The Castro—I

It was one of those days in San Francisco when the weather is so close to perfect that there seems to be no weather. The sun shone out of a cerulean sky, lighting the streets to a shadowless intensity. It was a Sunday morning, and the streets were almost empty, so our pickup truck sped uninterrupted up and down the hills, giving those of us in the back a Ferris- wheel view of the city. On Pacific Heights, the roses were blooming, the hollies were in berry, and enormous clumps of daisies billowed out from under palm trees. On Russian Hill, Victorian houses with ice-cream-colored façades seemed to reflect this bewilderment of seasons. At the bottom of the hill, skyscrapers wheeled across our horizon, and the truck careered through the deserted canyons of the financial district heading for the waterfront.

“Don’t worry,” Armistead Maupin said. “We’re on gay time, so the parade won’t have started yet.” He was right. The Gay Freedom Day Parade had not yet begun. Rounding a corner, we came upon a line of stationary floats. Bouquets of lavender, pink, and silver balloons clouded the sky, and bands were warming up. People in costumes milled about amid a crowd of young men and women in bluejeans.

Our truck nosed itself into the parade lineup behind a group of marchers with signs reading “Lutherans Concerned for Gay People” and a hay wagon advertising a gay rodeo in Reno. Our truck had no sign on it, but it carried, in addition to me and another journalist, two people well known to the gay community of the city: Maupin, San Francisco’s most prominent gay fiction writer, and Dave Kopay, the professional football player. In the front seat were Ken Maley and a couple of other friends of Armistead’s.

In a few minutes, our part of the parade began to move forward; a country-and-Western band struck up behind us, and a number of men dressed as cowboys or clowns took their places in and around the hay wagon. A clown in whiteface with baggy overalls walked along beside our truck. I asked him about the rodeo, and he said matter-of-factly, “This is only our second year, so we don’t expect any bulldogging, but we’ve got a lot of calf ropers, some bronc riders, and some really wonderful Dale Evans imitations. You’ve got to come.”

The clown drifted off, and I turned to watch a man in a Batman cape and a sequinned jockstrap roller-skating by. He had the torso of a dancer, and he moved with liquid, dreamlike movements, crossing and recrossing the street. He glided through the Lutheran contingent and then swept through a group of clergymen carrying large placards depicting Jesus on the Cross. At the next intersection, he looped around a yellow taxicab filled with young women in T-shirts. The young women were leaning out of the windows cheering and waving a sign that read “Lesbian Taxi Drivers of San Francisco.” I recognized one of them, a slim young woman with long blond hair, as the taxi-driver who had brought me in from the airport a few weeks before.

Eventually, our truck turned onto Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. Here we could suddenly see the whole first half of the parade—floats and lines of marchers filling the street in front of us—on its way to City Hall. The sun now looked like a klieg light; it burnished the streets and set the windows of the skyscrapers on fire. Nearby, an elderly Chinese man with a dog walked along the sidewalk close to the buildings, his head bowed, his eyes averted from the marchers. A block away, a woman in a baggy coat and a kerchief scuttled into a doorway just in time to avoid the sight of a transvestite copy of herself hulking down the avenue. Otherwise, the sidewalks and the streets leading off into the downtown were nearly deserted; there were no spectators to watch this horde, in its outlandish costumes, march into the city.

That summer—it was 1978—estimates of the gay population of San Francisco ranged from seventy-five thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand. If the oft-cited figure of a hundred thousand was more or less correct, that meant that in this city of fewer than seven hundred thousand people approximately one out of every five adults and perhaps one out of every three or four voters was gay. Many of the gay people—at least half of them—had moved into the city within the past eight years. And most of them were young, white, and male. There were by this time some ninety gay bars in the city, and perhaps a hundred and fifty gay organizations, including church groups, social service groups, and business associations. There were nine gay newspapers, two gay foundations, and three gay Democratic clubs—one of them the largest Democratic club in California. Though gays had settled all over the city, they had created an area of almost exclusively gay settlement in the Eureka Valley, in a neighborhood known as the Castro. The previous year, the Castro had elected a city supervisor, Harvey Milk, who ran as a gay candidate against sixteen opponents, including another gay man. Now, quite visibly, this area of settlement was spreading in all directions: up into the hills above Castro Street, down into the Mission district, and across into the lower Haight Street neighborhood. While New York and Los Angeles probably had more gay residents, the proportions were nowhere as high as they were in San Francisco. In fact, the sheer concentration of gay people in San Francisco may have had no parallel in history.

At that time, most San Franciscans still contrived to ignore the growing gay population in their midst. The local press reported on gay events, and occasionally on the growth of the Castro, but most San Franciscans I talked to seemed not to have noticed these pieces, or they had forgotten them. Small wonder, perhaps, for the articles were not sensational in any sense. Local reporters seemed to have got used to the gay community without ever giving it its due. They now took certain things for granted. Earlier that year, an out-of-town reporter had gone with the mayor and other city officials to the annual Beaux Arts Costume Ball. The event had shaken him, but the local newspapers had reported it as they would a mayoral visit to, say, a Knights of Columbus dinner. It was, after all, the third year the mayor had gone to a drag ball in the civic auditorium.

The program in my press kit showed that there were a hundred and thirty-eight contingents in the parade, and that with a few exceptions, such as Straights for Gay Rights and the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women, all of them represented gay organizations of one sort or another. With the program, it was possible to sort these organizations into certain categories: political organizations, human-rights groups, professional associations, social-service organizations, ethnic-minority groups, religious organizations, college groups, out-of-town contingents (such as the Napa Gay People’s Coalition), fraternal organizations (such as transsexuals and bisexuals for gay rights), sports groups, and commercial enterprises. The parade organizers, however, had chosen to mix up all the groups, so the actual order of the parade might have come from the pages of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

By the time our truck turned onto Market Street, I was too late to see the head of the parade: the Gay American Indian contingent, followed by Disabled Gay People and Friends, and then by a ninety-piece marching band and the gay political leaders of the city. Leaving the truck to walk along the sidelines, where a crowd was now gathering, I made my way up to No. 41, the Gay Latino Alliance, or GALA—a group of young men dancing down the street to mariachi music. Just behind them was a group representing the gay synagogue—a rather serious group of people, the men wearing yarmulkes and carrying a banner with the Star of David. This contingent was closely followed by a Marilyn Monroe look-alike on stilts, batting six-inch-long eyelashes and swaying to the music of a disco float just behind her. Farther back were people in country work clothes with a sign for the Order of Displaced Okies. The Local Lesbian Association Kazoo Marching Band led a number of women’s groups, including the San Francisco Women’s Center, U.C. Berkeley Women’s Studies Student Caucus, and Dykes on Bikes. This last group could be easily found: every time the members—six or seven petite women in tight jeans, men’s undershirts, and boots—came to an intersection, they would rev up their motorcycles, bringing loud applause from the crowd. Farther back, behind the Gay Pagans, the Free Beach Activists, the Zimbabwe Medical Drive, and the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, came the float that many had been waiting for: a sequinned, spangled, and tulle-wrapped chariot, holding the Council of Grand Dukes and Duchesses of San Francisco. Somewhere in this neighborhood there was a truly unfortunate juxtaposition. The Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media had taken their proper place in line, but then somehow, perhaps as a result of some confusion in the Society of Janus, elements of the sadomasochistic liberation front had moved in just behind them. The pallid-looking men in uniforms were not dragging chains—the parade organizers had counselled against that—but they were carrying a sign that read “BLACK AND BLUE Is BEAUTIFUL.”

At that time—the very height of gay liberation—many Americans believed that the homosexual population of the United States had greatly increased in the past ten or twenty years. And they were willing to explain it. Some said that the country was going soft—that there was no discipline any more, and no morality. Others, including a number of gay men, said that the country was in the act of finding its ecological balance and creating natural limits to population growth. There was, however, no evidence for the premise—to say nothing of the theories built upon it. Demographic studies showed that male homosexuals had remained a fairly stable percentage of the population since 1948, when the first Kinsey report came out. What had happened since then—and particularly in the past ten years—was that homosexuals had assumed much greater visibility. Gay liberation was, more than anything else, a move into consciousness. The movement “created” some homosexuals in that it permitted some people to discover their homosexual feelings and to express them, but its main effect was to bring large numbers of homosexuals out of the closet and into the consciousness of others. A secondary effect was to create a great wave of migration into the tolerant cities of the country. All the gay immigrants I talked to said that they had always known they were attracted to the same sex; their decision was not to become a homosexual but to live openly as one, and in a gay community. “I lived in Rochester,” a young political consultant told me. “I was white, male, and middle-class, and I had gone to Harvard. I thought I could do anything I wanted, so I resented having to conceal something as basic as sex. I resented being condemned to repress or ignore my homosexuality, and to live in turmoil for the rest of my life. The solution was to move here.”

The parade was advancing slowly, and the farther up Market Street we went the more spectators there were. First, there was a line of people, and then a crowd filling the sidewalks and spilling out into the streets behind. Many of the spectators were young men, and it now happened frequently that one of them would call out “Hey, it’s Armistead!” or “Look, it’s Dave Kopay!”

Kopay, tall, broad-shouldered, and lantern-jawed, was not hard to recognize: he looked like the movie version of a football player. A veteran running back, he had played pro ball for eight years with the 49ers, the Lions, the Redskins, the Saints, and the Packers. He retired in 1972, and three years later, convinced that rumors of his homosexuality had denied him a coaching job, he decided to come out to a newspaper reporter doing a story on homosexuality in professional sports. The reporter had talked to a number of gay athletes, but only Kopay permitted his name to be used. His gesture created a scandal in the sports world, for while everyone knew there were homosexuals in professional football, no one wanted evidence of it. But Kopay became something of a hero among gay men.

Armistead Maupin, who was wearing a lavender-and-yellow hockey jersey and a hat pulled down over bright-blue eyes, might have been more difficult to recognize. But in San Francisco he was just as well known as Kopay. He was the author of “Tales of the City,” a humorous serial about San Francisco life that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. The terrain he mapped in his “Tales” was the world of young single people, gay and straight, who came to San Francisco to change their lives. It was a world he knew well. Maupin, as it happened, came from an aristocratic and ultraconservative North Carolina family. On graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 1966, he joined the Navy, went through officers’ school, and served a tour of duty in Vietnam. He then spent an additional summer in Vietnam, as a volunteer, building refugee housing with some fellow-officers. On his return, President Nixon invited him to the White House and honored him as the very model of patriotic young Republicanism. He worked for a year on a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, and then left for San Francisco.

Maupin, because of his writing but also because of his enormous Southern charm, had become the Gay Personality of San Francisco. The year before, he had been master of ceremonies of the gay parade, and he had opened the annual game between the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department and the Gay Softball League by throwing out an orange. Once, to demonstrate that nothing is sacred, including amour propre, he turned up in a white rabbit suit to sell jockstraps for a gay charity. The epigraph for his first book was a quotation from Oscar Wilde: “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.”

Most of the spectators now crowding the sidewalks appeared to be in their twenties or thirties. Dressed California style, in natural fibres and hiking or jogging shoes, both the men and the women looked lean, tan, and athletic. Many of the men, now shirtless in the sun, had admirably muscled chests. Looking out at a row of them sunbathing on a wall, Armistead said, “Just think of all the fortunes spent on bodybuilding equipment.” There were some older people, including a group of four women with butch haircuts and lined faces, and a couple of men with identical beards and identical canes, but not very many. And apart from a few glum-looking tourist families there were hardly any mixed couples or children. To the expert observers on my truck, most of the spectators appeared to be gay.

The majority of San Franciscans could continue to ignore the growing gay population in their midst in part because the city was still decentralized, its residential neighborhoods a series of ethnic villages: black, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Chinese. Like all the other minorities, the gays had their own neighborhoods and places of entertainment, which other San Franciscans circumnavigated as they went from home to work and back. But, then, unlike the rest, most gay people had no distinguishing marks, no permanent badges of color, class, or accent. Going to work downtown, gay people—black or white, men or women—were invisible to others for as long as they wanted to be. Politically speaking, they acted like a highly organized ethnic group; indeed, this year they had persuaded the city government to give the gay parade the same sum it gave ethnic parades for the purpose of encouraging tourism. Yet this minority, being defined by desire alone, materialized in full only once a year, on Gay Freedom Day.

From time to time during the slow march up Market Street, it came to me to see the gay parade as the unfurling of a municipal dream sequence—the clowns, the drag queens, and the men in their leather suits being the fantastic imagery of the city’s collective unconscious. Sigmund Freud, after all, had believed that man was born bisexual and that every human being had homosexual desires in some degree. From this perspective, it seemed unreasonable that the parade should not include everyone in San Francisco. On the other hand, Freud believed that each individual’s inner world was unique—individual desires having different qualities or textures, different degrees of intensity and modes of expression. And from this perspective it seemed unreasonable that all these thousands of people should pick up a banner labelled “GAY” and march with it to City Hall. What made the experience more bewildering still was that to watch the contingents pass by was to watch a confusion of categories something like that of Kafka’s Chinese list: Dykes on Bikes, California Human Rights Advocates, Sutro Baths, Lesbian Mothers, the Imperial Silver Fox Court. Looking at the costumes—the leather and the tulle—I wondered which were new and which had been worn for decades, even centuries, in the undergrounds of Paris or London. Which were the permanent archetypes of desires, and which merely fashions or the jokes of the young? My friends on the truck would answer with the counterculture koan that everyone was in drag—all of us. And yet some of these costumes and dream images had settlement patterns in the city.

