11

Leading

HARVEY TOOK his responsibility to serve all of District 5 and all of San Francisco very seriously. He put immense energy into even the most nitty-gritty issues—getting the Public Works Department to sweep Castro Street daily rather than once a week, as it had been doing, getting the Municipal Transportation Agency to put up fifty new stop signs in his district. But he also kept a sharp eye out for a larger political stage. The Board of Supervisors has often been a stepping-stone for San Francisco supervisors: George Moscone, for instance, had been a supervisor before serving in the California Senate and then becoming mayor; Supervisor Dianne Feinstein would become mayor, make a failed run for the governorship of California, and eventually become a multiterm U.S. senator. But what was unique about Harvey’s aspirations was that at a time when openly gay politicians were rare, in 1978, he believed his success would be more likely if he made himself more prominent as a gay-activist leader. The constituent who had admonished him that “without your gayness, you’d be just another white liberal man running for office” was not off the mark.1

Assisted by his old speechwriter friend, Frank Robinson, Harvey delivered stirring speeches. Martin Luther King’s rhetoric was a conscious influence on him. In his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, King had declared on behalf of black people that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were “promissory notes” to which every American was a rightful heir. Every American was guaranteed the riches of freedom and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America could be a great nation only when it recognized that its minorities, too, are heir to its founding documents.

At San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day rally on June 25, 1978, Harvey was decked out not like Martin Luther King, in a formal dark suit and tie, but in 1970s gay style: tight jeans and a white T-shirt. He wore a lei draped around his neck. But he addressed the crowd of more than a quarter million people with a speech that had clear echoes of King. Gays, too, held a promissory note for the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence,” Harvey declaimed to his cheering audience. Nor can the words “yearning to be free” be chipped from the base of the Statue of Liberty; nor can “The Star-Spangled Banner” be sung without the words “land of the free.” “That’s what America is,” he shouted, as the crowd went wild. He proposed that on July 4, 1979, gay people from all over the country gather in Washington, D.C., “on that very same spot where, over a decade ago, Martin Luther King spoke to a nation of his dreams.” There, Harvey said, gays would tell the president of the United States “about America and what it really stands for.”² But at home, life could be shaky. Jack felt neglected. He was resentful and depressed. When he wasn’t holed up in their apartment drinking or calling Harvey at City Hall demanding that he come home, he was wandering the streets, or he would stumble into a gay bar demanding free drinks because he was the boyfriend of the most influential gay in San Francisco. If Harvey let himself think about what was going on at home, he was distressed. Most of the time he focused on carrying out his duties.

* * *

In envisioning a larger stage for himself, Harvey began to envision a larger world for gay people, where they would not need to live in ghettos to feel at home. He once composed a sort of love letter to Castro Street in which he wrote that after he had his first gay experience, at the age of fourteen, he felt that he never again would have a home in his parents’ house because he had to hide who he was. Even as an adult, wherever he went, he had had to suppress himself, so he always felt that he had neither home nor hometown—until he came to Castro Street, where “for the first time in my life, there was a place to live, to shop, to play, to be, that I felt was home.”3 Harvey never stopped loving the Castro, but his thinking was beginning to change: not only did gays have a right to feel at home anywhere they chose to live but also straight people everywhere needed to know that gay people were there too.

Harvey’s new mission was to shatter the myth that gay people live only in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York. He wanted heterosexuals to recognize that gays are everywhere, in all parts of society, even in their own families. He proposed that gays show up at gay pride parades—where people often held signs such as “Gay Rights Now”—with only one sign, displaying the name of the town and state where they were from: their hometown, a place to which they would now lay claim.⁴ In the San Francisco parade that year he rode atop his Volvo, legs dangling from the sunroof, holding aloft his own sign: “I’m from Woodmere, N.Y.,” it read.

