The Mayor of Castro Street (36 page)

Gay leaders had made a vast mistake in 1977 by underestimating the intense dedication of the legions of born-again Christians because of the ease with which their spokespeople could be dismissed. John Briggs, for example, scarcely made a secret of the fact that he viewed his anti-gay teachers' drive as little more than a publicity stunt for his gubernatorial bid. Anita Bryant's later confessions about her own love life also made it unlikely that she would be God's number one draft choice to throw the first stone. Behind these foppish leaders, however, were an ardent corps of true believers who were only beginning to flex their political muscle in 1978—and the issue that initially motivated them was fighting against homosexual rights.

Religious revivals have swept America at fairly regular intervals since the nineteenth century, and throughout the mid-seventies a substantial revival of evangelical fundamentalism had swept the country's heartland. Thousands of generally sincere born-again Christians echoed Pat's fears about the Final Days in the early months of 1978 and went on to stir up the most frenzied fundamentalist politicking since Prohibition. In St. Paul, fifty couples from the Temple Baptist Church spent weekends going door to door with the provocative question: “Would you want your children taught by an overt homosexual?” Without much problem, the couples quickly collected enough signatures to put that city's four-year-old gay rights law up for a repeal vote in late April. In Wichita, like-minded parishioners of Glenville Bible Baptist Church had circulated petitions to put that city's new gay rights law up for a referendum vote two weeks after the St. Paul election. A similar movement of fundamentalists in the mellowed-out college town of Eugene, Oregon, followed suit and petitioned to have that city's gay rights law on a special election ballot just two weeks after Wichita's. A Seattle coalition of fundamentalists, Mormons, and members of the John Birch Society successfully put another repeal measure on the Queen City's general election ballot in November.

The quick series of repeal referenda that swept west from Miami startled gay activists, who grew convinced that they were the victims of a massive New Right conspiracy. Though this initial politicization of fundamentalists over the homosexual issue certainly went on to aid the subsequent New Right emergence, gays in 1978 were the victims of nothing more vile than a conspiracy of belief. “Look right here,” explained a housewife volunteer at the Wichita anti-gay headquarters when a San Francisco reporter asked for her ideaological impetus. She whipped out a pocket-sized Bible and started poring over the dozen fairly specific scriptural condemnations of homosexuality. “Look what happened to Sodom and to even the world of Noah's day when they turned away from what God said,” she goaded. The fact that the nation's gay Mecca sat smack on the nation's most unstable earthquake fault only buttressed her case, she thought. Debating such campaigners produced negligible results. As one California fundamentalist shouted at a lesbian activist during a heated exchange at a Briggs organizing meeting, “You can argue with me, lady, but you can't argue with God.”

Few groups were as evenly suited to battle each other as gays and fundamentalists. Both gays and evangelicals shared a profound experience that shaped their politicking; they had both been born again. For evangelical Christians, it was a theological experience, finding God in a sinful world. For gays, it was a social experience called “coming out,” expressing one's gay sexuality and identity in a generally hostile heterosexual world. For both sides, the born-again experience usually meant breaking with the past, establishing a new social network and building a new life, one that was happier than the life left behind. Both sides also put great faith in the necessity for testifying to the born-again experience. Fundamentalists did this in their routine rounds of testimony for the Lord; gays did this by acknowledging their homosexuality to friends and relatives, a move that practically represented an article of faith for those in the gay movement. Both camps also saw themselves in an ultimate struggle. For gays, that meant the eradication of prejudice; for fundamentalists, it was the scripturally demanded battle against sinners and their sins. Most significantly, the costs for losing the struggle were incredibly high. During the fundamentalists' anti-gay groundswell of 1978, gay activists talked ominously of how failure could lead to a Hitleresque extermination of gays. Born-again Christians needed to go no further than
Revelations
to see that gays were the harbingers of the Final Days, times when Christians must fight sin or go to hell. Both sides, however, stood on polar opposites of society, with fundamentalists calling for a return to the most traditional American morality while gays stood for some of the least traditional social values. The troops of both sides were also incredibly motivated—gays were fighting to keep themselves out of modern-day Dachaus while, for fundamentalists, fighting gay rights became the surest way to keep their polyester leisure suits from melting in hell.

