The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  Local reporters’ favorite candidate was a man who had done nothing in gay politics, since he had only come out on the day of the Moscone-Milk killings. Scott Beach, a local radio personality, had long hung out on the fringes of San Francisco’s haute crowd, frequenting singles bars and journalists’ watering holes. Once Milk’s seat became open, however, Beach announced he had been gay all along and that Milk’s murder had inspired him to come out of the closet. To advance his candidacy, he wrote a song based on the Milk poem Anne had read at the opera house—“Our Time Is Now”—and played it for every approving reporter who showed up at his house. After singing the jingle, Beach would piously insist he was the man to carry on Milk’s legacy. When one gay reporter pointed out that Beach had tape-recorded commercials for Terrance Hallinan’s campaign against Harvey in 1977, Beach confided, “Well I did that for Terry as a favor, but when I went into the voting booth, I pulled the lever for Harvey Milk.”

  Newspaper columnists proclaimed Beach the best candidate for supervisor. He may not have taken part in any gay political activity, but the newspaper people had never considered such activity to be serious in the first place. Beach had never bothered them with uncomfortable prattle about homosexuals’ rights. Besides, Beach made great copy. He even played his song on network television, garnering more air time than any of the serious gay candidates. Gay politicos complained that once again the media were trivializing a serious issue, but these activists never understood that few reporters thought the gay movement was anything but trivial.

  All the while, Feinstein pondered and delayed the decision, impressing Harvey’s aides by her sincerity in really wanting to replace Milk with a politician in tune with Harvey’s populist views, and yet frustrating them by her apparent conclusion that none of the candidates acceptable to Milk were qualified to sit on the board. The indecision left gays feeling leaderless and angry. “If it took the Roman Catholic cardinals less than two days to choose a pope,” the Bay Area Reporter wrote after a month of waiting, “surely the mayor could have come up with a qualified supervisor in like time.”

  “Free Dan White.”

  Reporter Mike Weiss instantly recognized the slogan as the battle cry policemen had taken up after the assassinations. Still, he was taken aback when he unexpectedly saw the quote that surrounded this slogan on the t-shirt beneath the unbuttoned uniform of a police officer in the Hall of Justice. Encircled around “Free Dan White” was the John Donne quote: “No man is an island entire to himself.”

  Within a week of the killings, Dan White had become a cause célèbre for police officers who never had much use for either Harvey Milk or his liberal ally, George Moscone, the man who had appointed Chief Gain. Gays were enraged at the news that police and firemen had raised a reported $100,000 for White’s defense fund. Graffiti soon appeared throughout the city with such slogans as “Kill Fags: Dan White for Mayor” and “Dan White Showed You Can Fight City Hall.” An Irish Catholic friend of the White family joked with Weiss: “Why did Harvey Milk die a faggot’s death? Because he got blown away.”

  Feinstein had spent much of Mayor Moscone’s term lambasting Chief Gain, so rumors spread swiftly that Feinstein would soon can the controversial chief and replace him with a man from the ranks. Sensing a shift in the wind, some policemen removed the “lavender glove” which, they complained, Gain had insisted they don when dealing with gays. When a hotel manager objected to police beating several transvestite tenants, a police sergeant explained, “Well, they’re only fruits.” When the manager turned out to be a radical gay activist who filed charges against the sergeant, the police officer returned to casually ask, “How is your health? How is your life expectancy?”

  Cleve Jones got a call from two friends one morning who told of how a gang of Latino thugs had chased them through the Castro the previous night, right to the door of their Mission District apartment. When the police came, they did nothing, even though the attackers still sauntered defiantly around the gays’ apartment building. Once the cops left, the punks literally broke through the door, leaving the victims to fend them off with kitchen knives. Jones hadn’t spent his political stewardship under Harvey Milk for nothing: He quickly issued a press release, called television stations, and instructed his friends on how to reenact the crime for the TV news cameras.