There were four gay centers in San Francisco, each geographically distinct, each containing what appeared to be a distinct subculture or culture-part. The oldest gay center lay in the Tenderloin, a triangle of sleazy bars and cheap hotels bordered by the business district, the theatre district, and Market Street. Like its counterparts in other cities, the Tenderloin was by no means exclusively gay. The home of winos and bums, it was a transit station for sailors and impecunious travellers, and it harbored most of the prostitution, both gay and straight, for the entire city. In the late afternoon, female prostitutes, male hustlers, and transvestite whores could be seen performing a complicated street-corner ballet as they tried at once to evade the police and sort out their initially undifferentiated customers. In the nineteen-fifties, the district had harbored most of the gay bars in the city, but now only the hustler bars and the drag-queen bars were left. The Kokpit, owned by a queen called Sweet Lips, had been in operation for a decade. Now lined with trophies and photographs of countless drag balls, it had become a kind of Toots Shor of drag San Francisco. A few blocks away was a bar of a professional and much more highly specialized nature, where six-to-seven-foot-tall black transvestites hustled white men in business suits.

Chronologically, Polk Street, or Polk Gulch, was the second gay center of the city. It was the decorators’ district, and in the sixties a number of gay bars had moved into blocks lined with antique shops and furniture stores. Since then, it had been the major site of the Halloween festivities. On that one night a year, the police stood by, leaving the street to a carnival of witches, clowns, nuns on roller skates, and Jackie Kennedy look-alikes, or Patty Hearst look-alikes with toy machine guns. Polk Street was a mixed neighborhood—both gay and straight people lived there, and its restaurants catered to both crowds. Its gay bars were thus not conspicuous except at night, when groups of young hustlers stood out on the sidewalks around them. A number of the gay bars still catered to the stylish and the well-to-do. They had low lights, expensive furniture, and music by the old favorites—Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward, and Judy Garland. Even to outsiders, their patrons would be recognizable, for Polk Street was still the land of good taste and attitude: the silk scarf perfectly knotted, the sentimentality, the witty little jab.

A newer gay center lay on Folsom Street, in the old warehouse district, south of Market. At night, Folsom Street was the complement of Polk Street, for it was lined with leather bars: the Stud, the Brig, the Ramrod, to name a few. Late at night, groups of men in bluejeans, motorcycle jackets, and boots would circle around ranks of Triumphs and Harley-Davidsons, eying one another warily. The bars had sawdust on the floors, and men drank beer standing up, shoulder to shoulder, in a din of heavy metal and hard rock. In the Black and Blue, some of them wore studded wristbands, studded neckbands, and caps with Nazi insignia; above the bar, a huge motorcycle was suspended in a wash of psychedelic lights. On Wednesday nights, the Arena bar had a slave auction, at which men would be stripped almost naked, chained up by men in black masks with whips, and sold off to the highest bidder. Such was the theatre of Folsom Street. The men in leather came from Polk Street and other quiet neighborhoods; the money went to charity; and the “slave” put on a business suit and went to work the next day. The Folsom district was a night town—the Valley of the Kings, it was called, as opposed to the Valley of the Queens, in the Tenderloin, and the Valley of the Dolls, on Polk Street. In addition to the leather bars, a variety of gay restaurants, discothèques, bathhouses, and sex clubs had moved into its abandoned warehouses and manufacturing lofts. It was an entertainment place, and few people lived there.

The Castro, by contrast, was a neighborhood. Though gays first settled there—homesteaded, in effect—only in the early seventies, it had become the fulcrum of gay life in the city by 1977. At first glance, it was much like other neighborhoods: a four-block main street with a drugstore, corner groceries, a liquor store, dry cleaners, and a revival movie house. Here and there, money was visibly at work: a café advertised crab ravigote, a store sold expensive glass and tableware, and there were two banks. But there was nothing swish about the Castro. The main street ran off into quiet streets of two-story and three-story white-shingled houses; the main haberdashery, the All-American Boy, sold clothes that were conservative, traditional. In fact, the neighborhood was like other neighborhoods except that on Saturdays and Sundays you could walk for blocks and see only young men dressed, as it were, for a hiking expedition. Also, the bookstore was a gay bookstore, the health club a gay health club; there was a gay real-estate brokerage, a gay lawyer’s office, and the office of a gay psychiatrist. The bars were, with one exception, gay bars, and one of them—the Twin Peaks, at the corner of Castro and Market Street—was, so Armistead told me, the first gay bar in the country to have picture windows on the street.

Armistead and his friends liked to take visitors to the Castro and point out landmarks like the Twin Peaks. But in fact the only remarkable-looking thing on the street was the crowd of young men themselves. Even at lunchtime on a weekday, there would be dozens of good-looking young men sitting at the café tables, hanging out at the bars, leaning against doorways, or walking down the streets with their arms around each other. The sexual tension was palpable. “I’d never live here,” Armistead said. “Far too intense. You can’t go to the laundromat at 10 A.M. without the right pair of jeans on.” The Castro was the place to which most of the young gay men came. Perhaps fifty to a hundred thousand came as tourists each summer, and thousands of these decided to settle, leaving Topeka and Omaha for good. New York and Los Angeles had their gay areas, but the Castro was unique: it was the first settlement built by gay liberation.

The denizens of the Castro were overwhelmingly male, but occasionally in a crowd of men on the street you would see two or three young women dressed in jeans or jumpsuits. A few gay women lived in the Castro—they considered it safe—and close by were a few small lesbian settlements, in Haight-Ashbury, Duboce Triangle, and the Mission district. But these settlements were so inconspicuous that you couldn’t find them unless you knew where to look. On one quiet street, there was a comfortable neighborhood bar with a jukebox and a pool table; on the walls were framed photographs of a softball team that its regulars organized each summer. This was Maud’s Study, and the bartender and all the customers were women. But there were only five or six lesbian bars in the entire city. There were many more women’s organizations—theatre groups, social-service centers, and so on—but there was no female equivalent of the Castro. In Berkeley and northern Oakland, across the bay, young political women had taken over some of the big, slightly run-down shingled houses and started a newspaper, a crafts coöperative, a recording company, and various other enterprises. And there were a number of lesbian farm communes up the coast in Northern California. But nowhere did gay women congregate the way gay men did. In the city, feeling themselves vulnerable, they took on protective coloring and melted into the landscape. No one ever knew how many of them there were in San Francisco, for no research money was ever allotted to finding out. They appeared in large numbers only on Gay Freedom Day.

The front of the parade had long ago reached its terminus, City Hall, when our truck pulled into the Civic Center Plaza. San Francisco City Hall—a rotunda building like the United States Capitol—looked large and imposing, fronted, as it was, by tree-lined malls and a reflecting pool. At the same time, recently cleaned and bright white against a bright-blue sky, it looked like an enormous wedding cake, of the sort displayed in old-fashioned Italian bakeries. Harvey Milk was standing next to the dais, with a lei of purple orchids around his neck and a bunch of daisies in one hand, giving interviews to a small group of radio and television reporters. He had already made his speech—a strong one, I was told—denouncing the so called Briggs Initiative, a proposition on the November ballot that would have driven all openly gay teachers and all discussion of gay rights out of the public schools. He was now calling for a national gay march on Washington the following year. Nearby, a woman in a gypsy costume was swinging her child around through the air; a man in a tuxedo with makeup on and long red nails strolled past her humming to himself.

In front of the dais, a large crowd had assembled—a very large crowd. Indeed, it seemed to me when I looked at it from the top of the City Hall steps that I must be looking at all the twenty-to-thirty-year-olds in Northern California. The young people in front were following the proceedings on the dais enthusiastically. Some were waving banners; others were standing with linked arms, chanting and cheering. Behind them, groups of people were lying on the grass, their heads pillowed on backpacks, talking and rolling joints, while other groups of young people drifted around them. From the front, the crowd looked like an early anti-war demonstration; from the back, it looked like the Woodstock nation. Both seemed to be crowds of the sixties returned—only now both of them were gay.

The next day, June 26, 1978, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that two hundred and forty thousand people had turned out for the annual Gay Freedom Day Parade. It quoted the police estimate rather than the Chamber of Commerce estimate of three hundred thousand, made later in the day, or the figure of three hundred and seventy-five thousand which appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Even the second figure would make the turnout one of the largest in San Francisco’s history, and would equal nearly half the adult population of the city. The local press tended to avoid figures leading to such arithmetic. It did not like to advertise that San Francisco had become the gay capital of the country, and perhaps of the world.

Just why so many gay people came to San Francisco was a question that few non-gay San Franciscans asked themselves in the summer of 1978. But after the death of Harvey Milk, in November of that year, local journalists would be called upon to explain the Castro every time events focussed national attention on San Francisco. The boosterish explanation they evolved had to do with the Gold Rush, and with the thought that San Francisco had always been a wide- open city tolerant of “diverse life styles” and unconventional behavior. The city, it was true, did grow up as a wide-open miners’ town, and long after the Gold Rush was over it continued to attract a raffish crowd of fortune seekers and adventurers—not for tradition’s sake but because it became a port city, the largest on the West Coast, and the main jumping-off place for the American outback. During the Spanish-American War and again during the Second World War, it was a center for American naval operations in the Pacific. Like most port cities, it had a big, raunchy waterfront, which expanded mightily during wartime. But by the end of the nineteenth century it was also a manufacturing city, with a solid citizenry of blue-collar workers and prosperous, civic-minded entrepreneurs. In peacetime, its citizenry would wage strenuous and often successful campaigns against vice and sin on the waterfront: its preachers mounted a successful effort after 1906 by claiming that the earthquake was divine intervention against the new Sodom and Gomorrah; the city government cracked down in the twenties, the thirties, and then again in the fifties and early sixties. During that last period, the police championed bourgeois morality to the extent of confiscating copies of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” from the City Lights bookstore and closing most of the gay bars. But then, as had happened so often in the past, a new wave of invaders came to disrupt the order so carefully restored. In other words, San Francisco’s tolerance for unconventional behavior seemed to be cyclical.

What was certainly true about the booster version of San Francisco history was that among the immigrants to San Francisco, and to California in general, were a great many people who were looking for personal freedom and wanted to break with the past. Such was Henry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, which was the first homosexual-rights organization in the United States. Not much was known about Hay until the mid-nineteen-seventies, when the gay historian John D’Emilio interviewed him, for Hay and his first two associates, Chuck Rowland and Bob Hull, had Communist Party backgrounds. Well-educated and highly cultivated men—Hull was a classical musician—all three of them were immigrants to California. They had worked as organizers on Communist Party cultural committees and affiliates in the forties. Hay, who was then married, met Rowland and Hull in Los Angeles in 1950 and asked them to join him in creating an organization whose aim would be to raise the consciousness of homosexuals and take political action on behalf of what he defined as an oppressed cultural minority. Hay founded a society along lines familiar to them: its membership was secret and its structure cell-like and hierarchical. The need for secrecy seemed evident, for the House Un-American Activities Committee and other agencies, operating in California, had already begun a hunt for Communists, and for homosexuals with security clearances. In 1955, Hay was called up before HUAC for his Communist associations, but, perhaps because of the security system he had instituted, HUAC never discovered his connection with the Mattachine Society. The committee members thus missed the chance to substantiate their thesis that Communists and homosexuals were almost the same thing. In fact, Hay had quit the Party, and was now engaged in the most all-American of endeavors—a civil-rights struggle and the pursuit of happiness.

The Mattachine Society was enormously successful in California; so popular were Hay’s consciousness-raising sessions that it grew to several hundred members in the first few years. The new members, however, insisted that it have a democratic structure, and as secrecy could no longer be assured, Hay, Hull, and Rowland had to resign their leadership roles, fearing that their former associations might become a liability to it. The leadership then passed into the hands of people who were defensively anti-Communist, and who did their best to erase all memory of the founders. The headquarters moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and in 1955 two other San Franciscans, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founded a sister organization they called the Daughters of Bilitis.

These two “homophile” organizations, as they were known, did not, of course, create the homosexual population in San Francisco; rather, the reverse was true. According to students of gay history, the city had homosexual baths and meeting places as far back as the eighteen-nineties. (According to gay mythology, the fashion for wearing colored bandannas to signify sexual preferences came from the Gold Rush—from the miners’ practice of using bandannas to indicate “female” partners in their all-male square dances.) Though gay history remains largely anecdotal until the nineteen-fifties, it is clear that the homosexual population increased after the Second World War, when homosexual soldiers and sailors demobilized in the city took a look at the waterfront and decided not to return to Kansas City and Duluth. In any case, there were some thirty homosexual bars in the city in the early sixties, when the new crackdown occurred.

The proximate cause of this crackdown was a charge made in 1959 by a mayoral candidate that the incumbent mayor had allowed “sex deviates” to establish their national headquarters in the city. The candidate was, of course, referring to the members of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. There was a good deal of irony in this, for at the time two groups of more conservative and respectable people could hardly have been found. During the witch hunts of the fifties, the Mattachine Society had rejected the Marxist-style program of consciousness-raising and direct political action; indeed, it was rejected so completely that most of its members never knew it had existed at all. The emphasis in both societies was now on improving the “image” of homosexuals through educational programs and through appeals to clergymen, psychologists, and sex researchers. So eager were the members to demonstrate their respectability that they would have nothing whatever to do with the people who went to the bars. As a result, their numbers were extremely small, and had remained so into the sixties.

