by Cleve Jones
The anger in the crowd was intense and the potential for violence was very real, especially with hostile motorcycle cops pushing into the crowd. The memory of the Watts riots and the uprisings following the assassination of Dr. King were fresh in our minds, and we had a strategy. It was Harvey’s idea, born the year before on Orange Tuesday, when we lost the vote in Dade County. “You have to keep them moving, march fast and march them ’til they drop,” he told us. “We don’t want to burn down our own neighborhoods; take it downtown.”
Thus was born what we called the “disaster march route”: We’d leave Castro and Market, heading east on Market Street the mile and a half to Polk Street. We’d turn north on Polk Street and march, whistles blowing, past City Hall into the still very gay Polk Gulch, where our numbers would swell. We’d march up Polk for a mile to California Street, where we’d shut down the cable car lines and march loudly up the steep slope of Nob Hill, the sound of our chants, drums, and whistles reverberating loudly and astonishing the wealthy patrons of the elite hotels and the congregants of Grace Cathedral. After a brief pause to catch our breath, we’d pour down Powell Street to Union Square, snarling traffic and freaking out the tourists and shoppers.
“Gay rights NOW!” “Two-four-six-eight, separate church from state!” By the time we’d get to Union Square, most marchers would be too exhausted to even think about breaking windows or fighting the cops.
It was a very effective strategy, moving the potential for conflict out of our neighborhood. The crowd understood what we were doing, and it enabled us to avoid property damage in the Castro and to move people away from individuals who were clashing with the police, as well as to isolate provocateurs.
The next day Hank, Harvey, and I critiqued the march and digested the media reports. We decided we needed more people to help facilitate the flow of the march and also, if needed, to stand between justifiably furious protesters and lines of cops just itching to bash heads. “Just make sure the monitors understand that they aren’t cops. Their purpose is to protect the marchers, not control them,” Hank said.
Harvey was impressed by the turnout and by the press coverage and told me we’d done a good job. I was happy. Though I had been only peripherally involved with Harvey’s campaign for supervisor, the marches brought me closer to his inner circle and I gradually got to know his aides at City Hall, Dick Pabich and Anne Kronenberg. I also got to know Scott Smith, Harvey’s former boyfriend. Their relationship as lovers had not survived the trials of Harvey’s endless campaigns, but their friendship had. Wayne Friday, a former bartender turned political writer for the Bay Area Reporter (one of the local gay newspapers), was a close friend of Harvey’s and an important bridge between the younger radical crowd and the older folks from the bar scene and the queens of the Imperial Court, one of the first social organizations created by the gay community. I also got to know Danny Nicoletta, the cute photographer Harvey had hired to run Castro Camera, and Frank Robinson, an author of some renown. One of Frank’s novels had been reworked into the film Towering Inferno. There was also Harry Britt, a former minister from Port Arthur, Texas. He worked for the post office and was shy and awkward but intensely political. Like Harvey, he also had come out later in life. Harry and Chris Perry were among the activists who, encouraged by Harvey, finally gave up on the tired old Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club and launched the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club in 1977. I was a founding member.
I also met but tried to avoid Harvey’s new boyfriend, Jack Lira. I just didn’t get it. Jack was a drunk and a petulant and demanding brat, in my opinion. I don’t think I understood then what a miserable childhood Jack had experienced growing up in an impoverished Mexican family in California’s rural Central Valley. But Jack loved dramatic, alcohol-fueled confrontations, and on more than one occasion I would hear him screaming at Harvey from their open window. Once, coming home around three o’clock in the morning from a late night at the Stud, I found Harvey in his bathrobe, sheepishly sweeping up the shattered bits of crockery that Jack had pitched out the window in the midst of a tantrum.
