The Mayor of Castro Street (28 page)

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About two hours later, Police Sergeant George Kowalski answered a panicked phone call from the heavily gay Polk Street area. The caller was standing nervously by the pay phone on a street corner when Kowalski found him. He had picked up this guy at a South of Market bar, he told Kowalski, and they were starting to make out at his apartment, but he could swear he felt a gun under this guy's coat during the first hugs. Fearing his trick was one of the homophobes preying on gays, he had slipped from the apartment to call the police.

Kowalski and the caller cautiously approached the apartment where Al Asmussen sat. Asmussen became agitated and hyperactive when Kowalski asked to check his deputy identification. Kowalski assured Asmussen he would file no report; everything was over as far as he was concerned. But Asmussen still became visibly distraught and hurriedly left the apartment.

At about 3
A.M.
, a cab driver called police to tell of a car that was idling in the middle of a deserted city intersection, right off the freeway heading for the suburbs. The driver was slumped over the wheel, like he was drunk and passed out. That's how the police found Deputy Sheriff Al Asmussen, his Smith & Wesson near his right hand. A homicide inspector was briefly called off the Hillsborough murder to check into the case. He didn't need to do much sleuthing to see this was no homicide, and he went back to work on the Mission district killing. According to the coroner's report, Al Asmussen had died of “severe laceration to the brain due to a gunshot wound of the mouth.”

*   *   *

The news of the Hillsborough murder
leaped to the front pages. Mayor Moscone ordered the city's flags flown at half-mast and angrily blamed the killing on the anti-gay campaigns of Anita Bryant and John Briggs. From San Diego came a slight, seventy-eight-year-old widow, Bob Hillsborough's mother. “I didn't think much about Anita Bryant's campaign at first,” said Helen Hillsborough. “Now that my son's murder has happened, I think about the Bryant campaign a lot. Anyone who wants to carry on this kind of thing must be sick. My son's blood is on her hands.”

The weeks of spontaneous demonstrations had already made police fear a potential riot at the 1977 annual Gay Freedom Day Parade, scheduled for just five days after the murder, so they raced to solve the crime before the expected throngs took to the streets on Sunday. Though loud in their condemnations of the killing, the city's liberal politicians started backing away from the gay community. Last-minute problems arose with parade details, for example, problems only the mayor could resolve. Suddenly, however, parade officials found that Moscone simply refused to talk to them. Fearing that association with the gay parade might later prove a liability, many of the city's leading liberal politicians started phoning gay leaders to insist that last-minute obligations had arisen to prevent their attendance at the event.

The day before the parade, a relieved police spokesman made the announcement. They had arrested four youths—two Latinos, two whites—for the Hillsborough slaying. Two had pegged John Cordova, a nineteen-year-old car mechanic from a heavily Latino suburb, as the slayer.

Nearly 250,000 assembled the next day along the wide Market Street boulevard, more people than had come together in the city for nearly a decade. It would have been difficult for politicians like George Moscone or Joe Freitas to find a more receptive crowd, especially since they faced recall, but they and the many other liberal friends were nowhere to be seen as the quarter million solemnly marched toward the grand City Hall rotunda. Television stations had to rent helicopters to get a high enough vantage point to film the entire parade. Contingents came from as far away as Denver and Alaska. Vast crowds lined the streets. Hour after hour, the demonstrators poured into the Civic Center plaza. The largest group carried uniform placards: Save Our Human Rights. One row of picketers stretched the breadth of a street holding aloft large portraits of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, a burning cross—and the smiling face of Anita Bryant.

As the thousands passed the wide stairs of the majestic City Hall, one marcher dropped a flower over the headline announcing Robert Hillsborough's murder. Several more followed, the flowers falling for a man few had ever heard of a week ago. A small mound grew and, by the end of the day, thousands upon thousands of blossoms rested silently at the golden-grilled doors of City Hall, all in remembrance of a mild-mannered gardener who had been falling in love all over again just a few days before, on the first warm night of the summer.