For most of the sixties, and even into the early seventies, San Francisco was not a completely tolerant city as far as homosexuals were concerned. Police harassment was often ferocious: in the crackdown of the early sixties, most of the bars were closed (some temporarily, some permanently), and hundreds of gay men and women were picked up each year, often simply for dancing together or holding hands. In 1961, José Sarrio, a drag entertainer at a bar called the Black Cat, ran for supervisor in protest against this harassment. He won more than six thousand votes and came in seventh in the race, but two years later the state liquor authority closed the Black Cat for good. In 1965, the police even broke up a dance held by a group of local clergymen to raise money for a new committee they had formed—the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. Under the circumstances, the homophile organizations made little headway, and after 1961 the center of gravity in the Mattachine Society shifted to New York. In 1964, a new organization, the Society for Individual Rights, known as SIR, was created in San Francisco to provide a meeting ground for gay men that was safer than the much-besieged bars. SIR differed from the homophile groups in that it addressed the needs of gay men, and not what the larger community thought about homosexuality. Though it was mainly a social organization, it had committees to deal with legal and political issues and to offer social services. And because it dealt with the world of the bars it attracted a great many more members than the Mattachine Society: some twelve hundred at its peak. But it was not until the early seventies that gay organizations gained the strength to challenge city policies, and by that time two almost seismic changes had taken place. One of them was an economic transformation of the city. The other was gay liberation.

Our truck was idling at an intersection during the parade when Larry Glover emerged from the crowd and came up to say hello. He was wearing only shorts and hiking boots; with a backpack slung over his tanned shoulders, he looked like an advertisement for a wilderness trip or natural foods. I had met Glover on my first trip through gay night town. That was on a Saturday—Sunday morning, actually—and the Black and Blue, in the Folsom district, was packed so tight that it had taken me and a journalist friend fifteen minutes to work our way across the room. The crowd was not of the yielding variety. There were no other women, and all the men were dressed in heavy leather, Hell’s Angels style: leather boots, studded leather belts, motorcycle jackets. They were big men, many of them, with a lot of muscle and shoulder, and they had tough-guy expressions. My colleague, though gay, had never been to a bar like this before, and he, too, was feeling distinctly out of place. All of a sudden, he disappeared into the crowd, and a minute later he was back, smiling, with one of the more imposing figures there—a tall man with chest muscles bulging beneath an undershirt. “Old friend of mine!” he shouted at me over the din. “College together . . . Ann Arbor . . . S.D.S.!”

I thought that I had heard wrong. But no. Glover left the bar with us and, volunteering to act as our guide, took us to several other Folsom Street bars and after-hours clubs. A few days later, I went to see him in his apartment. It was a plain apartment, but the living room had a lot of hanging plants and a Victorian sofa covered with ancient, hairless Teddy bears. Glover was, it turned out, a gentle soul; he had a job he didn’t much like and was studying to be an actor. Over white wine, he told me about his days at the University of Michigan. He had gone to Ann Arbor in the late sixties, and though he came from a conservative blue-collar family, he had joined the anti-war movement and become a member of Students for a Democratic Society. He heard about the gay-liberation movement soon after it began, in 1969, and, feeling that it was closer to his own concerns than the peace movement, started a chapter in Ann Arbor. From then on, he devoted himself entirely to it, organizing educational programs and gay dances. The period was, he said, an exhilarating one for him. But it was also a sad time, because his lover, who was running for Congress on a peace ticket, decided that Glover was too radical, and left him. Then his best friend, a lesbian, became a separatist and would not speak to him again. Glover was sombre that day, and he seemed a little lonely. But on the street, in the midst of the parade, he looked much happier. “I’m in a good space,” he said. “I’m jogging now as well as doing weights. Then, we’ve got two plays in rehearsal, and I’m really getting into Brecht.” He smiled and waved as our truck pulled away.

The 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade marked the ninth anniversary of gay liberation. The event heralding its birth had been a riot on Christopher Street, in Greenwich Village. On June 27, 1969, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar that catered to effeminate young street people and drag queens, among others. Instead of acquiescing, the customers and a crowd that gathered on the street fought back with beer bottles and paving stones. The scene was iconic, and as the rioting continued for a second night graffiti announcing the birth of a revolutionary movement appeared on walls and sidewalks. Extraordinarily, a movement came into being that summer, and it was immediately successful. In the first year, it spread across the campuses—from Columbia to Berkeley and Ann Arbor, to colleges across the nation.

As John D’Emilio has shown, gay liberation did owe something to the older, homophile organizations. The gay liberationists, however, were largely college students, a generation younger than most of the members of the Mattachine Society, and a large proportion of them were involved with the other radical movements of the sixties rather than with the homophile groups. For them, gay liberation was simply a logical extension of the New Left, the counterculture, black power, and the feminist movement. Whereas the homophile groups had retained a moderate, reformist character long after other social movements passed into a radical phase, the gay liberationists adopted militant, confrontational tactics. The rhetoric of oppression, consciousness, and revolution came naturally to them, and they had, as well, a sense of impending apocalyptic change. They were not out to persuade and educate; they were out to shock the society into a sudden “change of consciousness.” Abandoning the old networks, they used the platforms provided by the other radical sixties movements. Gay-rights contingents carried banners at anti-war demonstrations; lesbian groups ran workshops at feminist conferences; gay speakers addressed New Left and black-power rallies; and gay students did guerrilla theatre on the campuses. While the older groups had counselled self-acceptance, the gay liberationists called upon homosexuals to make an open avowal of their sexual identity. Coming out symbolized the shedding of self-hatred, but it was also a political act, directed toward the society. In San Francisco, Leo Laurence, a thirty-six-year-old radio journalist, returned from the 1968 Democratic Convention “radicalized,” to write for the Berkeley Barb and for Vector, the publication of SIR. He wrote of the “homosexual revolution” and called upon homosexuals to “come out from behind a double-life.” He and his lover posed semi-naked for a photograph in the Barb, and he lambasted homophile activists and called them timid, bigoted, and “a bunch of middle-class, uptight, bitchy old queens.” This was gay liberation speaking.

The movement caught on as the homophile movement never had. The students, of course, had less to lose than their elders, and when they were called upon to do so they came out, and went out into the streets to demonstrate. In just a few years, the movement did “change the consciousness” of young gay men and women across the country: not just in the colleges but in the high schools; not just in the cities but in the small towns; and among those who otherwise cared nothing for radical politics. This change, in turn, set off the wave of migrations. In the seventies, thousands upon thousands of young gay men and women left their small towns and went to the cities. They went not only to San Francisco but also to New York and Los Angeles, to Chicago, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston. Roughly speaking, they went from the interior of the country to the cosmopolitan cities of the coasts. There were no reliable statistics, but the movement was clearly national, and in many cities it was on a scale to be of some significance to city planners and politicians.

In the early seventies, San Francisco seemed to be a logical place for movement activists to settle; not only was there a large and fairly open homosexual community but San Francisco was the place where gay liberation had its longest and probably its strongest roots. In the nineteen-fifties, the poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Kenneth Rexroth had created, with others, a small literary community in the North Beach district and launched a bohemian protest against literary conventions and also against the social and political conformity of the period. A number of them, including Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer, were homosexuals, and proclaimed it—Ginsberg raucously and joyously. Unlike the homophile groups of the period, Ginsberg and his literary friends were not purveyors of good taste; indeed, they thought of good taste as the enemy. Ginsberg’s first major epic, “Howl,” created a scandal on many counts, one of them its celebration of homosexual sex, and it was on that count that the San Francisco police confiscated copies of it from Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore. The Beats, as Ginsberg and his group came to be known, captured the attention of the press, and before long North Beach was inundated by young drifters, hipsters, and dropouts, enchanted with the notion of rebellion against, or simply escape from, social and parental authority. Before long, a number of the writers who had given North Beach its bohemian cachet moved to quieter quarters, in Haight-Ashbury, and, predictably, the young people followed them there.

The young who moved into the Haight in the sixties were the front ranks of a generation so large that it seemed to have no parents and no memory. In the Haight, the taste was for drugs rather than drink, metaphysics rather than poetry; and instead of despair at the condition of the world there was the arrogant optimism of youth. But the Haight was in some sense a fulfillment of the North Beach prophecy, for the hippies were pacifists in an age of war, critics of consumerism in an age of plenty, and the enemies of all convention. They believed that love—love or an altered state of consciousness—had the power to sweep away all repressive social institutions. Articulation was not their forte, and that was reasonable, since their whole endeavor was to disarticulate the society and the intellectual frames they had grown up in. Their long hair and loose clothes blurred the shape of the family and the sexual exclusivity that went with it. If people over thirty were not to be trusted, people under thirty were to be trusted implicitly: they were brothers and sisters, and everyone had a right to do his own thing. If they were gay, that was their thing, and it had to be respected.

As the Haight was the successor to North Beach, so the Castro was the direct descendent of the Haight. It grew out of its side, geographically speaking, for its main street, Castro, was only a few blocks away from the Haight settlement. When the first wave of gay settlers arrived there, around 1972, what they found was a decaying Irish neighborhood with two gay bars catering to hippies from the Haight. And the first settlers fitted right in. One of them, Harvey Milk, had been looking for a place to drop out. He had worked for years as a financial analyst in New York, but then the sixties had hit him, and at the age of forty-three he had long hair and friends in the avant-garde theatre. The Castro, with its cheap housing and good weather, suited him, and he bought a camera store with his lover. Milk, as it happened, was not a man in flight. He had lived most of his life quite openly as a gay man. Many of the others who moved there in the first wave, however, were looking for the shelter of bohemia in order to become gay; indeed, they equated gay and hip. For example, Frank Robinson, a science-fiction writer, had been an editor of Playboy, in Chicago, and deep in the closet until he picked up a sign at a gay-rights demonstration one day. Harry Britt, a Methodist minister from Texas, had been involved in the civil-rights movement, and had been married. He quit the church and got a divorce in 1968; three years later, he came to San Francisco, went into the human-potential movement, and finally realized that he was a homosexual. He took a job as a mailman in the Castro and began to think out his life anew.

The counterculture helped to bring the young men of the post-Stonewall generation to San Francisco. For them, however, there were other attractions as well. There was cheap housing in nice parts of the city; there were jobs available, too, and because most of the younger men were not dropouts—far from it—this was important to them. In addition, the city was now well known for its tolerance of unconventional behavior and “diverse life styles.” In fact, all these things were quite new, and all were related to the fundamental transformation of the city’s economy which occurred during the sixties—a transformation that changed the population of the city and its politics.

In 1960, San Francisco was a commercial and industrial city, with a wide variety of manufacturing enterprises. Its population was heavily blue-collar, and though the city was racially and ethnically diverse, it was not truly integrated. It was low-lying and decentralized: a city of neighborhoods, each with its own main street, its own shops and restaurants. It was a city of villages—Irish, Italian, black, Hispanic, Chinese. And, much as most San Franciscans resented being told so, it was quite provincial. Its Wasp establishment was more than a little stuffy, and its policemen and politicians, largely Irish or Italian Catholics, had no respect whatever for “diverse life styles.” During the sixties, however, the economic base of the city eroded. Manufacturing declined as factories moved out to cheaper quarters, across the bay; the port lost much of its shipping to Oakland. New York (among other cities) was going through the same kind of decline in that period, but since San Francisco was a much smaller city—it was like Manhattan with its Brooklyn and Queens as separate cities across the bay—the decline was sharper and more thoroughgoing in its effects. The flight of manufacturing emptied the factories and warehouses south of Market Street. The consequent flight of blue-collar workers emptied the ethnic neighborhoods, among them Haight-Ashbury and the Castro. It emptied the Irish and Italian neighborhoods, and it also thinned the black population in the Fillmore district and the Hispanic population in the Mission district. Great tracts of the Fillmore were razed and never rebuilt; the other neighborhoods offered good, cheap housing, but no jobs. This was ideal for the tribes of sixties children who came to live on the fringes of the economy.

In the nineteen-sixties, the city fathers sought to compensate for the losses by building up the already strong financial sector, attracting corporate headquarters, and making the city a major tourist and convention center. In the late sixties, Mayor Joseph Alioto cleared the path for real-estate developers, and new hotels and office buildings went up downtown. Corporate executives arrived and tourists arrived, and the city soon had a demand for white-collar office workers, professional people, and service-industry personnel. What it needed was young people with college educations, and since these were the most mobile people in the population, they came quickly.

Mayor Alioto, an Italian Catholic, was a big-city Democrat of the old school. He ruled the city autocratically and in part through the old networks—the ward bosses, the unions, and the construction firms. He changed the city, and at the same time swept away his own power base. As the manufacturing left, so did his supporters. By the mid-seventies, only one of the city’s eleven voting districts had a majority of conservative blue-collar Democrats. And, ironically, those for whom he had remade the city detested him and his politics. By the early seventies, the city was electing liberals to the Board of Supervisors and to the state legislature and Congress—liberals who believed that government should be more democratic, more open to racial minorities, and more tolerant of diversity. Even before the new wave of gay immigration began, a number of these liberals were attending candidates’ nights organized by the homophile groups. Dianne Feinstein went to them in 1969, when, as a thirty-five-year-old housewife from Pacific Heights, she took more votes than any other candidate in her first run for the Board of Supervisors. The same year, Willie Brown, the flamboyant state assemblyman, who later became the speaker of the California State Assembly, made his first attempt to repeal state statutes proscribing various forms of consensual sex. (In 1975, he and George Moscone, then the majority leader of the State Senate, engineered the passage of the legislation.) In 1971, Richard Hongisto, a civil-rights and anti-war activist, who was in the San Francisco Police Department, was elected sheriff of San Francisco County; on taking office, he gave a great deal of attention to improving relations between the gay population and the police. It was under the stewardship of these liberals that San Francisco politics gained its reputation for tolerance.