Our next opportunity to take the streets was only weeks away: a referendum challenging a gay rights bill that had been enacted in Wichita, Kansas. The election would be on May 9, 1978. Something about that date nagged at me, and after a few hours of leafing through my history books I remembered: Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, May 9, 1938, when Nazi SA units and German civilians launched attacks against Germany’s Jewish community that destroyed thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses and residences. I decide that this time, I would write a speech. So I spent hours scribbling notes on yellow lined paper as my friends distributed flyers and posters alerting the community to the upcoming vote.
The afternoon of May 9, I walked down to Castro Camera, where Harvey was hanging out with Danny and some other cute boys, waiting for the march. I asked if I could read what I’d written and he said sure.
I started, “Forty years ago tonight, the Jewish people of Germany and Austria learned that they no longer had rights.”
When I was done, Harvey looked up with a slight smile and said, “Not bad, Cleve, maybe a little long?” I was somewhat deflated and moving towards the door when he stopped me.
“Come over here, I want to give you something.” He reached under the counter and pulled out the battered old red and white bullhorn that Allan Baird and the Teamsters had given him during the Coors beer boycott.
“I want you to have this,” he said. “I may have an office in City Hall now, but we still need to be outside in the streets. This is yours now. Use it tonight.”
Crowds began to gather on Castro well before the march was scheduled. As expected, we lost Wichita overwhelmingly. Word went out on the telephone tree, and our march monitors gathered. At eight o’clock I climbed up on the big blue box at Castro and Market and began my speech, talking through Harvey’s bullhorn. It was windy, I was trembling with nerves, and the papers in my hand were shaking. Before I could finish my speech I noticed that the crowd was already starting to move down Market Street, and I scrambled off the box to get monitors in place at the front line.
Harvey was there; he gave me his little smirk. “I told you it was too long. And next time lose the paper, it’s distracting.”
Still, it was a start.
This march was huge. The crowd surged down Market Street, making noise that reverberated off the buildings. The cops were aggressive, edging their motorcycles into the crowd. We retaliated by closing more streets and marching against the flow of traffic. We shut down the electric buses and streetcars by pulling their connectors from the overhead wires. The din of thousands of whistles, chants, and drums filled the air as we roared down Market Street, past City Hall, up and over Nob Hill, and down to Union Square.
Two weeks later we did it again, with an even larger crowd, as the gay rights ordinance in Eugene, Oregon, was repealed. That night I spoke again briefly, without notes and without preparation. It felt good and I noticed that people were listening. We also had dozens of volunteers moving through the crowd with clipboards, collecting phone numbers and addresses for our growing army.
Harvey gave me a grin and a wink. “Not bad.”
A few days later I was hanging out on the street with John Canali, a friend from my film class days at City College. John was learning how to use the new medium of video, making short videos with some of the city’s more outrageous drag queens, including the notorious Doris Fish. Artie Bressan joined us; his documentary about the exploding gay movement, Gay USA, had just premiered at the Castro Theatre. Artie echoed what Hank Wilson had been saying about our need for a new symbol. He’d been talking about it with our mutual friend Gilbert Baker.
As summer approached, it was clear that the movement and the community had reached a transformative moment. Thousands of lesbians and gay men were flocking to the city from all over the country, many drawn by the news of Harvey’s election. They brought with them new skills and ambitions
that would propel all of us.
The mostly white, older gay men who had nominally run things were being challenged by the youthful arrivals, women, and people of many races and ethnic backgrounds. A new lesbian leadership emerged with women like Roma Guy, Sally Gearhart, Gwenn Craig, Pat Norman, Lenore Chinn, and others who coalesced around efforts to build a women’s center on 18th Street near Valencia. Peg’s Place, The Artemis Café, Scott’s Pit, and Amelia’s offered lesbians multiple places to drink, dance, play pool, and fall in love. There were so many lesbians living in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood, they started a group called Duboce Dykes. Glenne McElhinney and her motorcycle-driving buddies started Dykes on Bikes; they’d line up by the hundreds, engines roaring at the Gay Freedom Day Parade.
