14

Aftermath

THE OTHER bullets Dan White had carried in his pocket were intended for Carol Ruth Silver. He had not been blind to the notes she and Harvey passed behind his back at Board of Supervisor meetings, or to how she joined Harvey in smirking whenever White opened his mouth to speak. Carol Ruth Silver, Dan White thought, “was the biggest snake of the bunch.” If she had kept her usual schedule that day, White would have encountered her walking up the steps of City Hall about a quarter after eleven, just as he was leaving. But that morning she had gone to have coffee at the Daisy, a mile away, with “Mighty Mo” Bernstein, an avid liberal and big political donor. After their coffee Silver dropped by her law office to pick up some papers. She survived White’s murderous intent only because she arrived at City Hall late that day.1

Not finding Silver, White ran off, looking for a pay phone from which he could call his wife. He found one in a fast-food restaurant and asked her to meet him at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption. In the empty church he told her what he had done. Together they went to the Northern Station of the San Francisco Police Department, a ten-minute walk from the cathedral. There, White turned himself in. He chose that particular station because several of the officers at Northern were close friends. He gave his weeping confession to Police Inspector Frank Falzon, under whom White had once served. Falzon had been a buddy too. He and White were raised in the same neighborhood, attended a Catholic grammar school together, had the same friends.2

In his confession Dan White said that he killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk because “I saw the city going kind of downhill.”³

* * *

When Harvey won his election, he gave Cleve Jones the bullhorn that the union head Allen Baird once presented to him. Harvey had said to Jones, “We’ll play bad cop / good cop. You go out in the streets and make the demands. Be the radical. I’m gonna stay inside and fix things.”⁴ The evening after Harvey was killed Jones took his bullhorn out on the street with him, but he did not need it. By seven o’clock a huge crowd, gays and straights alike, thousands, had gathered spontaneously on Castro and Seventeenth Streets. The San Francisco Gay Democratic Club had asked those they alerted to bring candles. But everyone seemed to know to bring them. Led by a drummer and three gay men carrying a big American flag, a California State flag, and a flag of the City and County of San Francisco, they began marching toward City Hall on the route Harvey had walked, his arm around Jack Lira, the day he was inaugurated. As they marched, thousands more joined in. In the dark the marchers seemed to be a flowing river of light.⁵ Local news stations estimated they were thirty thousand strong. This was “the greatest single outpouring of grief since Martin Luther King was killed,” one newscaster declared.6

Gwenn Craig, who had been hired by Harvey to coordinate the San Franciscans Against Prop 6 campaign and to do black outreach, had gone to Hawaii for Thanksgiving and to celebrate the election victory. Her friend Bill Kraus, whom Harvey had hired to be the campaign’s strategist, called her the minute he heard the news that morning. Kraus was sobbing uncontrollably. “Harvey’s been killed!” he blurted out.

Craig threw her things together and rushed to the airport. In San Francisco she grabbed a cab. “Market Street, near Valencia,” she told the driver. She had expected to see a big demonstration but was shocked to find the streets empty. Then she looked up the hill and saw thousands of little flames.⁷

Except for the sounds of weeping, the procession marched in silence toward City Hall. Some, like Debra Jones, Harvey’s Nubian queen, were in the throes of such grief that they had to be held up by friends as they walked.⁸ A black man standing on a corner watched the quietly weeping marchers in disbelief. “Where is your anger?” he shouted. “Where is your anger?”⁹

Many placed their candles at the base of the statue of Abraham Lincoln that sits in front of City Hall. Dianne Feinstein, who, as president of the Board of Supervisors, had already assumed the position of acting mayor, promised the mourning crowd that “social change will continue in San Francisco. Harvey is gone, but he will not be forgotten.” Joan Baez led the crowd in “Amazing Grace.” The folksinger Holly Near was there too. A few hours earlier she composed a song for that evening, “Singing for Our Lives”: the lyrics she belted out referred to gentle, angry gay and lesbian people.¹⁰ That night the gay and lesbian people were only gentle. The anger would come later.

* * *

Harvey’s most intimate friends gathered to make funeral arrangements. Jim Rivaldo, who had been Harvey’s political strategist, volunteered to go to the mortuary and pick out a casket. Walter Caplan, at whose home Harvey had attended Passover seders at which he always wore a yarmulke, was certain, as he instructed Rivaldo, that Harvey would want an unpainted wooden casket, no nails or metal of any kind, in keeping with Jewish tradition.11

There was an outdoor memorial service in front of City Hall on November 29, with speeches by dignitaries such as Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, who had made Harvey so proud when he spoke at Harvey’s victory dinner less than eleven months earlier. Out of respect for George Moscone, the benediction was given by Archbishop John Quinn. Out of respect for Harvey, Rabbi Alvin Fine, a civil rights champion and the retired head of Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco’s main Reform temple, gave the eulogy. Harvey’s unpainted wooden coffin rested near the shiny mahogany and gold casket of George Moscone, under the ornate City Hall rotunda that Harvey had so loved. Flowers were strewn on every step of the beautiful marble staircase. More than ten thousand mourners stood in line, waiting to file by the closed coffins.