How many gay immigrants came to San Francisco during the nineteen-seventies it is difficult to say exactly, for they came in a flood of other young immigrants, most of them white, most of them single, themselves shaken loose from their home towns by the nationwide shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. The 1980 census showed that while the population of the city had declined by five per cent since 1970, the number of people between twenty-five and thirty-four had a net increase of more than twenty-five per cent.

A great many of the gay immigrants moved into the Castro and the neighborhoods around it. Beginning in 1973, the price of residential property climbed sharply; the boom was citywide, but greater in the Castro than anywhere else. A federal survey of one small neighborhood near the Castro showed that real-estate transactions increased by seven hundred per cent in the decade 1968-78. In 1977, Harvey Milk estimated through precinct counts that from twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand gay people had moved into the Castro. That year, the annual Castro Street Fair attracted seventy thousand gay tourists and immigrants, most of them men.

It was Armistead Maupin who introduced me to what he and his friends called alternately “the ghetto” and “the liberated zone.” Literally, this was the Castro, but, figuratively speaking, it was the world of gay immigrants in their twenties and thirties throughout the city. At the time, Armistead did not live in the Castro. He had an apartment in a small wooden house on Telegraph Hill overlooking the Filbert Steps. A number of his friends, including Ken Maley, Daniel Detorie, and Steve Beery, lived within shouting distance; their houses and apartments, backed up against the precipitous hillside, had clear views across San Francisco Bay. It was like the pueblo of some cliff-dwelling tribe. How many young men lived there I never really knew, for the friends seemed so much alike. Blond, pleasant, collegiate-looking, they wore khakis and Brooks Brothers shirts and went about in groups, often with other young men of the same general description. In the course of a year, there would be substitute—a Greg for a Bob, a Steve for another Steve—and since they introduced themselves, California style, by their first names alone, the substitutions could easily be missed. They were full of high spirits. On weekends, they would often hang out in someone’s apartment for hours, smoking a little dope and talking, talking. Then they would suddenly burst off down the hill to some adventure, laughing at some private joke. Their group was much like a college fraternity—the one they had never belonged to. At the bottom of the Filbert Steps, a garden bench had a plaque on it that read “I Have a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.” The plaque, with its “Wizard of Oz” inscription, had been put up by Armistead for Ken, who came from Kansas, and from a fundamentalist family to boot.

Through Armistead and also through Maley, who was working as a P.R. man for gay organizations, I met a number of young men then active in the cause of gay liberation. At a party that Maley had at his house after the gay parade, I met, among others, Randy Shilts, then a correspondent for the local public-television station, KQED, and the only openly gay major-media journalist in town; Peter Adair, a documentary filmmaker, whose latest film, “Word Is Out,” explored the lives of twenty-six gay men and women from several generations; Toby Marotta, a Harvard-trained social scientist, who was doing a study of gay hustlers for a policy research institute and writing a history of gay liberation in New York; and Jim Rivaldo, a political consultant, who with his partner, Dick Pabich, had worked on the Harvey Milk campaigns. Through them, in turn, I met a number of other gay activists. Both personally and politically, it was an exciting time for these men. They were too young to have suffered in any overt way for their homosexuality, but, having recognized in school or in college that they were homosexual, they had expected a life of suffering. They had equated homosexuality, as Toby Marotta wrote, with “a world of eccentric bachelors and effeminate characters, of unsavory public sex scenes and dingy bars and steam baths”—a shadowy world of indirection and conflict, guilt and tragedy. They had been isolated even in college. “I used to think that all gay people were hairdressers,” Rivaldo said. “It took coming here to find that there were gay lawyers, gay businessmen—a lot of people like me.” For these young men, coming out was a profound experience. It was, Ken Maley said, something like the evangelical experience of being born again: it lifted a huge burden and gave them a fresh start. Just the possibility of leading a normal life was heady, and on top of that was the fact that, historically, they were an avant-garde. “We’re the first generation to live openly as homosexuals,” Randy Shilts said. “We have no role models. We have to find new ways to live.”

In San Francisco, these young men had not only changed their lives but also found a community, a cause, and an intellectual endeavor, all in one. The homophile leaders had been engaged in a civil-rights struggle, but gay liberation had widened the task, for, like feminism, it offered a new perspective on the whole culture. The taboo against homosexuality went, after all, to the heart of it; to deny the taboo was to throw into question the traditional family structure, traditional sex roles, and sexual mores. Homosexuals had always been marginal to the culture, anomalies within it; thus, liberated homosexuals—gay men and women—had, as they saw it, a privileged position from which to observe it. In changing their own lives, they would provide a model for other gay men and women, in the generations to come; in breaking sex taboos, they would change the whole society. Gay liberation was, of course, a national movement, and its theorists lived largely in New York, but what was a matter of theory elsewhere seemed a matter of imminent realization here. The Castro was, after all, the first gay settlement, the first true gay community, and as such it was a laboratory for the movement. It served as a refuge for gay men and a place where they could remake their lives; now it was to become a model for the new society—a “gay Israel.”

As it happened, by the summer of 1978 the new society of the Castro had already taken shape; indeed, from the perspective of some years later, that summer marked a high point in its development. Given the homogeneity of its inhabitants, it had quite quickly and spontaneously evolved a new kind of politics, a new style of dress and behavior, new forms of couple relationships, and new sexual mores. It had an ideology rather different from that of gay groups on the East Coast, and it had what the sociologists call institutional completeness. It was something new under the sun.

The politics of the Castro were essentially the politics of Harvey Milk—the hip politics that the forty-three-year-old convert to bohemia devised in the front room of his camera store. They were difficult to define without reference to the man himself. Randy Shilts, who later wrote Milk’s biography, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” traced Milk’s decision to run for city supervisor a few months after he settled in the Castro to three incidents: first, a contretemps that Milk had with a state official over a hundred-dollar deposit against sales tax; second, his discovery that the local public school could not afford to buy enough slide projectors (a teacher had to borrow one from him); and, third, his indignation at former Attorney General John Mitchell’s performance at the Senate Watergate hearings. This was typical Milk politics. The man had no received political opinions when he decided to run for office. He had once professed right-wing Republicanism, but recently he had turned into an anti-war demonstrator. Abstractions didn’t interest him; his own immediate experience did. Energetic, sociable, gusty of temperament, he had a great capacity for sympathy and an even greater one for outrage. In many ways, he was the perfect representative for the Castro, a community coming out of the counterculture and trying something new.

Up to then, Milk had drifted, though respectably. Born in Woodmere, Long Island, into a middle-class Jewish family, he had attended teachers’ college in upstate New York and then gone into the Navy and quickly become an officer. He had spent nearly four years stationed in the Pacific. He later claimed to have been dishonorably discharged, as many homosexuals were, but this was not true; restive under the discipline, he simply left the Navy after four years. He returned to Long Island and taught high-school history and math for a few years; then he left, going to Dallas, with a lover, for no better reason than to get out of the cold weather. He soon moved back to New York. He took a job as an actuarial statistician for an insurance company, then one as a researcher for a Wall Street investment firm. Both jobs bored him eventually—as did running a camera store in the Castro. He seemed to be a hippie who had taken a long time to discover that he was one. He was, in fact, a born politician, and at the age of forty-three he had finally found his vocation.

Otherwise, Milk’s first campaign for supervisor made no sense at all. In the first place, the Castro was still a working-class neighborhood in 1973; largely Irish, it was known to its inhabitants as the parish of the Most Holy Redeemer Church. In the second place, Milk had no money, no staff, and no roots in San Francisco. And he presented himself quite openly as gay. This did not help him on any score, since the gay community in San Francisco already had well-entrenched political leaders—people who had stood up to be counted during the sixties and had recently taken the cause of gay rights a giant step forward. In the mid-sixties, the homophile leaders had of necessity remained largely anonymous to the outside world; by the end of the decade, however, a number of well-educated professional people were working openly for the cause. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon became well known in the city. Jim Foster, a sales representative and a founder of SIR, took over the political committee at SIR and made it an effective political organization. With him at SIR was Larry Littlejohn, a public-health worker; Rick Stokes, a Texas-born lawyer; and, later, David Goodstein, a financier from New York. Many of these people had been victimized because of their homosexuality. Foster had received a dishonorable discharge from the Army; Goodstein had been fired as vice-president of a bank; Stokes had been committed to a mental institution and given electroshock therapy (and had later studied law in order to fight for gay rights). In 1971, Foster turned his political committee into a Democratic club—the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club—and put it to work for George McGovern, the Presidential candidate that year with the strongest stand on gay rights. At the Democratic Convention, Foster, at the invitation of the California McGovern committee, made a major speech on gay rights. His speech marked a turning point for the movement nationally, because it permitted homosexuals to claim that, for the first time, a mainstream political party recognized homosexuals as a minority with legitimate grievances and claims to equality before the law.

In 1972, therefore, Foster, Stokes, and their colleagues had the best of credentials to represent “the gay vote.” In alliance with the new liberal Democratic politicians in the city—Feinstein, Brown, Moscone, and Representative Phillip Burton—they had changed city politics. Electorally, they had proved that they did not need the local New Left organization, Bay Area Gay Liberation. (BAGL had few members in San Francisco proper, and these seemed preoccupied with ideological hairsplitting.) And now, as far as they could see, they did not need an aging hippie who had just arrived in town and was running a camera store in the Castro. Yet Milk, running for supervisor in citywide elections in 1973, came in tenth in a field of thirty-two candidates, and proved to be the top vote-getter in the heavily gay precincts around Polk Street and the Castro. In 1975, he ran again for supervisor, and finished seventh, behind the six incumbents who were running that year. In 1976, he ran for the State Assembly and was narrowly defeated by a liberal, Art Agnos, who was backed not only by all the important liberal politicians in the city but by the gay leaders as well. In 1977, after a referendum that changed the electoral laws so that candidates for supervisor ran in their own districts, and not citywide, Milk ran for supervisor from the Castro and won.

Harvey Milk loved campaigning; that was the real secret of his success. For months out of every year, he would let his business drift into further disarray in order to get up at five in the morning and shake hands at bus stops, to visit people in the neighborhood, to speak at every meeting that he was invited to. He organized a Castro Village business association and the annual Castro Street Fair; he persuaded gay bars across the city to boycott Coors beer in aid of a union campaign. He became a figure in the neighborhood, and, eventually, one who could get things done. At the same time, he knew how to attract press attention. Witty and outspoken, he attacked Foster and Stokes as the Uncle Toms of the gay movement, and after Moscone was elected mayor he lambasted “the Machine.” His early supporters included a Eureka Valley housewife; the head of the Teamsters local; José Sarrio, the drag-queen entertainer; and a young lesbian, Anne Kronenberg, who wore black leather jackets and rode a motorcycle. After his first defeat, he cut his hair—a sign of the times—and took to wearing secondhand three-piece suits. As an outsider running against liberals, he became at once a fiscal conservative and a populist: he was for “the little people” in the neighborhoods against the downtown interests and the landlords; he was for mass transit, better schools, better city services for the elderly; to pay for these things, he said, he would end waste in government and tax the corporations and the commuters from Marin County. Along the way, he gained support from the Teamsters, the Firefighters Union, the Building and Construction Trades Council locals, and small businessmen, but in the end his main supporters were the thousands upon thousands of young gay men settling in the Castro.

In many respects, of course, these young men did not differ very much from the older generation of gay immigrants making up Foster and Stokes’ constituency. Most of them were white, most came from middle-class families, and most had college degrees. Those who went to work for Milk were liberal Democrats rather than New Leftists; their dispute with Foster and Stokes was largely a fight over turf—a struggle of the newcomers to make a place for themselves in city politics. On the other hand, the newcomers were virtually all in their twenties or early thirties. As members of the baby-boom generation, they were used to collective self-assertion, and used to getting their way. They had grown up with gay liberation, and they were still young enough to take risks. Furthermore, their very concentration in the Castro constituted a kind of critical mass. On June 7, 1977, the night the born-again singer Anita Bryant proclaimed victory in her campaign to repeal a gay-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida, three thousand people gathered on Castro Street to shout their protests. The police, fearing a riot, called on Harvey Milk to help, and to defuse the tension he led the crowd on a five-mile march through the city. At midnight, he rallied the marchers in Union Square and, taking up a bullhorn, told them, “This is the power of the gay community. Anita’s going to create a national gay force.” Ten days later, when Vice-President Walter Mondale came to Golden Gate Park to address a rally on the subject of human rights, Milk and a number of his supporters picketed the rally and heckled Mondale for not speaking about gay rights. This was how the Castro expressed itself—not by alliances and persuasion but by demonstrations and non-negotiable demands.

Harvey Milk’s victory in the 1977 election was a victory for the Castro and a proof of its new political power. At the same time, it signified a much more general triumph for gay liberation in the city. The homophile organizations had long been forgotten, and SIR had collapsed. Foster and Stokes—whatever Milk said of them—had long ago accepted the basic tenets of gay lib, and with the help of the liberals they had already made such changes in the city that Milk had a relatively short agenda of gay-rights items to take to City Hall. Then, too, emboldened by the Castro, important local businessmen and lawyers were coming out of the closet to join the cause. Between them, the older and the younger immigrants were introducing the concepts of gay liberation into fields far more resistant to change than city politics.

