The Mayor of Castro Street (54 page)

The first storming of the doors brought together an odd ensemble of Harvey's friends, lovers, and cronies, as they dived to the front of the crowd to try to contain the imminent riot. About two dozen joined hands and lined themselves between the mob and the doors. Terror and purpose overwhelmed Harvey's 1976 campaign manager John Ryckman as he tried to hold back the marauding crowd; Ryckman came from the old school and was truly opposed to any violence. Jim Rivaldo and Dick Pabich thought a violent response was not entirely inappropriate, but tried to hold back the rioters for fear that a riot might harm Harry Britt's reelection chances. Scott Smith had no doubt that Harvey would have loved the theater unfolding that night, but Smith also remembered how much his former lover had adored City Hall and would have considered any violence against the building to be desecration of good culture. For a dozen reasons, the thin line of monitors held firm, pushing the demonstrators back off the City Hall steps, even while rocks whizzed by their heads and glass sprayed at their feet.

Gay leaders tried to quell the violence. “Harvey. Remember Harvey Milk. He'd be ashamed of us,” shouted Harry Britt. But the crowd knew him only as the man put in office by Dianne Feinstein; they didn't know who he was then, they didn't know who he was now. They booed and jeered him. In frustration, Britt screamed, “Stop this. You're acting like a bunch of heterosexuals.” And the jeers rose again.

A well-known lesbian university professor yelled into a feeble bullhorn, “Harvey Milk lives.” From the mob someone shouted back, “Harvey Milk's not alive. He's dead, you fool.”

From the north side of the Civic Center Plaza, a wedge of police appeared. They started their march through the crowd, braving the fusillade of rocks and bottles that flew at them. Relieved at the support, the monitors decided to sit down on the cleared steps to show that they were part of the peaceful gays. The officers quickly reached the stairs, but rather than reinforcing the monitors, they summarily started beating them with their night sticks. The odor of tear gas began to fill the night air as the monitors scrambled for cover, away from the marauding nightsticks. While the police pummeled on, a young man kicked his Frye boot through the window of a lone police car parked in front of City Hall, lit a pack of matches, threw it in the front seat, and watched the upholstery burst into flames. Another man kicked in a newspaper stand and used the street editions to kindle a fire beneath a tree near the City Hall front doors. The flames leaped into the darkness and from the inferno that was once a police cruiser came a loud wail, the shrieking of a melting siren, punctuated dramatically by the dull thud of the gas tank's explosion. The crowd cheered the sight of the burning police car. From police radios, reporters listened to the codes shifting from warnings of 911's, broken windows, to 404's, possibility of riots, and then to 528's, fire.

The police secured the portico and stood stoically as the mob pelted them with rocks and chunks of asphalt pryed from the street. When other officers attempted further forays into the crowd, the rioters tore up parking meters to ram them back, holding lids from garbage cans as shields. They tore apart massive concrete trash receptacles and hurled the chunks at police, newspeople, any visible symbol of institutional authority.

Police Chief Gain watched the riot unfold from inside City Hall and issued one stern order. Police were not to attack the rioters but simply hold their ground. Even some of the police force's sternest critics were amazed at the restraint officers showed in those early hours.

Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver decided to wade into the crowd as a last-ditch effort to end the rampage. As she stepped away from City Hall, however, a chunk of concrete hit her in the face and she had to be carried back through the glassless doors.

Mayor Dianne Feinstein arrived at City Hall at 8:30
P.M.
While she huddled with aides and supervisors, more rocks crashed through her second-floor office, allowing tear gas to waft in from the night. The group retreated to the supervisors' offices, where Feinstein was greeted by the sight of Silver stretched on a couch, her face streaming with blood. Downstairs, standing in neat rows between the pillars of City Hall's marble-floored lobby, scores of police waited in full riot gear. Each new wave of shouting and each successive onslaught of missiles stiffened them further. Many beat their clubs rythmically against the columns. Their tempers throbbed as they heard that other police outside were being ordered to only stand their ground as the rioters taunted and stoned them.

