When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  There was something else on the San Francisco general election ballot that year: Proposition T, a proposal to change the city’s system of electing supervisors from at-large to district elections. George Moscone, who had been elected mayor the previous year, supported it. Harvey lost, but voters passed Prop. T and set the stage for one more act from Mr. Milk.

  In China, Mao was dead. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in November. In Argentina, the military junta launched a wave of torture, rape, and murder against leftist students. From Chile, General Pinochet sent killers to assassinate Orlando Letelier in the streets of Washington, DC. Back home in California, Patty Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison for her adventures with the Symbionese Liberation Army.

  My friends and I took classes during the day, worked evening and night shifts, and drank and danced all night. Everybody had a project: a film, a dance concert, a drag show, a gallery opening, a photography exhibit, poetry reading, or political action. And on the high holy days of Halloween and New Year’s Eve, we’d all contribute for a few grams of cocaine and break out the drag and the heels and the glitter, wigs, and eyelashes to promenade noisily on Castro, Polk, and Folsom Streets. It was not required to be actually good at anything, but everyone was expected to pitch in, to contribute something to the new culture we were creating.

  Marvin and I set up house. He brought a French-press coffeemaker, Marimekko T-shirts, and record albums of show tunes, Liza, Streisand, and Peter Allen. I brought Sandinista posters, boxes of books, and the small oak drop-leaf desk I’d found on Haight Street. Marvin took me to see A Chorus Line at the Curran when the tour company came to San Francisco, and a boy I’d met in Greece came to visit with a copy of the new Clash album, London Calling. The bars and dance clubs were packed almost every night. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we’d go to the Club Baths at 8th and Howard, get lockers, and soak in the giant hot tub.

  One night we sat in the bubbling hot water, high, and happy. It had been a fun week, starting with our new president, Jimmy Carter, issuing a pardon for Vietnam War draft resisters. It was a moral victory for those of us who opposed the war and meant that thousands of resisters and their families would be reunited, including Mary’s boyfriend Richard, back on Barer Strasse.

  The same week that Carter pardoned the draft resisters, ABC aired the miniseries Roots, which was watched by almost everyone I knew and by many millions more. A handful of counties and cities passed laws offering some limited protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. There was a sense—at least in San Francisco—that a new era might be opening with this mild peanut-farmer president from Georgia.

  The DJ at the baths played the new Fleetwood Mac single “Go Your Own Way,” and Marvin started talking about New York again. This was a daily occurrence.

  “You would love living there, Cleve, really, I can’t wait to go back again with you. We should get a place in the Village, or the Upper West Side, lots of gay guys are moving there.”

  He was excited about doing children’s theater and I had already resigned myself to his inevitable departure for New York, but I could not see myself in the Big Apple. My choice was between San Francisco and Europe, and I’d promised Scott to return in June for the summer at least.

  As the weather warmed, we started hitchhiking up to the Russian River in Sonoma County on weekends. We’d take sleeping bags, a change of clothes, and some magic mushrooms and camp out by Wohler Bridge, get loaded, then float naked downstream all the way to Guerneville, where we’d order cocktails and dance at The Woods or Fife’s.

  While we danced, in Colorado Springs a preacher named James Dobson was starting a new organization called Focus on the Family. And in Miami, Florida, a former beauty queen and orange-juice huckster named Anita Bryant had become the spokeswoman for Save Our Children, created to repeal Dade County’s gay rights ordinance, adopted just one year earlier. And Phyllis Schlafly, who had begun her crusade to stop the Equal Rights Amendment five years before, succeeded in stopping the ERA just three states short of ratification. More important, Dobson and Bryant and Schlafly were raising millions of dollars from conservative Christians to bankroll their efforts.

  I still didn’t know what I wanted to do or even where to live. I knew Marvin would soon enough be leaving for New York. The film classes were interesting but not producing any sparks for me. The political science classes seemed so boring compared with the political drama I saw being played out every day in the changing neighborhoods of San Francisco and my travels around the world.

