Harvey pushed it aside to see Jack hanging from a rope attached to the ceiling. The half hour that Harvey had been delayed at city hall convinced Lira that he was playing second fiddle to Harvey’s job. He might have thought that Harvey would be only five or ten minutes late and would arrive in time to see him kicking and cut him down.
A grief-stricken Harvey found a knife and cut the rope, then called the police and an ambulance for help. It was much too late.
The papers and television stations reflected how Harvey felt. Not all of their readers or viewers felt the same way.
Harvey told me he had gone to work the next day; there was nothing more he could do. The first phone call he received was from an irate elderly woman asking when was he going to fix the pothole in front of her house.
I often wondered why Harvey didn’t pick up his briefcase and walk out of city hall for good. For all of Jack’s faults Harvey had loved him to the bitter end and thought that somehow he could help him.
The rest of us sympathized, but we knew better.
The one thing that helped was when Harvey went to the funeral and met Jack’s family. Their sympathy was more for Harvey than for the deceased. Jack had been an alcoholic, headstrong, and full of self-pity all his life. His family had tried to help him, but everybody had failed. When Jack had started to go with Harvey, they all knew Jack was on a short string, and it was only a matter of tine.
Harvey’s win at the polls was a symbol of change. Attitudes toward gays were becoming different. San Francisco, and especially the Castro, was the mecca they traveled to. It was estimated that at one time 150,000 or more gays made up a good part of San Francisco’s 750,000 population.
There were a number of gay political groups in the city, but Harvey was now “head queen.” He had an enormous audience that he played to at the Castro Street Fair. There were booths selling food and beer and various trinkets. At one end of the two blocks of the fair (it became much larger later) there was a band, and if you were lucky, maybe Sylvester, the favorite singer in the Castro, would be on stage. And there was always the chance of meeting a friend for the evening. The uniform of the day was Levi’s, boots, and a T-shirt if it was warm so you could show your pecs.
The party wasn’t just for gays—it was for anybody in the city who dropped by. Whatever else could be said about them, gays knew how to throw a party.
And then there was the Gay Pride Day Parade, held on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village. The parade would start at the foot of Market Street and wind up at the mall in front of city hall. There would be politicians waving at the crowd from convertibles, floats for the various political organizations, several bands, and—naturally—floats sponsored by the bathhouses featuring musclemen in Speedos gyrating to phonograph music.
When the parade ended, there was always the grassy mall to sun yourself and eat hot dogs and ethnic food. At the far end would be a platform and usually Harvey giving a speech.
It was a great place to meet and greet strangers who might not be strangers for long. You hadn’t come to San Francisco to spend the night by yourself.
The first parade I went to had perhaps a quarter of a million spectators, not counting those stretched out on the mall.
With time the parades grew more serious but they always opened with the “dykes on bikes” roaring up Market to open the parade. In the first parade the riders were braless but became more sedate in later parades. There were stilt walkers, marching bands, baton throwers, political contingents of gays, and in front of city hall, booths peddling hot dogs and Korean dishes, kids selling ice cream bars, and always, booths touting the virtues of this and that political group and handing out flyers.
The Castro was getting to the point where it was overflowing; there were new arrivals every day. You could live a life in the confines of Castro Street and never meet a straight man. There were gay restaurants with gay cooks and waiters, offices for gay doctors and lawyers, and gay bookstores.
On Friday and Saturday nights there were lines of men standing before the bars waiting to get in. Sexual tension was strung across the street like piano wires. And if you were unlucky in finding a partner in the bars, there were always the bathhouses. Strip and wrap a towel around your waist, then wander the hallways looking through open doors at the men on the inside, most of them naked and waiting.
A few years later a friend told me he had had five thousand sexual partners. Do the math and you realize that not a day had gone by for ten or fifteen years when he was not having sex with somebody.
By this time I was thoroughly nonjudgmental no matter what. But I kept thinking that considering the number, he couldn’t possibly have remembered what they did or all their names and faces.
There were some upper-class bars as well, the best known being the Corner Grocery Bar. The jukebox featured nothing but operatic arias, and every Sunday there were recitals by talented locals or those singers performing in shows downtown.
One time I picked up a young man at the Corner Grocery Bar, and once in bed he started crying. I didn’t know why and he couldn’t tell me. I dressed and did my best to cheer him up and then it occurred to me that he was suddenly faced with the prospect of doing something that he wanted to do but in the back of his head were the strictures put there by his parents and his church and the public attitude. If that was so, it was a problem he couldn’t handle.
There weren’t many like that. The Castro was a sexual candy store, as Cleve Jones, Harvey’s talented rabble-rouser with the bullhorn, once said. But it wasn’t without its penalties. If there were lines forming outside the bars on Friday and Saturday night, in a week or two there would be lines at the medical center downtown. It was also a meeting place—a quick shot for clap and in a few days you and your new partner would shack up in his bed or yours.
Two friends of mine used to have breakfast together close to the window on the street. As the men passed the window my friends would count which ones they had slept with, and the one who counted more paid the bill.