The police cars that had escorted the marchers from the Castro had lined up on the north side of the Civic Center Plaza, deserted hours ago during the early moments of rioting. Cleve Jones was stunned as he watched a dozen gay men with helmets and clubs start darting from car to car, coordinating their actions with intricate hand signals. The youths would first kick in a car window, light a book of matches, throw it onto the car's upholstery and then methodically fan the flames until the blaze was well underway. Within minutes, a block-long line of police cars had burst into flames, their gas tanks exploding and their melting sirens screeching into the cool May night. Several of the braver rioters leaped into the broken basement windows of City Hall and set fire to printouts in the city's computer center. Police rushed from the lobby to squelch the flames.

Nearly three hours after the first rock had shattered the City Hall doors, a wide wedge of officers appeared, the flames of the burning police cars casting ominous shadows on their helmets. They marched sternly into the pandemonium, beating their batons on the pavement before them like a Roman legion out to make their final conquest. Minutes after wading into the crowd, small groups of police broke away from the wedge to take on knots of rioters. With the formation destroyed, Civic Center plaza became a mélange of skirmishes between gays and police. Police were surprised and enraged at the depth of resistance they encountered. Gays beat back police with branches torn from trees, chrome ripped from city buses, and slabs of asphalt torn from the street. As a young man torched a last police car, he shouted to a reporter, “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies.”

The fighting edged further into the night, and slowly, as the police forced the rioters from Civic Center, the battles dispersed to the side streets around City Hall as random cadres of police confronted the odd groups of hoods and hustlers who took advantage of the City Hall melee to begin looting stores. Civic Center soon turned from a grim portrait of chaos to an empty wasteland of broken glass and smoldering police cruisers.

Mayor Feinstein held a midnight press conference, praising the police restraint and promising to get on with the business of putting the city back together. The riots represented the most violent episode in city history since the racial rioting of 1966, but, Feinstein noted, not one person was killed that night and none of the reported injuries was critical. “The city,” she said, “is secure.”

As reporters left the press conference, however, policemen standing guard around City Hall seemed anything but in control. “The faggots had their day,” a cop shouted to no one in particular. “We'll get ours.”

*   *   *

Cleve Jones escaped being hunted down by the roving bands of police by hitching a ride on the back of a punk rock songstress's motorcycle. Once home, Jones climbed the fire escape of his apartment building to see if trouble had spread to the Castro. Below him were the silhouettes of dozens of helmeted officers gearing up for new action.

At about the same time, Warren Hinckle arrived in the Castro with a friend who had served many years on the police department. The night seemed remarkably quiet for Castro Street, though many of the neighborhood bars were crowded with nonviolent gays who had fled the rioting for the peace of the Castro. Moments later, however, Hinckle was aghast to see police cars cruising slowly down Castro, crammed with officers in full riot gear. Some smiled with grim satisfaction as crowds gathered on the corners, hurling epithets and an occasional beer bottle.

Hinckle and his friend, the police veteran rushed to the captain, who impassively watched the gathering storm. “You guys are gonna start a police riot here,” he accused. “We lost the battle at City Hall,” the captain retorted angrily. “We're not going to lose here.”

After several bottles crashed on the cruisers' hoods, the police spilled out, went into battle formation, and started their march into the Castro. Sensing trouble, many crowded into the Elephant Walk bar, where Harvey Milk and Allan Baird had once talked of how gays and straights could live together. The police gazed through the bar's plate glass windows at the sight of a homosexual haven that so brazenly exhibited its goings-on through picture windows. With neither orders nor method, two dozen officers suddenly charged into the Elephant Walk, flailing their clubs at everyone in sight and shouting, “Banzai.” Hinckle watched the attack with amazement. Most of the officers had hidden their badges so they could not be identified.

The surprised bartenders ducked behind the bar, stretching themselves out on the floor, so the policemen simply jumped on top of the bar and coldly aimed their batons for the prostrate employees' skulls, shouting, “Sick cocksuckers.” The bar's ornate engraved glass work shattered to the floor, further scarring the women and men the police were beating and kicking. After fifteen minutes of carnage, the police returned to the streets, where dozens more officers were haphazardly beating any gay they could spot.

