by Alia Volz
Roger twirled the metal police whistle he wore around his neck. “Fashion statement of the season.”
On Castro Street, people talked about the uptick in violence: brutal attacks in alleys; police harassment in lesbian and gay bars under flimsy pretenses; teens prowling in muscle cars, throwing garbage and picking fights. There were articles about it, and not only in the gay press and local papers; the Washington Post ran a piece under the headline, ANTI-GAY SENTIMENTS TURN VIOLENT IN AFTERMATH OF MOSCONE-MILK KILLINGS.
Mer might not have known that in the weeks following the assassinations police and firefighters had jointly raised $100,000 for Dan White’s defense. Or that White had been greeted with a friendly ass pat when he turned himself in at Northern Station, as if he were a baseball player returning to the dugout after a home run. Or that some cops had sung “Danny Boy” over the police scanner when the assassin’s identity was revealed. Or that the officer who’d taken White’s confession had known him since grammar school and softballed the interrogation. But she could see that her friends were scared.
Roger bought two dozen brownies. Looking at the bag design, he scrunched his forehead. “Is everything okay with you?”
It was one of Doug’s bags: a furiously scribbled drawing of a woman (obviously her) and a man (obviously him) facing away from each other with a malevolent demon sneering between them, and the words, It’s Not Me, It’s My Brownie.
Mer shrugged it off—“The joys of marriage!”—and continued on her way. Everything wasn’t okay, but she’d rather not advertise it. Unlike Doug, apparently.
He’d been going off his Dilantin again. Mer had woken up after midnight to an earthquake—no matter how many times it happened, it always felt like a goddamn earthquake. Realizing it was another seizure, she’d forced her arm under Doug’s jolting body and rolled him onto his side to prevent choking. The commotion woke the toddlers, who both started howling. Then the whole household was up. Mer had spent the morning bringing Doug cold washcloths for his headache while he vomited brown bile.
She wished episodes like this would keep him on his meds. Doug would take his Dilantin for a while, then secretly taper off again. Always testing, trying to prove he had the power to control his own epilepsy.
They fought about that. And about the ten pounds Mer couldn’t seem to lose, and the ledgers Doug insisted on keeping, and music and movies and art and their friends and pretty much everything else.
Mer was wearing an outfit inspired by Han Solo from Star Wars—khaki vest, black blouse, harem pants, knee-high leather boots, and a black beret. A militant look, but it suited the gunmetal weather. And her mood. She’d decided to do her run alone that afternoon—easier to negotiate stairs and tight spaces without a stroller—but she missed the guileless joy. The duffels of brownies seemed to weigh two tons as she trudged to her next stop. Boys were still cruising at Hibernia Beach, but there was a singed, burned-toast vibe.
The neighborhood seemed somehow stripped of its innocence. Because even in its most hard-core sexuality—the relentless cruising, the bathhouses and sex clubs, the orgies her friends told her about, even the S & M scene that Mer never quite understood—something about it had always seemed gleeful and immature, like teenage lust. Adding grief to the equation made the bawdiness so . . . intentional, like people were trying too hard to have fun.
* * *
Early 1979 clicked by with mounting tension, like a roller coaster climbing the first incline before the inevitable plummet and loop the loops. As anger and frustration intensified at the warehouse and in the City at large, so did the frenetic partying.
The photos of the Sticky Fingers crew from this period reveal a shift in attitude. The flamboyance rocketed into outer space. Especially in shots of my dad, whose outfits became dares. One week, he wore elaborate black eye makeup, shiny red spandex pants, and a women’s red satin blouse open to his navel and cinched at the waist. The next week, Stannous Flouride helped him dress up as a punk in torn slacks, plaid jacket, black nail polish, and a fake bloody wound on his face so he could experiment with nihilism for a day. Another week, Doug imitated the Chicano men he saw in the Mission wearing high-waisted black pants, a white wifebeater, and a panama hat. On the bus to Noe Valley, the dirty looks he got from real Chicanos convinced him never to try that again.