There were a few who partnered up and were loyal to each other and some who had “open” relationships—faithfulness to one’s partner was not always expected. “Marriage,” as such, was usually frowned upon. It was a “straight” practice and not held in high repute. Those who came from broken homes or who had parents who didn’t love each other could be forgiven. They had no role models they could look up to or serve as guides through popularly accepted sexual practices. And then there were those who had loving parents but had simply been born that way. (In a family with three or four boys, it was the youngest son who was usually the gay one.)
During the day, especially during the summer, shirtless, well-built men would stand along “Hibernia beach”—the wall of the Hibernia Bank on Castro (now a branch of the Bank of America). They were there to be admired or perhaps to find partners for the night. They usually weren’t disappointed.
It was a curious dichotomy. Those who wanted to be “gay” were right at home in the Castro. But once you got beyond the confines of Seventeenth and Market, or caught the bus to go downtown, it was a different story. Harvey Milk was one of the very few citizens of the Castro who was openly gay to the entire world. He hid from nobody. Most of us envied him the ability to be himself no matter what. The teller who waited on you at the bank downtown, the clerk in Macy’s, or the waiter on your table at lunch might be living two lives, but they made sure you only knew of one.
At night some might pocket little vials of pills and go to the bathhouse for a night of “unendurable ecstacy, indefinitely prolonged” with one or many partners, but downtown nobody knew it.
In the back of almost every gay’s head were the memories of the city or town they had come from. Of being bullied in the schoolyard, hit when nobody was watching, their heads pushed down the toilet by other students anxious to prove how butch they were, who called them names that cut or made fun of them behind their backs.
That life t
hey definitely kept to themselves. This might be San Francisco, where almost anybody could be anything, but past memories were too much to overcome. In a few years they would pay a horrifying price for their silence in a country that would consider them anything but honorable citizens, that would go out of its way to pass laws to punish them, and when they got sick and died it would be because they deserved it. If you were gay, few people held your life very dear.
In a few decades gays would discover once again that they were the last group in the country that suffered permissible prejudice. And depending on the circumstance, it was all right to kill gays. Parents who found out their boy was gay were horrified and did everything possible to “change” him, including sending him to psychiatrists and other doctors who would give him shots of only God knew what to “correct” his hormonal system.
(That wasn’t restricted to the United States. In England, Alan Turing, the man who had broken the Nazi submarine code and saved the British Isles, was caught with a rent boy and given injections of hormones to make him “straight.” When Turing started to grow breasts, he committed suicide. The country he had saved had rewarded him by killing him.)
In the eyes of religious conservatives, the Castro was Sodom and Gomorrah. For many gays, it was Camelot.
For a while it seemed like things might change. In January 1977, the Dade County Commission in Florida voted 5 to 3 to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and “public accommodations.” It was the first time a southern political entity had passed a gay rights law, joining cities such as St. Paul, Detroit, Seattle, and Minneapolis. By late spring, the total of states and cities that had decriminalized consenting adult sexual acts had grown. Wyoming was the nineteenth state to join the group.
Few people made a fuss about it except a mediocre singer who flacked for Florida orange juice.
Anita Bryant considered the commission’s decision as flaunting the Almighty. At first, nobody paid any attention to her. (Gays, of course, stopped drinking orange juice.) If pressed too hard in debates, Anita Bryant would endear herself to her fans by singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Much to the surprise of most gays, Bryant’s campaign caught fire, and on June 7 Dade County voters repealed the new law by two to one. The antigay fervor spread across the country, and fundamentalists filed for repeal of gay rights ordinances in Seattle, Eugene, Wichita, and St. Paul. In Oklahoma teenage gangs beat patrons in gay bars with baseball bats. In Arkansas the legislature considered a bill even more draconian that would ban gays from teaching and revoke their credentials in pediatrics, child psychology, and psychiatry. It you had a license, it would be taken away. If you lied about being gay, you could be sent to prison for five years. (Given their druthers, the voters in Wichita would probably have passed a law authorizing castration for any boy caught masturbating behind the barn.) Not to be outdone, Bryant introduced a bill that would send a man to prison for twenty years if he committed one homosexual act.
All of this was not lost on California state senator John Briggs, who introduced Proposition 6 in the state legislature, which would have prevented gays from teaching in the public schools. It also meant that gay teachers could not drink with a friend in a gay bar or even discuss homosexuality in the teachers’ lounge.
This time Briggs had overreached himself, and opposition started to build. The teachers’ unions rejected it, and even President Ronald Reagan came out against it.
“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not contagious,” Reagan said.
Most gays—myself included—were frightened by the antigay wave sweeping the country. It was Harvey who had the guts to do something about it. He decoyed Briggs into debating his Proposition 6 up and down California. It was a risky thing to do—Harvey was already getting death threats, and they would only increase if he fought against Prop 6, the welcome weapon of the righteous conservatives. His stack of hate mail was growing larger by the day, and he once showed me some. The writer would dismember Harvey and stuff his privates into his mouth. Others were a little less uncouth, but all had the same message: Harvey Milk would be killed.