In the early seventies, John Schmidt, a San Francisco insurance broker, left the big company he had been working for to start his own firm. In his former job, he had learned that most insurance companies penalized single people and gay couples by the structure of their premiums. His new firm equalized the premium structure, and attracted a good deal of business in the gay community. A few years later, he founded a savings-and-loan association, on the similar premise that loan officers in banks often discriminated—consciously or unconsciously—against gay and single people. Established in the depths of the savings-and-Ioan depression of 1980 on two million dollars scraped together from sixteen hundred shareholders, the Atlas Savings & Loan Association made an annual profit of a million dollars three years later.

During the seventies, a great many gay businessmen and women followed much the same pattern, starting travel agencies, hotels, financial services, and so on, that were tailored to a gay clientele. Gay professionals, too, developed specialized gay practices. Lawyers, for example, became expert not only in discrimination cases but also in cases involving child custody and inheritance. Some gay doctors specialized in the diseases common to the gay population, while others came out far enough to assure their gay patients that they found the gay way of life quite normal. The same went for gay psychotherapists. In 1978, Don Clark, a clinical psychologist, told me that when he came to San Francisco, in 1970, he knew only a couple of openly gay therapists, and they lacked credentials. Now, eight years later, he knew almost fifty, and he had worked with several of them in rethinking all the questions involved in treating gay patients. In Clark’s view, gay therapists were almost always better qualified than others to treat gay patients, because “they knew about gay life styles and could love and celebrate homosexual desires.”

A number of liberal Protestant clergymen in San Francisco, headed by the Reverend Cecil Williams, the pastor of the Glide Memorial Methodist Church, had been active in the gay civil-rights struggle of the nineteen-sixties. They had developed gay fellowships in their own churches, which now welcomed the gay immigrants. Other churches, however, were not so accommodating, and because this was true all over the country many gay people had simply lost their faith, or had lost interest in organized religion. Others had led double lives. Now, however, in the spirit of gay liberation, a number of these undertook to create churches where they could worship as gay men and women. For example, Bernard Pechter, a playwright and a stockbroker, had founded a gay synagogue. When I asked about it, he told me that he had gone regularly to a Conservative synagogue until eleven years earlier. At that point, it had occurred to him that, however accepting of homosexuals the rabbi seemed to be, the synagogue was family-oriented, and thus it excluded him. He could not go back. Then, some years later, a friend told him about a gay synagogue in New York, and after visiting it he became, as he put it, “a born-again Jew.” He then formed a congregation in San Francisco; it had no rabbi—a learned layman had written the liturgy, and the congregants took turns performing the services—but it now had two hundred and fifty members, most of whom, Pechter said, had come back to Judaism only because of it.

The gay Catholics in San Francisco had done much the same thing. Because the Catholic Church still viewed homosexual sex—along with all forms of extramarital sex—as a sin, gay Catholics had founded a separate congregation; they had found a priest to perform the services, but outside the church sanctuary. Protestants, too, now had an entirely gay church—the Metropolitan Community Church, a member of a nondenominational association founded by the Reverend Troy Perry, in Los Angeles. The pastors would perform gay marriages, and were rather more accepting of the far-out fringes of the gay community than most other Protestant clergymen in the city. In 1978, for example, the church took donations from drag balls held for charity and had a bike club described on its posters as an “outreach to the Western leather community.” Gay women as well as gay men went to these separatist churches, but a number of radical feminists were in the process of developing a whole religion of their own. Having abandoned the Judeo-Christian tradition as essentially and unalterably sexist, they were researching other traditions and discovering a host of female spirits and deities.

To a great degree, gay men—and, to a lesser degree, gay women—were building themselves a world apart from the rest of the city. Gay men could spend days, or an entire week, going to their offices, to the cleaner, to the bank and the health club, dining in restaurants, attending political meetings, and going to church without seeing anyone who was not gay. Some, such as Bob Ross, the head of the gay Tavern Guild, said that they actually did just that on occasion. Others normally lived all but their working lives within gay society. While the density of gay institutions gave them a good deal of power and influence in the city, it also, paradoxically, had the effect of separating them from it. The gay community, evolving according to its own logic, became more and more articulated and distinct. It now had not only its own political leaders but also its own habits and customs and its own holidays—Gay Freedom Day, Halloween—and the Castro Street Fair. As for the Castro, it was a great hive where everyone knew everything that happened every day. To an outsider, it seemed self-preoccupied and claustrophobic. Gay activists might argue among themselves, but they presented a united front to the outside world; gay men in the Castro even presented a uniform appearance.

Looking back, Randy Shilts felt that 1978 was the year when the Castro-clone style reached what was almost a Platonic perfection. Six years before, the look had been unisex hippie: green fatigues and pea jackets snatched from military-surplus stores and added, willy-nilly, to items found on the racks at the Salvation Army. Now the Castroids, as they sometimes called themselves, were dressing with the care of Edwardian dandies, except that the look was cowboy or bush pilot: tight bluejeans, preferably Levi’s with button flies; plaid shirts; leather vests or bomber jackets; and boots. Accessories included reflecting sunglasses, and keys dangling from leather belts; in the hot weather, there were muscle shirts. The look was male to the point of what the psychologist C. A. Tripp called “gender-eccentricity.” Short hair was now the style—very short hair, cut far above the ears. Mustaches were clipped, and there wasn’t a beard or a ponytail to be seen anywhere. And the new gear was cut to show off bulging deltoids, slim hips, and washboard stomachs. The muscles seemed to belong to the uniform, and so did the attitude. Men would swagger slightly, walking down the street, and watch each other from under lowered lids; there was a slightly hostile air about them. Bellied up to a bar, they would look around them with a studied casualness and, with one foot on the rail, communicate with their neighbor in grunts. The look, Shilts wrote later, was super-macho. “Tell ’em they’re femmy queers who need wrist splints and lisp lessons and they’ll end up looking like a bunch of cowboys, loggers, and M.P.s. Whaddaya think of that?”

Shilts, Maupin, Adair, and their friends had—personally—no interest in the clone style. I knew Armistead worked out only because he once gave a party for Ie tout San Francisco in a Market Street health club (he floated gardenias in the Jacuzzis). Randy Shilts dressed conservatively, and Peter Adair, tall and bearded, wore baggy trousers and oversize checked coats from the time they were hip to the time they were New Wave. They saw the Castro style as a caricature; all the same, they saw it as an important step forward. “The culture proceeds by contradictions,”

Shilts told me. “These days, the style is straight but sensitive, gay but macho. There’s some compensation involved. Gay men used to be expected to play women, so now they’re playing superstud.” What the change meant in particular, he felt, was that the Judy Garland style was really dead: there would be no more hostile mimicry of women, no more bitchiness, no exaggerated sense of vulnerability, and no self-destructiveness. “Younger people can’t relate to that kind of thing anymore,” he said. “Life is so much easier for us now. It’s the juggernaut effect of openness.” Gone, too, so my friends said, was gay mimicry of heterosexual marriages, with the “male” and “female” role-playing it had involved. “In the Castro, there are all kinds of experiments going on with communal arrangements and open relationships,” Adair said. “You have a roommate, or perhaps several of them. Or you have a lover but not an exclusive one. How people live together is a matter of negotiation.” It was in the sphere of relationships, my friends felt, that gay men were leading the way for the rest of the society—there and in the sphere of sexual freedom.

By 1978, the Castro had become the most active cruising strip in the city, and perhaps in the country. Even in the daytime, there were hundreds of young men out cruising in the bars, the bookshops, the restaurants, the stores—even the vast supermarket some distance down Market Street. At night, the bars were jammed—there were lines out on the sidewalks—and cars had trouble getting through the crowds of men. The scene was mind-boggling to newcomers: the openness of it and the sheer turnover. “It was crazy,” one gay activist told me, speaking of his first visit to the Castro. “I belonged to the Yippies at home, and I’d been through a smash monogamy period, but, you know, we were still very sexually oppressed. I came out here with my lover, and we couldn’t believe it. Everyone seemed to be living out his fantasies from day to day. We had dates at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was like opening up a treasure chest and rummaging through it in some hysterical way.” The gay activists had had a political vision, but few of them had imagined what a sexually liberated society might be like; few, certainly, had imagined the sexual carnival of the Castro in the late seventies. That year, two Kinsey Institute researchers, Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, published the results of a survey they had done of gay men and women in the San Francisco area in 1970, and these remained the only statistics available. Even then, over forty per cent of the white males interviewed (and a third of the black males) said that they had had at least five hundred sexual partners; twenty-eight per cent said that they had had over a thousand.

The extent of the sexual free-for-all in the Castro surprised gay women as much as anyone else. A decade before, gay liberationists had generally supposed that gay men and gay women had a great deal in common; the society, after all, assigned them to virtually the same category. But as gay liberation revealed them—and as their social worlds developed—they provided instead a study in contrasts. According to the Kinsey Institute researchers, for example, over half of the gay white females they interviewed said they had had less than ten sexual partners; most of the gay women they talked to rarely cruised and rarely had casual sex; they tended to be monogamous, serially. According to gay therapists I spoke with, a major problem for gay men often lay in developing intimate relationships; gay women often had the reverse of that problem their relationships were generally so close and so emotionally intense that even the unhappiest of couples would have difficulty separating. If gay-male society seemed in many ways impersonal and atomistic, lesbian society often seemed to be private and intimate to the point of suffocation. While gay men flocked to bars and bathhouses, gay women nested at home or gathered in small groups. The female co-chair of the 1978 gay parade told me that after the parade the women organizers were going to a retreat in the countryside. “It’s a lovely place,” she said. “It has Jacuzzis and steam baths. When we go there, we usually ditch our clothes and do a lot of chanting. It’s very sensual, but there’s not much sex.” While gay men built businesses, gay women built communes, both literally and figuratively speaking; that is, while gay-male organizations tended to be rationalized and, in the case of businesses, hierarchical, women’s organizations were structured for coöperation and the melding of individuals into the collective enterprise. The most businesslike of lesbian organizations would build in encounter-group techniques as a management strategy; the emotions, they understood, always had to be considered. Liberated gay women, in other words, turned out to be archetypically women, and gay men in the Castro archetypically men—as if somehow each gender had been squared by isolation from the other.

In a sense, the oddest thing about gay liberation in general and the Castro in particular was that neither gay men nor gay women had any agreed upon explanation for homosexuality. The gay men I knew said that they had known they were homosexuals so early in their lives that they felt it must be a matter of chemistry or biology. They felt this intuitively, but, lacking evidence to prove it, did not insist upon it. Perhaps it was nurture rather than nature, they said, but, if so, the psychologists had no very convincing explanation. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental illness. In that year, its board of trustees voted to take it off the list, but did so as a result of political pressure from gay activists and from the gay caucus within the Association. Though this was an advance, my friends felt, the procedure was hardly scientific. What gay activists generally believed was that, whatever the genesis of homosexuality, there was always—for reasons unknown—a fixed proportion of homosexuals in the population; ten per cent was their estimate. The figure derived from the Kinsey report of 1948. In that survey, Kinsey researchers had found that four per cent of American men were exclusively homosexual, and that ten per cent of the male population was almost exclusively so. (A later survey showed that from one to three per cent of single women in the United States were exclusively homosexual.) Changing attitudes toward sex would have changed these figures somewhat, the activists thought, but a figure of ten per cent would be roughly correct. Beyond that, they were resolute agnostics—indifferent or actually hostile to any further attempts at explanation.

As it happened, Wardell Pomeroy, one of the original members of the Kinsey research team, was now academic dean of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, in San Francisco. Pomeroy told me that he thought the 1948 figures were still approximately correct, but that he did not see them as permanent—as an attribute of nature. Pomeroy believed, with Freud, that man was innately bisexual. After all, he said, anthropologists had found that in many societies—including that of ancient Greece—homosexuality was ubiquitous. “The real question,” he said, “is not why anyone is homosexual but why everyone is not.” His own theory was that if cultural constraints were set aside, the spectrum of sexual behavior in the United States would be quite different. Perhaps half of the male population would continue to be exclusively heterosexual and four per cent would be exclusively homosexual—but the rest would be bisexual to one degree or another. As it was, he said, the culture pushed most people into the exclusively heterosexual end of the spectrum by condemning homosexual desires as sick or sinful. Therefore, in his view, the major thrust of the gay movement was correct, and homosexuals who were willing to stand up and be counted as such had a liberating effect on the whole society.

Pomeroy’s theoretical spectrum was a counterculture idea, in that it assumed—if only for purposes of argument—that cultural constraints could be put aside. While anthropologists would have rejected it categorically, on the ground that cultures will invariably condition sexual expression, it served to point up the dilemmas involved in gay liberation and in the particular society of the Castro. Gay liberationists were, of course, reacting to a culture that understood homosexuals as a distinct category of people and endowed them with all kinds of special attributes, from effeminacy to mental illness. But though they rejected the attributes, they accepted the category; that is, they viewed homosexuals as a distinct group of people, who had to unite and fight their oppression. In the view of many European gay intellectuals, this might be a mistake. The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault cautioned the gay movement in the United States against accepting the terms of its enemies—and not just its enemies but everyone’s. The real task, as he saw it, was to subvert all such distinctions, since the isolation of any sexual category could lead only to further oppression—or, at best, to further marginalization of the group.