* * *

Harvey made a giant leap onto a larger stage through his role in defeating California’s Briggs Initiative, Proposition 6. If passed, Proposition 6 would have prohibited homosexuals as well as all other public school employees who said anything positive about homosexuals from working in any capacity in California’s schools. The proposition, which was on the November 1978 ballot, was inspired by the barrage of right-wing successes in rolling back the modicum of civil rights that gays had been slowly achieving.

California state senator John Briggs, a far-right Republican from Orange County, hoped to run for governor. When polls showed him far behind in the gubernatorial race, he sought surefire issues to boost his campaign. He had gone to Miami with his Spanish-speaking wife, Carmen, during the Anita Bryant campaign so that Carmen could help Bryant get her message across to Miami’s large Cuban community. Bryant’s huge victory was eye-opening to Briggs.5 But he hoped to go even further than she had. He would put an initiative on California’s statewide ballot that would speak not only to the disgust Americans obviously still felt toward homosexuals but also to parents’ anxieties when they put their schoolchildren in the hands of strangers every day. His initiative would remove any public school employee not only for engaging in relations with members of the same sex but also for “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting [such relations] in private or in public.” Briggs needed 312,000 voter signatures on his petition in order for the initiative to qualify for the November ballot. “POLITICIANS DO NOTHING. DECENT CITIZENS MUST ACT,” he proclaimed in a dramatic appeal, censuring all the other California lawmakers for turning a blind eye to homosexual immorality.

Briggs got 500,000 signatures in his petition drive, almost 200,000 more than were required by California law. “It’s the hottest social issue since Reconstruction,” he boasted to the press. As Briggs’s campaign progressed, his rhetoric became increasingly outrageous. “The teaching profession,” he told one reporter, “is terribly attractive to the homosexual, and if the initiative is defeated, all of them are going to come out of the closet [as] legitimized role models for our children to emulate.” “One-third of San Francisco teachers are homosexual,” he told another. “I assume most of them are seducing young boys in toilets.”6

Gay people knew they had reason to panic. If Prop 6 won in the liberal state of California, the firing of gay teachers and their allies would only be the start. Reactionaries would be emboldened even further and it would lead to homosexual witch hunts all over America, like the ones of the 1950s and 1960s, when to be known as homosexual nearly guaranteed unemployment. Yet the juggernaut of antigay legislation beginning with Anita Bryant’s victory seemed unstoppable, even to many gay activists. The Briggs campaign kept sending out panic-inducing propaganda, such as a widely distributed flyer with a picture of innocent little boys and girls going off to school that said, in boldface type, “Preserve Parents’ Rights to Protect Their Children from Teachers Who Are Immoral and Who Promote a Perverted Lifestyle. Vote ‘Yes’ on 6!”⁷ Money raised in fundamentalist churches and huge, Bryant-style “God and Decency” rallies poured into the “Yes on 6” coffers. Reverend Jerry Falwell, a celebrity minister who spoke at Briggs’s rallies, predicted that Proposition 6 would lift good people out of their apathy and get them to the polls, and “a landslide will begin across the country.”⁸

Gay people despaired that Falwell was right and that a landslide was inevitable. Harry Britt, a human billboard in Harvey’s 1975 campaign and an openly gay activist ever since, lamented in the newsletter of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, “I know of no informed person who holds any real hope for defeating the Briggs Initiative.”⁹

David Goodstein, the influential Advocate publisher, was as pessimistic as most about defeating Prop 6, but he believed it was crucial to keep fighting to prevent Briggs from winning by the predicted landslide. If gays lost in California as dramatically as they had in Wichita or even in St. Paul, that surely would be the death knell for all gay progress. Goodstein teamed up with Harvey’s old nemesis, Jim Foster, to try to do damage control.

