The Mayor of Castro Street (53 page)

Schmidt had walked amiably through the court room for most of the case, but for his closing arguments, he brought in a high lectern from which he addressed the jury. Few could escape noticing how much Schmidt acted like a parish priest at his pulpit; one reporter watched his second hand for a quarter hour and figured that Schmidt invoked the name of God about once a minute. His speech was brief and dramatic, a stark contrast to Norman's long and dull oration.

“Lord God,” he said of Dan White's pressures, “nobody could say that the things that were happening to him wouldn't make a reasonable man mad. Surely he acted rashly and impulsively out of some passion.” Calling for a voluntary manslaughter verdict, Schmidt continued, “A good man, a man with a fine background, does not cold-bloodedly go down and kill two people. That just doesn't happen. I beg you. I would do anything to convince you of what I am saying.… The pot had boiled over.… He will be punished.… His child and his family will have to live with this.… God will punish him.… Please. Please. Just justice. That's all.”

*   *   *

At the same time Doug Schmidt was delivering his impassioned final argument, Cleve Jones and a handful of gay leaders were meeting with a police captain to discuss plans for handling gay response to a possible manslaughter verdict for Dan White. The captain assured Jones that homosexuals were far too responsible to do anything so troublesome as riot.

“You're not listening to me,” said Jones, pounding the captain's desk. “There's going to be trouble, and we're not leaving here until we have some contingency plans.”

“Okay, Cleve,” said the captain, thoroughly amused by Jones' outburst. “What do you think is going to happen?”

“If he gets off with anything less than first-degree murder, within an hour there will be five thousand people on Castro Street out for vengeance.”

“Okay Cleve,” the captain calmly advised. “If the crowd gathers, you get your bullhorn. You'll get a police escort and you can march them down to City Hall like you always have and you can have a rally.”

Jones returned to the Castro to find fliers on phone poles throughout the neighborhood:

Dan White Gets Special Treatment!

    Why?

Because: He's an Ex-Cop?

    He's a “Family Man?”

    He's White?

    Has Financial Problems!?

    He Eats Junk Food!?

 

We Denounce Trial And Verdict.

Protest! 8
P.M.
Night of Verdict, Steps of City Hall.

The group claiming to sponsor the posters was “Lesbians and Gay Men's Coalition Against the Death Penalty,” a group of radical lesbians and gay men few had heard of. Jones called the police to tell of the posters. “This is out of my hands now,” he said; he could tell the police didn't take his warnings very seriously.

*   *   *

The case went to the jury the next day. Reporters started their long vigil for the verdict, anxiously swapping theories and scenarios for possible decisions. Given the weak prosecution, most thought White might get a manslaughter verdict for Moscone's killing, but since White had to reload in order to kill Milk, a verdict of at least second-degree murder seemed inevitable on at least one count. One reporter offhandedly asked Defense Attorney Doug Schmidt if he felt society would feel justice was served if the jury returned the two manslaughter verdicts Schmidt wanted. “Society doesn't have anything to do with it,” Schmidt said. “Only those twelve people in the jury box.”

eighteen

The Final Act

Looking tired and spent, the seven women and five men of the Dan White jury filed into the warm, windowless courtroom in the Hall of Justice. Only juror Richard Aparicio, the retired policeman, seemed pleased with his work; he beamed at Dan White as he walked into the room and when White sat motionless, Aparicio rapped his knuckles loudly on the defense table in front of the defendant. The jurors had deliberated thirty-six difficult hours over their decision, producing some speculation that the trial might have created a hung jury, but at 5:28
P.M.
on Monday, May 21, the dozen San Franciscans were ready to announce their verdicts.

“Mr. Foreman,” Judge Walter Calcagno asked, “Has the jury reached verdicts in this case?”

“Yes, it has, Your Honor.”

“Will you read the verdicts, please.”