*   *   *

Harvey had long planned to announce his candidacy for the board during the week of festivities that surrounded Gay Freedom Day. The announcement was hardly necessary, since Milk had made no secret he would seek a slot on the board, whether through district or citywide elections. Coming the day after the Hillsborough murder hit the papers, his announcement was buried amid the deluge of other gay news. Harvey didn't need the extra publicity, however, since virtually every new story about the rapidly changing developments featured some quotable quip from the one gay leader who seemed to echo the sentiments of the young militant gays who, in a few short weeks, had burst to the forefront of the San Francisco gay community. Harvey and Frank Robinson honed the announcement speech just the same, since it would become the standard pitch for the rest of the campaign.

I'll never forget what it was like coming out.… I'll never forget the looks on the faces of those who have lost hope, whether it be young gays, or seniors, or blacks looking for that almost-impossible-to-find job, or Latinos trying to explain their problems and aspirations in a tongue that's foreign to them.

No it's not my election I want, it's yours. It will mean that a green light is lit that says to all who feel lost and disenfranchised that you can now go forward.

It means hope and we—no—you and you and you and, yes, you, you've got to give them hope.

The hope speech was getting down to its final draft, though for Milk the idea had been a fundamental tenet of his personal philosophy since he had written Joe Campbell after the suicide attempt so many years ago, insisting life was always worth living because life always held hope.

Like most of the city's supervisorial hopefuls, Milk faced tactical problems because he would not know until after the August special elections whether he would be running citywide or in District 5. Moscone, Freitas, and Hongisto were also laying their political survival plans, which were introduced in a frank meeting with gay leaders. They would have to keep their distance from gays since their gay ties could cost them votes, their strategist told gays bluntly, but they still had to have gay votes to win, and they expected gays to rally around their liberal friends as they had before.

The duplicity angered Milk and he saw it as proof of his contention that in a pinch, liberals could be counted on to protect only themselves. “No longer should we allow any candidate, even our ‘friends,' to evade the [gay] issue because it will hurt them with the voters,” he publicly railed. “If none appear, then none should get our votes.” Privately, however, Milk and the broad spectrum of other gay leaders had little room in which to maneuver. No acceptable alternatives stood on the horizon, especially if Moscone and Hongisto were thrown out of office. Moreover, the repeal of district elections would negate a cause for which every moderate and liberal interest group in the city had fought for years. David Goodstein broke ranks and supported repeal of district elections. Between the allies of all the city's major politicians, however, as well as the labor and neighborhood activists who had worked for district elections, the Democratic establishment built a mighty political effort for the August election.

*   *   *

“The last dying gasp of conservatives” was how one analyst sized up the returns on the night of the special election. The proposition to recall Moscone, Freitas, and Hongisto was beaten back by a 2-1 margin, with gay voters backing their allies by a massive 7-1 ratio. District elections won by a slimmer 58-42 percent margin, of which the 3-1 support from gay precincts was a key element. A jubilant Harvey Milk ran into his labor supporter Stan Smith and Smith's companion, Doris Silvistri, at a victory party. “We won, we won,” he shouted. He brandished an empty petition and offered Smith and Silvistri his pen. “I want you to be the first ones to sign,” he told them. In 1961, Jose had to scour the city for signers for his petition to run for supervisor; Harvey, of course, quickly qualified as a supervisorial candidate in District 5.

*   *   *

Though John Briggs began making regular pilgrimages to San Francisco to deliver pronouncements on this or that local vice and try to grab more media for his gubernatorial bid, his attempt to get an anti-gay teachers initiative on an early ballot fumbled on legal technicalities. The vote would be delayed until the 1978 elections. The torrid pace that had marked the weeks following Bryant's victory eased. Many gays were convinced that the gay cause—so close, they had thought, to being a juggernaut—had suffered a massive setback. Harvey Milk, for one, was gleeful at the turn of events, insisting gays should count their blessings. Gay groups had been holding press conferences for years and gained only a trickle of publicity, while it took an Anita Bryant to get the cause on the cover of
Newsweek.
“No matter which way the vote in Florida went, we won,” he wrote in his column in the
Bay Area Reporter,
“The word homosexual has now appeared in every household in the country. More good and bad was probably written about it in the last few months than during the entire history of the world. Anita Bryant herself pushed the gay movement ahead and the subject can never be pushed back into darkness.”