Goodstein and Foster had made steps toward reconciling with Harvey when he won the supervisorial race in November 1977 because they admired winners. But the reconciliation was tenuous. Though Harvey had gone through a gigantic metamorphosis in his appearance since 1973, on a more substantive level his style—brash, bold, and confrontational—continued to be abhorrent to them. For instance, fervently believing that the only way to stop antigay prejudice was for all gays and lesbians to be out, he did not scruple to out gays who were in the public spotlight, such as the ex-marine Oliver Sipple, who briefly became a national hero when he averted the assassination of President Gerald Ford by grabbing the arm of his would-be killer and deflecting the bullet. Sipple had been closeted with his family, but Harvey made sure that major newspapers reported that President Ford’s rescuer was a homosexual.10 The gay movement needed heroes, Harvey said, and the public needed to see that gays could be heroes. Harvey also kept insisting that it was important for gay people who were not public figures to come out to everyone—parents, friends, coworkers, neighbors—because it was impossible to fight the lies, myths, and distortions about gays if they remained in the closet. To defeat Briggs, Harvey argued, all gay people must tell those who already know them as human beings and not malevolent stereotypes that they are who gay people are.¹¹

Goodstein’s and Foster’s approach was the opposite. As Goodstein wrote in his column for the Advocate, he believed that the only way to run a campaign that would defeat Briggs was to pretend Prop 6 was not really about gay people. Gays could register gay voters and stuff envelopes in headquarters, but they must “keep out of sight of non-gay voters.” He was jabbing at Harvey when he added, “Gay media freaks must get off the television.” Only straight allies should do the talking against Proposition 6—and their talk should cover only “non-gay issues,” like how Proposition 6 would invite the government into people’s lives and homes and violate privacy; how Proposition 6 would add another layer of unnecessary bureaucracy to the government; and how taxpayers would have to pay to enforce it.12

To fight back against Briggs, Goodstein and Foster started an organization they called by the ultraneutral name Concerned Voters of California. They decided they needed to hire a high-powered PR person, one who would know how to get endorsements from people who counted, that is, influential heterosexuals; and they found a heterosexual to do the job: Don Bradley, who had helped John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson win their presidential bids in California. At the first organizational meeting of Concerned Voters of California, U.S. congressman Phil Burton, an “influential heterosexual,” was there to declare his support for the fight against the Briggs Initiative and to read aloud from the group’s brochure. The brochure addressed the necessity of defeating Proposition 6 because it threatened human rights and violated the sacred protections of the Constitution. In the entire brochure there was not one word about how homosexuals would be the primary victims of Proposition 6.

Harvey was at the meeting, and he sat quietly while Congressman Burton read aloud. Burton was one of the politicians he was counting on to endorse his next political run; but Harvey was repelled by the way the Concerned Voters of California was dressing up the issue in the generalized guise of human rights instead of confronting head-on the fact that gay citizens deserved the same protections granted to other minorities. The approach of Concerned Voters of California had been the approach in Miami-Dade, too. Harvey was certain that gays had been overwhelmingly defeated there because most straight voters had no idea that they had ever met a gay person—let alone that they had a beloved child or kindly aunt or uncle who was gay. In the fight against the Briggs Initiative, Harvey would urge gay people to say bluntly to everyone in their lives, “I’m asking you to help protect me.”

When Congressman Burton finished reading, Supervisor Milk jumped to his feet. “This is masturbation!” he shouted.13

But if Goodstein’s and Foster’s Concerned Voters of California was too buttoned-down for Harvey, another San Francisco group, the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative (BACABI) was too unbuttoned. BACABI was a grassroots organization started by members of the Socialist Workers Party, including Howard Wallace, the gay truck driver and union activist who, years earlier, had worked with Harvey on the Coors Beer boycott. There were things Harvey really liked about BACABI. It had a Third World Outreach Committee that focused on sending out lesbians and gays of color to speak to straight groups of color in order to show the straights who they are and to deliver the message that if rights could be taken away from gays, they could be taken away from other minorities too. BACABI also had a labor committee, and it sent out working-class gays to speak to groups like the Teamsters union, to deliver the message that Briggs was not only against gays but also against collective bargaining and other issues dear to labor’s heart. Harvey also liked BACABI’s take-to-the-streets, door-to-door politicking.