The foreman slowly told the judge that the jury had found Dan White guilty of violating section 192.1 of the penal code in the slaying of George Moscone. Voluntary manslaughter. The judge polled each juror to see if this represented the unanimous verdict. Dan White's family and the hundred reporters waited anxiously for the Milk verdict, since the second shooting represented the likelier case of murder. His voice quavering, the foreman told the judge that the jury had found White guilty of again violating section 192.1 of the penal code—voluntary manslaughter. The stunned reporters sat motionless, some calculating the sentence for two counts of voluntary manslaughter. Seven years, eight months. With time off for good behavior, White would probably be out of jail in less than five years. Dan White raised his hand to his eyes and cried. Mary Ann White and several of the jurors also broke into tears. Richard Aparicio walked from the jury box to the defense table and gave Doug Schmidt a firm and hearty handshake. Prosecutor Tom Norman sat in stony silence, flushed.

*   *   *

A radio station had called Cleve Jones' Castro Street apartment moments before the verdict was announced, so it could get an instant live response from the twenty-three-year-old activist. The reporter had left the receiver sitting next to her own radio connection. Jones could barely believe the words she broadcast: “Oh, my God! I can't believe it—he got off on both. Manslaughter for Milk. Manslaughter for Moscone.”

From the next room, Cleve's roommate started shouting that the verdicts had just flashed on the television news.

“What does this mean?” the shaken reporter asked Jones.

“This means that in America, it's all right to kill faggots,” Jones said. He hung up the phone and raced to the bathroom, where he started throwing up. He remembered the days he had thrown up in gym class bathrooms after getting beat up by high school bullies, he remembered the blood on the wall of the flophouse hotel where he had spent his first night in San Francisco, he remembered the blood on the wall in Dan White's office where Harvey's pale blue face had lolled on his dead shoulders, and he threw up some more. By the time Jones emerged from the bathroom, a small crowd had already gathered in his living room, Jones's militant young friends coming to the Castro apartment where they had assembled to plot marches and demonstrations in years past. Reporters were demanding Jones for instant interviews down on Castro Street, where most TV stations werer setting up their microwave discs to go live.

By a strange twist in timing, the next day, May 22, would have been Harvey Milk's forty-ninth birthday. Jones and the Harvey Milk Club had long ago planned a street celebration for that night. Once on Castro Street with reporters, Jones was besieged with questions about the planned party.

“Will the reaction to the verdict come here tomorrow night?” a journalist asked Jones.

“No,” Cleve said. “The reaction will be swift and it will be tonight.”

Already, a crowd of several hundred had gathered around the corner of Castro and Market, dazed and angry. Jones raced back to his apartment and searched for the battered white bullhorn Harvey had used in so many street demonstration. He grabbed Milk's old bullhorn and headed back to Castro Street.

*   *   *

Dianne Feinstein held an impromptu press conference when she heard the verdict. She had found Harvey's body, she noted, and had no doubt what the verdict should have been. “As I look at the law,” the mayor said, “it was two murders.”

Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver put her assessment of the verdicts more succinctly. “Dan White has gotten away with murder. It's as simple as that.”

Supervisor Harry Britt locked himself in his office for forty minutes after hearing the outcome and emerged after 6
P.M.
to deliver his own enraged reaction. “Harvey Milk knew he would be assassinated. He knew that the lowest nature in human beings would rise up and get him. But he never imagined that this city would approve of that act. It's beyond immoral. It's obscene. This is an insane jury. This man's homophobia had something to do with this verdict—and it
was
murder.”

A gallows humor pervaded the city's newsrooms as journalists started shaping their verdict reaction stories. “Sara Jane Moore got life for
missing
Gerald Ford,” a reporter commented. “Doug Schmidt's such a good lawyer he could get sodomy charges reduced to a citation for following too closely,” joked another. Gay journalist Randy Alfred wondered aloud why the jury had not just gone ahead and convicted Milk of “unlawful interference with a bullet fired from the gun of a former police officer.”

Journalist Francis Moriarty was standing next to a police radio when he heard the SFPD dispatcher cheerfully broadcast the verdicts and then burst into a chorus of “Danny Boy.” In the background, another officer started whistling the Notre Dame fight song.

*   *   *

Cleve Jones clasped his bullhorn firmly as he stared at the milling throng gathering on Castro Street. “Today, Dan White was essentially patted on the back,” he told the crowd of five hundred that had gathered below him, reading their EXTRA editions. “He was convicted of manslaughter—what you get for hit and run. We all know this violence has touched all of us. It was not manslaughter. I was there that day at City Hall. I saw what the violence did. It was not manslaughter, it was murder.”

