Supervisor
Milk's swearing-in made national headlines, as he became the
first non-incumbent openly gay man in the United
States to win an election for public office. He likened himself to pioneering African American baseball player Jackie Robinson and walked to City Hall arm in arm with Jack Lira, stating "You can stand around and throw bricks at Silly Hall or you can
take it over. Well, here we are." The
Castro District was not the only
neighborhood to promote someone new to city politics. Sworn in with Milk were
also a single mother (Carol Ruth Silver),
a Chinese American (Gordon Lau), and an African American woman (Ella Hill Hutch)—all firsts for the
city. Daniel White, a former police
officer, and a firefighter was also a first-time supervisor, and he spoke of how
proud he was that his grandmother was able to see him sworn in.
Milk's energy, an affinity for pranking, and unpredictability
at times exasperated Board of
Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein. In his first meeting with Mayor
Moscone, Milk called himself the "number
one queen" and dictated to Moscone that he would have to go through
Milk instead of the Alice B. Toklas
Memorial Democratic Club if he wanted the city's gay votes—a quarter of San Francisco's voting population. However,
Milk also became Moscone's closest ally on the Board of Supervisors. The
biggest targets of Milk's ire were large corporations and real estate
developers. He fumed when a parking garage was slated to take the place of
homes near the downtown area and tried to pass a commuter tax so office
workers who lived outside the city and drove into work would have to pay for
city services they used. Milk was often
willing to vote against Feinstein and other more tenured members of the board.
In one controversy early in his term, Milk agreed with fellow Supervisor Dan White, whose district
was located two miles south of the Castro,
that a mental health facility for troubled adolescents should not be placed
there. After Milk learned more about the facility, he decided to switch his
vote, ensuring White's loss on the issue—a particularly poignant cause that
White championed while campaigning. White did not forget it. He opposed every
initiative and issue Milk supported.
Milk began his tenure by sponsoring a civil rights bill that
outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. The ordinance was called
the "most stringent and encompassing
in the nation", and its passing demonstrated "the growing political power of homosexuals", according
to The New York Times. Only Supervisor White voted against it; Mayor
Moscone enthusiastically signed it into law with a light blue pen that Milk had
given him for the occasion.
Another bill Milk concentrated on was designed to solve the
number one problem according to a recent citywide poll: dog excrement. Within a
month of being sworn in, he began to work on a city ordinance to require dog
owners to scoop their pets' feces. Dubbed the "pooper scooper law", its authorization by the Board of Supervisors was covered extensively
by television and newspapers in San
Francisco. Anne Kronenberg,
Milk's campaign manager called him "a
master at figuring out what would get him covered in the newspaper". He invited the press to Duboce Park to explain why it was necessary, and while cameras were
rolling, he stepped in the offending substance, seemingly by mistake. His
staffers, however, knew he had been at the park for an hour before the press
conference looking for the right place to walk in front of the cameras. It earned him the most fan mail of his tenure
in politics and went out on national news releases.
Milk had grown tired of Lira's drinking and considered
breaking up with him when Lira called a few weeks later and demanded Milk come
home. When Milk arrived, he found Lira had hanged himself. Already prone to
severe depression, Lira had attempted suicide previously. One of the longest
notes he left for Milk indicated he was upset about the Anita Bryant and John Briggs
campaigns.
Briggs Initiative
John Briggs was
forced to drop out of the 1978 race for California
governor, but received enthusiastic support for Proposition 6, dubbed the Briggs
Initiative. The proposed law would have made firing gay teachers—and any
public school employees who supported gay rights—mandatory. Briggs' messages
supporting Proposition 6 was
pervasive throughout California, and
Harvey Milk attended every event Briggs hosted. Milk campaigned against the
bill throughout the state as well, and swore that even if Briggs won California, he would not win San Francisco. In their numerous debates, which toward the
end had been honed to quick back-and-forth banter, Briggs maintained that
homosexual teachers wanted to abuse and recruit children. Milk responded with
statistics compiled by law enforcement that provided evidence that pedophiles
identified primarily as heterosexual, and dismissed Briggs' assertions with
one-liner jokes: "If it were true
that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns
running around."
