfectly safe” stand.
An emboldened Harvey Milk issued a sweeping challenge to debate John Briggs at any place or any time. “He can pick the town and the audience and I’ll ask our supporters not to attend,” Milk said. “His issues are so phony, I think even an audience stacked in his favor would see through them.”
A week before the election Briggs responded, inviting Harvey to debate in his Orange County home turf for an evening sponsored by the “Pro-Family Coalition.” The debate’s location appealed to Harvey. If John Briggs could mount the steps of San Francisco City Hall, Milk could damn well go to Orange County. He was not about to be upstaged. Friends, however, warned of an assassination attempt. The local police offered bodyguards, but Harvey refused. “Listen, you know it’s going to happen and I know it’s going to happen some time,” he said. “There’s no use worrying about it—it’ll happen when it happens.”