Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  On Harvey’s murder, White played a good guy. He’d wanted to talk to Harvey, to explain things to him, that while they didn’t agree on a lot of things, White had always been honest with him.…

  Then Harvey had smirked at him so White got all hot and bothered and shot him five times, twice in the head.

  The real reasons never came up—Norman, the prosecuting attorney, never cross-examined him.

  The defense psychiatrists testified that White’s consumption of junk food the night before had raised his blood pressure and brought on fits of manic depression. (I’m fond of chocolate cake but no doctor ever warned me to stop eating it because I might have a fit of manic depression.)

  After thirty-six hours of deliberation, most of it spent sobbing into their handkerchiefs, the jury returned a verdict of voluntary manslaughter. White was sentenced to seven years and eight months; with time off for good behavior, he’d be out in less than five.

  The sentence stunned everybody in the city, excepting the little old ladies who lived in White’s district.

  One old lady was quoted as saying “It all came together as if God was watching over us, as if God had brought it together.”

  God would get no medals that day.

  A reporter covering the trial called White’s defense the “Twinkie” defense, and maybe White should have been convicted of hyperglycemia. Dianne Feinstein, who had found Harvey’s body, knew exactly what it was: two murders. Willie Brown (later mayor) said: “You’ve got to be kidding me. A man executes two men over fifteen minutes and gets voluntary manslaughter? This is like reducing two counts of drunken driving to two counts of double parking.”

  Another of the jurors crossed her heart and said, “The verdict had to be God’s will or it wouldn’t have turned out that way.” When White died, he would surely go to heaven.

  Asked by a reporter his opinion of how the trial went, lawyer Doug Schmidt shrugged and said, “The only opinions that matter are those of the twelve people in the jury box.”

  Cleve Jones warned a police captain that there might be riots that night, and the captain reassured him, “We’ll see you get a bullhorn, march them down to city hall, and give your usual speech.”

  Tom Norman, the prosecuting attorney, had tried dozens of murder cases. In this case he never introduced the possibility of malice—including White’s hatred of gays. Norman was an experienced prosecutor, and the possibility arose that perhaps he had thrown the case. But the dead were dead and the possibility of city officials working with an angry Police Department would be, at best, a difficult one.

  It had been, in short, a political trial. Any number of overseas tyrants probably took pointers.

  I don’t know if defense attorney Doug Schmidt lived in San Francisco. My guess is that if he did, he moved out shortly after the trial.

  The entire city was upset. The gay community was mad with rage. The mob predicted by Cleve Jones started to gather at Seventeenth and Market shortly after the verdict was announced and headed for city hall, joined by more furious citizens as it went. By the time it got there, there were perhaps ten thousand angry gays in the crowd. Cleve Jones hastened to the front of the crowd, but nobody was interested in listening to a speech about restraint.

  A thin line of moderate gays stood in front of the doors of city hall to protect it from entry—John Ryckman, Dick Pabich, Harry Britt, Scott Smith, and others. For a while they succeeded, fending off demonstrators while rocks were thrown at them and glass windows were shattered behind them.

  One of the monitors shouted into a bullhorn, “Harvey Milk lives,” and a voice from the crowd answered, “Harvey Milk is dead, you fool.”

  A phalanx of police showed up and marched through the crowd, ignoring the rocks thrown at them. The monitors on the steps sat down to show they were the good guys, and the cops promptly charged them and started beating them.

  Out in the crowd, one of the rioters kicked in the window of a police car, lit a pack of matches, and threw it in, waiting for the upholstery to burst into flames. When it did, he started down the line of parked police cars and eleven of them went up in flames.

  Bricks continued to fly, and soon all the first-floor windows of the building had been smashed. When more police showed up the thin line of cops who had been trying to protect the building moved back inside, hastily. One supervisor, Carol Ruth Silver, was hit by a rock and dragged inside, blood streaming from her face.