Attendance at Gay Pride
marches during the summer of 1978 in Los
Angeles and San Francisco
swelled. An estimated 250,000 to 375,000 attended San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade; newspapers claimed the
higher numbers were due to John Briggs.
Organizers asked participants to carry
signs indicating their hometowns for the cameras, to show how far people came
to live in the Castro District. Milk
rode in an open car carrying a sign saying "I'm
from Woodmere, N.Y." He gave a
version of what became his most famous speech, the "Hope Speech",
that The San Francisco Examiner said "ignited the crowd":
On this anniversary of
Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and
brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom,
for their country ... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our
closets ... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We
are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy
of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You
must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives.
Despite the losses in battles for gay rights across the
country that year, he remained optimistic, saying "Even if gays lose in these initiatives, people are still being
educated. Because of Anita Bryant
and Dade County, the entire country
was educated about homosexuality to a greater extent than ever before. The
first step is always hostility, and after that, you can sit down and talk about
it."
Citing the potential infringements on individual rights, former governor of California Ronald Reagan
voiced his opposition to the proposition, as did Governor Jerry Brown and President
Jimmy Carter, the latter in an afterthought following a speech he gave in Sacramento. On November 7, 1978, the proposition lost by
more than a million votes, astounding gay activists on election night. In San Francisco, 75 percent voted
against it.
Assassination
On November 10, 1978 (10 months after he was sworn in), Dan White resigned his position on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,
saying that his annual salary of $9,600 was not enough to support his family. Within days, White requested that his
resignation be withdrawn and he is reinstated, and Mayor Moscone initially
agreed. However, further
consideration—and intervention by other supervisors—convinced Moscone to
appoint someone more in line with the growing ethnic diversity of White's
district and the liberal leanings of the Board
of Supervisors.
On November 18 and 19, news broke of the mass suicide of 900
members of the Peoples Temple. The
cult had relocated from San Francisco
to Guyana. California Representative Leo Ryan was in Jonestown to check on the remote community, and he was killed by
gunfire at an airstrip as he tried to escape the tense situation. Dan
White remarked to two aides who were working for his reinstatement, "You see that? One day I'm on the front
page and the next I'm swept right off."
Moscone planned to announce White's replacement on November
27, 1978. A half-hour before the press
conference, White avoided metal detectors by entering City Hall through a basement window and went to Moscone's office,
where witnesses heard shouting followed by gunshots. White shot Moscone in the
shoulder and chest, then twice in the head.
White then quickly walked to his former office, reloading his
police-issue revolver with hollow-point bullets along the way, and intercepted
Milk, asking him to step inside for a moment. Dianne Feinstein heard gunshots and called police, then found Milk
face down on the floor, shot five times, including twice in the head. Soon after, she announced to the press,
"Today San Francisco has
experienced a double tragedy of immense proportions. As President of the Board of Supervisors, it is my duty to inform you
that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor
Harvey Milk has been shot and killed, and the suspect is Supervisor Dan White." Milk
was 48 years old. Moscone was 49.
Within an hour, White called his wife from a nearby diner;
she met him at a church and was with him when he turned himself in. Many people
left flowers on the steps of City Hall,
and that evening 25,000 to 40,000 formed a spontaneous candlelight march from Castro Street to City Hall. The next day, the bodies of Moscone and Milk were
brought to the City Hall rotunda
where mourners paid their respects. Six
thousand mourners attended a service for Mayor Moscone at St. Mary's Cathedral. Two memorials were held for Milk; a small one
at Temple Emanu-El and a more
boisterous one at the Opera House.
