When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  Gilbert announced he had an idea. He arched his eyebrows and paused until he was certain he had our full attention.

  “I’ve got it,” he said. “A symbol for our community, for all of us. And I’m going to present it at the parade. I’m going to make it myself and it’s going to blow your minds.”

  Hank and I grinned at each other. Gilbert’s over-the-top delivery was already semi-legendary.

  “Well,” said Hank, “we’re all ears.”

  Gilbert leaned forward, “I’m going to build it at the new Gay Center on Grove Street, come with me and I’ll show you.”

  We hopped on a bus and headed for 330 Grove Street, a gay community center founded by Paul Hardman, a World War II veteran and somewhat conservative older guy who was not particularly popular among the young gay radicals and artists who nonetheless flocked to the large space just blocks from the Beaux-Arts splendor of San Francisco City Hall and Civic Center Plaza.

  Gilbert’s drawings and sketches took my breath away. They showed the two towering flag poles in United Nations Plaza, behind them stretching the reflecting pool of the civic center and framing the magnificent dome of City Hall. From the poles flew two enormous flags, bigger than any flags I had ever seen, huge flags with bold colors streaming in the wind.

  Rainbow flags.

  I spent most nights with Danton, warm against his hard body on the foggy nights. Summer was coming, which in San Francisco means cold fog. During the days, I went to meetings, marches, and rallies. Many weekends I spent on Greyhound buses, traveling up and down the state, one of thousands of foot soldiers in the battle against Proposition 6. Danton wasn’t interested in politics and we had little in common, but I’d never experienced a better time in bed.

  I didn’t get to see much of Harvey. His landlord had tripled the rent, and Harvey moved into a flat on Henry Street with Jack. Danny Nicoletta managed a stripped-down version of Castro Camera in a corner of a cavernous building at 2362 Market Street that had once been a theater.

  Gilbert set up shop in the Gay Center at 330 Grove, filling large garbage bins with brilliantly hued dyes. He let me help him mix and stir the dye and showed the other volunteers how to dip and swirl the endless bolts of fabric in the brilliant colors. The massive swathes were hung from the roof to dry. Our gay Betsy Ross was hard at work.

  As Gay Freedom Day approached, the polls still showed Proposition 6 passing by a wide margin, but more and more people were speaking out against it. The alliance with the labor movement that Harvey and others had built with the Teamsters grew stronger as the teachers unions and other public employee unions grew alarmed by the increasingly obvious threat that the Briggs Initiative posed to all workers. Elected officials and Democratic Party leaders also joined the campaign, bringing seasoned political consultants with their knowledge of direct mail and media. As the liberal establishment’s involvement grew, tension emerged between the early organizers and the Democrats and politicians who were now taking an active role in the campaign.

  In San Francisco, members of the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative were alarmed when Democratic officials and union leaders formed San Franciscans Against Prop. 6 and launched their own campaign. Predictably, the strategy of the new organization relied heavily on endorsements from heterosexual politicians and avoided confronting the anti-gay rhetoric of the enemy directly, preferring to cloak the debate with vague references to privacy and human rights. They also made clear their aversion to the socialists, who were well represented in BACABI.

  Harvey had been peripherally involved with BACABI and also supported the creation of San Franciscans Against Prop. 6. But he was quick to criticize both organizations and was also willing to butt heads with Congressman Phillip Burton, the most powerful politician in town. A community meeting was called to discuss the division, and when Harvey appeared one of the BACABI activists challenged him, “Are you part of BACABI or part of SF Against Prop. 6?”

  Harvey didn’t hesitate, loudly responding, “I support SF Against Prop. 6 and I support BACABI and so should every one of you.” The large crowd applauded. We were going to stick together as best we could.

  I woke up early on Sunday, June 25, and pushed Danton out of bed for showers and coffee. I’d promised Gilbert we’d meet him at United Nations Plaza early, before the crowds assembled for the parade.