By 1978, many gay liberationists in New York had discussed the Foucault argument and rejected it on the ground that it was politically infeasible: gay men and gay women had to unite to break the taboo—there was no other possible strategy. In San Francisco, the argument was hardly discussed at all, and yet the dilemma was nowhere more apparent than in the Castro: by uniting, homosexuals were hardening the category. In the Castro, a gay society was coming into being, and, along with it, a “gay identity,” which, though still superficial, tended to divide gay men from others. In 1978, that society was still defining itself. It was pulling further and further away from its origins in the counterculture. It was doing so in part for reasons that had little to do with homosexuality and a great deal to do with the fact that its inhabitants were well-educated young white men. It had become a male preserve, and a society that more or less ignored gay women; it was now becoming a class preserve as well. For most young gay activists in the Castro, this was the tension, and this was the real issue.

By 1978, Harvey Milk had succeeded in representing the Castro and all that it stood for in the city. But, ironically, the Castro was no longer the place he had pictured in his campaigns. It had ceased to be a poor neighborhood. The Irish working-class families had largely gone, but so had most of the hippies. On Castro Street, there was an expensive home-furnishings shop, a wine-and-quiche café, a card-and-gift shop, and two expensive men’s-clothing stores, and boutiques were moving in. The neighboring streets looked equally prosperous, for gay men had bought up the old houses, stripped them of their aluminum siding, painted them, and renovated their interiors. By 1976, the old houses were fetching five times their value in 1973. In 1977, the rent on Milk’s camera store tripled. Milk denounced the landlord and all landlordism, but to no avail, for the rents up and down the street were now doubling every six months. He moved his store to a cubbyhole on Market Street, and the space he vacated was quickly occupied by a boutique selling Waterford crystal.

The Castro was no longer poor, and in a sense it was no longer a neighborhood. Milk had railed against the city’s spending money on making San Francisco a tourist center, but now the Castro had become a mecca (as journalists put it) for gay tourists. The air shuttle between Los Angeles and San Francisco was now nicknamed the Gay Express, for every Friday night it was filled with gay Angelenos coming to town for the weekend. New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and others would spend their vacations in San Francisco, staying at gay hotels, going to gay restaurants, and shopping at gay stores. In the summertime, you could hear the accents of New York and Houston on the streets of the Castro, and also of London, Paris, and Sydney. Then, too, with many of those who came as tourists returning to settle, the Castro was becoming the hub of a vast redevelopment project. Gay men—and some gay women—were moving into Noe Valley and the Mission district; they were moving into the Haight-Fillmore district and settling the back slopes of Pacific Heights, painting and refurbishing as they went. In some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, Victorian façades blossomed with decorator paint.

Harvey Milk, the populist, spoke of gay people as an oppressed minority and promised to make common cause with the racial-minority groups in the city and with the poor. But the gay immigrants were now calling this alliance in question. They might be refugees from oppression, but they were also, by and large, young white men who had arrived in town at the very moment for beginning their careers. In practice, they were taking professional and managerial jobs, or they were staffing the numerous new service industries, or they were starting businesses of their own. In many ways, they were proving a boon to the city. By pioneering the dilapidated neighborhoods, they were helping to reverse the white and middle-class flight to the suburbs, thus increasing the tax base both directly and indirectly. Since they had no children, they made no demands on the schools, and they had more income than the average family man or woman to spend both on entertainment and on housing. They were supporting the opera, the ballet, and other cultural institutions of the city. But in settling the poor neighborhoods they were pushing real-estate prices up and pushing black and Hispanic families out.

This was not, of course, their aim. Jim Rivaldo was one of the early settlers of the Haight-Fillmore, and when he arrived there, in 1972, the main street was a combat zone of alcoholics, drug dealers, and thugs. He set up a neighborhood association to make the area livable for black and white residents. Under his leadership, the association brought in the police, demanded efficient city services, and began to reverse the process of decay and dereliction in the area. Many black residents applauded his efforts, but, as one black social worker pointed out, the alcoholics and the drug dealers were the people who had been keeping the rents down. The safer the streets were, the more attractive they became to white settlers and real-estate developers, and the larger the number of black families that were pushed out—including the poorest families, with nowhere else to go. The logic was inescapable. Rivaldo understood it; he was defensive on that score. What he wanted was what Harvey Milk had wanted some years before in the Castro—to maintain an integrated neighborhood. But he could not insure it any better than Milk had, and for many gay settlers it was simply not a priority. And while Milk worried about gentrification, he predicted with some relish that an alliance of gay and Asian immigrants would control the city in a few years. It was, Shilts wrote, a time of gay manifest destiny.

The new Castro and all that it stood for set off a debate within the gay community—a debate whose terms were quintessentially Californian. One side of that debate was represented by the financier David Goodstein, who was now the publisher of the Advocate, a biweekly newspaper and the best-selling gay publication in the country. Published out of plush offices in San Mateo, the Advocate combined political and cultural journalism with photographs of beautiful semi-naked men and ads for gay baths, skin flicks, and hustlers. It was a kind of Playboy for the gay community, and Goodstein, short, plump, and forty-five, had Hugh Hefner views, except that he was considerably to the right of Hefner on economic issues. “I’m a libertarian,” he said when I went to see him. “I believe that freedom is indivisible—political and economic freedom are the same thing. I think that people have the right to Laetrile if they want it. I’m for the decriminalization of marijuana and prostitution. And I’m pro-abortion.” Goodstein was also strongly in favor of the new Castro. “Our cities are in very bad trouble, as the groups moving into them are generally without skills, education, or affluence,” he said. “The gay immigrants have these things, and they have a real interest in the cities.” Of course, he said, people were upset by the rise in rents, so gay landlords had to be tactful, and careful to establish communication within their communities.

It was on the ground of individual freedom that Goodstein defended the sexually explicit, if perhaps not pornographic, advertisements in the second section of the Advocate. “Sexuality is a private matter,” he said. “You should be able to regulate street signs but not censor books. Every expert I’ve talked to believes that pornography is good for sex. We support all forms of human sexuality that are freely consensual, not medically harmful, and not offensive to bystanders—so that rules out sex in public, anything to do with children, and extreme forms of s. and m. There’s nothing wrong with ads for male prostitutes. For people who use prostitutes, it’s much better to find them in a magazine than to have to look for them on the streets.”

Goodstein was a friend of Werner Erhard’s, and that year he was putting together a national organization to conduct est-type seminars for homosexuals, called the Advocate Experience. On this subject, Goodstein, a man known to his staff as a hard-headed businessman and political broker, talked like a religious visionary. “I believe the human-potential movement is more important for humanity than anything else that has ever happened,” he told me. “Est is just one aspect of it. What we’re all aiming for is transformation.”

He seemed quite surprised to be asked, “Transformation into what?”

“Transformation means the all-rightness of people,” he replied. “Health, happiness, love, and fun expression.”

On the other side of the debate were young gay activists from the left wing of the movement. Bill Hartman and others from Bay Area Gay Liberation put the case most vehemently. They believed in the Castro as a liberated zone—a place of refuge for gay men. At the same time, they deplored what was happening to it. Gay men were becoming “fodder for Wall Street West;” they were being “scapegoated” for driving out ethnic minorities when what was really happening was that the real-estate speculators and other forces for gentrification were seeing to it that only young white professionals or paraprofessionals could settle in San Francisco. A number of gay bars, Hartman said, now discriminated against blacks, women, and effeminate gay men. The new Castro was the sign and symbol of this tendency. And the Advocate, which ran only photographs of beautiful white men, was encouraging “ageism, sexism, and beauty snobbery.”

This analysis went far beyond the conventional Marxist analysis of political and economic factors, into the domains of psychology and aesthetics. The left-wingers were, in other words, joining Goodstein from the other side of the political spectrum to insist on the importance of social and psychological criteria. What they were saying, Goodstein to the contrary, was that the Advocate made a lot of people feel bad. Just how far they could take this radical egalitarianism remained to be seen, but Bill Hartman told me that friends of his were now suing a popular gay bathhouse on the ground that it discriminated against older and more effeminate men. He defined the litigation as “a class-action suit on behalf of sissies.”

Armistead Maupin, Randy Shilts, and Ken Maley did not fully sympathize with either side of this debate. The three of them had gone through the Advocate Experience by invitation from Goodstein and come out profoundly unmoved. Goodstein had taken up his role as facilitator by dramatically unveiling a blackboard with the word “Toilet” written on it, and in their view things had gone—aesthetically speaking—downhill from there. The facilitator had in the end asked them to contribute to various organizations, including a political-action fund, that he himself had set up, and, as they saw it, he was trying to transform himself into Chief and them into Indians. They were having none of it. On the other hand, they tended to take a more philosophical view of the new Castro than did Hartman et al. Gay irony, after all, had it that everyone, including the pin-striped banker and the long-haired truck driver, was in drag. Still, they believed that the Nautilus-machine look was only a phase, and that Castro residents would eventually grow up and come to look like normal human beings, without any distinctive style to speak of. When discussing the subject in dead earnest, they said that the Castro was a stage in gay development, and that in the end “the ghetto” would no longer be necessary to gay men.

Right now, however, the Castro flourished. And instead of returning to normal, whatever that might be, gay styles were proliferating, becoming more and more various. That is, while the Castro presented a fairly uniform look to outsiders, its residents could point out a huge number of species and subspecies, as distinct from each other as those of warblers. There was the clone style proper: short hair, clipped mustache, bluejeans, and bomber jacket. There was the preppie-athletic look: Lacoste or rugby shirt and well-shined loafers. There was the cowboy look, the logger look, the bodybuilder look, and so on. Randy Shilts—observer that he was—used to speak of the Folsom-district leather bars as something alien to the Castro. But in fact black leather had already made its début on the street. What was surprising was not that these varieties of dress existed but, rather, that their wearers did not seem to mix any more than did warbler species. If the limp wrist had been a sign of fraternity between one homosexual man and another, the number of signs had now multiplied to the point where they required the interpretative assistance of a Jacques Derrida. Some of the items of apparel—the bandannas, the keys—were precisely encoded for sexual preference. Other signs, however, belonged to the realm of aesthetics rather than to that of the sex manual. And these were so precisely and exquisitely articulated as to confound those who fought such grosser forms of discrimination as ageism and sexism. They were a type of “beauty snobbery,” all right, but what was a Bill Hartman to do about them?

The minute forms of discrimination testified, of course, to the sheer numbers of young men in the Castro and the extraordinarily high volume of sexual activity. Figuratively speaking, it was as if a small general store with staple items had been replaced by a vast supermarket where anyone could find virtually anything at any hour of the day. New choices were available, and so new distinctions had to be made. Bars became more specialized, and so did sex clubs; in fact, gay entrepreneurs were now creating the sexual equivalent of supermarkets, specialty markets, and boutiques. Some of these—high volume, quick turnover—were the equivalent of fast-food shops. In the South of Market Club, for example, a dark warehouse filled with plywood cubicles, a customer could take a cubicle and have sex through a hole in the partition without even the delay occasioned by eye contact. The entrance fee was only three dollars. There were eight of these “glory hole” establishments in the city now, and nine bathhouses. In the distant past, bathhouses had been squalid places where men deep in the closet had secret, guilty liaisons; now, however, they were well-appointed clubs—some with Jacuzzis and video screens—where young men went for fun or a change of scene. They had private rooms, lounges, public rooms for orgies, and specialty rooms. At least one of them had a room full of s.-and-m. machinery—racks, pulleys, and the like.

In addition to the increase in the volume of sexual activity, there was an increase in experimentation with new techniques. There was a vogue for various extremist practices, some of which were medically harmful. Sadomasochism, once confined to a tiny minority and considered perverse, was now rising to the surface of acceptability. “Why get hung up with higher prices when all you want is a place to hang your handcuffs?” one Folsom district hotel brochure asked jauntily. Gay boosters—when they did not deny that it existed—would explain that s. and m. was only theatre, involving fantasies, not bodily harm. Theatre was certainly the idea behind it, but, perhaps because of the number of amateurs involved, violence did occur. In 1981, the San Francisco medical examiner, Dr. Boyd Stephens, warned that he was seeing an “alarming increase in injuries and death from s.-and-m. sex.”

Most San Franciscans did not really know what went on in the Castro and Folsom districts at night. They avoided the two areas, and they avoided knowing about what went on if they could. But the sexual exuberance tended to spill over into the rest of the city. People who lived near the Castro or Buena Vista Park, in the Haight, sometimes could not help seeing gay men having sex with each other in public and in broad daylight. Such sights were not unknown in other parts of the city, either—particularly on gay holidays, such as Halloween and Gay Freedom Day. And, with the growing fad for s.-and-m. garb, men with spiked collars on their necks and Nazi insignia on their caps would appear on downtown streets. Dianne Feinstein, now in her third term as president of the Board of Supervisors, spoke to this issue in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, a large-circulation gay weekly distributed in the bars. “I know of no city in the United States where gay people live and work and create as constructively as they do in San Francisco,” she said. “What I see happening in San Francisco—in the bar scene, in the street scene, in the s.-and-m. scene—is an imposition of life style on those who do not wish to participate in that life style. I’ve tried to talk to various leaders in the gay community to say that the community needs to set some standards. I was not able to get a commitment. I am very concerned that unless some standards are set . . . many people will want to see a crackdown.” Feinstein said much the same thing on one other occasion that year.