One Saturday, Stannous accompanied Doug on a sales run. Doug wore white martial-arts pajamas with his skin and hair painted entirely white so he appeared to glow; Stannous wore all black, with face paint and mirrored sunglasses. They sold brownies in those getups: the silent wraith shadowing the movements of the shining man.
Even in San Francisco in the seventies, where fashion sometimes verged on costume, this would’ve raised eyebrows. I appreciate that my dad saw his sales runs as performance art. But from my distance of decades, I feel like I’m seeing him begin to slip, his grip on reality loosening. The bags he designed became stranger. One featured a nude man ripping his chest cavity open, spraying blood in all directions. The heart is an organ, too, it read, so why not let it breathe?
For the vernal equinox on March 21, my dad proposed a party to celebrate the rebirth he hoped would follow a winter so marked by death. San Francisco had been vanquished before in earthquakes and fires. Each time, the City had risen from its own ashes, renewed. The phoenix was a bird that combusted whenever it sensed death approaching; a new phoenix always rose from the ashes. It was the symbol of San Francisco, the image on the municipal flag.
He and Mer choreographed a dance together, fusing her jazz moves and his modern moves, their styles not parallel but intersecting. Five women would represent fire. Four men would embody the smoke and ashes. Doug would be the phoenix. Together, they’d perform a rite to welcome the cycle of new life that would accompany spring. They called it Phoenix Rising.
Of the friends they recruited to perform, not one of them was a trained dancer.
Stannous and Doug dressed to sell.
The memory makes my mom laugh. “John Battle was even in it, that oaf. He was gigantic and a total klutz. And we had him, like, leaping all around. Hundreds of people came to this party. I don’t know what we were thinking.”
I was too young to remember Phoenix Rising, but part of me would sacrifice a lesser tooth to see a video of my parents and their friends—not a serious dancer among them—pretending to be fire birds and flames and raining ash.
* * *
In the wee hours of March 31, the dregs of a bachelor party showed up at a low-key lesbian dive in the Avenues called Peg’s Place. According to a firsthand account published in the Bay Area Reporter, some of the eight or so men arrived carrying open beers, so the female bouncer denied them entrance. When the men tried to muscle past her, she yelled for the bartender to call the cops.
“We are the cops,” one of the men said. “And we’ll do as we damn well please.” He hit her in the chest. Someone in the group yelled, “Get the dykes!” as the men forced their way into the bar. One guy put the bar’s owner—a woman who was already disabled from a back injury—in a choke hold; she was later hospitalized. Another guy clobbered the bouncer’s head with a pool cue.
Two of the brawlers turned out to be off-duty police officers. The women tried to press charges, but no arrests were made.
Dianne Feinstein was so slow to discipline the rowdy police that she lost credibility with many in the lesbian and gay communities. Some were already upset because she’d been sluggish about filling Milk’s seat and had bypassed a neighborhood favorite, Harvey’s former aide and campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg. And Feinstein had won herself no friends by telling the Ladies’ Home Journal, “The right of an individual to live as he or she chooses can become offensive—the gay community is going to have to face this.” DUMP DIANNE T-shirts and pinbacks became a fad. Meanwhile, rumor had it that some cops wore FREE DAN WHITE shirts under their uniforms, as if this were a secret superhero identity.
Cleve Jones was in a bar on Castro Street when half a dozen
cops came in, demanded IDs, and roughed people up, apparently for kicks. Shortly thereafter, Cleve was sitting on his own stoop in the middle of the day when an officer strolling by whacked him on the shin with a billy club, “Get moving.”
“I live here,” Cleve said, rubbing his leg.
“I told you to get moving.”
Cleve headed inside and locked the door behind him.
* * *
Dan White consumed the news throughout spring. The defense was wily and innovative; the prosecution was weirdly limp—hobbled by politics (including District Attorney Freitas’s unflattering ties to Jim Jones). Before being selected as prosecutor, attorney Tom Norman allegedly commented to a colleague that he hoped he wouldn’t be assigned to the city hall murders because he felt sorry for the accused. White got an entirely heterosexual, predominantly white Catholic jury, one of whom was a retired cop, and half of whom lived near the area where White had grown up—the demographic most likely to share his frustrations over what he called “radicals, social deviates, and incorrigibles.”
