by Randy Shilts
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.”
Newspeople scurried to try to find a gay leader who would apologize. They had a tough time. “Political and cultural leaders haven’t apologized for creating a jury where Dan White is a hero and for creating a jury where Dan White can be found a moral man incapable of cold-blooded murder,” snorted Bill Kraus, the new president of the Harvey Milk Club. “They have a lot more to apologize for than we do.”
Graffiti around Castro Street took an even more strident tone. Slogans filled all available walls:
Gay Riots Now
Feinstein Will Die
Death Dan White
Islamic Justice—An Eye for an Eye
Dan White & Co. You will not escape, for violent fairies will visit you even in your dreams.
On a wall a few doors down from the old Castro Camera site was a tribute to the man who was becoming legend: Happy Birthday Harvey—At Least We Love You. Across the street from the devastated Elephant Walk, a spray-painter had scrawled a variation on the dramatic sentence from Harvey’s taped political will: Let the Bullets that Rip Through My Brain Smash Through Every Closet Door in the Country.
The only person remotely aligned with Harvey to denounce the riots was his estranged brother Robert, who pleaded that gays should “respect and honor his feelings and my feelings by not demonstrating.”
Down the Long Island Railroad tracks from Robert Milk’s Rockville Centre home, Harvey’s old basketball teammate from Bayshore High, Dick Brown, read the news of the riot that day with considerably less antipathy. When blacks have a riot, they burn their own neighborhoods, Brown thought. At least when gays riot, they have the sense to get out of their own neighborhood.
Officials from the Police Officers Association spent much of that day in press conferences angrily denounc
ing the restraint which Chief Gain had ordered during the early hours of the City Hall fracas. Gain defended himself by saying he had avoided a bloodbath; POA leaders said that sixty-one injured officers was, by their standards, a bloodbath. Cops also flayed at Gain for ordering the withdrawal from the Castro. One police officer even filed charges of “inciting a riot” against Harry Britt because of the supervisor’s insistance that police did not belong on Castro Street.
The newspaper editorials and columnists, of course, condemned the gay rioting, but the news coverage of the night worked to balance the public’s perceptions of the events. Spot news, after all, demands simplification of even the heaviest news events, so on the day after the riots, only two stories emerged: the story of the gay brutality against police at City Hall and the story of police brutality against gays on Castro Street. The police attack on the Elephant Walk was something of a lucky break, not only because it balanced the homosexual excesses at City Hall, but because media people were crawling all over the Castro before police arrived, permitting every police abuse to be fastidiously documented in both print and film. The fact that police had beaten reporters at both City Hall and Castro Street did little to engender journalistic sympathy for the SFPD.
Still, gay activists fretted about the political fallout from the rioting. The elections for mayor, D.A., sheriff, and six of the eleven supervisors were to be held less than six months away. They could provide a likely platform for any politician who decided to fan the flames of conservative voter discontent. As in the militant days after the Anita Bryant vote and again during the Briggs Initiative, the specter of an anti-gay backlash haunted the politicos who had worked so long to achieve gay political power.
* * *
By the afternoon newspaper editions, stories of the tense hours of jury deliberations began to emerge. Only one juror had voted for a charge of first-degree murder, and that was only on the first of many ballots. The jury had then spent hours trying to decide whether White might be guilty of second-degree murder, but arrived at the dual manslaughter verdicts, because, as one seventy-five-year-old woman juror put it, “It just all came together as if God were watching over us, as if God brought us together.” She had hoped that the decision would be best for San Francisco. “We didn’t want to give the city a worse name,” she said. “We wanted things to just quiet down and be over with.”
Another juror said that Dan White certainly was a “moral man” and was particularly impressed by the psychiatric testimony that said White had shot Moscone because he was too moral to punch him in the nose. “Many of us were praying for guidance,” said a Catholic juror who maintained that the verdict “must be God’s will or it would not have turned out this way.” Virtually all the jurors made the same point—for all the evidence the prosecution presented about the facts of the killing, they never had a sense that the prosecution had done anything to show that Dan White harbored any malice or motive to kill Milk and Moscone. They were amazed that prosecuter Norman thought he had had such an open-and-shut case of first-degree murder.
* * *
A radio blared in Cleve Jones’s apartment as he coordinated the training of some three hundred monitors for that night’s birthday party. The disc jockey was playing “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” and dedicating it to the memory of Harvey Milk. Down the street, volunteers were hoisting a huge blowup portrait of Harvey to hang from the theater sign, which spelled out CASTRO in three stories of neon. On the marquee, the theater had written: Harvey Milk Lives. Police blocked off the street so workers could erect the huge entertainment stage, as they had so many times before at the Castro Street fairs Harvey had once masterminded. Other volunteers printed up hundreds of T-shirts for the monitors with the slogan: “PLEASE—No Violence.” Late in the afternoon, Cleve and Scott Smith made their final plans with police, helping them set up a secret command post over Cliff’s Hardware. Other police officials were scouting hidden assembly points for the hundreds of uniformed police who would wait on the periphery of the Castro for any sign of trouble. Gays were making their own secret preparations too. First aid stations were covertly established in a number of neighborhood locations. Legal observers were donning green armbands so they could witness any arrests police tried to make. Though both sides had called a truce, neither trusted the other. Police felt humiliated by the gay show of strength at City Hall; gays still fumed over the unprovoked Elephant Walk bash-in. As dusk fell and thousands began descending on the Castro, Jones was enthusiastic: “We’ll disco right in the police’s faces.” Many of the celebrants were wearing helmets, however, and the neighborhood police captain called Jones over a special radio he had given him to say, “Don’t worry, Cleve. I’m right here in front of your apartment. We’ll see what happens.”