  When another phalanx of police showed up and moved into the crowd, some of the demonstators tore up parking meters and fought back, using garbage can lids as shields.

  Police Chief Gain told the cops to hold their ground, not to attack the rioters. Not many paid any attention. Still more cops moved in, beating their batons on the pavement—San Francisco’s own Roman legion. Once they were in the crowd, small knots of rioters and police broke off and fought hand to hand. The cops were enraged as rioters broke branches off of trees and tore up asphalt from the streets to use as weapons.

  The cops gradually pushed the rioters back, and Feinstein announced, “The city is secure.”

  It was wishful thinking.

  Some of the police took off their badges and drove down to the Castro. They beat gays on the street and broke into the Elephant Walk bar and took it apart, breaking the mirrors behind the bar. Then city hall rioters showed up at the end of the street, ready for another go-around. Cleve Jones said that he had seen several men with rifles on rooftops. He and his roommate had been busy pulling wounded rioters off the street into a storefront.

  Chief Gain had never authorized the trashing of the Castro and gradually got his police off the streets. The cops were reluctant to go—they said they had lost at city hall but no way were they going to lose in the Castro.

  The diehards gradually left, and the only sirens were those of ambulances taking away the wounded. Something like a hundred rioters and seventy policemen ended up in the ER.

  (I wasn’t there—I was in Cleveland visiting relatives. But I read the reports and eyewitness accounts when I got back.)

  There was one thing the reports missed. The Castro was gay turf—it was OURS. The Castro had been a happy hunting ground for gay-bashers in the past, and whistles had been issued to those who lived there so they could call for help if needed. Some, I knew, weren’t satisfed just with whistles and bought more substantial armament.

  I don’t know how many guns were in the Castro, but there were more than just a few. If the police had continued down the street, breaking up stores and beating gays, if they had refused to obey Chief Gain, shots would have been fired and there would have been a full-fledged revolt—maybe not as large as Watts but large enough for the mayor to call in the state police.

  By the next day, things had gotten almost back to normal. It was Harvey’s forty-ninth birthday, and they were already building a stage at the corner of Castro and Market for the rock bands and singers who would show up. The city didn’t like it, but the permit had already been issued days before, and to revoke it now would, perhaps, once again spur violence.

  The police were all set for trouble—perhaps hoping for it. They had assembled in the side streets, ready for any violence. Doctors and nurses had established their own presence in storefronts along Castro. With the help of Cleve Jones, the police had established a command post in the second floor of Cliff’s hardware store. What Cleve could have done, I don’t know, but he would have done his best to stop any violence. He had coordinated the training of some three hundred monitors to stop any violence by the crowd.

  The street itself was ready for it. Volunteers were hoisting a huge portrait of Harvey up the front of the Castro Theater, and on the theater’s marquee was the message “Harvey lives!”

  There were posters on buildings all around, pleading “PLEASE—No Violence!”

  The streets gradually filled with people and Cleve Jones gave an opening speech.

  “Last night the lesbian and gay men of San Francisco showed the rest of the ci
ty and the rest of the world that gay people are angry and on the move. And tonight we are here to show the world what we are creating out of that anger and that movement.”

  For anybody who was paying attention, the riot and the violence had changed the public perception of gays as being a collection of hairdressers and sissies. It was as important to changing the public image of gays as the Six-Day War had been in changing the public perception of Jews as weaklings and moneychangers—Shylock had disappeared forever. So had the images of the movie stars who portrayed gays as funny pansies.

  Sylvester, a gay favorite, had come onstage and was singing, and gays on the street began to dance and pass around joints—nobody worried about violating the pot laws.

  The night ended with twenty thousand celebrants singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Harvey—Happy Birthday to you!”

  In New York a small group of gay pickets had gathered in Sheridan Square, across from the old Stonewall bar.

  Their signs read, “We all live in San Francisco.”