The conspiracy of silence was definitely broken. That, gay activists long complained, was what they had always fought; the silence that had haunted them since they were children and realized they were somehow different; the silence that said they were different in a way so evil as to be unspeakable.

*   *   *

A secret to kill and die for.

It didn't make sense, Al Asmussen's friends agreed. Acquaintances in his Young Republican club theorized that he may have been silenced so he would never reveal some secret he may have learned in an important investigation. One neighbor became so convinced San Francisco police were covering up a murder that she called the San Francisco FBI office to ask for a separate investigation. The suicide didn't make sense.

Asmussen's mother let the stories spread, even though Sheriff Hongisto had told her the details of Al's last night as delicately as he could. She would not open the screen door when a journalist came asking questions. “I don't know about
that
part of my son's life and I don't want to know,” she shouted, angrily, as if the revelation of his homosexuality had added insult to the injury of her son's suicide. “My son is gone, dead and buried. No matter
what
he was, he was a fine and decent boy.”

*   *   *

The district attorney's investigators had already been there, as had the police and public defender. Still, the chunky, late-fortyish contractor was surprised to see two reporters pull into his construction site. The man uncomfortably adjusted his beer gut over his belt as the reporters confronted him with what they already knew—that he had had a sexual relationship with John Cordova, the nineteen-year-old just convicted of stabbing Robert Hillsborough fifteen times in the face and chest.

“I got this call from this friend of mine who knew what I liked, said I should meet this kid,” he explained. “He'd come over, drink a lot and say, ‘I'm tired, let's go to sleep.' Then before long, he'd be on top of me or his legs would be in the air, but he never wanted to act like he knew what he was doin'.”

The trysts occurred sporadically, he said. According to the contractor, Cordova would sometimes call and ask him to pick him up at an intersection four or five blocks from his home. The next morning, Cordova would always wake up as in a daze, insisting he had no idea what had happened the night before.

Then Cordova started degenerating. He'd show up at the man's front door, drunk, with his pants pulled down around his legs. Once he appeared naked, except for a coat, and the older man took him in, and in the morning, Cordova couldn't remember what had happened.

The judge at Cordova's trial denied a motion to introduce the information into the record, saying the subject matter was “too remote” from the case. Cordova was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.

*   *   *

Two men dead in the late hours of June 21, 1977, one a victim in the year's most celebrated murder, the other an obscure suicide that rated only three paragraphs deep inside the early edition of the next day's
Examiner.
The real stories of John Cordova and Al Asmussen never made the newspapers, so the only thing the two deaths had in common was that, in the big black book where deaths are logged in the coroner's office, the autopsies for Al Asmussen and Robert Hillsborough are just one page apart.

eleven

Showdown on Castro Street

“We could castrate you, but we'll try shock treatment instead.”

That was the studied opinion of the first psychiatrist, a man highly regarded in Oklahoma mental health circles. The second, younger doctor was more empathetic as he prepared the frightened and confused young man for his first rendezvous with the electrodes. “Your wife and your mother are the two people who really need this treatment,” he assured him, “but you're the one who has been selected, so let's get on with it.”

He would never forget the terror, sitting in the waiting room with the others, praying, hoping against hope that the next name they called would be someone else's. Please let someone else be next. The shot of Nembutal, slipping into a daze. The wooden machine is wheeled in. You're strapped on an ironing board with an axle, spinning through space, but you never really know what you're doing because you're unconscious. There's unspeakable pain but you're out so you can't scream or even open your eyes; you just feel your back arching and all you're left with is the profound sense that you've been hurt, hurt bad, because, as the doctor said, you were the one who had been selected.