  I took German and French classes that semester and decided to return to Scott in Munich but also resolved that this would be my last summer to wander for a while. It was time to commit to something, somewhere. After all, I was getting old, almost 23.

  We all still began every morning with strong coffee and Herb Caen’s column in the SF Chronicle. But before we read Herb, everyone was reading a delicious new series called Tales of the City, by a previously unknown writer with the improbable name of Armistead Maupin. Like Harvey Milk, Maupin had been a naval officer and a Goldwater Republican. Also like Harvey, Maupin came out a bit late in life, at 30. Born in Washington, DC, he grew up in North Carolina, a big fan of archconservative Jesse Helms. But he took a job with Associated Press in 1971 in San Francisco, a move that transformed him as he fell in love with the city and its characters.

  The city soon fell in love with Armistead as well, and delighted in reading the various escapades and dramas of Mary Ann Singleton, Michael Tolliver, Mona Ramsey, and the pot-growing landlady Anna Madrigal as well as the other characters, many obviously based at least partially on real people. For years people would love to claim that they or someone they knew was referenced in one of the installments.

  The news from south Florida was getting grim. The fundamentalist Christians that Anita Bryant had aroused with her libelous campaign equating homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children were on a roll. Money for their campaign to defeat Dade County’s nondiscrimination law poured in—raised by the faithful in churches across the country.

  The gay community sent Jim Foster and others to try to assist the locals, but Harvey—ever the outsider—was not impressed, seeing them as emblematic of the old strategies of keeping the spotlight away from gay people and relying on straight supporters and vague slogans of “human rights.”

  We all wanted to help, though, and a local producer decided to organize a benefit variety show at the Castro Theatre called Moon over Miami. Harvey got behind the idea and asked me to help get the word out. I was pleased that he’d asked me to get involved, so my friends and I plastered the neighborhood with posters. I started spending more time hanging out in his camera store.

  A few days before the show, Harvey was concerned that ticket sales were lagging and decided to hold a press conference to publicize the effort. We scheduled it at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, sent out the announcements, and followed up with phone calls to the local media. At the last minute, just hours before the press conference was to begin, Harvey decided he wanted an audience. It was midday, not an easy time to get folks to turn out, especially at a moment’s notice. He wanted a hundred people there; I told him it was impossible. He told me to call People’s Temple, a predominantly African American congregation run by a white preacher from Indiana named Jim Jones.

  I got Reverend Jones’s assistant on the line and relayed Harvey’s request. He put me on hold for several minutes, then asked me for the address and time. I told him. He said, “We’ll be there.”

  We had finished putting out the metal folding chairs and the reporters and camera crews were just setting up when I looked through the window and saw three school buses parking outside. Their doors opened and over a hundred members of People’s Temple filed silently into the building. They were almost all middle-aged African Americans, dressed conservatively. They looked like any of the congregations of the Bay Area’s large middle-class black churches. A tall black man with broad shoulders and mirro
red sunglasses was in charge and as we began the press conference he stood in front, off to one side where everyone in the audience could see him. When he clapped, they clapped. When he stopped, they stopped. I thought it was eerie as hell, but none of the reporters commented on it and Harvey just shrugged.

  The night of the event, the venerable old theater was packed and the audience loudly applauded, cheered, and stamped their feet after every performance and each speaker. Then Armistead Maupin took the stage and announced that he would be reading from his as yet unpublished next installment of Tales of the City. The crowd hushed as Maupin began to read what turned out to be a coming-out letter written by Michael Tolliver to his mother, living in Miami. At the end of the letter Michael appeals to his mother to vote against the repeal effort. When Maupin finished there was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of people sniffling and crying throughout the theater. Then we rose as one in a foot-stomping standing ovation.

  On June 7, 1977, Dade County voters, in record numbers, overwhelmingly voted to repeal the gay rights ordinance, and Anita Bryant danced a jig on TV and vowed to take her campaign nationwide.