  XXVI

  BY THE EARLY 1980s Harvey was still a vivid memory, a memory that seemed to grow with each passing year (a local play, a documentarty, an opera by the Houston Grand Opera, and much, much more to come). I subscribed to the New York Native to keep track of the gay scene in New York (as far as gays were concerned, there were only two cities that mattered—San Francisco and New York; Los Angeles was just a suburb).

  The paper covered a lot more than just the gay scene, and it was there I first read of a growing disaster, one that would become the greatest health disaster to ever hit the United States. The paper reported a short news item from the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” the newsletter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

  Five young gay men in Los Angeles had been diagnosed as having pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a disease that commonly affected young infants or the immunosuppressed. Two of them had died.

  Faint alarm bells rang in the back of my head. A follow-up article in a CDC item reported twenty-six hemophiliacs with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), six in California. Eight of the patients had died within two years of diagnosis. And ten more cases of PCP were reported in addition to the five original. Four of the KS patients had both KS and PCP.

  The article did not state why only gays were involved.

  I was both interested and worried. Gays never came down with anything that a quick trip to the med center and a shot wouldn’t cure. You waited in line to get your shot and maybe meet your next bed partner. It was as much a social affair as a medical one.

  The previous mystery disease—Legionnaire’s disease—had the doctors and medical researchers all over it and was squelched within a few weeks. Everybody apparently thought it would be the same this time.

  The technical journals. The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the victims were young gay men who traveled in the fast lane and were addicted to “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” (Major media such as the daily newspapers had yet to give it much coverage.)

  There was no mention of immediate cures or what was causing it. With time, more groups were involved than just gays—hemophiliacs, Haitians, and drug abusers made up the rest of the “4H Club.”

  I followed it in the Native, and coverage became more and more puzzling and gloomy. I didn’t know anybody who had it but suspected it that was just a matter of time.

  Some months later I met my first KS patient.

  One morning Tom Youngblood and I drove over to pick up his friend Reid and take him to the AIDS clinic (the disease had a variety of names before the doctors settled on “AIDS”). Reid’s apartment was in the middle of Haight-Ashbury. He was the sole occupant of a second-floor railroad flat (one with all the rooms strung along the side of the main corridor).

  Tom asked me to stay in the car while he went up to get Reid, who was sensitive about strangers seeing his lesions.

  I had never seen any KS lesions.

  Tom was gone a long time and returned looking worried. Reid didn’t have the energy to go to the hospital right then. Tom didn’t think Reid would make it to Thanksgiving—or even Halloween. He swore to me that he would sit with Reid and read to him “until the end.” Nobody should die alone like this. He climbed back into the car and said we should take Reid to the hospital that afternoon.

  I had known Reid for a far shorter time than Tom, meeting him during a tour of Ward 5B, the “AIDS” ward at San Francisco General Hospital. He was blond, blue-eyed, and personable despite his illness—he could still crack a joke and wink at the nurses. He was thirty-four years old and before he got sick was considered a “hot number” in San Francisco’s gay community.

  He was smart—he had a degree in Slavic languages and literature from Princeton. He had been a member of one of Princeton’s “eating clubs”—fraternities. Once he and a male friend had danced together all night. Other members thought that was a little much and asked for Reid’s resignation. He refused.

  He moved to San Francisco and got a job as a bartender—a job that pays handsomely in San Francisco and makes you a minor celebrity, one very much in demand.

  He was diagnosed as having AIDS in April of ’83. He’d had all the standard symptoms—night sweats, swollen lymph glands, fevers, weight loss, and thrush (whitish patches on the mucous membranes of the mouth). Later, he was diagnosed with a few small, reddish marks on his upper arms.

  The diagnosis was KS, usually found in elderly Italian and Jewish men. It’s a slow disease, and they usually died of something else. In gay men, you can die of it in a short length of time.

  Later, Reid was admitted to Ward 5B with a case of pneumocystis pneumonia—as final a death sentence as medical science knows, hands down.