  Gilbert was there, with his friends and two flags, carefully folded. Gilbert was decked out as “Glamour Jesus,” in a white silk gown and clear Lucite high heels. One flag was a simple rainbow with eight bars of bright color: hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. The second flag had the same bands of color but also a blue square in the upper corner with fifty white stars, a rainbow version of the US flag. The sky above us was clear and robin’s egg blue. Gilbert directed us as we attached the flags to the tall poles. He pulled on the ropes, and the flags rose into the sky to be grabbed by the wind and unfurled to greet the hundreds of thousands marching up Market Street.

  Years later Gilbert would say, “Raising it up and seeing it there blowing in the wind for everyone to see. It just astounded me that people just got it, in an instant like a bolt of lightning—that this was their flag. It belonged to all of us. It was the most thrilling moment of my life, because I knew right then that this was the most important thing I would ever do—that my whole life was going to be about the rainbow flag.”

  Danton and I were in front, helping to carry the lead banner as the parade moved up Market Street. We were wearing tight white T-shirts and jeans, and like the rest of the young people marching that morning, our heads were spinning with the sheer exhilarating joy of the moment, the strength and beauty of our bodies, and the expanding possibilities of our future.

  That night, high on weed and vodka and the scent of our bodies, Danton and I played Patti Smith’s new album, Easter, and waited for one of my favorite tracks, “Till Victory”:

  Raise the sky.

  We got to fly over the land, over the sea.

  Fate unwinds and if we die, souls arise.

  God, do not seize me please, till victory.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Victory and a Massacre

  SAN FRANCISCO’S UNITED CAMPAIGN TO DEFEAT PROPOSITION 6 OPENED headquarters at 2275 Market Street in the building that once was the Shed, where I had danced as a teenage refugee from Phoenix years before. Bill Kraus and Gwenn Craig were hired to coordinate the effort, and volunteers streamed through the doors every day to walk precincts and staff the phone banks.

  Harvey was eager to show off our new power to the old powers and brought Congressman Burton in for a visit to see for himself the energy our campaign had harnessed. Burton was indeed impressed, and said so. Harvey was on a roll. I introduced him to Sally Gearhart and the two became our spokespeople for the media and debates.

  One day at the end of August Jack Lira called Harvey at city hall repeatedly, complaining that Harvey was always late coming home. Jack wasn’t getting enough attention, he was drinking even more, and his outbursts were exhausting not only Harvey, but also his assistants Dick Pabich and Anne Kronenberg and everyone else.

  Harvey finished work and headed home to Jack, but it was too late. He found Jack’s body hanging behind a curtain. Notes from Jack accusing Harvey of neglecting him were all over the apartment and also tucked into books and files and behind pictures. We’d be finding them for years to come.

  Devastated, Harvey threw himself even more into the campaign.

  I decided not to go back to school at SF State. I couldn’t bear sitting in class. It always felt like I was missing the action entirely. My teachers didn’t inspire me and the only pleasure I got on campus was at the meetings of the gay and lesbian student organization. But Harvey intervened and told me quite sternly that I had to stay in school. He arranged for me to work in his office as an intern, earning credits in the political science program.

  The weekend before my first day of work in City Hall I begged a used suit
from a friend. Harvey laughed when he saw me.

  “I want you to wear jeans to the office, your tightest jeans. It makes Dianne Feinstein nervous.” After a few weeks we both noticed that my tight pants also seemed to bother another member of the Board, Supervisor Dan White.

  By the end of September the campaign against Briggs had become the single largest political effort ever launched to defend the rights of gay and lesbian people. Millions of dollars were raised and tens of thousands of volunteers were mobilized to take our campaign’s message directly to the voters.

  It wasn’t just the campaign that was heating up. The last week of September 1978 was one of the hottest on record, with the temperature in San Francisco soaring over 90 degrees. The volunteers wore shorts and carried canteens of water as they kept on walking precinct after precinct.

  The shirts came off at the Castro Street Fair in early October as muscle hunks, drag queens, lesbians and belly dancers and bands entertained the thousands of fairgoers jammed into the two blocks from Market to 19th Street. I was working the fair and Danton had left early.