George Moscone’s services, both a public funeral and a private funeral Mass, were held at St. Mary’s Cathedral, home of the archdiocese of San Francisco. There were several memorial services for Harvey. In the tape recording he had left with his lawyer friend Walter Caplan shortly after his election in 1977, Harvey said that if he was ever assassinated there should be no religious services for him. “I would turn over in my grave if there were any kind of religious ceremony,” he had declared. But there were many kinds of religious ceremonies for him.

One was at the Gay Community Center (which had been the cause of the federal investigation against him that was mooted by his death); Rabbi Martin Weiner of the Reform Temple Sherith Israel officiated.12 Another service was organized by the gay Congregation Sha’ar Zahav; the gay rabbinical student Allen Bennett officiated. Sha’ar Zahav members even raised money to fly Harvey’s brother, Robert, from New York to San Francisco to attend the service. They rented an auditorium too, Dovre Hall, which seated four hundred; and they arranged with the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency for a special bus to bring people directly to the door. The hall was overflowing, and the service had to be amplified so that the hundreds unable to get in could hear it outside. Sha’ar Zahav was a tiny congregation before stories about the service and Sha’ar Zahav’s gay membership appeared in San Francisco’s newspapers. Because of the publicity, it grew exponentially, and San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center finally recognized the gay congregation and welcomed the members to hold Friday and Saturday services at the JCC until the money was raised for Sha’ar Zahav to build its own home. Harvey would have liked that, at least.¹³

But neither of those Jewish memorials was the official one. Acting Mayor Dianne Feinstein was a member of Temple Emanu-El, which was not only San Francisco’s wealthiest Reform congregation but also its largest, seating two thousand people. It was decided that the official Jewish service be held there, right after Harvey’s lying in state at City Hall. Temple Emanu-El’s senior rabbi, Joseph Asher, had always been committed to civil rights; in 1958 he had even participated in sit-ins in the South. But he was not a proponent of homosexual equality, and he was not at all charmed by the proposal that Allen Bennett, the only openly gay rabbi in San Francisco, give the eulogy at Temple Emanu-El. Under pressure from City Hall, however, Rabbi Asher could hardly say no. Harvey would have liked that too—and he would have liked that at the podium of stuffy Temple Emanu-El an openly gay rabbi talked about Harvey Milk’s pride in his Jewishness.14

The memorial service that would have pleased Harvey the most was held at the Opera House. Not only was the lieutenant governor of California at this service: Governor Jerry Brown and the chief justice of California, Rose Bird, were also there. Robert Milk, because he was Harvey’s brother, sat with the dignitaries in the front row. Robert did not know yet that Harvey’s will excluded him from inheriting anything of the meager estate because Harvey had never gotten over his anger that his brother was contemptuous of him for being gay.¹⁵

At the Opera House, Robert had to have recognized what a somebody his younger brother had become. Every one of the more than three thousand seats was taken, as was every space where people could stand. Another thousand mourners listened to the service over a loudspeaker outside.

Acting Mayor Feinstein told the dignitaries and Robert and the thousands of others there that “the fact of [Harvey’s] homosexuality gave him an insight into the scars which all oppressed people wear. It was undoubtedly the genesis of his admirable commitment to the cause of human rights.” The eulogy was given by Harvey’s friend the Reverend William Barcus, a gay priest at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church. Barcus turned his eulogy into an exhortation that all gay people exit the closet “as a tribute to Harvey Milk and as an affirmation of our own freedom and integrity and wholeness.” He called upon “every gay person in this room, in this city, in this country” to come out en masse on the following Monday. He echoed the words of the slain supervisor: “Come out to your friends, your employers, your clergy, your bankers, your neighbors, your families. Come out!” He also reiterated the call Harvey had made at the last Gay Freedom Day rally for a gay march on Washington on July 4, 1979, to tell the president of the United States “about America and what it stands for.”

