The Mayor of Castro Street (41 page)

Liberal politicians were often more reticent to take a stand against the measure than the conservatives. Governor Jerry Brown waited until the last minute to state his opposition to the proposal. President Carter said nothing, even after Milk telegrammed repeated pleas for a statement—any statement. “How many lives must be destroyed before you speak out?” he asked. What angered Harvey most was that the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce pointedly turned a deaf ear to gay pleas for a “no” stance on Prop 6, saying it had “studied” the issue and would release no position. More proof that the Chamber thought homosexuals were bad for business, Milk complained.

The lack of gut liberal outrage at the Briggs campaign provided more fodder for Harvey's contention that the future of the gay movement lay not with nurturing liberal friends through high-level politicking, but in forging strong power for gays at the grass roots. “It's not enough to have friends represent us, no matter how good friends they might be,” he told a statewide caucus of gay Democrats. “If we remain invisible, we will be in limbo, people with no brothers, no sisters, no parents, no positions of respectability. The anger and frustration some of us feel because we are misunderstood—friends cannot feel that anger and frustration. They can sense it in us, but they cannot feel it.… It's time we have many legislators who are gay, proud of that and do not remain in the closet.”

Such pleas were always followed by Harvey's insistance that all gays should come out of the closet to show the world that gays indeed were everywhere and not an exotic tribe beamed to San Francisco from Mars. Harvey's call to come out became as adamant as his protestations that everyone should register to vote. Coming out represented the assertion of personal power, of the personal belief that one person
can
make a difference and play a role in changing the world. To surrender the opportunity to make a dent in history was to Milk like surrendering the point of one's very existence. “All human beings have power,” Harvey had said in his 1973 campaign. “You are just one person, but you have power. That makes power so significant.” Harvey's basic campaign theme hadn't changed in the five years since then.

Polls, meanwhile, confirmed the political value of gays being up front with friends and relatives. Voters who knew gays personally were twice as likely to support gay rights than those who said they had never known a homosexual. On a fundamental level, however, Harvey was more concerned with what coming out meant to gays themselves than to heterosexuals.

*   *   *

Miraculously enough, gay factionalism submerged during the campaign, partly because of the steadying hand of the no-nonsense veteran Don Bradley at CVC, and the radicals and moderates coordinated their efforts with a unity previously unknown in the gay movement. In an attempt to head off competition for scarce funds, Milk started the United Fund Against the Briggs Initiative to dole out money to various groups around the state—and, some politicos sniped, to give Harvey's new protégé, Cleve Jones, a job as its director. The grass-roots politicking at the San Franciscans Against Prop 6 headquarters was also creating a cadre of activists well trained in Harvey's own brand of meet-the-people campaigning. Once these new volunteers learned the political ropes, Harry Britt took them aside to sign them up as members of Harvey's San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. By the closing week of the campaign, the club had surpassed the older Toklas club in its ability to get large numbers of volunteers out to the precincts on short notice.

Milk proudly brought Congressman Phil Burton and Mayor Moscone down to his headquarters to show off his humming operation. Once considered a wild-eyed radical himself, Burton smiled at the sight of all these militant gays being drawn from street protests into the nuts-and-bolts politics of the system. Both George and Harvey started making regular Saturday morning visits to the headquarters to give volunteers pep talks as they set out to ring doorbells and canvass precincts. Harvey eagerly accepted invitations from around California, refusing to accept honorariums for his talks. “I'm going to speak out about what I believe in,” he told Anne. “I can't take money for that.”

Still, many gays around California did nothing—some out of apathy, others out of terror. Every day at City Hall, Anne and Dick Pabich took fearful calls from around the state and the nation. “What happens if it passes?” fearful teachers called to ask. “What do we do—where else is there to go?” Psychiatrists with large gay clienteles reported growing caseloads not only of teachers, but of pediatricians, counselors, and child psychologists who feared that Prop 6 was merely the first step.

*   *   *

“Harvey, I think there's gonna be riots if this thing passes,”
Cleve Jones warned one day.

“There goddamn better be,” Harvey snapped back.

“When are we going to fight back?” Harvey asked Chris Perry. “I can't say it because I'm a public official, but for God's sake, fight back.”