  On Castro Street, police started making random identification searches. For the first time in years, uniformed officers started appearing in gay bars during peak hours to undertake such important business as checking pinball licenses. Gain no longer had control of his officers, activists feared, and the police were reverting to the harassment of years past. The stories coming from all corners of the city’s gay community later had politicos terming the months after the assassinations “the winter of our discontent.”

  * * *

  Nobody works on New Year’s Eve.

  Harry Britt glanced at his clock; it was 11:30 P.M. on New Year’s Eve. He couldn’t believe Mayor Feinstein was working at that time on that day, but there she was on the phone, asking Harry if he could drop by her Pacific Heights home to discuss Harvey’s replacement. By now, some five weeks after the killings, Harvey’s aides were convinced that they had lost the seat to the moderates. Though they still ostensibly backed Anne, they were desperately floating trial balloons for other candidates. Harry could tell that he had impressed both Feinstein and her fiancé Richard Blum, who seemed to have a major role in the mayor’s decision making. He was at Feinstein’s door at what seemed a most ungodly hour the next morning. Over coffee, the mayor wondered aloud if she should appoint a caretaker replacement. A federal employee who was unknown to gay political activists had caught her favor and she was eager to appoint him. Britt counseled that it would be politically foolish to lose control of the seat by appointing someone who would never turn into a gay leader and help promote Feinstein’s own election in November. Who was Britt’s second choice, after Kronenberg? Feinstein asked. Harry refused to forward any other names. The mayor pressed further. “If I can’t appoint Anne, who should I appoint?”

  Harry suggested another name from Harvey’s list—his.

  As soon as news surfaced that Feinstein was seriously considering Britt for supervisor, gay moderates spread rumors that he was a communist, a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Pabich, Rivaldo, and Britt corralled all the Democratic leaders they could to make one point: Harry was a Democrat. They also struggled to fabricate a respectable image for Harry. Though he was now more apt to be found at meetings of the local Gay Atheist League than at MYF gatherings, Britt’s backers highlighted Harry’s background as a Methodist preacher. Though his politics indeed lay at the socialist end of the spectrum, he now was presented as a stolid Democrat. Harry was no homosexual militant, but a Texas-bred, soft-spoken minister who would bring mature leadership to the gay community. They would promise Feinstein his loyalty and support—anything to keep the seat. The strategy often stepped over the line between politicking and deception—and it worked. On Thursday, January 8—almost one year after Harvey Milk and Jack Lira had led the inaugural march from Castro Street to City Hall—Feinstein and Britt held a joint press conference to announce that Harry Britt, Jr., would be the new supervisor from District 5.

  Anne went into seclusion. Her lesbian friends had long told her that in the end, the gay men would screw her over and now, she was convinced they had been right. Her original backers, who had defected to Britt, felt Anne missed the point. The necessity was not to get Anne or any specific individual in Harvey’s seat, but simply to get someone committed to Harvey’s progressive and militant gay politics. Anne had been plucked from obscurity and essentially created and marketed, the way a company markets a new laundry soap, they felt. She shouldn’t take the defeat personally. With this analysis, the aides closest to Harvey had taken their first steps away from Milk’s ward politics. They had learned that once you have power, you don’t have to bother spending years to stake out a score of stands on a score of issues; candi
dates can be created and marketed and imbued with the power that connections and political savvy can bring. Harvey had brought them this power. Now it was theirs to use.

  Harry Britt was just over forty years old. He spent the Saturday between the press conference and his formal swearing-in wandering around the familiar haunts of Castro Street, watching the hot young guys guzzle beer and shoot pool. He viewed this scene with a certain nostalgia now. He knew it was his last weekend to be an anonymous Castro clone. He had come to the Castro because of the murder of his first hero, Martin Luther King, and now he was leaving it because of the killing of his second, Harvey Milk. That afternoon he went downtown to buy something he hadn’t needed in years—a suit.

