By Cleve Jones–
(Editor’s Note: For this issue’s remembrance of Supervisor Harvey Milk on the 40th anniversary of his and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone’s assassinations on November 27, 1978, we present in its entirety Chapter 18 of Cleve Jones’ memoir When We Rise: My Life in the Movement (Hachette Books, 2016).
Jones, a founding contributor to the San Francisco Bay Times, worked with Milk as a dedicated LGBT and civil rights activist. After Milk’s death, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and conceived the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Continuing his efforts as a labor activist, Jones remains an inspiring leader.
We believe that When We Rise should be required reading for all, and particularly for those desiring an honest, firsthand account of the LGBT movement from someone who has been at its epicenter for decades.)
San Francisco’s united campaign to defeat Proposition 6 opened headquarters at 2275 Market Street in the building that once was the Shed, where I had danced as a teenage refugee from Phoenix years before. Bill Kraus and Gwenn Craig were hired to coordinate the effort, and volunteers streamed through the doors every day to walk precincts and staff the phone banks.
Harvey was eager to show off our new power to the old powers and brought Congressman Burton in for a visit to see for himself the energy our campaign had harnessed. Burton was indeed impressed, and said so. Harvey was on a roll. I introduced him to Sally Gearhart and the two became our spokespeople for the media and debates.
One day at the end of August Jack Lira called Harvey at City Hall repeatedly, complaining that Harvey was always late coming home. Jack wasn’t getting enough attention, he was drinking even more, and his outbursts were exhausting not only Harvey, but also his assistants Dick Pabich and Anne Kronenberg and everyone else.
Harvey finished work and headed home to Jack, but it was too late. He found Jack’s body hanging behind a curtain. Notes from Jack accusing Harvey of neglecting him were all over the apartment and also tucked into books and files and behind pictures. We’d be finding them for years to come.
Devastated, Harvey threw himself even more into the campaign.
I decided not to go back to school at SF State. I couldn’t bear sitting in class. It always felt like I was missing the action entirely. My teachers didn’t inspire me and the only pleasure I got on campus was at the meetings of the gay and lesbian student organization. But Harvey intervened and told me quite sternly that I had to stay in school. He arranged for me to work in his office as an intern, earning credits in the political science program.
The weekend before my first day of work in City Hall I begged a used suit from a friend. Harvey laughed when he saw me.
“I want you to wear jeans to the office, your tightest jeans. It makes Dianne Feinstein nervous.” After a few weeks we both noticed that my tight pants also seemed to bother another member of the Board, Supervisor Dan White.
By the end of September the campaign against Briggs had become the single largest political effort ever launched to defend the rights of gay and lesbian people. Millions of dollars were raised and tens of thousands of volunteers were mobilized to take our campaign’s message directly to the voters.
It wasn’t just the campaign that was heating up. The last week of September 1978 was one of the hottest on record, with the temperature in San Francisco soaring over 90 degrees. The volunteers wore shorts and carried canteens of water as they kept on walking precinct after precinct.
The shirts came off at the Castro Street Fair in early October as muscle hunks, drag queens, lesbians and belly dancers and bands entertained the thousands of fairgoers jammed into the two blocks from Market to 19th Street. I was working the fair and Danton [Cleve’s lover at the time] had left early.
Later, as the cleanup crews packed up the garbage and hosed down the street, I took a bus towards Danton’s apartment, looking forward to resting my head on his broad shoulders and smoothly muscled chest.
I let myself in quietly and opened the door to Danton’s room only to discover a skinny blond boy on my side of the bed. Danton scrambled to cover them with the sheets but I’d seen more than enough and ran out to the street in tears.
The next day Harvey listened to my tale of woe with a sad smile and let me wallow in it for a few minutes. “We’re not like heterosexuals, and shouldn’t try to be. You’re going to have many lovers, Cleve. You’re going to meet so many beautiful men and fall in love so many times. It won’t be until the end of your life, when you look back, that you will know who were your greatest lovers and dearest friends.”
He meant well, but it wasn’t particularly comforting. Decades later, though, I’d learn how right he was. On Wednesday, October 11, 1978, Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart debated John Briggs and other supporters of Proposition 6 in the town of Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County, about twenty-five miles northeast of San Francisco. I wanted to go but there wasn’t room for me in the car, so I watched the debate on closed circuit TV at Mission High School. Harvey and Sally were calm and strong and brilliant and the crowd at Mission High laughed and cheered as Harvey and Sally demolished Briggs. We knew Harvey was driving back to Castro Street, and I waited for him at the Elephant Walk bar on the corner of 18th Street. Harvey walked in to applause, grinning, with one hand behind his back. He gave me a hug and held out a paper bag from the doughnut shop across the street. We sat down and he put a candle on the doughnut and beamed at me. He had remembered. “Happy Birthday, Cleve.” I was 24 years old.
