by Randy Shilts
The Final Act
Looking tired and spent, the seven women and five men of the Dan White jury filed into the warm, windowless courtroom in the Hall of Justice. Only juror Richard Aparicio, the retired policeman, seemed pleased with his work; he beamed at Dan White as he walked into the room and when White sat motionless, Aparicio rapped his knuckles loudly on the defense table in front of the defendant. The jurors had deliberated thirty-six difficult hours over their decision, producing some speculation that the trial might have created a hung jury, but at 5:28 P.M. on Monday, May 21, the dozen San Franciscans were ready to announce their verdicts.
“Mr. Foreman,” Judge Walter Calcagno asked, “Has the jury reached verdicts in this case?”
“Yes, it has, Your Honor.”
“Will you read the verdicts, please.”
The foreman slowly told the judge that the jury had found Dan White guilty of violating section 192.1 of the penal code in the slaying of George Moscone. Voluntary manslaughter. The judge polled each juror to see if this represented the unanimous verdict. Dan White’s family and the hundred reporters waited anxiously for the Milk verdict, since the second shooting represented the likelier case of murder. His voice quavering, the foreman told the judge that the jury had found White guilty of again violating section 192.1 of the penal code—voluntary manslaughter. The stunned reporters sat motionless, some calculating the sentence for two counts of voluntary manslaughter. Seven years, eight months. With time off for good behavior, White would probably be out of jail in less than five years. Dan White raised his hand to his eyes and cried. Mary Ann White and several of the jurors also broke into tears. Richard Aparicio walked from the jury box to the defense table and gave Doug Schmidt a firm and hearty handshake. Prosecutor Tom Norman sat in stony silence, flushed.
* * *
A radio station had called Cleve Jones’ Castro Street apartment moments before the verdict was announced, so it could get an instant live response from the twenty-three-year-old activist. The reporter had left the receiver sitting next to her own radio connection. Jones could barely believe the words she broadcast: “Oh, my God! I can’t believe it—he got off on both. Manslaughter for Milk. Manslaughter for Moscone.”
From the next room, Cleve’s roommate started shouting that the verdicts had just flashed on the television news.
“What does this mean?” the shaken reporter asked Jones.
“This means that in America, it’s all right to kill faggots,” Jones said. He hung up the phone and raced to the bathroom, where he started throwing up. He remembered the days he had thrown up in gym class bathrooms after getting beat up by high school bullies, he remembered the blood on the wall of the flophouse hotel where he had spent his first night in San Francisco, he remembered the blood on the wall in Dan White’s office where Harvey’s pale blue face had lolled on his dead shoulders, and he threw up some more. By the time Jones emerged from the bathroom, a small crowd had already gathered in his living room, Jones’s militant young friends coming to the Castro apartment where they had assembled to plot marches and demonstrations in years past. Reporters were demanding Jones for instant interviews down on Castro Street, where most TV stations werer setting up their microwave discs to go live.
By a strange twist in timing, the next day, May 22, would have been Harvey Milk’s forty-ninth birthday. Jones and the Harvey Milk Club had long ago planned a street celebration for that night. Once on Castro Street with reporters, Jones was besieged with questions about the planned party.
“Will the reaction to the verdict come here tomorrow night?” a journalist asked Jones.
“No,” Cleve said. “The reaction will be swift and it will be tonight.”
Already, a crowd of several hundred had gathered around the corner of Castro and Market, dazed and angry. Jones raced back to his apartment and searched for the battered white bullhorn Harvey had used in so many street demonstration. He grabbed Milk’s old bullhorn and headed back to Castro Street.
* * *
Dianne Feinstein held an impromptu press conference when she heard the verdict. She had found Harvey’s body, she noted, and had no doubt what the verdict should have been. “As I look at the law,” the mayor said, “it was two murders.”
Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver put her assessment of the verdicts more succinctly. “Dan White has gotten away with murder. It’s as simple as that.”
