May 21-22, 1979
I missed Stonewall, but on White Night, I got slugged by a fat Irish cop in front of the Elephant Walk.
A decade earlier, my response to Stonewall was to organize a stuffy seminar on the Church and Gay Rights at Woodstock College. My response to White Night was to become a radical.
The San Francisco community’s response to White Night was far more ferocious than Stonewall. Our sense of outrage ran deep. In just a decade, we really had thrown off centuries of old stereotypes. A momentous change had happened in the community. For us, being gay was simply a fact of life. Stubborn segments of the general society were lagging behind, and they were about to feel the fury of the men and women they intended to keep in their place. We had won a place at the table, fair and square. It had been taken away violently, and the consequences of assassinating our leader were going to be a blink and a nod. Never again, and certainly not in San Francisco.
The verdict was announced late in the day, close to 5 o’clock. I remember because later the police claimed it was the end of a shift, and they had no time to prepare for the mayhem that ensued. I was working late in my wood shop on 22nd and Alabama. The Inner Mission, a very Hispanic neighborhood, was perhaps an unlikely place to hear about Dan White’s fate, but the whole city was listening to the news. I turned on the shop radio. Manslaughter. Dan White had been slapped on the wrists. He shot at close range, and killed two public figures. The jury of his peers was letting him off not because he binged on Twinkees but because they were sympathetic to what he stood for. We all knew this. A minimum sentence may have been the official outcome, but having tasted power by electing Milk, the GLBT community was not going to be silent.
I decided to drive down Howard and cross Market at 9th Street. As I started north on Larkin, I passed a line of parked police cruisers. Within a few hours, these would be torched, but it was still fairly early in the evening. I decided not to join the crowd that was already forming outside City Hall. My motivation might just have been hunger. I needed to eat.
At home on Pierce Street, Terry and I watched live TV coverage as the crowd grew to several thousand, and then in the dark we could see the flames of the burning police cars. We could hear the actual sirens in our kitchen. We were less than 14 blocks away. It was loud. I decided to walk to Castro Street. That was the community’s home. It was where the march formed if there was a protest. It was where we celebrated. I knew that there would be something going on. I had to be there, but I also had a strange sense of foreboding.
There was stunned disbelief about White’s verdict, and the rage was not in hiding. It might have been after 10 or a little later that the first protesters from City Hall began to straggle into the Castro. They arrived in small groups, mostly on foot. No one was shouting, “Out of the Bars and Into the Streets.” It was not that kind of night. This was the debriefing after a battle. What happened? How many people were hurt? Who was arrested? What’s the current situation? Drinks were bought for the warriors.
The crowd began to grow. I don’t remember thousands, but it was more than a few hundred. The bars were full with some spilling out onto the sidewalks. People were looking for their friends. It was pre-cell phone, so we relied on the more primitive communication of friends asking about friends. Each of the few buses that headed towards Noe Valley was full of weary men. Cabs picked up passengers quickly. But the fury had not finished its work.
I found a few friends from Alice, the gay Democratic Club, on 18th, standing near the entrance of the Elephant Walk. There was a heated discussion. Of course, we were talking politics. The real activists were already trying to formulate a strategy for the coming days and months. I was already disappointed in Harry Britt, the man whom Harvey had groomed as his successor and Mayor Feinstein had appointed to finish his term. I knew we couldn’t look to him for leadership. The majority supported Britt, or were willing to give him some time to learn to swim after being pushed into the pool. Filling Harvey’s shoes was an impossible job, and grudgingly I kept my mouth shut.
But most of the guys just wanted to get some dirt. We were angry, and we were about to get more angry. The cops had targeted the Elephant Walk as point zero in their retaliation for the humiliation of losing control of the rioting, looting, and burning in the Civic Center. It was just after midnight or perhaps a little later that a pretty sizable phalanx of cops, swinging clubs in riot gear, appeared at Market Street and began slowly making their way down towards 18th. They stuck together but were not in tight formation, as if to protect themselves from what who knows. Probably more than a few still had grandmothers living close to Most Holy Redeemer two blocks away. Our neighborhood had been an Irish ghetto they’d abandoned for the carports of Daly City.
Then came one of those moments that sticks in your mind for life. I don’t think there were more than a dozen of us standing close to the front door of the Elephant Walk. We were just talking. At that point, there was no traffic on the street, but we were on the sidewalk. I remember I was standing on the left side of the door, perhaps 10 feet away, perhaps as close as 5 or 6 feet. Three or four cops, maybe 10, were leading the group. They speeded up, and I thought about ducking inside. One of the leaders hit me on the chest and pushed me aside. Looking at me directly he said, “Go home if you don’t want to get hurt.” I could feel his anger was much more violent than mine. He was armed, and his badge was hidden. There was going to be a fight. I realized we were overpowered and the dangers would be entirely felt by the men and women in the streets, not the cops.
I started to walk up Castro slowly and hesitantly at first. The crowd started to come out of the other bars and were taunting the cops. I looked back and saw the cops smash through the Elephant Walk’s lovely front doors with the huge brass tusk pulls. There was lots of screaming and shouting, breaking glass, the men who’d been inside began running out. Some were fighting back. I began to run up to get across Market Street knowing that many white gay men like myself would be punched, beaten and arrested that night along with many others. I stood guiltily behind the police lines on the northside of Market until the cops began threatening us as the fighting increased in the Castro.
I was trapped in a wide range of feelings. They swung from indignation and anger to helplessness and finally just naked fear. Of course, I knew that we gays and lesbians were a minority, but somehow, this liberal former Jesuit believed that if the world were just, I would escape discrimination. The last vestiges of white classist privilege would prevail and save me from harm. I was wrong.
The only time that I experienced this kind of rage before was during the Roxbury riots that followed the killing of MLK in ‘68. I was a second-year novice doing my “Hospital Trial” at Mass General, where we served as orderlies in the Emergency Room. The stream of ambulances and police cars dumping off the victims of the riots was horrifying. Early in the morning, when all the gurneys on the platform of the ER dock were full, three Boston cops were rushing back to their cruisers. One turned to the other two and said, “Let’s get back and break some more skulls.” They used the n-word. They saw me and quickly apologized, “Sorry, Father, you just don’t know what it's like out there.” I was and am no street fighter, but my gut told me that an unprovoked attack had to be answered. There was no apology from the cops on White Night, and I still had no idea how to respond.
After Harvey’s death, I’d always been on the lookout for good gay candidates, and there have been several, but in general, I’ve been disappointed by the series of lackluster politicians who flooded San Francisco’s political life after Harvey opened the gates; Britt took being supervisor as a promotion from letter carrier and now he had Wednesday and Thursday afternoons free to play the ponies at Tanforan or Golden Gate Fields. He certainly was no Harvey Milk. But if gay men and women were to enter the world as equals with the rest of America, there is no reason why we should be spared the sad breed of political hacks. I just always hoped we could do better. I still do.
