Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  The fly was that the salary for a supervisor was $9,000 a year. Unless you had an outside job, there was no way you could live on that. Dan White and Harvey Milk were the two poorest members of the board. Harvey eked out a living with the help of his always failing camera store. Dan White and his wife had a “hot potato” stand on the waterfront, which didn’t do much better. The major financial difference between the two was that White had two kids while Harvey had lovers who more or less supported themselves (with the exception of Jack Lira).

  Harvey was no longer a storefront politician. He had a much bigger stage now and much more influence. He had hit the “big time,” or at least a small version of it. I thought that Harvey’s election to city hall had made him lose some of his street smarts. There was no more dropping by the camera store to shoot the shit with Harvey. Now you had to make an appointment. The number of drop-ins dropped drastically. He no longer had a public that kept him in touch with the pulse of the city, though he did marvelously well with what he did have.

  The difference between him and Dan White was the difference between night and day. White was the type who was the star of the local football team, a war hero, and the darling of the elderly Catholic ladies who made up the bulk of his constituency. He was the son that all the old ladies had wanted to have. White didn’t like the influx of gays into his city, and neither did they. There was something … unclean about them.

  White had his flaws, of course, all of which his voters overlooked. He had been a policeman, and failed at that. He tried being a fireman, and that was another failure. Now he was a supervisor, and he was sure that this time he’d make all his voters proud.

  One thing he really wished he had: the charisma and the headline-grabbing abilities of Harvey Milk, the ability to connect with the various ethnic groups in the city (no way was that in the portfolio of the All-American boy). But then the little old ladies really didn’t care that he wasn’t buddy-buddy with the Asians, the blacks, and the various uncouth union members, all of whom were ruining the beautiful city of their youth.

  None of us liked White. In a sense, he was a failed snob. And it was more than obvious that he didn’t care much for gays.

  Harvey, on the other hand, was convinced that he could “educate” White into understanding and accepting the minorities. He had tried that with Jack Lira and failed; now he was aiming higher. None of us understood why he didn’t see that White was homophobic to the core.

  Once again I was convinced that Harvey had lost his street smarts.

  At the start Harvey did his best to befriend White, and the two frequently appeared on talk shows together. It was a mistake on White’s part—he was straitlaced and reserved and paled next to Harvey’s outgoing personality. On a lot of topics, they disagreed. Once again, White would come out the loser.

  We all warned Harvey that White was excessively proud of his conservative outlook and not about to change it. If he had any reaction to Harvey, it was one of contempt.

  And envy.

  The real split came when White argued passionately against locating a psychiatric center in an empty convent that happened to be in White’s district. His cadre of old women were dead set against it, afraid dangerous riffraff would be sent there. The supervisors voted 6 to 5 against it, and that included Harvey’s vote, which White was counting on.

  Later, looking into the problem of the children who would be sent to the convent, Harvey changed his vote so the final tally was 6 to 5 for.

  White had promised his constituents that once he was supervisor, the center would never be located there. He had failed again. He considered Harvey’s switch, of course, a betrayal.

  A week later, when Harvey’s pet project of a gay rights bill came up, White was the only supervisor who voted against it. He admitted that he was getting even.

  He was, White decided, a supervisor with very little power. When Prop 6, the Briggs bill, failed by sixty to forty, White turned in his resignation three days later. The reason he gave was that his family couldn’t live on the little money the hot potato stand brought in and his meager supervisor’s salary. But the Police Department, the Realtors, and the business interests had counted on White’s vote when a bill came up that directly affected them. White was the swing vote that they could always rely on.

  Representatives of the groups cornered White and promised they would make up the difference between a livable wage and what he was making as supervisor.

  A few days after White had submitted his resignation, he told Mayor George Moscone that he wanted it back, that he had changed his mind. Bighearted Moscone handed his resignation back to him, remarking to the press that White was young and new to the political game and was entitled to change his mind.

  Apparently the other supervisors greeted it with a shrug except Harvey, who boiled over. He had been delighted with White’s resignation and that the board could now break 6 to 5 in favor of the liberals.

  Moscone hesitated until Harvey reminded him that he had gotten the gay vote in a very tight race. If he let White back on the board, Harvey would see to it that his gay vote would vanish.

  Moscone decided Harvey was right and he would consider White’s initial resignation as final.

  Unfortunately, somebody in his office leaked the news to a radio reporter, who promptly called White to ask for his reaction. White said he knew nothing about it and hung up.

  He didn’t talk about it to his wife and ended up lying on the sofa eating junk food and brooding. He guessed the reporter had been right and he had been double-crossed once again. It wasn’t hard for him to figure out that Harvey Milk had been behind it.

  Harvey had gone to the opera a few nights before and spent time talking with Bidu Sayão, a favorite old-time opera star, and left in high spirits. He wrote a short note to Tom O’Horgan telling him about the evening, ending with “ah—life is worth living.”

  The next night he spent talking to old friends, who remarked later that it was unlike Harvey, that he had seemed lonely on the phone.

  Early the next morning White dressed, then found his police revolver and loaded it with hollow-pointed bullets (dumdums, which explode on impact).