With the chant of “Out of the bars and into the streets,” Jones started leading the mob down Castro where scores more emerged from each bar. The crowd circled the Castro, past Most Holy Redeemer Church, with its chants:

Out of the bars and into the streets

Dan White was a cop

Out of the bars and into the streets

Dan White was a cop

The crowd surged up Castro again, a thousand strong. There, a wispy, blond-haired young man held a handscrawled sign: “Avenge Harvey Milk.” He was Chris Perry, the first president of what was now the Harvey Milk Club, an old Milk political croney who remembered Harvey telling him seven months before that gays needed to fight back. Perry thought about this and all the times in the past months that he and his friends had been kicked around by thugs and police on the sidewalks of the Castro; today it made sense that, even after his years of registering voters and nudging gays into nuts-and-bolts Democratic Party politics, he should be standing on this corner, a block from Harvey's old ward headquarters, holding his sign: Avenge Harvey Milk. One year ago that very afternoon, Harvey Milk had been dressed in a clown suit, jumping aboard passing cable cars to tell tourists, “I'm an elected official. I run this city.” A year later, Harvey was only a memory, his ashes spread in the cold waters of the Pacific, but an angry mob took up the chant as it passed Chris Perry's sign and started down Market Street toward City Hall, and hundreds more joined in from every side street, echoing the mantra of a thousand voices:

Avenge Harvey Milk

Avenge Harvey Milk

Avenge Harvey Milk

As the crowd passed out of the Castro, Cleve sought out the policemen he had been promised a few days before in his stormy meeting with a police captain. “I hope you have my escort.”

“Yes, Mr. Jones,” said the officer, with newfound respect.

New chants rose and fell as the throng, now 1,500 strong, moved down Market Street:

Dan White, Dan White

Hit man for the New Right

Dan White, Dan White,

Hit man for the New Right.

And the chant that had become increasingly popular during the mounting tensions of the past months:

Dump Dianne

Dump Dianne

Dump Dianne

Police whistles shrieked at the fading day. The crowd had followed this path so many times before, but today their anger was not directed toward a nebulous electorate in the Midwest and they bore no candles. Slogans rose, evaporated, and were forgotten amid each successive wave of angry mottos that deafened commuters trying to wend their way up Market Street.

All-straight jury

No surprise

Dan White lives

And Harvey Milk dies.

Fresh crimson paint now dripped from the wall of the hamburger joint across the street from City Hall, a few feet from the phone where Dan White had called his wife after the killings: “HE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER.” The crowd had swelled to over five thousand by the time it reached City Hall. The handful of police officers inside were confused. None of the experienced police brass, who had spent so many years of their careers watching courteous homosexuals walking docilely into paddy wagons during the decades of bar raids, could have imagined a gay crowd literally screaming for blood.

Kill Dan White

Kill Dan White

Kill Dan White

The anti-death penalty coalition that had organized the march had a sound system waiting on the wide granite stairs of City Hall, but as the crowd surged toward the building's glass doors, the handful of officers decided they had to make a stand. They charged up the steps, knocking over the public address system's generator and mortally mangling the loud speakers' wiring. The officers quickly retreated back into City Hall as the thousands pressed in upon them. As dusk fell, the first rock crashed through one of the doors and the crowd roared its approval.

The throng had grown far beyond the first five thousand who had marched from the Castro. While the first hundred at the front tried to storm the City Hall doors, thousands more stood by confused, trying to figure out what was going on as the sounds of shattering glass echoed through the darkening sky. A dozen young men tore the gilded grill ornamental work from the front doors and then used the spears to batter through the thick glass at the entrance. Stones hurled from all directions began smashing every first floor window in the building. The outbreak of violence surprised many of the more sedate gays who were expecting another rally. Scuffling broke out between the protesters. As one man hurled a rock, he was confronted with a pair of well-dressed professionals arguing for peace; the professionals were then threatened by a half dozen angry youths who were engulfed by still more gays arguing nonviolence.