  Later, as the cleanup crews packed up the garbage and hosed down the street, I took a bus towards Danton’s apartment, looking forward to resting my head on his broad shoulders and smoothly muscled chest.

  I let myself in quietly and opened the door to Danton’s room only to discover a skinny blond boy on my side of the bed. Danton scrambled to cover them with the sheets but I’d seen more than enough and ran out to the street in tears.

  The next day Harvey listened to my tale of woe with a sad smile and let me wallow in it for a few minutes. “We’re not like heterosexuals, and shouldn’t try to be. You’re going to have many lovers, Cleve. You’re going to meet so many beautiful men and fall in love so many times. It won’t be until the end of your life, when you look back, that you will know who were your greatest lovers and dearest friends.”

  He meant well, but it wasn’t particularly comforting. Decades later, though, I’d learn how right he was.

  On Wednesday, October 11, 1978, Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart debated John Briggs and other supporters of Proposition 6 in the town of Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County, about twenty-five miles northeast of San Francisco. I wanted to go but there wasn’t room for me in the car, so I watched the debate on closed circuit TV at Mission High School. Harvey and Sally were calm and strong and brilliant and the crowd at Mission High laughed and cheered as Harvey and Sally demolished Briggs. We knew Harvey was driving back to Castro Street, and I waited for him at the Elephant Walk bar on the corner of 18th Street. Harvey walked in to applause, grinning, with one hand behind his back. He gave me a hug and held out a paper bag from the doughnut shop across the street. We sat down and he put a candle on the doughnut and beamed at me. He had remembered. “Happy Birthday, Cleve.” I was 24 years old.

  The polls showed that we were narrowing the gap, and more and more newspapers across the state editorialized against Proposition 6. But Harvey was pessimistic and called me in to talk about what would happen if we were defeated. I knew exactly what would happen: there would be a riot. Everyone knew it. It was talked about on the sidewalks on sunny afternoons, in Golden Gate and Dolores parks, and in the bars on Castro, Folsom, Polk, and Haight Streets.

  Harvey told me, “We don’t want to burn down our own neighborhood.” I knew he was remembering the riots following the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 and the Watts Rebellion of 1965. “If it happens, march them downtown, Cleve. Get them out of the Castro fast.”

  We’d had this conversation before. We were a nonviolent people, deeply influenced by the civil disobedience traditions espoused by Gandhi, Dr. King, and the Quakers. But there was also a sense that some kind of rebellion was inevitable and maybe even necessary. After all, Stonewall was a riot.

  The weather stayed warm, unusually warm, and the streets and bars were full every night as if no one could sleep. There was only one topic: what would it be like to win, what would happen if we lost.

  On November 1, former Governor Ronald Reagan announced his opposition to Proposition 6. He was gearing up to run against Jimmy Carter, who had already come out against the measure.

  In every county of California our volunteers worked around the clock, knocking on doors, dropping literature and leafleting shopping centers, churches, colleges, and universities. Get-out-the-vote rallies were held, television ads were aired, and I began to think it might really be possible, that we just might win.

  Harvey still was grim. “Just make sure you’re ready to march.”

  On Tuesday, November 7, our volunteers headed out at dawn. Harvey spent most of the day talking with the press while Gwenn Craig, Bill Kraus, Dick Pabich, and Jim Rivaldo directed operations at the headquarters. It was a long day, but then it was over and the results came in.

  We had won.

  And we won big: 58.4 percent voting no, 41.6 percent voting yes. The party began.

  “Harvey, you look disappointed.” I laughed at him. “I think you were looking forward to that riot.”

  He grinned back at me and shrugged, “Some people are sore losers, maybe I’m a sore winner.”

  The riots he had predicted would eventually come, but Harvey would not be there to see them. We had won the first statewide election victory in the history of our young movement.