* * *

Harvey was cremated on the Thursday after he was shot. On Friday, December 1, Scott Smith and Galen McKinley drove together to the mortuary to pick up his ashes. Tom Randol, who had helped Harvey and Scott silkscreen the first campaign posters and who had led Veterans for Harvey Milk during the 1976 and 1977 campaigns, drove with them. They argued about who would get to hold the urn in his lap.16 Scott took the urn home, to keep until Saturday.

Saturday morning, December 2, the three men wrapped the urn in Harvey’s favorite comic strip, “Doonesbury,” from the San Francisco Chronicle. Over the comics they pasted rhinestones that spelled out “RIP” and “December 2, 1978.” About thirty of Harvey’s closest friends, including Tom O’Horgan and men who had been his lovers through the years, including Joe Campbell, had chartered a vintage sailing ship, Lady Frei. As the Lady Frei sailed past the Golden Gate Bridge they scattered Harvey’s ashes, along with peach-colored roses that represented his beloved opera Der Rosenkavalier. They also scattered bubble bath and the contents of a packet of grape Kool-Aid in remembrance of the victims of Jonestown, who had died two weeks earlier after drinking the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid under Jim Jones’s command. The bubble bath and Kool-Aid created a coral-colored wake. They fired a little cannon to salute their martyred friend and lover.¹⁷

* * *

John Briggs had gotten two propositions qualified for California’s ballot in November 1978. Though Proposition 6 went down to defeat, Proposition 7, called the Death Penalty Act, won by a landslide: 71 percent to 29 percent. It affirmed a law passed by the state legislature the year before that reinstated the death penalty in California; it made capital punishment mandatory for first-degree murder under “special circumstances.” Those circumstances included murder of multiple victims and assassination of a public official. Who could doubt that Dan White, who had assassinated two public officials, would be executed?

White spent six months in jail as he awaited trial. Rumor had it that those months behind bars were made easy by White’s former colleagues in the San Francisco Police Department, who allowed him to order take-out meals from his favorite restaurants and feast on chocolate cakes baked by his admirers.

Another rumor held that police officers passed the hat and raised a hundred thousand dollars for White’s defense fund.18 There was, in fact, little doubt on whose side the police were in this city that was, in their perception, being co-opted by progressives while those on the right were left to stew. Despite Moscone’s chief of police appointee, the reformist Charles Gain, who had declared on taking office that he would welcome gays into the force, most policemen were conservative, if not reactionary. In fact, the Police Officers Association had held a no-confidence vote on their new chief. The assassinations of the mayor who had foisted Gain on the department and of the man who was famous for flaunting his homosexuality were no great tragedy to the force.

* * *

San Francisco’s district attorney, Joe Freitas, whose job it normally would have been to prosecute the case, recused himself because he had been personally acquainted with the mayor and both supervisors. The job fell to Thomas Norman, the assistant district attorney. Norman intended to ask for the death penalty. He queried all the potential jurors about their views on capital punishment to be sure they had no scruples against it. Norman thus inadvertently dismissed liberal prospective jurors, who would have been most reliably outraged about the murders of a gay man and a gay-friendly mayor. The defense lawyers, Douglas Schmidt and Steve Scherr, were many steps ahead of the assistant D.A. They dismissed any prospective juror who was not white, straight, and conservative. The jury on which the defense and the prosecution agreed was composed of seven women and five men, mostly from working-class backgrounds very similar to Dan White’s own.19

Assistant D.A. Norman made another grave mistake by playing for the jury the tape of White’s twenty-four-minute police station confession. In the hushed courtroom the jurors heard White weeping audibly as he told Inspector Falzon about the murders. White’s confession was so affecting that the jurors wept too. He had not intended to kill Moscone and Milk, White had said to his former schoolmate, colleague, and friend. He had been upset because he was so worried about how he was going to support his wife and little baby. All he wanted to do was take care of them and take care of the city that he loved so much. He had worked so hard to get elected supervisor because he wanted to fight corruption and keep San Francisco from deteriorating. True, he had carried a loaded gun to City Hall, but a lot of supervisors carried loaded guns, for self-protection—even Dianne Feinstein carried one. The day Moscone and Milk were killed he had gone to City Hall just to talk to them; but “I got kind of fuzzy; my head didn’t feel right,” White told Falzon in a pathetic-sounding voice.²⁰

Each of the eleven days of the trial, the jurors saw before them, sitting in the courtroom, a pale, clean-cut family man. His grief-stricken wife, Mary Ann, was there too. Dan and Mary Ann looked devastated—the sight of the attractive young couple was heartbreaking, just as White’s lawyers knew it would be. Defense Attorney Schmidt pointed out to this jury of White’s peers that he’d had a spotless and honorable record before the tragedy—Vietnam vet, policeman, fireman. “Good people, fine people with fine backgrounds, simply don’t kill people in cold blood,” Schmidt summed up.