The polls showed that we were narrowing the gap, and more and more newspapers across the state editorialized against Proposition 6. But Harvey was pessimistic and called me in to talk about what would happen if we were defeated. I knew exactly what would happen: there would be a riot. Everyone knew it. It was talked about on the sidewalks on sunny afternoons, in Golden Gate and Dolores parks, and in the bars on Castro, Folsom, Polk, and Haight Streets.
Harvey told me, “We don’t want to burn down our own neighborhood.” I knew he was remembering the riots following the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 and the Watts Rebellion of 1965. “If it happens, march them downtown, Cleve. Get them out of the Castro fast.”
We’d had this conversation before. We were a nonviolent people, deeply influenced by the civil disobedience traditions espoused by Gandhi, Dr. King, and the Quakers. But there was also a sense that some kind of rebellion was inevitable and maybe even necessary. After all, Stonewall was a riot.
The weather stayed warm, unusually warm, and the streets and bars were full every night as if no one could sleep. There was only one topic: what would it be like to win, what would happen if we lost.
On November 1, former Governor Ronald Reagan announced his opposition to Proposition 6. He was gearing up to run against Jimmy Carter, who had already come out against the measure.
In every county of California our volunteers worked around the clock, knocking on doors, dropping literature and leafleting shopping centers, churches, colleges, and universities. Get-out-the-vote rallies were held, television ads were aired, and I began to think it might really be possible, that we just might win.
Harvey still was grim. “Just make sure you’re ready to march.”
On Tuesday, November 7, our volunteers headed out at dawn. Harvey spent most of the day talking with the press while Gwenn Craig, Bill Kraus, Dick Pabich, and Jim Rivaldo directed operations at the headquarters. It was a long day, but then it was over and the results came in.
We had won.
And we won big: 58.4 percent voting no, 41.6 percent voting yes. The party began.
“Harvey, you look disappointed.” I laughed at him. “I think you were looking forward to that riot.”
He grinned back at me and shrugged, “Some people are sore losers, maybe I’m a sore winner.”
The riots he had predicted would eventually come, but Harvey would not be there to see them. We had won the first statewide election victory in the history of our young movement.
Three days later, on November 10, Harvey got another surprise. Dan White, the supervisor from District 8, resigned with a petulant rant about corruption in City Hall and the challenges of raising a family on a supervisor’s salary. This meant that Mayor George Moscone would have the opportunity to appoint White’s successor. Harvey was delighted, knowing that the liberal Moscone now had the chance to flip the 6–5 conservative-liberal ratio to a liberal majority. Then, on November 14, Dan White changed his mind and asked the mayor to give him back his job. White’s backers at the Police Officers Association (POA), appalled by his resignation, had leaned on him hard.
The POA had good reason to be concerned by the potential of a liberal majority on the board of supervisors. The NAACP had been fighting the segregation of the city’s police and fire departments for years and won a federal consent decree to integrate both departments. The Board was to implement the order. As a conservative former cop and firefighter, White’s vote was crucial to the old guard of the SFPD.
The warm weather held for another four days. Then, on November 18, the temperature plummeted and the city was blanketed with cold grey fog.
Outside Port Kaituma, Guyana, 4,396 miles away, the insane final chapter of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple played out in the hot and humid jungle. It was called a mass suicide by the media but it was in fact a mass murder, orchestrated by a madman who took with him almost a thousand San Franciscans.
The images of their bloated bodies piled around the encampment stunned the city. People stood in small groups by the newspaper stands, shivering in the cold. Parents struggled to explain the photographs to their children. Those of us who had visited People’s Temple or interacted with their members were both sickened and terrified. Rumors spread of death squads coming from Guyana to continue the slaughter.
Decades later, people who had not yet even been born in 1978 would blithely use the phrase, “drinking the Kool-Aid” without a clue as to its origin.
For most San Franciscans, all other issues were temporarily forgotten as we absorbed the enormity of the tragedy in Jonestown. Few were paying attention to Dan White’s whining little drama. But Harvey was.
When word got out that Mayor Moscone was considering reappointing Dan White, Harvey went ballistic and confronted Moscone. Harvey believed that this was a chance to fundamentally reshape the city’s politics, with a new majority committed to defending the most vulnerable of our citizens—renters, seniors, kids, and minorities, including gay people. Harvey organized support for a neighborhood activist from District 8 named Don Horanzy. Horanzy was a liberal but moderate enough to have a chance of reelection in the blue-collar white ethnic neighborhoods of the district.
On Sunday night, November 26, a reporter from KCBS Radio named Barbara Taylor called Dan White at home to tell him that she had learned Mayor Moscone would not be reappointing White to the Board of Supervisors.
I got up early on Monday, November 27, because I knew that Harvey’s City Hall aide Anne Kronenberg would be out of town, visiting her parents in Seattle. Dick Pabich, Harvey’s other paid staffer, was planning on leaving City Hall soon to start a political consulting firm with Jim Rivaldo. Harvey had told me that I could have Pabich’s job if I would agree to take at least one class per semester towards my degree. I was eager to show Harvey how useful I could be and arrived at City Hall before him. I wasn’t the only intern; working with me was a baby dyke named Kory White and Debra Jones, a black heterosexual woman who adored Harvey and wanted to help build coalitions between the gay/lesbian community and African Americans. She was also keenly interested in urban planning issues, more so than me.