  Three days later, on November 10, Harvey got another surprise. Dan White, the supervisor from District 8, resigned with a petulant rant about corruption in City Hall and the challenges of raising a family on a supervisor’s salary. This meant that Mayor George Moscone would have the opportunity to appoint White’s successor. Harvey was delighted, knowing that the liberal Moscone now had the chance to flip the 6–5 conservative–liberal ratio to a liberal majority. Then, on November 14, Dan White changed his mind and asked the mayor to give him back his job. White’s backers at the Police Officers Association (POA), appalled by his resignation, had leaned on him hard.

  The POA had good reason to be concerned by the potential of a liberal majority on the board of supervisors. The NAACP had been fighting the segregation of the city’s police and fire departments for years and won a federal consent decree to integrate both departments. The Board was to implement the order. As a conservative former cop and firefighter, White’s vote was crucial to the old guard of the SFPD.

  The warm weather held for another four days. Then, on November 18, the temperature plummeted and the city was blanketed with cold grey fog.

  Outside Port Kaituma, Guyana, 4,396 miles away, the insane final chapter of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple played out in the hot and humid jungle. It was called a mass suicide by the media but it was in fact a mass murder, orchestrated by a madman who took with him almost a thousand San Franciscans.

  The images of their bloated bodies piled around the encampment stunned the city. People stood in small groups by the newspaper stands, shivering in the cold. Parents struggled to explain the photographs to their children. Those of us who had visited People’s Temple or interacted with their members were both sickened and terrified. Rumors spread of death squads coming from Guyana to continue the slaughter.

  Decades later, people who had not yet even been born in 1978 would blithely use the phrase, “drinking the Kool-Aid” without a clue as to its origin.

  For most San Franciscans, all other issues were temporarily forgotten as we absorbed the enormity of the tragedy in Jonestown. Few were paying attention to Dan White’s whining little drama. But Harvey was.

  When word got out that Mayor Moscone was considering reappointing Dan White, Harvey went ballistic and confronted Moscone. Harvey believed that this was a chance to fundamentally reshape the city’s politics, with a new majority committed to defending the most vulnerable of our citizens—renters, seniors, kids, and minorities, including gay people. Harvey organized support for a neighborhood activist from District 8 named Don Horanzy. Horanzy was a liberal but moderate enough the have a chance of reelection in the blue-collar white et
hnic neighborhoods of the district.

  On Sunday night, November 26, a reporter from KCBS Radio named Barbara Taylor called Dan White at home to tell him that she had learned Mayor Moscone would not be reappointing White to the Board of Supervisors.

  I got up early on Monday, November 27, because I knew that Harvey’s City Hall aide Anne Kronenberg would be out of town, visiting her parents in Seattle. Dick Pabich, Harvey’s other paid staffer, was planning on leaving City Hall soon to start a political consulting firm with Jim Rivaldo. Harvey had told me that I could have Pabich’s job if I would agree to take at least one class per semester towards my degree. I was eager to show Harvey how useful I could be and arrived at City Hall before him. I wasn’t the only intern; working with me was a baby dyke named Kory White and Debra Jones, a black heterosexual woman who adored Harvey and wanted to help build coalitions between the gay/lesbian community and African Americans. She was also keenly interested in urban planning issues, more so than me.

  As it turned out, Harvey was less than impressed with me that morning. I’d left a file in my apartment that he wanted to see. Anticipating a reelection campaign challenge, I’d been doing some research on potential opponents, including Leonard Matlovich and Chuck Morris, publisher of the gay and lesbian newspaper the Sentinel. He frowned when I told him I didn’t have the file and told me to go back to my place on Castro Street and bring it back. He was abrupt, but when he saw my crestfallen face he softened and said, “Take your time, I hear Local 2 is picketing the Patio Café. Say hi to them, get some lunch, and I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  The Patio Café was originally a bakery. In the early ’70s it was transformed into the Bakery Café, one of the most lovely and relaxing places to have an espresso and a pastry while reading or studying. Behind the building was a large space covered with lawn and a beautiful garden of hydrangeas, abutilons, foxglove, and fuchsias. The flowers attracted hummingbirds and butterflies that hummed in abundance.