By the time the party started, twenty thousand had gathered in the Castro to hear Jones’ opening words:
Thank you for being here. Last night the lesbians and gay men of San Francisco showed the rest of the city and the rest of the world that gay people are angry and on the move. And tonight we are here to show the world what we are creating out of that anger and that movement. A strong community of women and men working together to change our world.
It seems highly appropriate to celebrate Harvey’s birthday in this manner, a party on the street he loved. Castro Street was Harvey’s home. Where he lived, worked, and organized.
How many have moved here, to this new home from somewhere else?
How many are not native San Franciscans?
We have come here from all the old hometowns of America to reclaim our past and secure our future and replace lives of loneliness and despair with a place of joy and dignity and love.
The crowd cheered and Jones began introducing the acts. The Castro’s own star, Sylvester, got the crowd dancing to his latest disco hits and before long, the street was filled with the bobbing heads of people dancing, slurping beers, and generally congratulating themselves on the unique homosexual ability to stage a stormy riot one night and then disco peacefully in the streets the next. The most disgruntled folks on hand were the plainclothes vice cops who could do nothing while the celebrants happily passed marijuana cigarettes among each other. When the late-night chill crept into the partying throng, the event’s organizers assembled on stage to sing one last tribute to the man who would have been forty-nine years old that day. The words echoed by the storefronts Harvey had once organized into his business group, through the alleys where Harvey had walked precincts, and down the streets where he had cruised, demonstrated, and registered voters. Twenty thousand voices singing for a dead man who had spent most his life as an unsettled drifter with strange forebodings until six years before, when he had found a home on this obscure street in San Francisco. “Happy birthday, dear Harvey,” they sang. “Happy birthday to you.”
* * *
In New York City that night, several hundred gay pickets gathered in Sheridan Square, across the street from the location of the old Stonewall bar, where gays had first rioted a decade before. They knew nothing of the cheerful birthday party a continent away and were still outraged by the verdict. Some signs bore just one phrase: “We all live in San Francisco.”
Epilogue
Attempts to investigate and prosecute those involved with either the gay rioting or the police brutality largely fizzled. The anti-gay backlash some activists feared also failed to materialize. With the 1979 municipal elections only months after the White Night Riots, most concern about the city’s gay community focused solely on its political clout.
By the November elections, gays wielded unprecedented power. The surprisingly strong showing of a virtually unknown gay mayoral candidate—David Scott, Rick Stokes’s successor on the Board of Permit Appeals—forced Mayor Feinstein into a runoff against conservative Supervisor Quentin Kopp. Feinstein promptly apologized for her “community standards” remarks, promised a gay police commissioner, lunched nearly every day in the Castro, and ultimately gained lopsided percentages in gay preci
ncts to win her own term as mayor.
Other incumbents had an even tougher year. Voters sent District Attorney Joe Freitas into political exile, handing him a three-to-one margin of defeat and electing novice politician Arlo Smith, the mild-mannered attorney general’s staffer who had once stuffed envelopes in Castro Camera for Harvey Milk. All incumbent supervisors in contested races that year also lost their bids for reelection except one—Harry Britt.
Those 1979 supervisorial elections, however, were the last to be held under the district elections system that politicians like George Moscone and Harvey Milk had worked so hard to enact. In a special election in the summer of 1980, voters narrowly repealed district elections and reinstated citywide, at-large elections of supervisors. An attempt to repeal this repeal failed three months later. Though the new citywide board had roughly the same liberal-conservative balance of the district body, liberals saw the city rapidly shift away from the neighborhood-oriented course charted during the height of the Milk-Moscone era. In the same election, voters also rejected a proposal to raise supervisor’s salaries.
Once mayor in her own right, Feinstein nudged the city back toward the pro-business polices of the pre-Moscone years. Feinstein no longer peopled planning boards with troublesome environmentalists who worried about the Manhattanization of San Francisco. Developers and business interests once again had a friendly ear in City Hall. As for Feinstein’s pet city agency, the police, one of the mayor’s first moves after her election was to announce the appointment of a new police chief, Cornelius Murphy, a stolid Irish Catholic from the ranks. Murphy decreed that police cars were no longer to be painted powder blue, they were again to be macho black-and-whites; and this made the men of the San Francisco Police Department happy with their leadership once again. Murphy, however, swore to keep Gain’s progressive policies toward gays. One of his first appearances as chief-designate came at a fundraiser for a gay police recruitment drive. By 1980, one in seven new police recruits were either lesbians or gay men. Feinstein appointed her old friend Jo Daly, a former Alice president, to the Police Commission, fulfilling a gay demand that dated back to Jose’s first campaign for supervisor. Chief Charles Gain did not leave without his own burst of glory. In one of his last appearances at a major gay function, he told a roaring crowd that he fully expected to see the day when San Francisco had both a gay mayor and police chief. Saying this, Gain retired and moved to a small town near Fresno, where he bought and managed a mobile home park.