  Large protests erupted in cities across the country, particularly in San Francisco. Thousands of people shut down Castro Street, and Harvey Milk stood among the crowd with a bullhorn and spoke for us, channeling our anger into a march that ended finally without violence at Union Square. The tension deepened when gay bashers randomly murdered a young gay man named Robert Hillsborough in the street just days after the Dade County vote.

  I had my first long conversations with Harvey Milk during the days after Anita Bryant’s victory in Florida. As usual, he was kind of flirty. Also as usual, he was registering voters and passing out political leaflets on Castro Street. I hung out in several different neighborhoods, and we had encountered each other and exchanged brief words at various community meetings and rallies or just cruising Polk Gulch, the Tenderloin, South of Market, Haight Street, or the Castro. I could tell he associated me with Polk Street and I told him I was living in the Castro now. He was gearing up to run for city supervisor again in the fall. I still wasn’t much interested in electoral politics or the Democratic Party and told him as much. He told me my pants fit well. He asked me to sign up; I told him I had tickets for Europe and was leaving in a few days, but that I’d be back in the fall for the election and would help out then. He grinned and I decided that I liked him.

  Anyone could see that the battle lines were being drawn, and that our tiny new movement had at least advanced far enough to provoke a response from our opposition. The fight was coming. Part of me wanted to stay, and part of me wanted to go far away. The flight back to Europe took forever and I couldn’t sleep for the longest time, even after I’d landed and made my way back to Barer Strasse and to Scott.

  CHAPTER 14

  Summer of ’77

  I MET WOLF THROUGH SCOTT, WHO HAD DATED HIM DURING THE months I was back in California. He was a lawyer of some kind who was several years older than us and had grown up in communist East Germany. He was very cute and smart, with black hair and a funny smile. We hooked up, which really wasn’t cool of me, but Scott was forgiving.

  Wolf took me to Formentera, one of the Balearic Islands off the Mediterranean coast of Spain. He had a friend with a home there where we could stay, but first we would make a stop in Barcelona during the last week of June.

  As we traveled I was very aware that I was missing the drama being played out in the streets of San Francisco. Anita Bryant had a new ally in California, a state senator from Fullerton in Orange County named John Briggs. They were calling for a ban against gay people working in public schools, continuing to exploit the “save our children” hysteria that had worked so well in Dade County. The murder of Robert Hillsborough shocked the community and underscored for all the consequences of the political attacks. In our view, the rhetoric of the fundamentalist Christian right-wingers was directly responsible for harassment, discrimination, violence, and murder.

  Wolf and I were in Barcelona while the largest Gay Freedom marches ever held in the Unites States occurred in cities across the country. I knew I was missing everything and I was annoyed. One afternoon shortly after our arrival, we were walking down La Rambla just taking in the sights. It was exciting to be in Spain at that moment, and especially to be in Catalonia. Generalissimo Francisco Franco had finally died in November 1975, and the nation had been lurching in fits and starts through the transition to democracy. The first free and democratic elections in Spain since 1936, prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, had just concluded with a centrist victory and a strong second-place showing by the Socialist Workers’ Party.

  Walking down La Rambla, we were moved by the long lines of customers waiting patiently to purchase books by authors who had been banned by the fascist Franco regime. We had strolled past the booksellers, food vendors, and cafés towards the monument to Christopher Columbus at Port Vell when we noticed a small gathering of people standing around some posters and flowers that had been placed on the pavement. We approached slowly, noticing that there seemed to be several gay people around: boys with earrings and long hair, butch-looking women with short hair, and drag queens wearing gowns, glitter, and wigs.

  One of the posters called on Spaniards and Catalans to remember the homosexuals who had been imprisoned, tortured, and killed under Franco.

  As we absorbed the reality that we had just accidentally stumbled on what was probably the first public manifestation of the gay liberation movement in Spanish history, the streets suddenly exploded with the sound of whistles, drums, and chants as hundreds of young gay people converged from side streets and narrow alleys out onto La Rambla.