The open-and-shut case grew slippery. To get first-degree murder convictions, the prosecutor had to prove that White had acted with premeditation and malice aforethought. But instead of laying out that crucial angle, Norman belabored ballistics and other details of the killings that weren’t even being disputed. Homophobia was never discussed in court nor was the political jockeying between Milk and White. Both issues could have been used in a malice argument but not without exposing broader corruption within city government and law enforcement.
Some mainstream reporters took pains to describe White in sympathetic tones, waxing at length about the loss of his father at a young age, his athleticism in school, military record, heroism as a former firefighter and police officer, and his devotion to family—while managing rarely to mention the wife and four children mourning Moscone or the vast community grieving for Milk. Toward the end of the trial, one reporter for the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle went so far as to conclude that “there were three victims of the terrible events in City Hall Nov. 27: George Moscone, Harvey Milk, and Dan White.”
Even so, Mer felt sure that the only real question was whether Dan White was going to get the death penalty (which he, ironically, had helped reinstate for crimes like his in California) or life in prison. Because how could someone—anyone—walk into city hall in broad daylight, execute two elected politicians, boldly confess to pulling the trigger, and not spend the rest of his days behind bars?
Tension was ratcheting up. At the same time, spring of 1979 saw some of the decade’s most opulent parties as well as an obsession with all things shiny and gold. The Treasures of Tutankhamun would come to San Francisco’s de Young museum in June, drawing record crowds and becoming one of the most popular exhibits of all time. The hoopla started months in advance: there were movies, camp theater, and academic seminars; fashion leaned heavily on draped fabric and gold serpent bracelets; a new seventeen-scene Egyptian exhibit opened at the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf. In April, Barb landed a gig costuming an elaborate Egyptian-themed benefit for Children’s Hospital, a spare-no-expense, gala-cum-all-night-disco extravaganza.
To costume the event, Barb rented pieces from the American Conservatory Theater and created others out of gold lamé, painted leather, beads, and glass gemstones. Cyril Magnin, the elderly magnate behind the I. Magnin department stores, embodied the pharaoh perched on a golden throne borrowed from Twentieth Century Fox. To portray the pharaoh’s royal court, Barb recruited the Sticky Fingers crew; Doug, Mer, Cheryl, Carmen, and Susan appeared dripping in gold jewelry and wrapped in muslin. Even the brownie babies—Noel, Marcus, and I—shuffled around in tiny white togas and little headdresses.
Camels were hauled in from Marine World/Africa USA to roam the dance floor along with pythons and brightly plumed parrots. There were live bands and deejays, belly dancers, and hors d’oeuvres sprinkled with flakes of real gold. Sand dunes and statuary flanked the entrance of the South of Market Galleria event center. It was a high-society ball straight from the satirical “Tales of the City” column.
Cultural insensitivity abounded: heavy brown bronzer and thick black eyeliner was fair game for an “Egyptian look,” and blonde toddlers in togas could belong to the royal family of a nation on continental Africa. No one worried about the mental health of live camels forced to prance around a crowded disco with flashing lights and pounding music. All of it done in the name of something so unimpeachably respectable as children’s health care. There was, perhaps, a hint of desperation in the extravagance, as if people sensed they’d better get their kicks while they could; the seventies were ending.
Sticky Fingers kids, left to right: Noel, Alia, and Marcus.
And there we were, interlopers from the fringe of society. My parents were in orbit, their kohl-ringed eyes bulging from cocaine. Old Cyril Magnin surveyed the revelry from his golden throne.
* * *
Mer drew a king on a throne. In his right hand, a sword. In his left, the scales of justice. With a verdict on Dan White expected any day, she based her brownie bag for May 18 on the tarot card Justice.
She thought closure would do everyone good. The assassinations had revealed festering ugliness; it was as if a rock had been moved, exposing a world of creepy crawlies. She hoped they could kick some dirt over it and move on.