"City in agony"
In the wake of the Jonestown
suicides, Moscone had recently increased security at City Hall. Cult survivors recounted drills for suicide preparations
that Jones had called "White
Nights". Rumors about the
murders of Moscone and Milk were fueled by the coincidence of Dan White's name and Jones's suicide
preparations. A stunned District
Attorney called the assassinations so close to the news about Jonestown "incomprehensible" but denied any connection. Governor Jerry Brown ordered all flags
in California to be flown at half-staff,
and called Milk a "hard-working and
dedicated supervisor, a leader of San Francisco's gay community, who kept his
promise to represent all his constituents". President
Jimmy Carter expressed his shock at both murders and sent his condolences. Speaker of the California Assembly Leo
McCarthy called it "an insane
tragedy". "A City in
Agony" topped the headlines in The San
Francisco Examiner the day after the murders; inside the paper stories of
the assassinations under the headline "Black
Monday" were printed back to back with updates of bodies being shipped
home from Guyana. An editorial
describing "A city with more sadness
and despair in its heart than any city should have to bear" went on to
ask how such tragedies could occur, particularly to "men of such warmth and vision and great energies". Dan
White was charged with two counts of murder and held without bail, eligible
for the death penalty owing to the recent passage of a statewide proposition
that allowed death or life in prison for the murder of a public official. One analysis of the months surrounding the
murders called 1978 and 1979 "the
most emotionally devastating years in San Francisco's fabulously spotted
history".
The 32-year-old White, who had been in the Army during the Vietnam War, had run on a tough anti-crime platform in his
district. Colleagues declared him a high-achieving "all-American boy". He was to have received an award the next week
for rescuing a woman and child from a 17-story burning building when he was a
firefighter in 1977. Though he was the only supervisor to vote against Milk's
gay rights ordinance earlier that year, he had been quoted as saying, "I respect the rights of all people,
including gays". Milk and White
at first got along well. One of White's political aides (who was gay)
remembered, "Dan had more in common
with Harvey than he did with anyone else on the board". White had voted to support a center for gay
seniors, and to honor Phyllis Lyon
and Del Martin's 25th anniversary
and pioneering work.
The plaque covering Milk's ashes reads, in part: "[Harvey
Milk's] camera store and campaign headquarters at 575 Castro Street and his apartment upstairs were centers of community
activism for a wide range of human rights, environmental, labor, and
neighborhood issues. Harvey Milk's hard work and accomplishments on behalf of
all San Franciscans earned him widespread respect and support. His life is an
inspiration to all people committed to equal opportunity and an end to
bigotry."
After Milk's vote for the mental health facility in White's
district, however, White refused to speak with Milk and communicated with only
one of Milk's aides. Other acquaintances remembered White as very intense. "He was impulsive ... He was an
extremely competitive man, obsessively so ... I think he could not take
defeat," San Francisco's
assistant fire chief told reporters. White's first campaign manager quit in the
middle of the campaign and told a reporter that White was an egotist and it
was clear that he was antigay, though he denied it in the press. White's associates and supporters described
him "as a man with a pugilistic
temper and an impressive capacity for nurturing a grudge". The aide who had handled communications
between White and Milk remembered, "Talking
to him, I realized that he saw Harvey Milk and George Moscone as representing
all that was wrong with the world".
When Milk's friends looked in his closet for a suit for his
casket, they learned how much he had been affected by the recent decrease in
his income as a supervisor. All of his clothes were coming apart and all of his
socks had holes. His remains were
cremated and his ashes were split. His closest friends scattered most of the
ashes in San Francisco Bay. Other
ashes were encapsulated and buried beneath the sidewalk in front of 575 Castro Street, where Castro Camera had been located. There
is a memorial to Milk at the Neptune
Society Columbarium, ground floor, San
Francisco, California. Harry Britt, one of four people Milk
listed on his tape as an acceptable replacement should he be assassinated, was
chosen to fill that position by the city's acting mayor, Dianne Feinstein.