The rhetoric flared. Homosexuality, said Wichita's anti-gay spokesman, the Reverend Ron Adrian, “is a sin so rotten, so low that even dogs and cats do not practice it.” The brochure from the St. Paul Citizens Alert for Morality outlined the frightening world facing fundamentalists in the Twin Cities:

They've opened gay rap parlors, saunas, and night clubs supported by extensive advertising obviously aimed at the “uncommited” as well as their own kind. They've imported gay films for public showings. Again, obviously welcoming the “uncommitted.” They've infiltrated state and city government offices and other activities, including the clergy, with homosexuals or sympathizers.

A Seattle anti-gay spokesperson chose more nostalgic phrases when she called on “Christian patriots” across America to help their anti-gay effort, saying, “This would be a step forward in preservation of Aryan culture and western civilization.”

The widespread attacks hit a movement that suffered from factionalism and had little national direction. Only a handful of gay groups could claim a national constituency, and they often lacked funds to carry on a meaningful effort. The leader of one national gay organization, for example, had to supplement a meager salary by illicitly running counterfeit transit tokens for organized crime. This moonlighting was even known to members of the group's board of directors, one of whom shrugged, “I guess it shows we should pay more money.” The lack of a major national group forced each city to sink or swim on its own, while the leaders who claimed to speak for gays nationally—generally based in New York—took to calling the referenda local ‘brushfires' that could not be tended by the national organizations.

Harvey Milk railed on about fundamentalists being the new Nazis, but privately Harvey, for one, was thrilled at the turn the gay rights fracas had taken. News about one or another initiative made the papers daily, reaching into the homes of every American family, including those of closeted teenagers who would grow up hearing of homosexuality as a civil rights issue, not just a matter of sin, crime or perversity. Liberals may have passed the laws, but in so vociferously seeking their repeal, the born-again Christians had aided the gay cause much more profoundly by making gay rights a daily conversation topic.

At twenty-three, Cleve Jones did not have the disposition to ponder these complex interrelationships between the media, politics, and long-term social change. He was just pissed. As the April date of the St. Paul vote neared, he talked more heatedly as he cruised the corners of Castro Street. They had to do
something.
At 3
A.M.
, just days before the balloting in Minnesota, Cleve and a handful of friends made their move. Armed with staplers and cheaply reproduced fliers, they blanketed all available walls and phone poles in the neighborhood with the announcement—come to Castro Street at 10
P.M.
on the night of the St. Paul election. In evening sessions at Jones's Castro Street apartment, the covert activists trained monitors to serve as a buffer between the expected crowds and police. There would be no notification of authorities, no police permits, nothing polite—just a raw, spontaneous expression of anger.

Even the most pessimistic gay activists were stunned at the proportions of defeat in St. Paul, which was even worse than in Dade County. Hundreds of young men in fleece-lined bomber jackets milled around the corner of Castro and Market as the news of defeat swept the neighborhood. Jones took a bullhorn and held up a police whistle, which so many gay men carried to ward off attackers. “You have whistles,” he shouted. “You use them when you have been attacked. Tonight, we have been attacked.”

With whistles shrieking, the crowd surged past Castro Street's gay bars, attracting hundreds more. The size and intensity of the throng startled even Jones, not to mention the police, who gave up trying to restrict the crowd to a sidewalk. By the time the raucous demonstration passed City Hall, at least two thousand were shouting and blowing their whistles in unison. They cut the traditional five-mile swath through the city, the path they had followed on Orange Tuesday, and a lively rally at Union Square lasted past midnight. Afterward, Jones and his angry young friends decided they must further organize so that they could call a spontaneous demonstration with only a few hours' notice. They also had to stake out Castro Street as the locale for gays to go to during times of crisis. “Castro Street has to be made into
our
territory. Strictly,” said Jones.