It seemed like new organizations were forming every day. Randy Burns and Barbara Cameron started Gay American Indians. Jon Sims created the San Francisco Gay Freedom Marching Band. Allan Estes cofounded Theatre Rhinoceros and began producing plays written by gay people about gay lives. Groups were created for gay Catholics, Jews, and other denominations, even Mormons. The Gay Latino Alliance, the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance, and the National Association of Black and White Men Together drew large crowds to their meetings and social events. The Radical Faeries, founded by Harry Hay, explored gay male spirituality.
There was constant conflict as we struggled to celebrate our diversity while maintaining solidarity. Sylvester was becoming famous as the Queen of Disco. Performances by Tede Matthews, the Angels of Light, Hibiscus, and Rodney Price entertained us even as the older queens of the Tenderloin continued their lip-sync shows in the smoky bars.
Gay people from Baptist and other conservative religious denominations filled the pews at the Metropolitan Community churches. Gay Republicans joined the new Log Cabin Republicans club. I met Bernice Becker, one of the founders of PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Bernice’s gay son had committed suicide and she would devote the rest of her life to the cause. I suspected that I reminded of her son. Other heterosexual supports started Straights for Gay Rights and marched with their banner, “Straight But Not Narrow.”
Every day brought more gay and lesbian immigrants, fleeing intolerance and violence for San Francisco. The platform shoes and glitter of the ’70s gave way to a new look, derisively labeled “Castro clones” by Arthur Evans. The hippie look of long hair and bell-bottoms was gone. The ’70s disco look of platform shoes and glitter was disappearing. The men of Castro Street now wore work boots, plaid flannel shirts, tight T-shirts revealing broad chests and biceps, and straight-leg Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans, with one button left strategically undone. It was a hyper-masculine look, with crew cuts and bulging denim crotches. Any sunny day found the sidewalks of Castro packed shoulder to shoulder with shirtless men.
As word of what was happening in San Francisco spread, and as the backlash from the right grew more intense across the country, more and more people arrived and fewer of the new arrivals came from the same hippie-influenced, antiwar, civil rights, and feminist backgrounds shared by me and most of my friends.
Leonard Matlovich moved to San Francisco in 1978, just as we were gearing up for the final push against the Briggs Initiative, Proposition 6 on the November California ballot. Leonard became famous when Time magazine ran a picture of him in uniform on their cover in September of 1975 with the caption “I Am a Homosexual.”
Born in Georgia, Leonard was raised Catholic and grew up on military bases in the South. He enlisted and served three tours of duty in Vietnam, and received both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart after being severely injured by an exploding landmine. He was the first person to deliberately out himself specifically to challenge the US military ban against gay and lesbian service.
The initiative that brought district elections to San Francisco provided for a coin toss to stagger future elections so that half of the new Board of Supervisors would be given two-year terms, and half would serve for four. As it happened, the newly elected supervisors representing the odd-numbered districts were given only two years. So Harvey knew that he had to begin campaigning for reelection almost immediately. We were pretty certain that there would, again, be a challenger from within the gay community. Speculation began that the challenge might come from Matlovich.
CHAPTER 17
Raise the Sky
CAN I HELP YOU?” THE WOMAN ANSWERING THE DOOR OF HER Richmond District home looked suspicious and annoyed.
“Hi, my name’s Cleve Jones, I’m a volunteer with the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative. Have you decided how you plan to vote?”
“I’m not sure, which one is that?” She seemed slightly relieved that I wasn’t a salesman.
“It’s Proposition 6. If passed, it would ban gay people and supporters of gay rights from working in public schools.”
She stiffened and her thin lips pressed together in a frown. “Well, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. We don’t need child molesters in the schools.”
I took a deep breath. “All studies show that gay people are no more likely to abuse children than heterosexuals. In fact, the overwhelming majority of these crimes are committed by heterosexual men against girls.”