Trial and conviction
Dan White's
arrest and trial caused a sensation and illustrated severe tensions between the
liberal population and the city police. The San Francisco Police were mostly working-class Irish descendants
who intensely disliked the growing gay immigration as well as the liberal
direction of the city government. After White turned himself in and confessed,
he sat in his cell while his former colleagues on the police force told Harvey Milk jokes; police openly wore "Free Dan White" T-shirts in
the days after the murder. An
undersheriff for San Francisco later
stated: "The more I observed what
went on at the jail, the more I began to stop seeing what Dan White did as the act of an individual and began to see it as a
political act in a political movement."
White showed no remorse for his actions and exhibited vulnerability
only during an eight-minute call to his mother from jail.
The jury for White's trial consisted of white middle-class San Franciscans who were mostly
Catholic; gays and ethnic minorities were excused from the jury pool. Some of the members of the jury cried when
they heard White's tearful recorded confession, at the end of which the
interrogator thanked White for his honesty. White's defense attorney, Doug Schmidt, argued that his client
was not responsible for his actions; Schmidt used the legal defense known as
diminished capacity: "Good people,
fine people, with fine backgrounds, simply don't kill people in cold
blood." Schmidt tried to prove
that White's anguished mental state was a result of manipulation by the
politicos in City Hall who had
consistently disappointed and confounded him, finally promising to give his job
back only to refuse him again. Schmidt said that White's mental deterioration
was demonstrated and exacerbated by his junk food binge the night before the murders
since he was usually known to have been health-food conscious. Area newspapers quickly dubbed it the Twinkie defense. White was acquitted of
the first-degree murder charge on May 21, 1979, but found guilty of voluntary
manslaughter of both victims, and he was sentenced to serve seven and
two-thirds years. With the sentence reduced for time served and good behavior,
he would be released in five. He cried
when he heard the verdict.
White Night riots
Acting Mayor Feinstein, Supervisor
Carol Ruth Silver and Milk's successor Harry Britt condemned the jury's decision. When the verdict was
announced over the police radio, someone sang "Danny Boy" on the police band. A surge of people from the Castro District walked again to City Hall, chanting "Avenge Harvey Milk" and "He
got away with murder". Pandemonium rapidly escalated as rocks were
hurled at the front doors of the building. Milk's friends and aides tried to
stop the destruction, but the mob of more than 3,000 ignored them and lit
police cars on fire. They shoved a burning newspaper dispenser through the
broken doors of City Hall and then cheered
as the flames grew. One of the rioters
responded to a reporter's question about why they were destroying parts of the
city: "Just tell people that we ate
too many Twinkies. That's why this is happening." The
chief of police ordered the police not to retaliate, but to hold their ground. The White
Night Riots, as they became known, lasted several hours.
Later that evening, several police cruisers filled with
officers wearing riot gear arrived at the Elephant
Walk Bar on Castro Street. Harvey Milk's protégé Cleve Jones and a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Warren Hinckle, watched as officers
stormed into the bar and began to beat patrons at random. After a 15-minute
melee, they left the bar and struck out at people walking along the
street. The chief of police finally
ordered the officers out of the neighborhood. By morning, 61 police officers
and 100 rioters and gay residents of the Castro
had been hospitalized. City Hall,
police cruisers, and the Elephant Walk
Bar suffered damages in excess of $1,000,000.
After the verdict, District
Attorney Joseph Freitas faced a furious gay community to explain what had
gone wrong. The prosecutor admitted to feeling sorry for White before the
trial and neglected to ask the interrogator who had recorded White's
confession (and who was a childhood friend of White's and his police softball
team coach) about his biases and the support White received from the police
because, he said, he did not want to embarrass the detective in front of his
family in court. Nor did Freitas
question White's frame of mind or lack of a history of mental illness, or bring
into evidence city politics, suggesting that revenge may have been a motive. Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver testified
on the last day of the trial that White and Milk were not friendly, yet she had
contacted the prosecutor and insisted on testifying. It was the only testimony
the jury heard about their strained relationship. Freitas blamed the jury whom he claimed had
been "taken in by the whole emotional
aspect of [the] trial".
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