*   *   *

One week later, State Senator John Briggs appeared on the wide granite steps of City Hall to file the petitions that would assure that his initiative, now dubbed by gays the Briggs Initiative, would appear on the November ballot. Briggs's gubernatorial campaign had fizzled by then. The initiative represented his last chance to get statewide recognition for whatever ambitions for higher office he might have held. The chants of gay demonstrators assured lead-story coverage: “John Briggs, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.”

As usual, the state senator from Fullerton had his dollop of hyperbole. He was launching the drive in San Francisco again because, he explained, the city was “the moral garbage dump of homosexuality in this country.”

Not about to be outdone, Supervisor Harvey Milk told reporters, “Nobody likes garbage cause it smells. Yet eight million tourists visited San Francisco last year. I wonder how many visited Fullerton.”

Within a week, Wichita voters rejected their city's gay rights ordinance by a whopping five-to-one margin. The posters had been put up secretly, only days before that march too; monitors were ready to keep the crowd in line so police would have no reason to attack. Over one thousand assembled at Castro and Market, angrily surging about like a herd of impatient cattle waiting to stampede. A true child of the Television Age, Cleve Jones had already arranged a march route that would assure the best pictures for the television cameras ready to get the tantalizing live shot of the demonstration for the late-night news. Cleve took his bullhorn to address the crowd, but before a dozen sentences came from his mouth, the throng spontaneously turned and pushed toward City Hall, leaving Cleve scrambling to catch up and take his ostensible post as leader. On the sides, walking inconspicuously in his cordoroy jacket, blue jeans, and sneakers, was Harvey Milk. The militance he had been urging gays to gain since 1973 had become a fait accompli. The shouts were no longer courteous slogans like “Gay Rights Now,” but chants like, “Civil Rights or Civil War.”

As the crowd turned off Market Street on the final blocks toward the City Hall rotunda, a wave of anger swept over the throng, an invisible yet palpable tide that rose cathartically like a small waft of gasoline vapor rising toward a spark, and then ebbing, falling back slowly, only seconds before the moment of ignition. “It only came
this
far from being a riot,” Harvey confided to a reporter later that night. The reporter noted that Harvey didn't seem particularly upset by the prospect.

At the rally after the march, Jones took his bullhorn to note that the day marked the fortieth anniversary of the year Adolf Hitler issued his first anti-homosexual decrees banning gays from many jobs and making homosexual thoughts a punishable offense. “Forty years ago tonight, the gay citizens of Germany found out they no longer had civil rights,” Cleve exhorted. “Tomorrow morning, the gay citizens of Wichita will also awaken to find that they too have lost their civil rights.”

*   *   *

“Take the clown suit off Harvey and all you end up with is another clown,”
Harvey's friend Carl Carlson said later.

Barnum and Bailey's circus had come to town, and, as a publicity stunt, offered to make up a number of public figures as clowns. Harvey, City Hall's most ardent circus lover, stepped to the front of the line; Harvey could finally be a clown—a real one—for a change. A
California Living
magazine writer, Ira Kamin, was on hand to record Harvey's transformation. His description has eerie implications, given both the bizarre sequence of events that followed the story's publication and the later historic significance of the date, May 21, just one day before Harvey's forty-eighth birthday.

“How do you feel,” asked the make-up artist.

“I'm getting into sadness,” said Milk.…

You don't realize someone's sad, really, till you see them in clown make-up. The eyes will always give you away. And Harvey Milk in white face had these terribly sad eyes.… Harvey Milk jutted out his lower lip, and drooped his shoulders. It was as if, getting into sadness, he was picking up the horror, the real horror of the world and there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about the real horror of the world, but jut out your lower lip and drop your shoulders and apply white cream to your face and feel it.

Once outside, Kamin wrote, “something snapped” and Harvey gleefully started running up to cable cars, shaking tourists' hands. “Hey, I'm a supervisor,” he explained, in full clown regalia. “I pass laws. I run this city. I'm an elected official.” The fact that the bozo claimed his name was Harvey Milk didn't do much to convince the skeptical visitors.