  Tom and I came back early that afternoon to Reid’s flat. He was sleeping again. Tom went to get him out of bed, and I looked over the apartment. It was stripped—Reid’s roommates had taken most of what might have been there.

  The kitchen was clean—no dirty dishes in the sink. In the fridge was a carton of milk, a few eggs, a plastic bowl of orange Jell-O, a half-eaten sandwich. Reid hadn’t been eating; the garbage can was as empty as the sink. I offered to scramble some eggs, but Reid wanted a bowl of dry cereal, nothing really solid.

  The change from when I had seen him in the hospital before was appalling. His face was puffy, his left eye swollen shut, and the other a mere slit. His blond hair was sticking out at all angles, the purple bruises of KS scattered randomly across his neck and face. His flannel shirt and Levi’s had become far too large for his shrunken frame. We had to help him put on his boots.

  He didn’t want any help in descending the stairs but wanted us to be close in case he fell. Once outside, he sat on the steps to rest while Tom drove over in his car. A young man with hair to his shoulders was working on his motorcycle on the sidewalk, with two young boys as an audience. None of them looked at Reid. I was sure they had seen him before, and once was enough.

  In the car, Tom and I worked hard at making small talk. Reid was animated only when I mentioned some of the volunteers in Ward 5B. “They’re beautiful,” he said in a fadeaway voice. “They’re the most beautiful people I’ve ever met.”

  It was old home week on the sixth floor, where the clinic was located. Tracy, a young nurse, hustled over to talk to Reid. Jeremy, a worker for Shanti, a support group for AIDS patients, kissed him on the cheek and said, “How ya doin’, gorgeous?” Reid brightened; he was among friends. A moment later they took him away to weigh him and draw blood and start him through the clinic routine.

  It was a shadow show, I thought. There was nothing to be done for Reid. It was psychological—for the few weeks he had left, he could feel that at least somebody gave a shit.

  We couldn’t locate a social worker. It might be another day before arrangements could be made with Shanti for a volunteer. The only solution was to have Reid readmitted to the hospital.

  Dr. Connie Wofsy, one of the doctors o
n duty, was sympathetic, but Reid hadn’t been her patient. She said she didn’t know much about him from the clinical aspect. I suspected that the ward was full, that Dr. Wofsy was practicing AIDS triage, and sick as he was, Reid wasn’t sick enough.

  Half an hour after Reid had disappeared into the treatment room, Dr. Paul Volberding, the young oncologist who had been treating him, came out to talk to us.

  Reid was dying. The only treatment for his lesions was more Vinblastine, a chemotherapy drug. If that didn’t work—it hadn’t so far—there was other experimental chemotherapy they could try, but the side effects were severe. It would be up to Reid if he wanted to try it. In the meantime, we should take him home.

  But Reid couldn’t go back to his apartment; there was nobody there to take care of him. Dr. Volberding didn’t understand. Reid said he didn’t want to be admitted to the hospital, he wanted to go home.

  Then it was time for Reid to leave. One of us would stay overnight with him until we could make arrangements for a Shanti volunteer.

  I stayed with Reid while we waited for an elevator. He suddenly said he had to sit down. Just then the elevator arrived and I helped Reid inside.

  As we passed the fourth floor, Reid collapsed, hitting his head against the elevator wall. I had broken his fall, but it had been like catching an armful of sticks. He lay quietly on the floor, exhausted. He had done his share—he had said he wanted to sit down; now it was up to somebody else. I hit the button for the sixth-floor clinic.

  When the door opened the clerk at the desk spotted us and shouted for help. They got Reid into a wheelchair and took his blood pressure. Tracy asked him what he had been eating and he said Cheerios and Jell-O and some tuna fish sandwiches that friends had brought him. She decided that he hadn’t been drinking enough liquids, that his heart hadn’t been pumping enough volume of blood to keep him from blacking out. She said they would readmit him to the hospital.