  The crowd surged and began to march, carrying banners and flags with the pink triangle and the yellow and orange flag of Catalan. Hundreds, then thousands joined the queens and the dykes and the long-haired boys, and the march swelled and thundered through the streets of Barcelona. I was out of my mind with joy. In the faces of the marchers I could see their exhilaration, but also anxiety. There had been bombings by right-wingers in the months before and no one was certain that Spain’s fragile new democracy would survive. Under Franco, for generations, they had been oppressed and imprisoned and tortured and killed.

  We began to hear sirens closing in as larger numbers of police arrived to direct and control the crowd. The chanting and rhythmic clapping grew even louder as the crowd doubled, then doubled again. I was several hundred feet back from the head of the march, trying to stay on the side in case things got out of hand. Then suddenly I heard people shouting, and the center of the crowd melted as protesters darted into side streets away from the main boulevard. I stood up on a café chair to see over the heads of the crowd and saw the source of fear: a unit of the dreaded Guardia Civil—Franco’s shock troops—had formed a line directly in the path of the march. In their grey military uniforms and space-age helmets, they reminded me of the Imperial stormtroopers of Star Wars, which I had seen just a few weeks earlier when it opened at the old Coronet Theatre out on Geary Street. I wondered if George Lucas had drawn inspiration from these frightening soldiers’ headgear.

  The crowd milled around, with thousands more marchers pressing from behind, unaware of the soldiers’ blockade. I noticed many of the young men in the crowd begin to cover their faces with bandanas, some removing their shirts to wrap over their mouths and noses. I pointed that out to Wolf and we began to look for a way out.

  Then the soldiers raised their guns, pointed them directly at the crowd, and opened fire.

  For one terrifying moment I saw in my mind the iconic photograph from Kent State and wondered if we were going to be killed. Then I realized that they were firing large hard rubber bullets, which began to ricochet violently, bouncing off walls, shattering windows, and battering bodies. Those who were shot directly in the torso would fly several feet before hitting the ground. One bullet grazed the scalp of a tall queen who was standing just yards from us,
sending a plume of blood into the air. The crowd began to yell as volley after volley of rubber bullets tore through us. Some panicked and ran into side streets or attempted to find shelter in the cafés and restaurants lining La Rambla. The soldiers advanced with clubs, beating to the ground and arresting anyone unfortunate enough to be caught.

  But many of the young men and women in the crowd did not flee. They covered their faces, built barricades of overturned café tables and chairs, hurled stones, lit bonfires, and screamed defiance at the soldiers. The fighting continued late into the night, and a haze of smoke and tear gas hovered over the city.

  Back at our hotel, uninjured but shaken and exhilarated, I couldn’t sleep and stayed up all night writing a long account of the day. In the morning I walked to a post office and mailed it to Howard Wallace in San Francisco.

  After the shock of Barcelona, Wolf and I stayed on the island of Formentera for a couple weeks to relax, then headed back to Germany. We went to Kassel for documenta, the giant exhibition of modern art held every five years, and then returned to Munich.

  Scott and I made plans to meet my friend Joanne in Rome. I’d been introduced to Joanne by Kristi Olesen and Rick Dillenback in San Francisco a couple years earlier. Joanne was an odd and intriguing woman with wild black hair, a sharp wit, and a barking laugh. She was also extremely secretive and mysterious about her family.

  Joanne’s father, Joseph, had died four months earlier in a hotel room in Munich. That puzzled me because Joanne had told us her father was retired and living in Israel. Now she wrote us to meet her in Rome and Scott and I packed our knapsacks and headed south again. We met up with Joanne in the lobby of her hotel, a rather grand if slightly decrepit place on a beautiful piazza. We noticed that the hotel staff treated her with great deference, and later, sipping wine after a meal in the piazza, we watched silently as, one by one, older Italian gentlemen in suits and hats would approach our table, bow to Joanne, and kiss her hand. She greeted each man by name and spoke gently with them in Italian, punctuated by occasional barks of laughter. A few of the men bent to whisper in her ear and she would nod, eyes sparkling, saying, “Grazie, signore,” over and over. We questioned her with our eyes, but she just looked away with an enigmatic half-smile.