By now, Cleve Jones and his roommate were making brief forays onto Castro Street to drag the wounded back to their apartment. On one trip outside, Jones looked across the street and spotted two gay men on a rooftop holding rifles. Blood stained his carpet, and when he heard a new wave of police sweep past the apartment for another attack, he ordered everyone to lie on the floor. Cleve had come to San Francisco to be free and march in a gay pride parade; tonight he felt like Anne Frank dodging the Gestapo.

Harry Britt left the City Hall press conference and was heading toward his Castro home when the sight of dozens of police cars drew him to the marauding police on Castro Street. He ran up to a police sergeant who was watching the mayhem. “I'm Supervisor Harry Britt and you work for me,” he shouted.

“Buddy,” the cop answered. “I work for the city, not for you.”

From the corners, gays mocked Britt. “Okay, Harry,” they shouted, “if you got clout, use it.”

The police were regrouping again on the corner of Market and Castro when Britt caught sight of Police Chief Gain. “The police don't belong on this street,” he railed. “Get them to leave.” By now, Gain had heard the reports of the Elephant Walk rampage, an excursion he had not ordered. A mob now was marching toward the new police line, shouting, “Go home. Go home. Go home.” They were ready for another fight. Gain ordered his men out of the Castro. The officers were itching for more action, but they reluctantly withdrew.

Later that night, a friend of Mike Weiss, a free-lance reporter, ran into a cheerful group of police officers who were whooping it up at a downtown bar. “We're celebrating,” one cop explained. “We were at City Hall the day it [the killings] happened and we were smiling then. And we were there again tonight and we're still smiling.”

*   *   *

The glass cleared from the streets, the windows of City Hall now neatly boarded up, the city's gay leadership assembled in a board of supervisors committee room the next morning, just hours after the police had made their final sweep of Civic Center. By now, the statistics were being endlessly repeated by the media: At least sixty-one police officers were hospitalized and an estimated one hundred gays. A dozen police cars had been burned. Police estimated total damage to be near $1 million, a figure that later proved to be exagerated threefold. Only nineteen rioters had been arrested. Different journalists had variously tagged the riots as the “Twinkie Riots” or the “Night of Rage,” but the name beginning to stick was the “White Night Riots,” a bizarre echo of the “white night” code word Jim Jones had dubbed his suicide rituals. Mayor Feinstein had hastily called a meeting with gay leaders for that morning. Gays had now come together for an earlier conference, because Supervisor Britt and the more militant gays from the Harvey Milk Club wanted to make one point clear to the more stolid gay moderates:
No one
was to apologize for the riot. Harvey's party would go on as planned.

Mayor Feinstein clearly would have preferred gays to cancel that night's street celebration, but the Harvey Milk Club's leaders pointed out that over ten thousand posters had gone into circulation weeks before, all featuring a picture of Harvey Milk in his clown outfit, and it would be impossible to stem the tide of gays going to the Castro that night. “We have a choice between escalation or resolution of this,” Cleve Jones told Feinstein. The solution, Milk Club leaders advised, was not to keep gays out of the Castro, but to keep police away; the party must go on. Feinstein assented and Jones feverishly started training monitors and coordinating contingency plans with police. At another meeting, that night's planned speakers decided that they could variously address whatever issue they wished in their talks, but on one condition—no one should apologize.

“Harvey Milk's people do not have anything to apologize for,” Harry Britt told a gaggle of reporters after the Feinstein meeting. “Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have hairdressing salons, but as people capable of violence. We're not going to put up with Dan Whites anymore.” The reporters were shocked that a public official would condone violence. Britt was shocked they would expect anything else. The journalists asked if such a riot would not set back the gay movement. “No one has ever accepted us,” Britt snapped. “What sets a movement back is not violence. What sets us back is Uncle Toms.”