As it turned out, Harvey was less than impressed with me that morning. I’d left a file in my apartment that he wanted to see. Anticipating a reelection campaign challenge, I’d been doing some research on potential opponents, including Leonard Matlovich and Chuck Morris, publisher of the gay and lesbian newspaper the Sentinel. He frowned when I told him I didn’t have the file and told me to go back to my place on Castro Street and bring it back. He was abrupt, but when he saw my crestfallen face he softened and said, “Take your time, I hear Local 2 is picketing the Patio Café. Say hi to them, get some lunch, and I’ll see you this afternoon.”
The Patio Café was originally a bakery. In the early ’70s it was transformed into the Bakery Café, one of the most lovely and relaxing places to have an espresso and a pastry while reading or studying. Behind the building was a large space covered with lawn and a beautiful garden of hydrangeas, abutilons, foxglove, and fuchsias. The flowers attracted hummingbirds and butterflies that hummed in abundance.
The Bakery Café was sold, and a guy from Germany named Wolfgang took over. He was tall and handsome but I couldn’t stand him and neither could his employees, who approached Local 2 of HERE, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, for help in organizing.
I retrieved the file from my apartment and walked the half block to the Patio Café, grabbed a picket sign, and began walking with the other picketers. I knew a few of them, told them that Harvey sent his regards and got in a conversation with one about the giant ugly deck that Wolfgang had built over the beautiful garden area. The flowers and hummingbirds were gone.
After about fifteen minutes the 24-Divisadero bus drove up and slowed down to stop at 18th Street. A woman I recognized from the Women’s Building yelled at me out of the bus window, “Cleve, it’s on the radio, they shot Mayor Moscone.” I dropped my picket sign and ran to the curb to hail a taxi. As the cab sped down Market Street, I wondered who “they” were. I figured it was either death squads from People’s Temple or the cops.
The driver dropped me off on Van Ness Avenue at the western side of City Hall. I ran in, seeing the police swarming around the mayor’s office on the other side of the building. The cops frightened me and I ran up the stairs. The Board of Supervisors was on the second floor, and each supervisor had a small office opening to a private hallway that ran parallel to the public hallway. There was a passageway that connected the ornate supervisors’ chambers to the reception area and the hall to the individual offices.
Harvey had given me a key to the passageway, and as I let myself in I saw even more police officers running up the stairs. I felt panic in my chest and turned left towards the offices, looking for Harvey, when Dianne Feinstein and an assistant rushed past me. Feinstein’s sleeve and hand were streaked with dark red.
I looked down the hallway and saw Harvey’s feet sticking out from Dan White’s office. I recognized his secondhand wingtip shoes immediately.
Then my memory shifts to slow motion.
I float to the door of White’s office and peer in. There is a cop there, on his knees, turning Harvey’s body over. I see his head roll. I see blood, bits of bone, brain tissue. Harvey’s face is a hideous purple. I feel all the air leave my lungs. My brain freezes. I cannot breathe or think or move. He is dead. I have never seen a dead person before.
I struggle to comprehend, as my mind begins to understand what my eyes are seeing. The only thing I can think is that it is over. It is all over. He was my mentor and friend and he is gone. He was our leader and he is gone. It is over.
We are there for hours, trapped in his little office as they bundle up his body. People come in. More cops. We find Harvey’s old cassette player and the taped message he had recorded in anticipation of his assassination. I’d known of the tape and teased him a bit, “Who do you think you are, Mr. Milk? Dr. King? Malcolm X? I don’t think you’re important enough to be assassinated.” We press the play button.
And now he is dead and it is all over and we are listening to his voice tell us that he always knew this is how it would go down.
This is what he expected.
This is what he was willing to do. This is what had to happen.
And all I can think, all I can say to myself, is, “It’s over. It’s all over.” And then the sun goes down and the people begin to gather.
They come from all over the Bay Area: young and old; black and brown and white; gay and straight; immigrant and native-born; men and women and children of all races and backgrounds streaming into Castro Street—Harvey’s street—faces wet with tears, hands clutching candles. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands fill the street and begin the long slow march down Market Street to City Hall, a river of candlelight moving in total silence through the center of the city.
There were songs and speeches but I remember none of them. I stood there in Civic Center Plaza in the midst of an ocean of candlelight, in front of the building where Harvey had died, in the middle of the city he had come to love and that had come to love him back in equal measure. And now it was all over.
My friends and I walked slowly back to Castro Street. Police cruisers lined Market Street and followed the returning marchers, but they kept their distance. Had they been closer we might have heard what they were hearing: over the police radio, the cops were singing
Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.
From glen to glen and down the mountain side …
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so.
I was wrong. It wasn’t over. It was just beginning.
For more information on Cleve Jones and “When We Rise”: https://www.clevejones.com/
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