  Denise Apcar, White’s aide, picked him up at home and drove him to city hall. He did not go through the front doors, which had metal detectors, but went to the side of the building and climbed through an open basement window. A janitor saw him, asked who he was, and White told him and hurried past—he was late, he said.

  He got to Moscone’s office at about ten thirty. The secretary told him Moscone was busy, but she would let him know. Moscone knew White was there to see him and a few minutes later buzzed the secretary to let him in.

  Upstairs, in his office, Harvey was waiting for an aide, Carl Carlson, to show up with a check. Carlson was late, and Harvey started to make his morning phone calls.

  Outside Moscone’s office, his secretary, heard voices raised in argument. Inside, Moscone had gone into his den to get two drinks and offer one to White to try to molify him. He lit a cigarette and returned to his office to find White pointing a revolver at him.

  White fired a shot, hitting Moscone in the arm, and another shot to his chest. Moscone sank to the floor, and White knelt and fired two more shots, directly into Moscone’s head. He then stood up and reloaded his revolver.

  Outside, his secretary thought she heard a car backfiring. She did not see White leave by a side door and hurry down the corridor to the supervisors’ offices. He brushed past the office of supervisor Dianne Feinstein (later a US senator). She saw him and called out to him. He said he didn’t have time to talk and hurried to Harvey Milk’s office, where Harvey was still on the phone. White asked if he could see him for a moment. Harvey said “Sure,” and followed White into his old office, where White closed the door. Once inside, Harvey turned and White shot him twice in the arms, then shot him in the chest with another dumdum bullet. Harvey fell to the floor and White knelt and shot him twice directly in the head, blowin
g Harvey Milk’s brains out.

  Harvey died on November 27, 1978.

  I didn’t know anything about this—I read about it later. I was walking down Castro and somebody stuck his head out of a bar and shouted, “Harvey’s been shot!” I thought it would be followed by another announcement that Harvey was in such and such hospital and was being patched up.

  I hurried into the bar just in time to see a disheveled Dianne Feinstein—now the de facto mayor of San Francisco—in a close-up on the tube announce:

  “As president of the Board of Supervisors, it is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.” You could hear gasps from the crowd of reporters and the police behind her. She continued: “Supervisor Dan White is the suspect.”

  Feinstein had opened the door to White’s old office and saw Harvey in a pool of blood on the floor. She had had some medical training and tried to feel for a pulse. There was none. She hadn’t expected that there would be.

  Dan White, who had failed at almost everything in life, had finally succeeded at being a Class A assassin.

  He left the building and called his wife at the potato stand to ask her to meet him at St. Mary’s Cathedral. When they met, he told her what he had done. She replied that she would stand by him no matter what. They then walked to a police station, where White had friends.

  The word had spread in the Castro, and crowds started to gather at Castro and Market. It was something that was very hard to believe. Harvey had been close to most of them for years; it was difficult to believe he was dead.

  It was starting to grow dark when somebody showed up with lit candles in paper cups and passed them around. Others found more candles and cups, and a rough parade began to form. They automatically started to march to city hall.

  It was dusk by the time the march got under way, and by now it had finally hit me and I started to cry. I marched with Jim Rivaldo and Denton Smith, two close friends of Harvey, though all of us were close friends of Harvey.

  In some of the apartment buildings that we passed I noticed that people had put candles in their windows. It was a blow not alone to gays—it was a blow to everybody who lived in San Francisco.

  There was an underpass before we got to city hall, and I turned and looked behind us. The line of mourners carrying paper cups with candles stretched from where I was all the way back to the Castro. I found out later that there were some forty thousand people in the march—probably the biggest spontaneous funeral march there had ever been in the country. More than any other, it was one of the people, by the people, and for the people.

  I don’t remember when we got to city hall. There was a bronze bust of Lincoln on the corner, and we doused our candles on it as we walked by. The next morning all you saw was this mountain of wax hiding Lincoln.

  At city hall Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Dianne Feinstein spoke a few words: “Those of us on the board will remember him for his commitment, for his sense of humor, and for his ability to develop a sense of destiny.”

  It was probably the nicest thing that Feinstein ever said about Harvey.

  Harry Britt followed. “He was to us what Dr. King was to his people.… How many times have we made that walk down Market Street and known that when we got to city hall, Harvey would be there? Harvey will be in the middle of us, always, always, always.”

  Then the words were over and everybody went home.

  I went to bed that night, still crying.

  The coroner decided that Harvey might have survived his body wounds, but then he shaved Harvey’s head and found where the coup de grâce shots had hit. Harvey had died instantly. The coroner then removed his eyes to give to the living, as Harvey had requested.

  The next day Jim Rivaldo and Scott Smith went through Harvey’s closet, searching for clothes to bury him in. Most of his clothes were threadbare; it was difficult to find socks with no holes in them.

  Moscone’s choice for somebody to replace White was no problem—Moscone had already named him. For Harvey, it was a different story. His will had requested a choice from four successors in case he was killed: Anne Kronenberg; Bob Ross, editor and publisher of The Bay Area Reporter; Harry Britt, a close campaign worker; and myself.