But there was much that bothered him about BACABI. As a duly elected politician he scorned decentralized chaos. He did not like it that anyone who showed up at a BACABI meeting could vote on any issue—and did not have to do any homework to educate himself or herself—just like in the old, radical Gay Liberation Front meetings. He wanted an organization that did the things BACABI did but was also well-organized and spoke not just to the radicals but to middle-class, mainstream people too.14

Because neither Concerned Voters of California nor BACABI suited him, he formed a third group, San Franciscans Against Prop 6, through which he could represent the campaign as he thought it should be represented. He set up the headquarters for his new organization in an old building south of Market that had once housed The Shed, a popular dance club that used to attract hordes of young gays. He put together a steering committee, and, to manage the running of San Franciscans Against Prop 6, he hired Bill Kraus, a young man who was working on his doctorate at UC Berkeley and who had been the coordinator of Get Out the Vote for Harvey Milk in 1977. Kraus became a canny strategist, mapping out the crucial areas into which San Franciscans Against Prop 6 had to put its greatest energy. Under his direction, eight hundred volunteers of every stripe went door to door, traversing the city according to his map, registering those who had never registered to vote, telling their own gay stories if they were gay, saying why Proposition 6 was hurtful to them personally and would be hurtful to everyone because it threatened privacy and would be the start of witch hunts.

Harvey also hired Kraus’s friend Gwenn Craig, a twenty-four-year-old black lesbian activist from Atlanta, to coordinate the operation and do outreach. Harvey’s detractors called her “the black woman in the window,” meaning he had hired her as window dressing. But it was proof of his sound political sense that he understood how Craig would be crucial to the success of their battle. She met with groups such as the Black Leadership Forum and the Black Ministers Alliance as well as San Francisco’s black congregations, which were often fundamentalist. Her task was to shift a knee-jerk focus on sin to a focus on the harm inherent in Proposition 6. Yes on 6 proponents assumed they would have a sympathetic audience in the black churches, but Craig was a counterbalance, telling the congregants how Briggs’s ideas were dangerous not only to her as a black lesbian but also to all of them as black people.15

Harvey’s job was to be the face of the battle against Briggs—the spokesman for San Franciscans Against Prop 6 and very soon a key personality in the entire campaign. He was the one whose face was seen most often on TV and whose words were quoted most often in the newspapers. But radical gays did not like that. In September 1978, less than two months before voters would go to the polls, Harvey was invited to speak about the Briggs Initiative on News Talk, a local TV show hosted by a young Latina, Juana Samayoa. Spiffed up for the interview in a suit and tie and a very white, pressed shirt, looking and sounding very much like a mayor (at the minimum), and ready to talk sense about why Proposition 6 was pernicious, Harvey must have been taken aback when Samayoa announced on air that a BACABI spokesperson had told her, “You shouldn’t have Harvey Milk on. He’s just doing it to further his political career.” As BACABI members saw it, Harvey was destroying their group through his opportunism. He was getting headlines in the San Francisco Examiner; he was getting support from the Democratic Party leadership; he was sabotaging BACABI’s fund-raising efforts by badmouthing the dominance of the Socialist Workers Party in the leadership of BACABI.¹⁶

Harvey had suffered for years from horizontal hostility in the gay movement but had worked around it, and he had been triumphant. Now all gays were facing a lethal enemy. Polls of likely voters were frightening. A Field Survey showed that a whopping 61 percent of the California electorate had made up its mind that it would vote in favor of Proposition 6. Only 31 percent were saying they opposed it.¹⁷ And still, incredibly, some gays took time off from attacking the foe to attack each other, in front of the straight public. It could not have been easy for Harvey to keep his temper. But with the KBHK-TV audience watching, he took the high road, seamlessly explaining that the fight against Briggs had “three major campaigns” in San Francisco, and each—BACABI, Concerned Voters of California, San Franciscans Against Prop 6—worked on “three distinct levels,” all in the service of defeating a dangerous proposition.