  Harry’s inaugural speech at the board was emblematic of his first months in office. “Decisions about gay people must be made by gay people,” he said. “Decisions that affect women must be made by women. The decisions that affect human beings must be made by women because they are free from the macho mentality.” Even Harry’s close friends glanced at each other nervously when Britt fumbled over the last sentence. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  * * *

  Modern lawyering requires careful use of the press, Dan White’s lawyer, Doug Schmidt, later told a barrister’s convention. The press speculation surrounding Dan White’s preliminary hearing—just one week after Harry Britt was sworn in—certainly represented a masterful stroke of media manipulation, perhaps, some observers later guessed, the move that won Schmidt the trial. The list of prospective witnesses Schmidt presented at the hearing read like a Who’s Who of city government. A judge, congressmen, current and former supervisors, and even State Senator John Briggs were among the forty politicians Schmidt indicated he might call during his client’s trial. The list mystified most of the people named on it. A number of former supervisors complained that they had never served on the board with White; some had never even met him. One miffed judge filed a motion to squash any subpoena of herself, pointing out she had met White only once and could offer no information about either the crime or criminal.

  For his part, Schmidt would only say he was basing his defense on a “broad spectrum of social, political, and ethical issues,” arguing against the judge’s motion by vaguely insisting he would present a unique defense, unlike anything seen in courtrooms before. The “broad spectrum” quote caught the reporters’ fancy and after a number of well-timed leaks, the story of Dan White’s possible defense emerged. White’s case obviously would not question whether the former policeman had actually fired the bullets that killed George and Harvey. That point was obvious. White might instead plea that he had killed the pair in a heat of passion bred because, one newspaper report speculated, a “profound change had occurred in the political climate at City Hall and that this had offended White’s sense of values.” The “broad spectrum of social, political, and ethical issues,” therefore, could include everything from excesses at Gay Freedom Day Parades to the seamier sides of some of the major city politicians’ sex lives to such issues as the tremendous clout Peoples Temple wielded in city government. Confronted with this snake pit of San Francisco politics, the theory went, Dan White’s traditional all-American values were so offended that in a moment of moral outrage, he killed the two politicians.

  Lawyers debated whether such a broad argument with all its particulars would even be admissable in court. But many also noted that a major figure in any snake pit scenario would be the man prosecuting White, District Attorney Joe Freitas. A top lieutenant of the Reverend Jim Jones had literally lived in the D.A.’s offices when he was an assistant D.A. for Freitas, and the ambitious district attorney owed his election in no small part to aid from the temple. Some attorneys reportedly advised Freitas to hand the case over to a special prosecutor or to the state attorney general’s office. He had known both Milk and Moscone and could rightly say that his office would be biased in its prosecution. But Freitas pressed ahead with his plans for prosecution, despite the snake pit speculation. He charged White with two counts of first-degree murder, invoking for the first time the clause in John Briggs’s new capital punishment law that called for the gas chamber for any person who assassinated a public official in an attempt to prevent him from fulfilling his official duties.

  * * *

  “Look it’s easier to grab fruits,” the policeman explained to the bystander who asked why five police officers had yanked two men about to walk into a gay bar, dragged them to the street, and started pummeling them with their nightsticks. When another gay man protested the beatings, an officer tartly informed him, “Shut up, faggot, or I’ll knock you out.” The two beaten men were arrested for “blocking an entrance.”

  * * *

  “Let’s get the dykes,” shouted the ten men as they ran toward the doorway of Peg’s Place, a lesbian bar, in another incident.

  “Call the police,” shouted the bouncer to the bartender.

  “We are the police,” one of the drunken men shouted. “We can go anywhere we damn well please.”

  A melee broke out between the men and the women patrons who rushed to the bar employees’ defense, beating the intruders with pool cues.

  The police lieutenant who came soon afterward shook his head when told of the behavior of the men, two of whom were off-duty cops. He knew one of the attackers, the lieutenant said, and he was “a good guy.” He had a hard time believing the policeman would do such a thing. The lieutenant then checked the bar’s various licenses and inquired if the bartender wasn’t really drunk.

  The Peg’s Place brawl hit the front pages with gay complaints that the fracas was only part of a concerted increase in police intimidation of gays. Feinstein said nothing for two weeks and then released a statement calling for stern prosecution of the policemen involved. The response satisfied no one. The POA criticized her for taking the gays’ side while gay leaders were miffed at the two weeks it took to get a response.