  Ross was out beause he had once been the emperor of the drag queen court, and Feinstein had no use for drag queens. Anne Kronenberg was the most logical choice, but Feinstein decided she was too young, and in the interview Feinstein had with her, Anne had refused to pledge undying loyalty to Feinstein’s political wishes. It was rumored that Feinstein was also afraid Anne would show up at city hall on her motorcycle, wearing leathers.

  I was next and very nervous about the possibility of filling Harvey’s shoes. Of all those nominated by Harvey, I was the least likely (it was rumored that I had been his number one choice, but I don’t know the truth of it; I had never read his last will and testament.)

  It was a position I didn’t want and knew I could never fill. I told Feinstein I was working on a book and she pooh-poohed it—being a supervisor was a part-time job. I had been too close to Harvey to know that wasn’t true. I had no political following and knew little about the politics of the board. Feinstein shrugged; I didn’t have to, all I had to do was follow her lead.

  I remembered the arguments that Harvey frequently had with her and his generally low opinion of her.

  I then pulled what I thought was my trump card. I wasn’t in the best of health, I said—I had atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat.

  She looked into the distance for a moment and remarked that when she had been on television to announce the deaths of Moscone and Harvey, Police Chief Gain had had to hold her up—her heart had hit two hundred beats per minute (normal would be about sixty).

  The next day I sent her a brief letter withdrawing from any consideration as a supervisor. There was a brief boomlet for Anne that collapsed, and Feinstein settled on Harry Britt. He was the least controversial of all of us, had worked closely with Harvey, and had once been a Methodist minister.

  Most importantly, he pledged undying loyalty. It wasn’t true, but it took a few votes before Feinstein realized that Britt was reflecting the wishes of the gay community, not hers.

  Britt made a good supervisor, but he was no Harvey Milk. Who was? God had made only one Harvey Milk. As mayor, considering all the problems Feinstein had, I thought she made a pretty good one. She was fairly tight with the police, so there was no difficulty there. After two terms as mayor, she ran for the governorship and lost. She then ran for senator. Jumping forward a few decades, she has turned out to be one of the stellar Democratic senators. If she ever leaves office, it will be because she doesn’t want the office, not because the voters would reject her. At this writing, I can think of no Republican who could possibly beat her.

  Considering Feinstein overall, I would have run her against Maggie Thatcher any day.

  Feinstein would have won—she’s one tough lady.

  I was disappointed that she didn’t care for Harvey. He talked too often and talked too long, she said. I would have replied that was because he usually had something important to say.

  XXV

  WHITE’S TRIAL WAS a farce.

  We all thought that White deserved life in prison, where the inmates would have showed the All-American boy what being gay was all about. Or better yet, that he would get the gas chamber.

  As Randy Alfred, a local reporter, quoted—res ipse loquitur. In Latin, “the thing speaks for itself.” Dan White had murdered two men in cold blood. Period.

  The only ones who favored White were, predictably, the police. If you went to Castro and Market you’d find a cop car parked there, the car radio blasting “Danny Boy.” There were signs posted around town reading “Free Dan White!” And there were rumors floating around that Moscone had not been the squeaky-clean moral mayor he had been portrayed. He’d had a thing for young, black, female prostitutes, so the story went. It wasn’t difficult to f
igure out who was responsible for that one.

  Anybody who watched the O. J. Simpson trial knows that the outcome of jury trials are usually decided when they pick the jury. If you thought Simpson was going to get the gas chamber, you were naive.

  We all thought that was what White would get. His was one of the very first trials of a politician in the country—the second only in California, if memory serves.

  Give the devil his due—defense counsel Doug Schmidt was brilliant. There were 250 prospective jurors. Tom Norman, the prosecutor, used only six of his twenty-six peremptory challenges (where you could dismiss a potential juror without a reason).

  Schmidt ended with a jury that had seven old ladies from White’s home district. There were no blacks, Asians, or gays. There was also one cop-lover who rushed over to Schmidt when it was all over to shake his hand. Schmidt had seen to it that Dan White was indeed being judged by a jury of his peers.

  Schmidt’s defense hung on what a great All-American boy White was. How could anybody believe that such a lad could shoot somebody in cold blood? The reason, never stated, was that Harvey Milk was gay and the jurors hated the gays who were ruining their fair city.

  Homosexuality was on trial, not just Dan White.

  White had been the captain of both his baseball and football teams in high school, he was an ex-paratrooper who’d fought for his country. Quoting Schmidt, “Good people, fine people, with fine backgrounds simply don’t kill people in cold blood.”

  Leaving one to wonder just who the hell did it. As for fine people with fine backgrounds killing people, all you had to do was read the morning paper.

  Schmidt played White’s taped confession, taken by one of his old cop buddies who’d been his coach in high school. White was all choked up on the tape, and some of the jurors cried. White claimed he hadn’t planned on going to city hall, didn’t know why he was wearing his Smith & Wesson.… In Moscone’s office, he’d heard a roaring in his ears and his taped voice trailed off.… His police interrogator didn’t press him on describing either murder.