Samayoa persisted: “So how close are you, then, to the gay community?” she asked. Harvey’s politic answer surely won him more of the mainstream admirers he now sought: “Nobody can be close to the entire gay community, because we go from the extreme left to the extreme right. And I am a good, old-fashioned Harry Truman–Adlai Stevenson Democrat. I sit in the middle. Those on the extreme left think I’m too conservative. Those on the extreme right think I’m too liberal.”18 Harvey Milk was ready for prime time.

* * *

John Briggs was an enigma even to his colleagues in the State Senate. He was apparently a right-wing populist, but he did not really give a damn about following the party line; he was a loner. The other senators on the right resented that he was less interested in their agenda than in grabbing headlines for the sake of his own advancement. Briggs would stoop to anything for that and did not care when he enraged even his own party. As Senator H. L. Richardson from the conservative bastion of Glendora told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Anybody can get attention by dropping his pants. That’s how Briggs operates.”¹⁹

Briggs dreamed up Proposition 6—as well as Proposition 7, which would expand the list of crimes that warranted the death penalty—because he thought those were the big issues that would get voters on the right off their couches and into the voting booths. His gubernatorial fund-raising campaign fizzled early, but when polls showed that a huge majority of Californians favored both of his initiatives, he decided he might take advantage of the headlines he was getting as their author to run for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by Alan Cranston, a liberal Democrat.

As Harvey would learn, Briggs was not really emotionally invested in destroying gay people; he was emotionally invested in advancing his career.20 But whether or not Briggs truly believed that homosexual teachers raped children and should not be allowed in the classroom, he said it, and his initiative was designed to make voters believe it. Harvey, as the leading voice against Briggs, had to make voters understand Briggs’s dangerous malevolence.

The grimmest instance Harvey knew of dangerous malevolence had been forever impressed on his psyche when he was a child listening with his parents to radio reports of the destruction of European Jewry. The Holocaust became the metaphor he kept returning to in his speeches against Proposition 6. When he spoke to Jewish groups, the metaphor poured out of him in a torrent of emotion: “I cannot remain silent anymore,” he told the congregation at Oakland’s Temple Sinai. “There was silence in Germany because no one got up early enough to say what Hitler really was. If only someone did, maybe the Holocaust would never have happened.”²¹ A coalition of lesbian and gay Jews, Hashevet Ha’avud, the Lost Tribe, encouraged his Holocaust comparisons with materials they sent him: “Just as Proposition 6 would prevent gay people from teaching in the public schools”—Harvey bracketed the statement to incorporate in his talks—“so, forty-five years ago, did the German law prohibit Jews from teaching or holding any other civil service positions.”²²

Even with non-Jewish groups the metaphor seemed apt to him. To ignore the deadly threat Proposition 6 would lead to, he warned readers of a national gay newspaper, was “to be like Jews in Nazi Germany as they were being loaded into the boxcars and hoping they will be treated nicely and not put into the ovens.”23 “Senator Briggs is using the gay community as scapegoats, much as Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats,” he said on a panel with United Farmworkers and NAACP members.²⁴

In October, before the election, BACABI’s leaders challenged John Briggs to a debate, saying they would get KQED, a PBS station, to televise it. To their astonishment, Briggs said yes. Now they had to find someone who could hold his own in a debate with Briggs. Millions of Californians would be watching, so the stakes were high. Howard Wallace, the Socialist Workers Party truck driver and cofounder of BACABI, was the first choice of some. Wallace was articulate, good-looking, and had all the right political sentiments. But as others in BACABI pointed out, he was barely known outside of leftist circles. Harvey Milk might have been persona non grata in BACABI, but he was prominent, an elected official, and if he was there, the media would be there to cover it. “Let’s not be stupid,” they argued. “Milk may be a pawn for the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use a pawn to a good end.”²⁵ A BACABI delegation showed up at Harvey’s City Hall office to say, “We have Briggs and we have Howard Wallace, but we’ll take you over Howard.”²⁶