Supervisor Harry Britt locked himself in his office for forty minutes after hearing the outcome and emerged after 6 P.M. to deliver his own enraged reaction. “Harvey Milk knew he would be assassinated. He knew that the lowest nature in human beings would rise up and get him. But he never imagined that this city would approve of that act. It’s beyond immoral. It’s obscene. This is an insane jury. This man’s homophobia had something to do with this verdict—and it was murder.”
A gallows humor pervaded the city’s newsrooms as journalists started shaping their verdict reaction stories. “Sara Jane Moore got life for missing Gerald Ford,” a reporter commented. “Doug Schmidt’s such a good lawyer he could get sodomy charges reduced to a citation for following too closely,” joked another. Gay journalist Randy Alfred wondered aloud why the jury had not just gone ahead and convicted Milk of “unlawful interference with a bullet fired from the gun of a former police officer.”
Journalist Francis Moriarty was standing next to a police radio when he heard the SFPD dispatcher cheerfully broadcast the verdicts and then burst into a chorus of “Danny Boy.” In the background, another officer started whistling the Notre Dame fight song.
* * *
Cleve Jones clasped his bullhorn firmly as he stared at the milling throng gathering on Castro Street. “Today, Dan White was essentially patted on the back,” he told the crowd of five hundred that had gathered below him, reading their EXTRA editions. “He was convicted of manslaughter—what you get for hit and run. We all know this violence has touched all of us. It was not manslaughter. I was there that day at City Hall. I saw what the violence did. It was not manslaughter, it was murder.”
With the chant of “Out of the bars and into the streets,” Jones started leading the mob down Castro where scores more emerged from each bar. The crowd circled the Castro, past Most Holy Redeemer Church, with its chants:
Out of the bars and into the streets
Dan White was a cop
Out of the bars and into the streets
Dan White was a cop
The crowd surged up Castro again, a thousand strong. There, a wispy, blond-haired young man held a handscrawled sign: “Avenge Harvey Milk.” He was Chris Perry, the first president of what was now the Harvey Milk Club, an old Milk political croney who remembered Harvey telling him seven months before that gays needed to fight back. Perry thought about this and all the times in the past months that he and his friends had been kicked around by thugs and police on the sidewalks of the Castro; today it made sense that, even after his years of registering voters and nudging gays into nuts-and-bolts Democratic Party politics, he should be standing on this corner, a block from Harvey’s old ward headquarters, holding his sign: Avenge Harvey Milk. One year ago that very afternoon, Harvey Milk had been dressed in a clown suit, jumping aboard passing cable cars to tell tourists, “I’m an elected official. I run this city.” A year later, Harvey was only a memory, his ashes spread in the cold waters of the Pacific, but an angry mob took up the chant as it passed Chris Perry’s sign and started down Market Street toward City Hall, and hundreds more joined in from every side street, echoing the mantra of a thousand voices:
Avenge Harvey Milk
Avenge Harvey Milk
Avenge Harvey Milk
As the crowd passed out of the Castro, Cleve sought out the policemen he had been promised a few days before in his stormy meeting with a police captain. “I hope you have my escort.”
“Yes, Mr. Jones,” said the officer, with newfound respect.
New chants rose and fell as the throng, now 1,500 strong, moved down Market Street:
Hit man for the New Right
Dan White, Dan White,
Hit man for the New Right.
And the chant that had become increasingly popular during the mounting tensions of the past months:
Dump Dianne
Dump Dianne
Dump Dianne
Police whistles shrieked at the fading day. The crowd had followed this path so many times before, but today their anger was not directed toward a nebulous electorate in the Midwest and they bore no candles. Slogans rose, evaporated, and were forgotten amid each successive wave of angry mottos that deafened commuters trying to wend their way up Market Street.
All-straight jury
No surprise
Dan White lives
And Harvey Milk dies.
