A Sad Day in San Francisco Remembered

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

40 years ago today, around 10:00 in the morning, I went to the nearby Safeway supermarket in San Francisco to pick up a few things, mostly in a great mood, as I was less than three weeks away from getting married for the first time. When I got back home, my fiancé had a look of anguish on her face, and said, “There’s something terrible in the news that’s just happened.” I couldn’t imagine that what she was going to tell me was that the SF mayor George Moscone, as well as Supervisor Harvey Milk, had both been shot to death, and the suspect was the former supervisor Dan White, whose bid to regain his supervisor seat only a couple weeks earlier had been rejected by Moscone and one of the mayor’s strongest backers was Harvey Milk. Moscone was shot four times, Milk five!

Where it most affected me was that two months before, we had met the mayor at a posh political rally at SF’s Fairmont Hotel, where we performed. Every major local politician was there, including Dianne Feinstein, still active today as a Senator, and unbeknownst to everyone in the room, would become SF’s Mayor on November 27. The guest of honour was actor and staunch liberal Ed Asner, best known for playing the crusty character Lou Grant in both a sitcom (“Mary Tyler Moore Show”) and a spinoff drama (“Lou Grant”). We would have a continuing communication with him for several years, and more immediately, he helped get us booked on the daytime talk show hosted by Mike Douglas during a week when Asner would be co-hosting. Other guests that day included country singer Loretta Lynn and then body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom were very nice to us, even though the performance we gave on the show didn’t really do us any favours. From the night at the Fairmont, I still have a picture of us with both the late mayor and Mr. Asner.

We had already known Harvey Milk for over a year by the time of that Fairmont gig. He was, for those that somehow missed the Sean Penn biopic, the first openly gay person in America to be elected to a public office, and was a very visible presence among not just the gay community, but everywhere else in the City. Where we first met him was at an annual Labor Day weekend event in 1977 known as the Castro Street Fair, which was by then in its fourth year, and still goes on today, though moved to October. Milk was one of the initial organisers of the event, and in 1977 we would be the opening act. Needless to say, it cemented our following amongst the gay community, and Milk came up to introduce himself after we were done. We would run into him several times over the next year, and by the time the Street Fair came around the following year, we had been enough of a presence on the SF scene that instead of opening the whole show, we were now closing.

The news on November 27, 1978 hit home on so many levels, and even more sad was the case of Dan White, who was arrested a day later. He was strongly conservative, almost as much a rarity for San Francisco as snow (last time that happened was 1976). He was a family man, Viet Nam veteran and former police officer who held Christian values, and was elected from one of the few conservative-leaning districts in the City. Milk knew better than most that White was a loose cannon, and believed his presence on the Board of Supervisors was a major problem, which is why he campaigned vociferously to oppose his reappointment after he had resigned when the Board told him he couldn’t run another business at the same time. The space of time between his first resignation and the assassinations was 17 days total.

In his trial, his attorneys used the renowned “Twinkie defence,” which implied diminished capacity due to stress, and his propensity to only eat junk food during this time was a contributing factor. The plea was successful, as White was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder, which resulted in only a 7-year prison term as opposed to a life sentence. That verdict caused rioting in the City, which I was a witness to from the SF Opera House, where I’d gone to see the classical music satirist PDQ Bach. During intermission, my friends and I were looking out the window and seeing police cars on fire, and thinking back to a decade before when this was a common occurrence, albeit over a different cause. Watching the news coverage of the riots later that evening, I remember the newscaster commenting, “One name that has been rather under-mentioned in all of this is George Moscone.” Sad but true. White served five years of his seven-year sentence, then killed himself a year after parole at the ripe old age of 39.

For me, it’s difficult to look at the photo of us with Moscone and Asner (who is still with us and still working at age 89), and adjacent to that, a photo of us with Harvey Milk without getting a little teary, especially today. I imagine Dan White was at that same event at the Fairmont, as it was in September, 1978, and White didn’t resign his seat until November. Who’d have thought?

November 27th, 2018



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