This was an offer Harvey could not refuse. It was a chance not only to let Briggs have it in front of a large television audience but also to unite disparate elements of the anti–Prop 6 campaign, so that together they could crush the opposition. He had been trying to unify the factions. When asked in public which of the anti–Prop 6 groups someone should support, he had inevitably answered, “All of them.” He had even helped to form a statewide No on 6 campaign to bring together, in a very rare collaboration, gay groups from Northern California and Southern California, which were often hostile to one another. “I’d be delighted to debate John Briggs on PBS,” Harvey told the BACABI delegation.

Harvey also knew that he had to unify the perpetually warring factions of lesbians and gay men. That animosity had surfaced yet again in the battle against Prop 6. Many of the anti-Briggs organizations, including BACABI, did try to defuse this infighting by ensuring that there would always be a man and a woman as cochairs. But lesbians in Gay Teachers and School Workers, a group led by two gay men, split off and formed their own group, Lesbian Schoolworkers. Harvey was opposed. He thought that separating at this time was a drain on energy that needed to be spent on the Briggs battle; and he redoubled his efforts to build coalitions with the lesbian community.27 To that end he worked closely with lesbians to help start A United Fund to Defeat the Briggs Initiative. He told a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, “If you’ll look at the letterhead of our group, it says in bold headlines, ‘A UNITED FUND.’ ” After the proposition was defeated, Harvey said, the United Fund was going to unite to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have mandated the federal government to prohibit discrimination against women.²⁸

So when Anne Kronenberg—among whose jobs it was to tug at Harvey’s coat if he was about to screw up on issues relating to women—told him, “You need to have a lesbian debating Briggs alongside you,” he listened.²⁹ Cleve Jones, the young man who lived up the street from Castro Camera and was a poli sci major at San Francisco State University, had the perfect person, a professor: “Her name is Dr. Sally Gearhart, a lesbian feminist, teaches Speech and Women’s Studies—and she exudes dignity,” Cleve promised.³⁰ She did. And when Harvey asked, she agreed to be his debate partner. Poised, stately, handsome, a fine match for Harvey’s new “well-turned-out” appearance, they joked that together they looked like “Mom and Pop of Middle America.” They became a duo not only in the PBS debate but also at many anti–Prop 6 rallies, where onstage Harvey would raise Sally Gearhart’s arm and call her “San Francisco’s next Supervisor!” a tacit promise that he would help bring lesbian feminists into mainstream politics.31

John Briggs chose as his debating partner Ray Batema, the crusading minister of the Central Baptist Church in the small Southern California town of Pomona. Batema was cochair with Briggs of Citizens for Decency and Morality. Looking anxious and lost in the debate, he let Briggs do most of the talking. Briggs came unhinged when a member of the live audience, former governor Ronald Reagan’s campaign chair, Mike Curb, rose to say that Reagan, who remained beloved by Republicans, told him he was opposed to Proposition 6. “I don’t care what Governor Reagan says,” Briggs sputtered, before impugning Reagan’s judgment and morality because “he comes from the same Hollywood crowd” that was financing the No on 6 campaign. “And ninety percent of the films that come out of Hollywood that are pornographic films are homosexual films!” he added.³²

Cool and composed, Sally Gearhart came armed with real figures and facts instead of Briggs’s nonsensical math. In response to his usual assertion that homosexuals were child molesters she calmly cited the FBI, the National Council on Family Relations, and the Santa Clara County Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center—whose statistics all showed that most child abusers were heterosexual men.

Harvey dominated the debate from the start. “How many teaching careers are you willing to see destroyed?” he asked the senator directly. “How many lives will you destroy in your lust for power?” In the service of showing up Briggs’s absurdity, Harvey was funny too. In response to Briggs’s claim that homosexual teachers can actually teach their students to be homosexual, he quipped, “How do you teach homosexuality? Like you’d teach French?”