She wasn’t having any part of it. “I’m tired of hearing gay this, gay that. When I was young, respectable people did not discuss such things. Now it’s all we hear about and some of us don’t like it.”
She began to close the door.
“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I hope you’ll think about this more before election day. If this measure passes, a lot of innocent people are going to suffer. Just think how a law like this could be abused.”
The door closed.
That encounter, in a neighborhood in the northwest corner of San Francisco, was being repeated in every county of the state, from remote Del Norte and Shasta Counties to Riverside, Orange, and San Diego. Thousands of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and straight supporters were knocking on doors, passing out leaflets in shopping centers, organizing rallies, and staffing telephone banks, all with the same message: “Please don’t vote for this. I am your neighbor. If you vote for this, it will hurt me and it will hurt my family. Please don’t believe the lies, vote no on Proposition 6.”
The grassroots Committees Against the Briggs Initiative proliferated across the state. Those in the larger cities were able to raise some money, but the activists in the smaller towns and rural areas were on their own.
“We have to get money to our people in the Central Valley.” Harvey looked tense. “We’re probably going to lose this one, but we need to be visible everywhere, not just in San Francisco and Hollywood. We need to take the campaign to Redding and Red Bluff and Modesto and Bakersfield.”
With Roma Guy from the Women’s Building, Sally Gearhart, and other activists, we started the United Fund to Defeat the Briggs Initiative, headquartered in Walter Caplan’s law office in an odd tiny wedge of a building in United Nations Plaza at the eastern edge of San Francisco Civic Center. The address was One United Nations Plaza, which we reckoned sounded pretty impressive.
Most of the actual work occurred on the living room floor of the flat I still shared with Eric Garber. We collected every list we could find of gay and lesbian people from organizations and personal rolodexes and sent appeals signed by Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart. Gradually the money began to trickle in, and Harvey sent me out to the hinterlands with samples of campaign literature, talking points for activists, and checks.
In addition to funding No on 6 groups in rural areas, we also channeled money to Latino and African American activists who were trying to counter the opposition within those communities, fostered by the Catholic Church and many of the black clergy.
Across the state, the conversation had begun and it was unprecedented. For the first time, gay people were coming out en masse, revealing their true identities to family members, coworkers, neighbors, and friends. We heard reports every day: accounts of volunteers being spit on
or assaulted; people who had lost their jobs or been evicted. We were inspired, especially, by the gay and lesbian school workers who risked the careers to which they had dedicated their lives. Gradually—as summer turned to fall—door by door, person to person, the conversation began to change. Increasingly, the stories from the returning canvassers were of voters opening their doors and listening. But the polls were consistent and unanimous: Proposition 6 would pass with overwhelming support from California voters.
During one of the marches down Market Street I noticed a muscular young man with curly brown hair keeping close to me. A line of motorcycle cops began pushing into the crowd in a futile effort to get us back on the sidewalks. The muscle boy got closer and shot me a look. I found it difficult to pay attention to the cops after that.
Danton had one of the most beautiful bodies I had ever seen and I couldn’t get enough. He was intense in bed, and on the streets with me he was protective, always on guard. I liked that. He had a bench press in the apartment he shared with three roommates in an alley South of Market. I’d watch him work out; we’d fuck, then go to the Stud or somewhere to drink.
One morning while walking back to the Castro from Danton’s bed I ran into Hank Wilson and Gilbert Baker. Gilbert was an occasional drag queen, activist, and Vietnam-era veteran who loved to sew. He and I had both joined the organizing committee for that year’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, the annual observance of the Stonewall riots. Gilbert and Hank, as usual, were brimming with outrageous ideas and gossip, and we laughed over our coffees.
Gilbert was a dramatic personality to say the least, and we were soon allies in the effort to build the parade and use it to focus the community on fighting Proposition 6. He was still very much a hippie at heart, with long brown hair and a knack for creating complicated and gorgeous costumes, gowns, and art.
