Harvey Milk -” the White Knight

By Steve Ostrow

San Francisco in the late ’70s was like one huge open bathhouse, a gay paradise. The macho queens with their leather drag hung out in the Castro sprouting moustaches and beards, whilst the dewy-eyed youths patrolled Polk St in T-shirts and jeans. As you might suspect, I didn’t spend a helluva lot of time in the Castro.

There were backrooms, side rooms, leather clubs, drag clubs, porno theatres and, above all, gay was in -” so much so that in 1977, a 47-year-old camera store owner, Harvey Milk, became the first openly gay person elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Also elected to the Board that year was former policeman Dan White, who ran with the slogan Crime is Number One with Me.

The sexual revolution, heralded in by the Continental and Stonewall, had now spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and everything in between. Manufacturers reported that sales of amyl nitrate that year topped the 4 million bottle mark, up from 900,000 in 1973.

Bette Midler, still gaining momentum, did her first network television special on NBC, wisecracking. -˜Well, we finally made it to network television. The big time. We are living proof that the moral fibre which this country lives on has died.’ I was having a coffee on Polk St [in 1978] when a police siren went off, and suddenly the whole area was ablaze in light, ambulances and police cars everywhere.

What’s happening?’ I yelled to the cafe owner.

They’re all running into City Hall, he said. I ran after one of the policemen. Hey, what’s going on, officer?

Somebody just shot Harvey Milk and the mayor.

It was bedlam. I watched till the ambulance sped away before racing back to my apartment just in time to catch a bulletin on the TV. The white-haired newscaster was in the middle of his report when I tuned in.

-¦Informed that San Francisco mayor George Moscone was about to announce a replacement for him on the City Board of Supervisors, Dan White strapped a snub-nosed .38 pistol to his shoulder and had a friend drive him to City Hall, where he entered through a side window, thus avoiding metal detectors. He then pumped two bullets into Mayor Moscone’s chest and then two more into his skull. White then reloaded, crossed City Hall and used five bullets to assassinate gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk.

That night the city mobilised itself in response to the double assassination, and I joined a massive candlelight march down Market St. The news called it one of the most elegant responses of a community to violence ever witnessed. The front page of the San Francisco Examiner the next day was headed:

November 28, 1978 A City Weeps.

After a lengthy trial White was found guilty on two counts of voluntary manslaughter and not first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of Moscone and Milk. The verdict was precipitated in part by White’s claim that a steady diet of junk food diminished his capacity to act rationally on the day of the killings.

It was 10 o’clock at night after the announcement when I was awakened by what sounded like a small war. I ran to the window where I could see out to Market St. Dozens of police sirens were shrieking in the night and what sounded like small bombs were exploding everywhere. The street was awash with people running in all directions.

Grabbing some clothes I ran through the maze of people who were marching on City Hall. Police cars were overturned and burning in the dark foggy night. Hundreds of demonstrators shouting, We want justice! and He got away with murder! were trashing City Hall, throwing rocks through windows and breaking through the massive oak entrance doors with battering rams. Molotov cocktails were being thrown at every police car in sight.

The hundreds of policemen on the scene were helpless against the city’s massed gay outpouring. There was no stopping the wave of rage and disbelief in the gay community that culminated in the massive riot that didn’t subside till the early hours of the morning.

Wandering through the mayhem I could see the frenzied fury on people’s faces, not only for the White decision but also for all the years of persecution and marginalisation. The pent-up fury of hundreds of thousands of gays and their friends was pinpointed at the very shrine of local authority: City Hall. By the time it was over, dozens of police cars had been overturned and burnt, and more than a hundred and sixty people, including fifty policemen, had been injured. Damage in and around City Hall was estimated to be in the millions.

In the wee hours of the morning, I walked the desolate streets back to my apartment. It was like a scene out of Gone with the Wind, Atlanta during the Civil War. A gay spokesman interviewed on the midday news proclaimed, Society is going to have to deal with us, not as nice little fairies who have hairdressing salons, but as people capable of violence.

Citing the Twinkie defence, White was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison, with a possibility of parole after five years. That same year, Sarah Jane Moore got life for missing President Gerald Ford.

Five years later as I sat waiting at a bank for a transaction, on the manager’s desk were strewn papers from all over the country. The New York Times had a front-page story on AIDS, a virginal happening for them, covering the first meeting of White House officials with representatives of the gay community since Ronald Reagan had come to office. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss the administration’s response to the AIDS epidemic.

The Miami Herald ran a story on the alarming rate of AIDS infections in Haitian refugees. The Virginia Spokesman quoted Jerry Falwell telling a group of followers in Lynchburg that -˜AIDS is the judgment of God.’ Five years later the San Francisco Examiner headlined Dan White Free. Having served five years for the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, White was paroled from prison. Ordered by the parole board to stay away from San Francisco, he settled in southern California.

Eighteen months later he committed suicide by asphyxiating himself in his wife’s car with a hose running from the exhaust pipe to the passenger’s compartment.

info: A condensed and edited excerpt from Saturday Night at the Baths, Book 2: The Best is Yet to Come by Steve Ostrow.