The Mayor of Castro Street (37 page)

The circus' major problem was that once in a clown outfit, Harvey didn't want to give it up. After terrorizing tourists and charming children with his antics, Harvey went on to make his appointed rounds of political events that day—in his clown drag.

The day after the clowning, while supervisors deliberated their serious municipal measures, Board President Feinstein was startled to see a man in a huge gorrilla costume come traipsing into the board chambers, lean over the railing separating supervisors from the gallery, hand Milk a red rose, and plant a big kiss on the legislator's lips. It was Harvey's last birthday.

*   *   *

Caught up in the tide of events
that seemed so unrelenting in those early days of 1978, voters in Eugene repealed their gay rights ordinance the day after Harvey's birthday. Once again, thousands took to the streets of San Francisco to chant, blow whistles, and then rally. After the successive losses in Dade County, St. Paul, and Wichita, a gay cartoonist depicted the new vote with one scoreboard: Lions—4, Gays—0. Few had any doubts that the Christian lions would chalk up another win when the Briggs Initiative—just qualified as Proposition 6 for the November ballot—came up for a vote. David Goodstein wrote that any fight was hopeless but that gays should slip into the background and let experienced campaign managers handle the effort. Less moderate gays condemned this as elitist Uncle Tomism, but they were not much more optimistic. “We're going to be creamed and it's important that we not deceive people into thinking we can win,” warned Chris Perry, former President of the S.F. Gay club.

Gay politicos responded to the Prop 6 threat by doing what they usually did when faced with a tough fight—splintering into factions. Moderates aligned with the Goodstein-Foster axis formed the statewide Concerned Voters of California (CVC), which would serve as the top-level professional side of the statewide campaign. The group hired Don Bradley, a veteran campaign warhorse whose experience included managing the statewide campaigns of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, former Governor Pat Brown, and many local politicians, most notably George Moscone. Bradley was well connected with political machines, which would ensure endorsements from virtually every major public figure and union in the state. Radicals, meanwhile, jelled into a statewide network of groups highlighted by San Francisco's Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative (BACABI). These groups stuck to the tactics they knew best, organizing demonstrations and rallies. BACABI moved quickly to shore up support among all gays activists to the left of Goodstein.

Neither group satisified Harvey. At a meeting of local gay leaders with CVC strategists, Representative Phil Burton proudly held up a brochure that talked in nebulous terms of human rights and the U.S. Constitution. “This is masturbation—shit and masturbation,” Harvey shouted, convinced the brochure was merely a tepid response to what he considered a dangerous threat. All he'd get from CVC, he decided, was liberal bullshit. Milk also doubted that the rowdy demonstrations and leftist rhetoric of groups like BACABI would do much to convince California voters either. Harvey and his corps of close followers formed their own group, San Franciscans Against Prop 6. Since winning the election seemed out of the question, the group had only one primary goal: to make sure Prop 6 was defeated in San Francisco. A statewide loss might be tolerable, but losing in San Francisco would have national significance and prove a devastating blow to the image of gay power Harvey had promoted for so many years. Harry Britt was now president of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club; he and activists like Cleve Jones, Dick Pabich, and Jim Rivaldo put together the framework of S.F. Against, deciding to avoid the high-budget media strategy of CVC and to leave picketing to the hard-core radicals. Instead, they would use the political tactics Harvey had lectured on through his four campaigns—registering voters, walking precincts, and gaining support through old-fashioned door-to-door canvasing. Harvey spurned suggestions that big names be brought in to direct and staff the group. “Always take people from the streets,” he urged. So the two directors, Bill Kraus, a UC-Berkeley graduate student fresh from the anti-Jarvis–Gann campaign, and Gwenn Craig, a black lesbian from Atlanta, were activists with little organizational experience.

The formation of Harvey's own anti-6 group outraged both radicals and moderates. The CVC forces had long distrusted Milk's type of volunteer-intensive campaigns, fearing that all those unkempt Castro Street gays wandering the neighborhoods might scare voters away from the gay side. Radicals, meanwhile, saw the new organization as a naked power play by Harvey, another step toward building the political machine he had started to put together with San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. To a large extent, the radicals were right. Harvey had every intention of building a machine trained in his pragmatic theories of realpolitik; it was no accident that the people he assembled in his City Hall office and anti-Briggs campaign—people like Kraus, Craig, Anne Kronenberg, Pabich, Rivaldo, Cleve Jones, and Harry Britt—would indeed prove to be the people who, in a few months, would be leading the gay community, their hands on more power than Harvey could have imagined.

With State Senator Briggs appearing regularly on nightly news broadcasts with anti-gay tirades that made Anita Bryant sound like Gertrude Stein, gays did not have much time to bicker. The three major groups learned to take up a policy of peaceful coexistence and coordinated their various efforts. It had been nearly a year since Briggs first announced his campaign, so the hysteria with which gays first viewed the Briggs Initiative had given way to calmer determination as the hard work of the campaign neared.

*   *   *

“You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone.”
The neatly typed postcard bore only that simple message, underscoring all the fears Harvey had about his appearance in the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade. A number of threats had promised Milk death on that day. Milk talked freely of the potential of assassination; maybe it would happen while he was riding in the open car, maybe on the stage, but he refused police protection. The Briggs Initiative had cast the eyes of the nation on California and especially on the San Francisco gay community. Harvey had to be there.