  Homosexual rancor grew further when, at a meeting with gay leaders, Feinstein refused to promise to appoint a gay police commissioner. George Moscone had pledged such an appointment before his term was out and Feinstein’s reneging on that promise seemed further proof that the climate for gays had turned considerably colder under Feinstein. A Ladies Homes Journal interview with the mayor set off more controversy when she worried about how gays’ flouting of community standards might “set up a backlash” in the city. “The right of an individual to live as he or she chooses can become offensive,” Feinstein said. “The gay community is going to have to face this. It’s fine for us to live here respecting each other’s lifestyles, but it doesn’t mean imposing them on others.” As far as gays were concerned, Dan White and his police friends were the parties guilty of imposing their lifestyles on others—and the mayor’s continued fretting about gay sexuality tendered further proof of her own prudery, many gays thought. Around the Castro, posters soon appeared depicting Feinstein in sadomasochistic leather drag, cracking a cat-o’-nine-tails, under the caption, “The Ayatollah Feinstein.”

  Supervisor Britt could do little to counter the growing disatisfaction. He never rallied from the initial burst of criticism over his strange inaugural remarks. He was intimidated by the charges of sexism lesbians leveled against him after the Kronenberg affair. He had none of Harvey’s skill at dealing with reporters, insulting them and even hanging up on them if he didn’t like the direction he thought the interview was taking. In public appearances, Britt was a frumpy dresser. His contact lenses made him blink uncontrollably when put under television lights. People frequently called him Harvey instead of Harry, a habit which infuriated Britt and delighted his critics who insisted that the novice politician suffered in comparison to the late Milk.

  “The change began with the assassinations of Moscone and Milk. The pair were put out of the way to destroy what they stood for and to dismantle what they had achieved,” editorialized the Bay Area Reporter, echoing the fears that many gays were voicing at the increased gay proble
ms. “The evidence is coming in day after day: Violence against gays is on the rise. Police harassment (both covert and overt) is on the rise.… At this writing, the Dan White plan seems to be succeeding, for once again, gays are targets and victims.”

  Such an assessment left Police Chief Gain in a curious position. During his three years as chief, relations between police and gays had evolved into the most cordial between any police agency and gay community in the United States. The majority of his police officers were far more sophisticated in dealing with gays than police in other major cities. Police Officers Association president Bob Barry, for example, was outspoken in his opposition to the Briggs Initiative. In another time, the outbursts of police harrassment might not have been seen as a barometer of a changing social climate in the city. Coming just months after a former policeman killed the city’s first gay official, however, they seemed part of a concerted effort by the police to pull San Francisco back. Gain, who was more sympathetic to gays than any other police chief in the nation, was powerless to change this growing perception that he reigned over the most anti-gay institution in the city.

  * * *

  “Have you ever supported controversial causes, like homosexual rights, for instance?”

  Doug Schmidt asked this question of potential jurors since the judge had forbade him to ask directly if people were gay. Homosexual activists complained that few judges in America would allow black jurors to be systematically excluded from a jury weighing the murder of the nation’s most prominent black public official. But the first days of the jury selection for the Dan White trial saw precisely the analogous drama unfold. One heterosexual woman was disqualified from the panel when she said she had gay friends and had once walked with them in a Gay Freedom Day Parade. One man was disqualified from sitting on the case when he answered the question about controversial causes by saying, “I sign anything that comes along Eighteenth and Castro.” When a juror appeared in a plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a thick, dark mustache, Schmidt asked with whom he lived. A roommate, he explained. “What does he or she do?” Schmidt asked. “He works at Holiday Inn,” the young man said, putting special emphasis on the sentence’s subject. Schmidt asked the judge to pass the juror “for cause,” meaning it was prima facie that the man would not be a fair juror; the judge agreed. For the duration of the trial, gay papers pointedly referred to the panel on the case as the “all-heterosexual jury.”