So how had it happened that Dan White, by his own confession, had killed two people? An expert witness testified that the upstanding young man had been so shaken by the loss of his position that he could not eat. He had been subsisting on Coca-Cola and Twinkies, and that had made it impossible for him to think clearly. The jury paid no attention to the fact that White had been deliberate in planning the murder of two public officials: he had cleaned his gun, loaded it with five bullets, put ten more in his pants pocket, dressed in a three-piece suit with a vest that would conceal his weapon, evaded City Hall’s metal detector by climbing through a ground-floor window. On May 21, 1979—the day before Harvey Milk would have been forty-nine years old—the jury found Dan White guilty of voluntary manslaughter. For assassinating two public officials he was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison.

But how was that possible? a San Francisco Chronicle reporter asked the foreman of the jury. Dan White had admitted to killing a mayor and a supervisor. He had committed a double capital offense. “Well, no one could come up with any evidence that indicated premeditation,” the foreman explained.21

* * *

“Where is your anger? Where is your anger?” the man watching the silent candlelight march had cried out six months earlier. The jury’s outrageous verdict now detonated that anger. A crowd began to gather in the Castro as soon as the verdict was announced. Cleve Jones ran to get the bullhorn to shout, “Out of the bars and into the streets!” thinking he would lead another mournful march. Five hundred people had congregated already, and they started walking to City Hall. By the time they got to Civic Center Plaza the number had swelled to thousands. It was almost dark. A mob massed in front of City Hall’s main entrance on Polk Street. One man struggled to pull down a piece of the ornate grillwork to make a battering ram. Others joined him, pulling down rods of the grillwork and using them to smash the glass doors. Some broke off chunks of the aggregate trash bins on the streets, others pulled up chunks of pavement, others uprooted parking meters and newspaper vending racks, and they hurled them at the windows of City Hall. People yelled, “He got away with murder!” “We want justice!” “Avenge Harvey Milk!”

Cooler heads, hoping to calm the mob, located Harvey’s beloved debating partner, Sally Gearhart, in the crowd. They rushed her up to the City Hall steps and put Cleve Jones’s bullhorn in her hands. “There’s nobody in the city angrier than I am tonight,” she shouted through the bullhorn. “But Harvey Milk would not be here tearing down the doors of this building. Harvey Milk would say, ‘I don’t want my death avenged by violence. There are better ways to deal with our rage!’ ”

Her plea fell on deaf ears. Rioters broke limbs off of trees and used them to smash every car window in sight. They hurled burning shrubs through the broken windows of parked police vehicles.

Dianne Feinstein watched, peeking from behind the curtains of the mayor’s office. She ordered the SFPD to call in every off-duty policeman in an attempt to restore order. She summoned the police departments of Oakland, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Marin, pleading for backup. The streets looked like they had in Greenwich Village ten years earlier at the Stonewall riots. Policemen wearing riot shields and helmets tried to drive the angry mob from City Hall and the Plaza. The rioters ran north to Larkin Street, setting fire to trash cans, breaking plate-glass windows, looting stores. “Political trashing,” they gleefully dubbed their deeds. “Make sure to put it in the papers that I ate too many Twinkies,” one of them screamed at a Chronicle reporter while torching another police car.

Five hours after the riot began, it was finally over. Seventy rioters and fifty-nine policemen had to be treated for injuries from billy clubs, rocks, and flying bottles. The damage was over one million dollars.22

* * *

Hoping to quiet the crowd, Sally Gearhart had told them that Harvey would not have wanted a riot, but that was not quite accurate. Harvey had seen the impact of the 1969 Stonewall riots. He understood that militant action could be necessary to the gay movement if nothing else would make straight people sit up and take notice. Once the straight world started listening, then more reasonable-looking and -sounding spokesmen—like Harvey Milk in a suit and tie—could deliver the message of gay rights.

The day after the riot the San Francisco Examiner, trying to make sense of what had happened, interviewed Harry Britt. He had been a founding member of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, which was formed to help Harvey in his 1976 Assembly run; after Harvey’s assassination it was renamed the Harvey Milk Democratic Club. Britt was one of the four people Harvey had named in his political will as his possible successor on the Board of Supervisors; and he was the one Dianne Feinstein appointed.

Like Harvey, Harry Britt understood the uses of riots. He explained to the newspaper and the world, “Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have their hair-dressing salons, but as people capable of violence. This was gay anger you saw. There better be an understanding of where this violence was coming from.”23