What Harvey did say publicly—certainly was not tepid. “At what point do we say ‘Enough?'” he wrote in his column for the gay
Bay Area Reporter.
“At what point do we stand up—as a total group—and say we will not allow it to happen any more? Enough is enough! Should we wait until the Bryant camps are built?”

Gay rights lawyers had suits challenging the law's constitutionality ready to be presented in court the morning after the election. But that was not the response most gays on Castro Street were discussing. Riots. Most activists did not speak of them publicly, but with so many convinced that defeat was inevitable, the potential was never far from the minds of gay activists in the Milk camp. Already many militant gays were circulating a “Statement of Conscience,” swearing to take part in nonviolent civil disobedience if Prop 6 passed. Many were signing up, even though some objected to the inclusion of the term “nonviolent.” The news that the Atlantic-Richfield oil company had contributed to Briggs's gubernatorial campaign had insiders warning, “If Prop 6 passes, I wouldn't be around the Castro Street Arco Station on election night.”

Harvey relished the opportunity to caution reporters about possible rioting, always prefacing the warning with, “I'm not for violence, but…” One CBS reporter looked at Milk incredulously when the supervisor brought up the possibility of a violent reaction to the passage of Prop 6. “You mean homosexuals can be violent?” he asked. That comment, if nothing else, made Harvey actually look forward to rioting. That would show them gays weren't a bunch of pantywaists to be pushed about like sissies in a locker room.

*   *   *

“The Lord said, ‘Go find me ten righteous men.'”

The Reverend Ray Batema seemed pleased with the analogy, as he sat back in his paneled office behind his Central Pomona Baptist Church, his head silhouetted on a Mexican-made American eagle tapestry, the kind you buy in the parking lots of deserted Exxon stations in San Bernadino County. The Reverend Batema was co-chairman of the Citizens for Decency and Morality—the other co-chairman was John Briggs himself—and he saw no problem with using that Biblical quote from the story of Sodom as the basis of his campaign tactics. “That's going to be our strategy. We'll ask each of our people to go find ten righteous men to support morality. And they'll find ten righteous men and
they'll
find ten more.”

“That's just why we're going to win this campaign,” commented CVC director Don Bradley upon hearing of the plan. “The other side is a bunch of religious fanatics who won't be able to put together a campaign.”

Even while gay activists were signing their Statement of Conscience slips, the Yes-on-6 campaigners like the Reverend Batema were sowing their own destruction. Briggs could rally few political figures to his side, so he was surrounded exclusively by fundamentalist preachers who figured that God, not campaign managers, would give them victory. Even as conservative opposition to the measure dried up the Yes campaign's funding, the preachers were convinced that Batema's Ten Righteous Men plan would win the election. By late fall, the campaign was broke. In the closing weeks before election day, only three well-known political organizations had endorsed the measure—the state Nazi party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriffs Association. An October poll showed support slipping drastically. In one month, the 61–31 margin for Prop 6 fell to a razor-thin 45–43 lead.

A big boost for gays came in the final weeks of the campaign when President Carter came to California to campaign for Governor Brown's reelection. Carter had finished his speech and was walking away from the podium when a television microphone picked up Brown telling Carter, “Proposition 6. You'll get your loudest applause. Ford and Reagan have both come out against it. So I think it's perfectly safe.” Carter walked back to the mike and added, “I also ask everybody to vote no on Proposition 6.” The crowd cheered wildly, though it was never clear whether Carter actually knew anything more about Proposition 6 than that, by late October, opposing it was a “perfectly safe” stand.

An emboldened Harvey Milk issued a sweeping challenge to debate John Briggs at any place or any time. “He can pick the town and the audience and I'll ask our supporters not to attend,” Milk said. “His issues are so phony, I think even an audience stacked in his favor would see through them.”

A week before the election Briggs responded, inviting Harvey to debate in his Orange County home turf for an evening sponsored by the “Pro-Family Coalition.” The debate's location appealed to Harvey. If John Briggs could mount the steps of San Francisco City Hall, Milk could damn well go to Orange County. He was not about to be upstaged. Friends, however, warned of an assassination attempt. The local police offered bodyguards, but Harvey refused. “Listen,
you
know it's going to happen and
I
know it's going to happen some time,” he said. “There's no use worrying about it—it'll happen when it happens.”