Fresh crimson paint now dripped from the wall of the hamburger joint across the street from City Hall, a few feet from the phone where Dan White had called his wife after the killings: “HE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER.” The crowd had swelled to over five thousand by the time it reached City Hall. The handful of police officers inside were confused. None of the experienced police brass, who had spent so many years of their careers watching courteous homosexuals walking docilely into paddy wagons during the decades of bar raids, could have imagined a gay crowd literally screaming for blood.
Kill Dan White
Kill Dan White
Kill Dan White
The anti-death penalty coalition that had organized the march had a sound system waiting on the wide granite stairs of City Hall, but as the crowd surged toward the building’s glass doors, the handful of officers decided they had to make a stand. They charged up the steps, knocking over the public address system’s generator and mortally mangling the loud speakers’ wiring. The officers quickly retreated back into City Hall as the thousands pressed in upon them. As dusk fell, the first rock crashed through one of the doors and the crowd roared its approval.
The throng had grown far beyond the first five thousand who had marched from the Castro. While the first hundred at the front tried to storm the City Hall doors, thousands more stood by confused, trying to figure out what was going on as the sounds of shattering glass echoed through the darkening sky. A dozen young men tore the gilded grill ornamental work from the front doors and then used the spears to batter through the thick glass at the entrance. Stones hurled from all directions began smashing every first floor window in the building. The outbreak of violence surprised many of the more sedate gays who were expecting another rally. Scuffling broke out between the protesters. As one man hurled a rock, he was confronted with a pair of well-dressed professionals arguing for peace; the professionals were then threatened by a half dozen angry youths who were engulfed by still more gays arguing nonviolence.
The first storming of the doors brought together an odd ensemble of Harvey’s friends, lovers, and cronies, as they dived to the front of the crowd to try to contain the imminent riot. About two dozen joined hands and lined themselves between the mob and the doors. Terror and purpose overwhelmed Harvey’s 1976 campaign manager John Ryckman as he tried to hold back the marauding crowd; Ryckman came from the old school and was truly opposed to any violence. Jim Rivaldo and Dick Pabich thought a violent response was not entirely inappropriate, but tried to hold back the rioters for fear that a riot might harm Harry Britt’s reelection chances. Scott Smith had no doubt that Harvey would have loved the theater unfolding that night, but Smith also remembered how much his former lover had adored City Hall and would have considered any violence against the building to be desecration of good culture. For a dozen reasons, the thin line of monitors held firm, pushing the demonstrators back off the City Hall steps, even while rocks whizzed by their heads and glass sprayed at their feet.
Gay leaders tried to quell the violence. “Harvey. Remember Harvey Milk. He’d be ashamed of us,” shouted Harry Britt. But the crowd knew him only as the man put in office by Dianne Feinstein; they didn’t know who he was then, they didn’t know who he was now. They booed and jeered him. In frustration, Britt screamed, “Stop this. You’re acting like a bunch of heterosexuals.” And the jeers rose again.
A well-known lesbian university professor yelled into a feeble bullhorn, “Harvey Milk lives.” From the mob someone shouted back, “Harvey Milk’s not alive. He’s dead, you fool.”
From the north side of the Civic Center Plaza, a wedge of police appeared. They started their march through the crowd, braving the fusillade of rocks and bottles that flew at them. Relieved at the support, the monitors decided to sit down on the cleared steps to show that they were part of the peaceful gays. The officers quickly reached the stairs, but rather than reinforcing the monitors, they summarily started beating them with their night sticks. The odor of tear gas began to fill the night air as the monitors scrambled for cover, away from the marauding nightsticks. While the police pummeled on, a young man kicked his Frye boot through the window of a lone police car parked in front of City Hall, lit a pack of matches, threw it in the front seat, and watched the upholstery burst into flames. Another man kicked in a newspaper stand and used the street editions to kindle a fire beneath a tree near the City Hall front doors. The flames leaped into the darkness and from the inferno that was once a police cruiser came a loud wail, the shrieking of a melting siren, punctuated dramatically by the dull thud of the gas tank’s explosion. The crowd cheered the sight of the burning police car. From police radios, reporters listened to the codes shifting from warnings of 911’s, broken windows, to 404’s, possibility of riots, and then to 528’s, fire.