The 1977 parade had been marked by strident militance in reaction to both the unexpected Bryant victory and the Robert Hillsborough murder; the 1978 parade, on a warm, sunny Sunday at the end of June, turned into a confident show of strength. A musician had organized a ninety-piece marching band to lead the parade. Near the head of the crowd stretched a long banner touting Jimmy Carter's classic quote: “Human Rights Are Absolute.” Contingents from over one hundred gay groups—everything from gay doctors, teachers, and plumbers to the roaring Dykes on Bikes—filled the streets. Pink triangles dominated many of their posters. The
Los Angeles Times
estimated the crowd at 375,000—the largest assemblage of people that would meet in one place in San Francisco during the entire 1970s. Only the helicopters hovering overhead with their network cameramen could see the broad expanses of people eking their way slowly toward the beautiful Civic Center plaza. Parade organizers had asked marchers to carry a sign saying where they were from, so the television cameras could record that San Francisco's homosexuals were indeed refugees from all over the United States. With a flowered lei thrown casually over his white T-shirt, Harvey Milk, sitting in the back of a convertible, carried his hand-lettered sign, “I'm from Woodmere, N.Y.” He waved to the crowd that swelled around his car, cheering wildly as he passed. “This is such a great crowd,” Harvey enthused. “They'd even elect me mayor.”

Wayne Friday carefully held Milk's legs in case the car had to make a sudden lurch forward. As she drove slowly toward the City Hall rally site, Anne Kronenberg kept retracing the routes to the nearest hospital in case it happened. Less than a year ago, Anne had walked into Castro Camera to volunteer for some campaign work because she didn't have anything better to do; now, she was driving one of the nation's most famous gay leaders, bracing herself for the sound of gunfire. So much had happened so fast. And it had only begun.

Harvey and Frank Robinson had prepared one of the dramatic pieces of oration Harvey loved so much for that day. Maybe the assassination threats had made him think of Martin Luther King, because he quoted King freely during the speech, even calling for a march on Washington for the next July 4. Few politicians in American history got the chance to directly address a crowd the size of the one stretched out before him and Harvey wanted to make the best of it.

My name is Harvey Milk—and I want to recruit you. I want to recruit you for the fight to preserve democracy from the John Briggs and Anita Bryants who are trying to constitutionalize bigotry.

We are not going to allow that to happen. We are not going to sit back in silence as 300,000 of our gay sisters and brothers did in Nazi Germany. We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads into the gas chambers.

On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country.… Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.… We are coming out. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives. I know that it is hard and that it will hurt them, but think of how they will hurt you in the voting booths.…

Jimmy Carter, you talk about human rights. You want to be the world's leader for human rights. There are 15 to 20 million gay people in this nation. When are you going to talk about
their
rights?

If you do not speak out, if you remain silent … then I call upon lesbians and gay men from all over the nation, your nation, to gather in Washington one year from now … on that very same spot where over a decade ago, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to a nation of his dreams, dreams that are fast fading, dreams that to many in this nation have become nightmares rather than dreams. I call upon all minorities and especially the millions of lesbians and gay men to wake up from their dreams, to gather in Washington and tell Jimmy Carter and their nation: “Wake up. Wake up, America. No more racism. No more sexism. No more ageism. No more hatred. No more … And to the bigots. To the John Briggs, to the Anita Bryants … and all their ilk: Let me remind you what America is.

Listen carefully:

On the statue of Liberty, it says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free…”

In the Declaration of Independence, it is written: “All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights…”

And in our national anthem, it says: “Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free.”

For Mr. Briggs and Ms. Bryant … and all the bigots out there: That's what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence. No matter how hard you try, you cannot chip those words off the base of the Statue of Liberty. And no matter how hard you try, you cannot sing the “Star Spangled Banner” without those words.

That's what America is.

Love it or leave it.

The sight of the hundreds of thousands gathered in front of the stately City Hall, overflowing from the large Civic Center plaza, flashed on television sets across the nation that night. The press had a field day with human interest side stories to the event. One white-haired, seventy-four-year-old woman, for example, told reporters about her two gay sons who were both teachers. “My older son committed suicide when his local school board found out he was gay and made moves to fire him,” she said. “My other son is afraid to be here today because of that S.O.B. Briggs and what he wants to do to teachers. I lost one son to the likes of Mr. Briggs and I don't intend to lose another one.”

Also granting interviews that day was Supervisor Dan White, who stood grimly on the sidelines of the parade as the thousands marched by. White was the only supervisor who had voted against closing Market Street for the annual parade. “This is our only opportunity to approve or disapprove of what goes on in our streets,” he said. “The vast majority of people in this city don't want public displays of sexuality.”

Anita Bryant asked Christians to pray for San Francisco on that Sunday.

Harvey was ecstatic about the response to his speech. As usual, he never mentioned the assassination fears once the imminent threat had passed. Instead, he spoke enthusiastically about the crowd and carefully handed out copies of his speech to every reporter he could buttonhole. Already, he could imagine the tens of thousands walking by the White House next year, assembling under the shadow of the Washington Monument. Such good theater.

*   *   *

Bienvenidos Castro. Willkommen Castro. Bienvenue Castro,
in seven languages, the large canvas banner festooned over the intersection of Eighteenth and Castro spoke to the new role the Castro neighborhood now fulfilled in the homosexual collective conscious. The corner had been dubbed the crossroads of the gay world, and by the summer of 1978, the neighborhood had become an international gay tourist mecca. Thousands more were moving to the neighborhood, prompting gay politicos to speculate not
if
gays would become a numerical majority of San Francisco adults, but when. A new gay chauvinism ran rampant, complete with a lexicon of pejoratives. Heterosexuals became known as breeders—“Today's breeders, tomorrow's cows,” went one slogan—and the game of spotting heterosexuals on Castro Street replaced the old heterophile game of picking out queers.