At the Orange County Airport, Harvey and Dick Pabich ran into John Briggs, his wife, and his State Police bodyguard. Briggs offered to drive the pair to the debate, but Harvey wanted to wait for a ride from his boyfriend, Bob Tuttle. The quintet decided to have a cup of coffee at the airport lounge and for a half-hour Briggs and Milk bantered back and forth about the campaign like two old World War II buddies reminiscing about their days in the trenches. Dick Pabich never forgot the friendly exchange. They were two seasoned politicians who had spent years breaking all the political rules, relying on sheer showmanship for their successes, and delighting in the give-and-take of politics. When Briggs left, Harvey giggled to Dick, “This really is a big joke to him.”

At the debate, the pair viciously ripped into each other.

Bob Tuttle was startled at the vehemence of the many Briggs supporters who came to jeer Milk. “That,” he said later, “was when I realized that Harvey was right—he was going to get shot some day.”

*   *   *

By the campaign's closing days, pollsters called the race too close to call, though gays had clearly seized the momentum. It wasn't so much that homosexuals were winning, but that John Briggs was losing. Another spokesperson could have pulled it off, but the public didn't like the senator. In a last-ditch effort to grab the media spotlight, Briggs called the San Francisco Police Department on the afternoon of October 31 to say that in four hours he intended to show up at Polk Street. Halloween, of course, had been the city's high homosexual holiday since the times of Jose's Black Cat. In recent years, crowds around the gay Polk Street neighborhood had grown so massive that police routinely closed off the street and let the drag queens have their annual field day. Some 80,000 revelers were partying on Polk Street when Senator Briggs arrived. A battery of media had also come to try to grab the expected shots of Briggs confronting drag queens. “I'm going because this is a children's night and I'm interested in children,” he solemnly told reporters who asked why he was dropping in on that particular street on that particular night.

The police car carrying Briggs, however, took him not to the Polk Street action but to a special delegation that had been arranged to greet the senator a few blocks away. Mayor Moscone, Police Chief Gain, Supervisors Milk and Silver all stepped forward to shake Briggs's hand when the shocked legislator saw them. The mayor suggested it was not in the best interests of law and order for the senator to wander to Polk Street. The police chief, flanked by about twenty-five officers, agreed. The senator testily gave in and started his drive back to Sacramento.

Just fifteen years ago that night, the police and city authorities had forced The Black Cat to close. The confrontation between Briggs and city authorities on Halloween 1978 was but another indication of how fully the tables had turned since that Halloween in 1963.

*   *   *

Election night. Harvey Milk was hopping mad.

The pollsters had been wrong. The vote wasn't even close. Around the state, voters were smashing Briggs's ambitions by gigantic proportions. In San Francisco, the proposition was losing by a 75–25 percent margin; only one supervisorial district produced a majority for Prop 6—District 8, Dan White's district. It looked like the measure would lose by over a million votes statewide and Harvey was pissed. All fall he had been looking forward to, at best, a narrow loss—and then some riots. People fought best with their backs to the wall, he thought, and he wanted his people to keep fighting. “You've heard of sore losers,” he complained to Cleve Jones. “Well, I'm a sore winner.”

But the show had to go on. An empty hall off Castro Street had gone through a one-day refurbishing for the dozens of television cameras from all the networks that had assembled for the victory party that night. Mounted on the stage's television-blue backdrop was a huge cutout of the Statue of Liberty, holding not a Bible but a large No-on-6 poster. The poster concealed a jockstrap that the artist had jokingly painted on Liberty. At 11
P.M.
, when Harvey figured the television newscasts would cut to the headquarters for live coverage, Milk gave the signal. From downstairs came the sound of a brass band, which marched into the hall blaring “San Francisco,” the perfect background music for the announcement of the results which showed a 2–1 victory for gays statewide. Harvey mounted the stage. “This is only the first step,” he told the roaring crowd. “The next step, the more important one, is for all those gays who did not come out, for whatever reasons, to do so now. To come out to all your family, to come out to all your relatives, to come out to all your friends—the coming out of a nation will smash the myths once and for all.”