The verdict landed like a fist to the jaw at 5:28 p.m. on May 21: two counts of voluntary manslaughter carrying a maximum sentence of eight years. With good behavior, Dan White could be free in under five years.
“Lord God,” White’s defense attorney had said in his closing statement. “Nobody could say that the things that were happening to him wouldn’t make a reasonable man mad . . . A good man, a man with a fine background, does not cold-bloodedly go down and kill two people. That just doesn’t happen.” White was simply an earnest, patriotic San Franciscan who’d been pushed too far by conniving liberals, lost too much sleep to depression, and, yes, ate too much sugar. Anyone in his position might have done the same.
Contrary to popular belief, the defense hadn’t argued that overdosing on Twinkies had driven Dan White insane. His plea wasn’t one of insanity, but rather that he’d suffered a brief period of impairment caused by long-term undiagnosed depression and insomnia. Eating sugary food was held up as a symptom of his malaise (not the cause). But some clever journalist coined the term “Twinkie Defense,” and it caught on. The voluntary manslaughter conviction was so improbable given the facts (the deliberate reloading of his gun before killing Milk, for example) that you might as well blame it on sugar.
James Denman, the undersheriff who held Dan White during the seventy-two hours after his arrest, described his prisoner to journalist Warren Hinckle as “perfunctory and businesslike” and without an “iota of remorse.” And when the supposedly impaired White entered the state prison in Soledad to begin his sentence, the psychiatrists who examined him decided against prescribing therapy, finding “no apparent signs” of mental disorder.
* * *
Cleve was in his apartment when a city hall reporter called. He stretched the cord of his kitchen phone into the bathroom and closed the door for privacy. When the reporter told him the verdict, Cleve leaned over the toilet and puked.
“Are you there?” the reporter asked. “Do you have anything to say?”
He wiped his mouth. The verdict had shown Cleve that the justice system wouldn’t protect even the most powerful among them. “This means that in America it’s okay to kill gay people,” he said.
Cleve’s roommate pounded on the door to say that lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were waiting in front of the Twin Peaks Tavern with some reporters. Cleve grabbed his jacket and ran downstairs for an impromptu press conference.
A local TV news reporter said, “You have a permit to close Castro Street tomorrow to celebrate Harvey Milk’s birthday. Is that when the community will react to this verdict?”
Cleve looked dramatically
into the camera. “No,” he said. “The reaction will be tonight. It will be now.”
Days before, Cleve had walked down to the Mission Station with two other activists to warn the SFPD that if Dan White got off the neighborhood was going to explode; they should prepare for a riot.
“You people aren’t really violent,” Captain George Jeffries told him. “If a crowd gathers, you’ll march them down Market Street like you always do.” The captain’s smile was so condescending that Cleve thought he might get a pat on the head.
Now the scenario Cleve had predicted was underway. He ran back to his flat to get ready. Paramount in his mind was something Harvey had said in the lead-up to the Briggs vote: “Don’t burn down your own neighborhood.” He’d taken note of the destruction in Watts and other black neighborhoods after Dr. King was assassinated. “If there’s going to be a riot,” Harvey said, “take it downtown. Burn the banks. Don’t let it happen where we live.”
Cleve grabbed his jacket and a bullhorn Harvey had given him. By the time he got back on the street, hundreds of people had already gathered in the intersection.
Doug and Mer consulted the I Ching about joining the protest that night, but the hexagram warned of violence and possible bloodshed; with a baby to protect, they decided to sit this one out. Later, at about ten that night, Barb called the warehouse. “They’re rioting at city hall. It’s on the news.”
Some five thousand people had marched to Civic Center chanting, “Dan White was a cop!” and “Avenge Harvey Milk!” Chief Gain—the Moscone appointee who’d had the police cruisers painted baby blue—ordered his men to hold their ground without using force against the protesters, a stance many of the rank and file resented. This would later cost the chief his job; the San Francisco Police Officers Association would vote “no confidence” in Gain the following month, and Feinstein would eventually give in and appoint a good old boy who would promptly repaint the squad cars black and white.