The Castro reacted to such expressions of concern with ridicule or outrage. How dare she say such a thing! Feinstein was a prude—that was Ken Maley’s view. Her “interest in the gay leather scene bordered on an obsession”—that was Randy Shilts’s. “What if she told blacks their behavior was offensive?” someone asked indignantly at a gay-political-club meeting. To report that the sight of gay men in Nazi caps or gay men having sex in public did offend other San Franciscans—that Feinstein was not making it up—was to call forth a storm of objections from gay activists. The very same people would argue that public sex did not exist, that those who proclaimed themselves offended were closet cases or voyeurs, and that everyone had better just get used to it. The fact that an outsider had asked the gay community to “set some standards” was seen as a challenge to the movement and a threat to the civil rights of all gay men. An editorial in the issue of the B.A.R. in which the Feinstein interview appeared said, “What Feinstein cannot or will not face is that the Gay movement is much more than a civil-rights affair. . . . It is a revolution. To digest that the Gay movement has to do with the reëvaluation of sexuality . . . is more than she can handle. Her solution is tolerance—not to be confused with acceptance. To Feinstein a gay presence is possible, gay dominance a disaster.” This was indeed a time of gay manifest destiny.

That the whole bar-and-sex culture of the Castro might be harmful to the gay men themselves was not at the time given any serious consideration in the gay community, and yet it was clearly unhealthy in many respects. “In the seventies, you used to go into someone’s refrigerator and see no food, only drugs,” one gay activist told me years later. The bar scene involved a great deal of alcohol and various sorts of drugs, including amyl nitrite, which puts stress on the heart. Alcoholism was prevalent, and so were a good many sexually transmitted diseases. Syphilis and gonorrhea were epidemic in the Castro. According to Bell and Weinberg, two-thirds of the gay men they interviewed had had a venereal disease at least once, and according to public-health authorities homosexuals accounted for between fifty and fifty-five per cent of all syphilis and gonorrhea cases across the country. In 1978, the San Francisco Health Department announced that over the past three years there had been a dramatic increase in hepatitis and intestinal infections among males in their twenties and thirties. In 1979, there were seven hundred and forty-four cases of hepatitis and two hundred and twenty cases of amoebic dysentery in the city; a year later, health officials found that from sixty to seventy per cent of the gay men in San Francisco had the virus for hepatitis B. Some gay leaders, including some of the bar owners, worried about the casualties from alcoholism—to the extent, at least, of raising money for treatment centers and outdoor activities. No one worried about the sexually transmitted diseases, because they were curable. “Clap was a big joke,” Shilts told me years later. “Going to the city clinic was part of the routine. There would be all this camaraderie, and people would tell each other how many times they’d been there.”

The idea that the sexual free-for-all might be aesthetically unpleasing, emotionally unrewarding, or morally troubling in its disregard for the individual was generally rejected by the Castro generation. Older men, however, expressed concern. Zohn Artman, at the time the head of public relations for the rock impresario Bill Graham, and a respected figure in the city, said, “They’re meat palaces. Grade A, Grade B, Choice, U.S.D.A.-approved. I worry a lot about the young right now. They think they are free, but they are getting locked in behind their genitalia. So much of life seems concentrated there. It worries me that they don’t have more of a sense of self.”

Dianne Feinstein had warned of a backlash against gays in San Francisco. There was no evidence of this now, but another kind of backlash had already taken shape outside the city. In the mid-seventies, conservative churches across the country experienced a revival, and fundamentalist preachers drew huge new audiences on radio and television. Now preachers such as Jerry Falwell and political strategists such as Richard Viguerie were translating fundamentalists’ concerns into politics, reviving the right wing of the Republican Party. The New Right, as it was called, made the Panama Canal treaty its first major foreign-policy issue and gay rights its first major domestic issue. In fundamentalist doctrine, homosexuality was simply a choice—a sexual preference, as it were—except that it was a sinful choice, in the same general category as adultery or rape. For fundamentalists, the very notion of gay rights was an abomination, and at the same time made no sense at all. (Falwell and others, however, adopted the general parlance and spoke of “homosexuals,” thereby implying that homosexuality was not a choice, but the logical problem was generally overlooked.) In 1978, the year after Anita Bryant won her campaign against the Dade County gay-rights ordinance, similar ordinances were defeated by voters in St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon. In Oklahoma, a law was passed permitting public schools to fire homosexual teachers. On the strength of these victories, California State Senator John Briggs gathered enough signatures from fundamentalist constituencies around the state in 1978 to put a proposition on the November ballot mandating the dismissal of any schoolteacher who advocated or encouraged homosexuality. The wording of what came to be known as the Briggs Initiative was vague enough to threaten the job of any teacher who as much as discussed gay rights in class. Briggs put out a series of pamphlets associating all homosexuals with child molestation and pornography. The “moral decay in this country,” he said, was “a greater danger than Communism.”

Since the spring, a number of gay organizations in San Francisco and Los Angeles had been preparing a riposte to the Briggs Initiative and the fundamentalist crusade in general. Harvey Milk had spearheaded a voter-registration drive through his own political organization, the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. In the Castro, leaflets had been distributed, demonstrations held, and committees formed. Countering the initiative was the major political theme of the Gay Freedom Day Parade. In the gay community, there was a good deal of consternation about the backlash: many thought that the Briggs Initiative would pass, and that that would be only the beginning. Leaflets and placards announced that Anita Bryant—or Falwell or Briggs—wanted to put all gay people in concentration camps. In his speech at the gay parade, Harvey Milk said:

I want to recruit you for the fight to preserve your democracy from the John Briggses and the Anita Bryants who are trying to constitutionalize bigotry. We are not going to allow that to happen. We are not going to sit back in silence as three hundred thousand of our gay brothers and sisters did in Nazi Germany. We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads into the gas chambers.

There was among gay activists, just as among fundamentalists, a general propensity to seek out signs of impending doom and to imagine the worst. Milk had this vision, but at the same time he was delighted with the opportunity the initiative presented. Judging that the proposition would not pass, he saw it as a means of raising the issue of gay rights in places where it had not been raised before. As for Briggs, a born-again Christian with ambitions for the governorship, he virtually acknowledged that the issue was an attention-getting device for himself. When Milk challenged him to a series of debates in towns and cities across the state, he accepted with alacrity, and the two went on the road together, joking with each other in airports and lambasting each other in front of audiences. At one point, Briggs brought up the Bell and Weinberg statistic on the percentage of gay men with over five hundred sexual partners. “I wish,” Milk replied, laughing.

Milk could afford to laugh, for in five years of campaigning he had become a powerful speaker—articulate, witty, and capable of pulling out the full range of rhetorical stops. On the rostrum, Briggs was no contest for him, and in November Milk’s political judgment turned out to be correct. The teachers’ associations viewed the Briggs Initiative as threatening to teachers and to the cause of civil liberties in general, and campaigned vigorously against it. The liberal politicians in the state came out against it, but so, too, did former Governor Ronald Reagan. President Carter came out against the initiative, as did former President Ford. On Election Day, Californians voted two to one against it.

The defeat of the Briggs Initiative was a personal triumph for Milk. In San Francisco, the campaign against it had brought a number of wealthy conservatives out of the closet and had focussed the attention of the Castro on politics. The attention went to Milk. In addition, the campaign brought him statewide, and even national, coverage. In a movement that had no well-known national leaders, Milk began to stand out as the most effective spokesman for gay rights. Politician that he was, Milk understood this very well. When, in his speech at the parade, he had called for a national gay march on Washington for the following year, he knew his assistance would be required for mounting such an effort, and he was looking forward to it. Then, too, he was thinking (as most city supervisors do) of running for mayor one day. The idea was not wholly unreasonable.

In the ten months since his inauguration, Milk had proved an effective member of the Board of Supervisors. His colleagues, who had seen him as a single-issue candidate, found him hardworking and concerned with all issues, from the city transportation system to social services for the elderly. He worked for his own district like a good ward boss, seeing to it that more street lights were put in, that the streets were cleaned regularly, and that the local branch of the public library had adequate funds. At meetings of the Board of Supervisors, he was sometimes abrasive—gleefully so—and his talent for attracting the spotlight was hardly collegial, but he was an engaging man, with a talent for disarming opponents. He made friends. And, on a board that often split six to five, he voted consistently with the liberal minority in support of the mayor, George Moscone. His own bill forbidding discrimination against gays in housing and employment passed by a majority of ten to one. When I went to see him that summer, he spoke enthusiastically about new projects, including the revamping of the Civil Service Commission and a pooper-scooper bill he himself had introduced. He said that the direction of the board was changing: the old guard was losing ground, the liberals and minority representatives were gaining power. Self-confident and outspoken, he seemed very much at home in City Hall.

On November 27, 1978, just three weeks after the election and the defeat of the Briggs Initiative, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were shot and killed. They were shot down in their City Hall offices by Dan White, a former member of the Board of Supervisors. Dianne Feinstein was the first to see Milk’s body; later, she announced the news to the press in a horror-stricken voice amid a milling crowd of people at the head of the stairs at City Hall. It was just eight days after the news of the Jonestown suicides reached the city, where Jim Jones had been a prominent minister. San Francisco lay in shock. That night, forty thousand people walked from the Castro to City Hall carrying candles, singing, and weeping.

Some months later, in May of 1979, Dan White was tried for murder. He was charged with two counts of first degree murder—murder committed with premeditation, deliberation, and malice—and it was generally assumed that the prosecutor would make the case for deliberation on circumstantial evidence. The question was why White shot his two colleagues; the answer was not obvious. White, thirty-two years old at the time of the trial, had been elected to his first term on the Board of Supervisors in district elections the year before. A former policeman, he represented District Eight, the last of the conservative blue-collar districts in the city, and the only one that had voted in support of the Briggs Initiative. His campaign photographs showed a good-looking young man with sideburns, well groomed and neatly dressed in a three-piece suit. White had served only eight months on the board. He had resigned in early November, explaining that his supervisor’s salary, ninety-six hundred dollars a year, was not enough to support him, his wife, and their new baby. The Mayor accepted his resignation. Four days later, however, White asked for his job back, giving no clear reason for his change of mind. Moscone was inclined to reappoint White, but Milk went to see him and argued that he now had the opportunity to change the majority on the board and get his programs through. Milk then told the press what he had told the Mayor.

White heard of the Mayor’s decision from a radio journalist the evening before it was to be announced. He stayed up all night long. The next morning, he took out his loaded .38 Smith & Wesson police revolver, put ten extra dumdum bullets in a handkerchief, and put the handkerchief in his pocket. His aide picked him up and drove him to City Hall. After she dropped him off, he went into City Hall through a window below the ground floor, thus avoiding a metal detector at the door. He walked into the Mayor’s office, asked the secretary to announce him, and talked with her until the Mayor ushered him in. Shortly after Moscone told White of his decision, White pulled out his revolver and shot him once in the right arm and once in the body. As Moscone slumped to the floor, White walked over to him and, bending over, shot him twice in the head at very close range. He then reloaded and ran to Harvey Milk’s office. Finding Milk there, he asked if he could see him in his own former office, now empty, which was across the hall. Having ushered Milk into the office ahead of him, he closed the door, and, after some words passed between the two, he shot Milk five times—three times in the body and twice in the head. He then ran out of City Hall, called his wife from a pay phone, and asked her to meet him at St. Mary’s Cathedral. When she arrived, he went with her to a nearby police station, where he had once worked, gave himself up, and confessed to the killings.

The trial lasted three weeks, and at the end of it the jurors returned a verdict of voluntary manslaughter. San Franciscans were shocked. District Attorney Joseph Freitas said he didn’t think justice had been carried out. The judge in the case, who later gave White the maximum sentence—seven years and eight months—said he thought the punishment “inappropriate.” Dianne Feinstein, now mayor, called a press conference upon hearing the verdict. She had been in her City Hall office when the killings occurred; she had heard the shooting, she said, and had been the first to rush into White’s office. She had seen her colleague on the floor in a pool of blood and felt for his pulse. She said she had no doubt what the verdict should have been. “As far as I’m concerned, these were two murders,” she said.

How the jury had reached its verdict was not entirely clear. The defense counsel, Douglas Schmidt, had pleaded temporary insanity (or “diminished capacity,” as California law had it) for his client, and he had made a good case, given what he had to go on. He constructed a picture of Dan White that looked like this: White was a good person from a fine background. A native of San Francisco, he went to school in the city and was a noted high-school athlete. He served in the Army in Vietnam and thereafter joined the San Francisco Police Department. “A brief hiatus developed” (so said Schmidt); then he rejoined the police force and later transferred to the Fire Department. As a fireman, he was decorated for saving a woman and a child from a burning building. He was an idealistic young man who believed strongly in traditional American values; he was “supremely frustrated with crime and the politics of the city and saw the city deteriorating as a place for the average and decent people to live.” He was moral—almost rigidly moral—but he was a fair man and “perhaps too fair for the politics of San Francisco.” He had sought to befriend Harvey Milk, though the man represented “a vastly different life style” and different values from his own. He had worked hard over issues only to find that the politicians had no interest in their merits. What no one knew until after “those tragedies” occurred was that White had a history of “manic depression.” That fall, he had been depressed and under great strain in his job.