The police secured the portico and stood stoically as the mob pelted them with rocks and chunks of asphalt pryed from the street. When other officers attempted further forays into the crowd, the rioters tore up parking meters to ram them back, holding lids from garbage cans as shields. They tore apart massive concrete trash receptacles and hurled the chunks at police, newspeople, any visible symbol of institutional authority.
Police Chief Gain watched the riot unfold from inside City Hall and issued one stern order. Police were not to attack the rioters but simply hold their ground. Even some of the police force’s sternest critics were amazed at the restraint officers showed in those early hours.
Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver decided to wade into the crowd as a last-ditch effort to end the rampage. As she stepped away from City Hall, however, a chunk of concrete hit her in the face and she had to be carried back through the glassless doors.
Mayor Dianne Feinstein arrived at City Hall at 8:30 P.M. While she huddled with aides and supervisors, more rocks crashed through her second-floor office, allowing tear gas to waft in from the night. The group retreated to the supervisors’ offices, where Feinstein was greeted by the sight of Silver stretched on a couch, her face streaming with blood. Downstairs, standing in neat rows between the pillars of City Hall’s marble-floored lobby, scores of police waited in full riot gear. Each new wave of shouting and each successive onslaught of missiles stiffened them further. Many beat their clubs rythmically against the columns. Their tempers throbbed as they heard that other police outside were being ordered to only stand their ground as the rioters taunted and stoned them.
The police cars that had escorted the marchers from the Castro had lined up on the north side of the Civic Center Plaza, deserted hours ago during the early moments of rioting. Cleve Jones was stunned as he watched a dozen gay men with helmets and clubs start darting from car to car, coordinating their actions with intricate hand signals. The youths would first kick in a car window, light a book of matches, throw it onto the car’s upholstery and then methodically fan the flames until the blaze was well underway. Within minutes, a block-long line of police cars had burst into flames, their gas tanks exploding and their melting sirens screeching into the cool May night. Several of the braver rioters leaped into the broken basement windows of City Hall and set fire to printouts in the city’s computer center. Police rushed from the lobby to squelch the flames.<
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Nearly three hours after the first rock had shattered the City Hall doors, a wide wedge of officers appeared, the flames of the burning police cars casting ominous shadows on their helmets. They marched sternly into the pandemonium, beating their batons on the pavement before them like a Roman legion out to make their final conquest. Minutes after wading into the crowd, small groups of police broke away from the wedge to take on knots of rioters. With the formation destroyed, Civic Center plaza became a mélange of skirmishes between gays and police. Police were surprised and enraged at the depth of resistance they encountered. Gays beat back police with branches torn from trees, chrome ripped from city buses, and slabs of asphalt torn from the street. As a young man torched a last police car, he shouted to a reporter, “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies.”
The fighting edged further into the night, and slowly, as the police forced the rioters from Civic Center, the battles dispersed to the side streets around City Hall as random cadres of police confronted the odd groups of hoods and hustlers who took advantage of the City Hall melee to begin looting stores. Civic Center soon turned from a grim portrait of chaos to an empty wasteland of broken glass and smoldering police cruisers.
Mayor Feinstein held a midnight press conference, praising the police restraint and promising to get on with the business of putting the city back together. The riots represented the most violent episode in city history since the racial rioting of 1966, but, Feinstein noted, not one person was killed that night and none of the reported injuries was critical. “The city,” she said, “is secure.”
As reporters left the press conference, however, policemen standing guard around City Hall seemed anything but in control. “The faggots had their day,” a cop shouted to no one in particular. “We’ll get ours.”
* * *
Cleve Jones escaped being hunted down by the roving bands of police by hitching a ride on the back of a punk rock songstress’s motorcycle. Once home, Jones climbed the fire escape of his apartment building to see if trouble had spread to the Castro. Below him were the silhouettes of dozens of helmeted officers gearing up for new action.