Not even the most committed Yes on 6 supporter could imagine that Briggs and Batema had won that debate.

* * *

John Briggs was not only an opportunist; he was also deeply cynical. While he was promoting Proposition 6, Briggs, a nominal Catholic, and his young aide, Don Sizemore, often attended fundamentalist prayer meetings, where Briggs declared himself “born again” and knelt in the aisles while people all around him spoke in tongues. At one point Briggs whispered to Sizemore out of the side of his mouth, “Gibberish!”33

Surprisingly, in the course of the campaign the personal dynamic between Briggs and Harvey changed. Contemptuous as the two men were of each other in their public debates, they actually developed a sort of camaraderie behind the scenes. On Briggs’s part the feeling verged on admiration. As he told Sizemore, he thought he recognized a lot of himself in Harvey, who was “a natural politician, very gifted.” They were “the same species,” Briggs said—both superaggressive, hyper; they were guys who used angry language even when they were not truly angry and who respected the campaign process. Their debates were “nothing personal,” Briggs thought.³⁴

Like Harvey, Briggs knew a lot about theatrical performance —never mind that what he was performing could destroy people’s lives. After one knock-down, drag-out debate Briggs remarked to Sizemore, “Well, that was lively. That oughta wake people up.” In their spirited duels, Briggs saw Harvey as a worthy opponent. “You’ve got to hand it to Harvey, the anti-side isn’t well funded like we are, but he’s really making something out of nothing,” Briggs would often say to his aide.³⁵

For his part, Harvey came to understand that Briggs really did not care what homosexuals did, he just wanted to be governor, or U.S. senator. On Halloween, just a week before the November 7, 1978, election, Briggs informed the San Francisco Police Department that he and his aide, Sizemore, would be going to Polk Street to see the grand Halloween bacchanalia in which gays participated every year, thousands frolicking in orgiastic nudity, fabulous drag, glitter and greasepaint everywhere. The senator stood side by side with Harvey, whom everyone recognized. Hardly anyone recognized Briggs, perhaps because it was so unbelievable that he would be there, standing next to his most famous opponent. The press knew he would be there, though, and had sent reporters and cameras. “I’m here because this is a children’s night and I’m interested in children,” Briggs told the press. The next day the San Francisco Examiner ran a story headlined “Polk Street’s Odd Couple,” with a picture of Harvey next to the far-right senator. Briggs looked as though he was having the time of his life. As he admitted to his aide, he was not particularly shocked by or disapproving of what he saw there.36 Standing in the midst of the revelry, Harvey put his arm around Briggs’s shoulder and said, “John, if you hadn’t come along we would have had to invent you.”³⁷

* * *

By early October it was clear that the tide of support for Proposition 6 was waning: the yes and no sides were in a dead heat. Harvey was not solely responsible for that, of course. Concerted efforts by all manner of activists in both the north and the south of California; anti-Briggs editorials in the major newspapers and on radio and TV; statements by major political figures, especially Ronald Reagan, who told the press that Proposition 6 “has the potential for real mischief”—all of those things contributed to its rapid loss of favor. Harvey, however, remained the face of the battle to the end and its most eloquent spokesman. It was he whom the leading pollster, Mervin Field, quoted when he reported on the dramatic shift in voter sentiment: the proposition was “un-American,” Harvey said, “based on the same abuse of civil liberties that gave us witch hunts and McCarthyism.”³⁸ On November 7, when voters went to the polls, Proposition 6 lost by a landslide: 58.4 percent to 41.6 percent, with a margin of over a million votes.

Harvey orchestrated the victory celebration in a big hall near Castro Street. The central decoration was a large cardboard Statue of Liberty wearing a No on 6 sign, a jockstrap peeking out beneath it. Harvey had assigned to Dick Pabich, his aide, the job of blowing up hundreds of red, white, and blue helium balloons. When it was clear that Prop 6 had gone down, Pabich released the balloons over the heads of the cheering celebrants. It was like a national presidential convention when the nominee is announced.39