To fill in this picture, Schmidt introduced a battery of psychiatrists to testify to White’s depression. According to one of them, White, when depressed, would consume inordinate quantities of junk food: Cokes, Twinkies, chocolate bars, and the like. Junk food, according to the psychiatrist, especially that with a high sugar content, was thought to exacerbate anti-social behavior. Schmidt’s insistence on White’s junk-food habit became known as “the Twinkie defense.” Significant help for the defense case came from a tape recording of the confession that White had given to Homicide Inspector Frank Falzon. On the tape, White sobbed out a story of the great stress he had been under and how he had heard something like a roaring in his ears after Moscone told him that he would not reappoint him to the board. White, the defense counsel concluded, was not in his right mind when he went to City Hall; with his background of mental illness, his high consumption of junk food, and under the strain of having to deal with devious politicians, he had snapped. It had to be that, he said, because “good people, fine people with fine backgrounds, simply don’t kill people in cold blood.”

On the face of it, the problem with this story was that White had no clinical history of mental illness; he had been depressed—that was all that the psychiatrists knew for sure. Then, too, if he had had a lapse of sanity, he had never, on returning to sanity, expressed any remorse in public for what he had done. His confession was full of self-pity. It was a story about how he had worked hard and tried to be honest, and how Milk and Moscone had deceived and mocked him. (He said that in the end Milk had “smirked” at him, as if to say “Too bad.”) He had given this confession to a homicide inspector whom he had worked with and whom he had known since grammar school. Falzon, as was clear from the tape, had not pressed him about his intentions when he went to City Hall, but had allowed him to narrate his own version of events, in which stress played such a big role.

To the journalists following the trial, it seemed that at least some of the responsibility for this “miscarriage of justice,” as Freitas later called it, lay with the jury. The defense counsel had eliminated all prospective jurors who belonged to racial minorities or who acknowledged that they supported gay rights. The prosecution had not questioned Schmidt’s choices, and, as a result, the jury was made up largely of white working-class people, most of them Catholics. A number of them lived in or around White’s old district. Long after the trial, a few of the jurors came forward to say that they had agonized over the decision. They had deliberated for thirty-six hours and dismissed premeditation early on, but some had voted for second-degree murder; eventually, however, they had come to the conclusion that, given the trial record, they had no choice but voluntary manslaughter. In their view, the responsibility for the verdict lay squarely with the prosecution.

Whether or not the jurors were justified in their verdict, the fact was that the prosecutor, Thomas F. Norman, had made a very poor case. He took only three days to make it, and seemed to rely on a bare presentation of the facts to establish premeditation. In addition, he made a number of blunders. First, he apparently did not anticipate that the jurors might react sympathetically to White’s tearful confession. Second, he did not rake Falzon over the coals for failing to interrogate his friend aggressively; instead, he let the homicide inspector testify to White’s good character and to his impression that White was a broken individual after the killings, and not at all the man he had known. Third, in cross-examining the psychiatrists called in by the defense counsel, he failed to make them differentiate clearly between signs of “diminished capacity” and the agitation that any normal person might feel before shooting two men in cold blood. Finally, and most important, he failed to address the question of motive adequately. He had to prove malice, and he merely pointed to the fact that Moscone and Milk had blocked White’s reappointment to the board. To the jury, this did not seem an adequate reason for any wholly sane man to kill two of his colleagues.

But what was the motive—if there was a motive? What could it have been? The question haunted San Francisco journalists. After the trial, a number of them came up with a good deal more information about Dan White and the political circumstances surrounding the killings than had ever been presented to the jury—though they did not satisfactorily resolve the question, either. Still, from what they found out, it was possible to put together a rather different picture of Dan White from the one presented by Schmidt. Also, they discovered that there were people in the city, and particularly in the Police Department, who were not at all sorry to see Harvey Milk and George Moscone dead.

During his campaign for supervisor, Dan White had been a spokesman for conservative social values—for the importance of the family and the neighborhood. When he was interviewed on television, he had sounded concerned, civic-minded, and moderate, but some of his constituents had noticed signs of a mean streak in him. It was said that he packed other candidates’ meetings with gangs of young hecklers; at one joint meeting, four hecklers had shown up with White buttons on—and with Nazi insignia. White had refused all requests to ask them to leave. One of his campaign leaflets read, “I am not going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals, social deviates, and incorrigibles.”

When he joined the Board of Supervisors, in January, the board members, who knew nothing of these incidents, found him a nice young man, if a bit naïve. Dianne Feinstein undertook to educate him in the ways of city government, and Harvey Milk, who saw him as a potential ally on neighborhood issues, made an effort to cultivate him. As the defense attorney suggested, the two had a cordial relationship for some time. White voted for Milk’s gay-rights bill in committee after making a long statement about how as a paratrooper in Vietnam he had found “a lot of things that I had read about—that had been attributed to certain people: blacks, Chinese, gays, whites—just didn’t hold up under fire, literally under fire,” and how he had learned that “the sooner we leave discrimination in any form behind, the better off we’ll all be.” As time went on, however, it became clear that the two would never be allies. White drifted to the pro-big-business, anti-neighborhood side of the board; he voted for bills favored by the real-estate developers, and one developer arranged to get him the lease for a baked-potato stand on one of the piers renovated for the tourist trade. Also, he became the voice of the conservative Police Officers’ Association, championing every request it made. Milk lost his initial interest in White, but so, in another way, did the more conservative members of the board. After working with him for a while, Feinstein found him neither very bright nor very reliable; he hated to lose, and would erupt into a fury of temper if he could not make his point. After Joseph Molinari, one of the board members who had befriended him, voted for a trivial traffic measure that White was opposing on behalf of the Police Department, he would not speak to Molinari for days. For a time, White seemed to have inhaled a whiff of higher political ambition. When he was asked whether he might run for mayor, he answered, diplomatically, “Not yet.” To his colleagues, however, it became clear that he was not cut out to be a politician. He seemed unable to compromise, and unable to “disagree without being disagreeable,” as the Irish political credo has it. Mel Wax, Mayor Moscone’s imperturbable aide, felt that there was an extraordinary tension in him. Playing softball with city officials, he would play “as though this were the World Series,” Wax said, while the other players swapped stories and drank beer in the sun.

During the spring, a feud had broken out between Dan White and Harvey Milk. From the beginning, White had attached great importance to the defeat of a bill that would put a psychiatric-outpatient clinic for teen-agers in his district. Milk initially told White that he would probably vote against the bill, but then, after examining the needs of the patients, he changed his mind and voted for the bill. After the bill passed, White refused to speak to Milk. He cast the only vote against Milk’s gay-rights bill when it came to the floor, and opposed every request that Milk made on behalf of the gay community. The feud became public, but neither the defense counsel nor the prosecutor gave it any weight at the trial. In early November, Milk told friends and aides that he thought White was “a closet case” and “dangerous;” he did not explain why he thought so, but he repeated the remark several times.

When White tendered his resignation from the board, he spoke of financial pressures, and these were real. The salary of a supervisor was not enough to support a family, as he had said, and he, unlike most of his colleagues, had no outside source of income. The baked-potato stand only added to his worries, because his wife had to leave her baby to go out and tend it, and still it looked as if it might fail. Molinari, who sympathized with White, thought he had made the right decision in resigning, and thought he looked relieved and happy because of it—as though a great weight had been lifted from him. But four days later, after meeting with the leaders of the Police Officers’ Association and representatives from the Board of Realtors, White asked to have his job back. He never really explained why.

Harvey Milk had cheered when White resigned and, on hearing that the Mayor was inclined to reappoint him, went to Moscone and pointed out that White’s vote had been crucial to the defeat of a number of the Mayor’s projects. He also pointed out that if Moscone reappointed the only anti-gay spokesman on the board he would lose every gay vote in the city in the next election. Milk was not kidding, and he gave the Mayor to understand that. “You won’t get elected dogcatcher,” he said.

At the trial, both the defense and the prosecution generally avoided the whole subject of city politics, but since White had the swing vote on the board, there were real political issues at stake in his reappointment. There were also real political tensions in the city. Harvey Milk took the question of White’s reappointment seriously, but so did the Police Officers’ Association. The old-line policemen had a number of problems with the Mayor. In the first place, they disliked Charles R. Gain, the police chief Moscone had appointed two years before. Gain was an outsider—he had not come up through the ranks—and he was not one whose values they respected. According to Frank Falzon, the trouble had begun on Gain’s arrival, when he removed the American flag from his office and replaced it with plants. In their view, the gesture symbolized the man. The disaffection grew when Gain had the police cars painted powder blue, and when he backed the Mayor on minority hiring. For some months, Moscone had been pushing the board to settle a discrimination suit brought by the few black officers in the Police Department—a settlement that would have required the police to take affirmative action to hire and promote members of racial minorities. The Police Officers’ Association had come out against it, and thus far the board had blocked it, six to five. What was more, Moscone and Gain were promising to hire openly gay policemen, and Moscone had said he would put an acknowledged homosexual on the Police Commission. It had been less than ten years since the police were asked to raid gay bars and lock up gay men as perverts—and this was too much for them. The year before, there had been loose talk in the department about killing the police chief. Now there was loose talk about getting rid of the Mayor.

Investigating the police connection during the trial, Warren Hinckle, of the Chronicle, found an undersheriff who had witnessed White’s arraignment and his first evening in jail. White, he said, had not shown any signs of “diminished capacity,” nor had he seemed at all sorry for what he had done. And why should he? The police were laughing and joking with him and giving him friendly pats. The undersheriff worried about this. It wasn’t that he suspected a police conspiracy in the killings; rather, he thought that if there were any police approval of the assassinations, the prosecutor should have brought this out at the trial.

Later, journalists reëxamining the case investigated the possibility that there might have been a police conspiracy. They found no evidence for one, though they did find considerable animosity toward the former Mayor among conservative policemen (and some officers wore “Free Dan White” T-shirts after the killings). From a factual standpoint, the better hypothesis seemed to be that White had acted independently for the purpose of making himself a hero in their eyes. Yet this didn’t make sense, either. On the board, White had been of great service to the Police Officers’ Association—the proof being that the officers wanted him back on it. But if he wanted their approbation why had he resigned? Then, too, if he had killed Moscone and Milk simply because he knew—or thought he knew—that the police wanted them out of the way, his act would not have been that of a totally sane man. Yet the journalists refused to believe that White was insane—even temporarily insane. The killings had been too deliberate. White, after all, had sat up all night after he heard of the Mayor’s decision; then he had acted methodically. His former aide testified that he had seemed agitated that morning, but the Mayor’s secretary had noticed nothing unusual about him. He had killed the two men like an executioner; then he had called his wife, gone to the police station where he had worked, and confessed—not to murder but to voluntary manslaughter. He had seemed quite himself in the police lockup. When he went to the state prison to serve his term, psychiatrists had examined him and had decided against prescribing therapy; he had “no apparent signs” of mental disorder, they said. He served his term without incident, and was back out on parole in 1984.

But there was a workable hypothesis. There was a story that the prosecutor might have told about Dan White if he had wished to construct a plausible motive for murder. The story went like this: Dan White had resigned from the Board of Supervisors for purely personal reasons. He had financial problems, and he worried that his wife and child were suffering because of him. Besides, the job did not suit him: he was too tense—too controlled and too controlling a man to get along in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. Because of all this, he had fallen into a depression—a depression that had been alleviated by his decision to resign. But he had also quit because he was a quitter. In a television interview after the trial, Frank Falzon said that White had finally left the Police Department for good because he objected to the treatment of a prisoner in handcuffs and could not get his way. “He had a tendency to run occasionally from situations,” Falzon said in his testimony during the trial. White did not lack physical courage—that was not the point. Rather, he lacked the psychological flexibility to deal with the everyday politics of any organization.

Being politically naïve, White did not realize the political consequences of his private decision to quit the board until the real-estate men and the police came to him. What kind of pressure was put on him remains unknown, but the pressure was certainly great enough to make him put himself in the humiliating position of asking the Mayor to give him his job back after only four days. The developers meant nothing to him—that was politics. But the police—well, they were his buddies. He hung around with them even while he was on the board. And if you have been a policeman or a fireman, and if you have been a trooper on the line in Vietnam, you know that your honor and your life depend on your not letting your buddies down. White (as someone may have reminded him) had let his buddies down—had let them down by quitting, the way he always did.

For a time, White thought he could get his job back. “I’ve got a real surprise for the gay community,” he told a reporter from a gay newspaper a day or so after he heard that Harvey Milk had opposed his reappointment. He had hope, but then he learned that the Mayor had decided against him. That evening, after the radio reporter called him, the realization hit: he had sold out his buddies for his family life and a baked-potato stand. He wrestled with his guilt all night long; then, in the morning, he made his plan. He carried it out, and afterward his conscience was clear; he had done the right thing; he had sacrificed himself for his buddies.

Of course, no one knew, or could know, what went through Dan White’s mind the day he shot George Moscone and Harvey Milk. But a plausible scenario was what a prosecutor would have needed to establish premeditation and convict him. For a prosecutor, however, the difficulty was that to construct a plausible motive for White was necessarily to bring city politics into the courtroom. Such a prosecutor would have had to bring witnesses to testify to the conflict between the Mayor and the old-line policemen. He would have had to talk about the police opposition to the anti-discrimination suit brought by the black officers, and about the hostility that many of the rank-and-file felt toward their own police chief. Further, he would have had to expose the repugnance the police felt for what went on every night in the Castro and Folsom districts. He would have had to reveal the vein of anger against the gay community which lay below the surface of city politics and public discourse—the anger that Dianne Feinstein had warned the gay community about. He would have had to show that San Francisco was not the perfectly tolerant city that it seemed to be. But Thomas Norman did not do this, and so the conflict broke out into the open. ♦

(This is the first part of a two-part article.)