It was probably this that made Harvey dictate a number of copies of his last will and testament in the event he should be murdered. He gave me a copy, and I threw it in my desk drawer and told him he was being morbid. He expected it, he said. If they could get President Kennedy, they could certainly get a lowly supervisor.
He didn’t take me on his tour of the state—he didn’t need a writer (I didn’t think he ever needed one—he didn’t lack the talent, he lacked the time).
His one-liners were priceless.
“How would you teach homosexuality? Like you’d teach French?”
“If little girls copied their teachers, there would certainly be a lot more nuns running around.”
Proposition 6, which had started with a sixty-to-forty majority, was now fighting an opposition that had started to build. The teachers’ unions had come out against it, and people were impressed by Harvey’s courage in debating Briggs, even in the red-hot middle of the Republican bastion of Orange County. If he was going to be shot anyplace, Orange County was the most logical spot. All of us were afraid for him.
The kiss of death for Briggs was when Jimmy Carter came to town campaigning for the presidency. As he was leaving the speakers’ platform, Governor Jerry Brown ran up to him and suggested he tell the audience to vote against Proposition 6. (Carter, Brown said, had nothing to lose.) Carter returned to the microphone and said, “And I want everybody here to vote against Proposition 6.”
Proposition 6, which had started with a sixty-to-forty margin, lost by the same amount. The frosting on the cake was that on the same night voters in Seattle rejected the even more draconian Proposition 13.
The back of the antigay movement had largely been broken, and gays danced in the street at Castro and Market.
They didn’t dance for long.
XXIV
THE GAY PRIDE Parade that year was huge. The year before it had shrunk to something like a quarter of a million (the “friends of gays” and their acolytes had failed to show). The name of the game was to show solidarity against Prop 6. Doctors, lawyers, Teamsters—every group had a contingent in the parade. The count this time was 350,000—almost half the population of San Francisco was strung out along Market Street. It wasn’t all gays—this time sympathetic straights had their contingents as well.
But the ten days toward the end of the year were to be more than any city could have taken.
Earlier in the year the Reverend Jim Jones had moved his entire congregation of close to a thousand down to Guyana, a country on the northern coast of South America, to start a small paradise of their own. Most of the city’s politicians were sorry to see him go. He was every politician’s helper—you needed people to hang doorknob posters early in the morning? Jones could lend you a few hundred from his congregation. It didn’t matter what side you were on; Jones played both. That way he couldn’t lose no matter who won—they were all beholden to Jones.
Once Jones had left, reporters started snooping around, searching for corruption by Jones. It wasn’t hard to find. Later there were notes and letters from some of his parishoners in Guyana saying they wanted to leave but Jones wouldn’t let them go.
One week Jones’s wife sent Harvey a letter saying she’d seen a photograph of him in the newspapers and he looked worn out. Why didn’t he come down for a week or two and rest up? When Harvey told me about it, I warned him not to go, that the papers were digging up a lot of dirt on Jones, and the more space he put between himself and Jones, the better. Jones had helped all the politicians in town, including Harvey, lending him a small offset machine and an operator to work it, printing flyers for Harvey.
Harvey wouldn’t have gone anyway; too much to do back here. But the complaint by some of Jones’s parishioners that they were being held against their will got to Congressman Leo Ryan, and he decided to go down and have a look, maybe talk to Jones. With him w
ent an NBC photographer and several members of Ryan’s staff.
Whether some of the disaffected got to Ryan, I don’t know, but I was pretty sure he talked to Jones himself. The group went back to the plane, tailed by a truck with some of Jones’s men in it. As Ryan and company were getting into the plane, the men in the truck opened fire, killing Ryan and the photographer and injuring some of the others. Those still alive managed to get into the plane, which promptly flew back to Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. Police were sent to investigate, and what they found was horrifying.
Jones and his parishioners had committed suicide. Jones’s wife, who had written Harvey, was found with her throat slit, along with her two children. Some of the others were shot, but most had been forced—or perhaps volunteered—to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Nobody was spared; babes in arms had had the Kool-Aid forced down their throats.
Jones’s church and its parishioners were mostly San Franciscan, and the city made headlines all over the country. Mayor Moscone was appalled, as were the city’s officials and inhabitants.
The election results grabbed the headlines in a few days, and relatives of Jones’s parishioners, mostly black people plus a scattering of white converts, were left to grieve by themselves.
But Fate wasn’t through with San Francisco, and the next disaster to hit it was equally as horrifying.
Dan White, the All-American boy from the conservative section of the city, had been elected to the Board of Supervisors, along with Harvey. What was important to the Police Department, the real estate boards, and business interests was that the presence of White on the board preserved the board’s conservative outlook, despite the presence of a liberal mayor and that noisy liberal, Harvey Milk.
There was one major fly in the ointment that would lead to the city’s second major headline-grabbing event in something like ten days. San Francisco was not the biggest city in the country but it was the most notorious, dating from the days of the Barbary Coast. What happened next kept it on the front pages.
Not So Good a Gay Man Page 21