Legacy of Harvey Milk and His Assassination

As president of the Board of Supervisors, it's my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. Oh, Jesus Christ! The... I hit him! I hit him! Hold Shh. Quiet. Quiet. The suspect is Supervisor Dan White. On November 27, 1978, San Francisco's Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in City Hall. Harvey Milk had served only 11 months on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, but he had already come to represent something far greater than his office. A year before he was gunned down, Harvey Milk tape recorded a will. This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or the potential target for somebody who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed themselves. knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time, I feel it's important that some people know my thoughts. I stood for more than just a candidate. I have never considered myself a candidate. I have always considered myself part of a movement, part of a candidacy. I wish I had time to explain everything I did. Almost everything was done in the eyes of the gay movement. I met Harvey like most people met Harvey, I think, in his camera store. I had been living in the city about a year and a half, I guess, and maybe not even that long, and went into the camera store. Someone recommended it to have my film developed and was greeted by this raving maniac. He was screaming and shouting. I don't even... know what the issue was at that point but he was screaming and shouting at someone in the camera store and I I was a little intimidated you know I thought this guy is a little too weird for me when I really got to know him was in 70 1975, I had a miscarriage and I was astounded that I had, 75 or 76, I had a miscarriage and I was astounded. I mean, it's a devastating physical experience as well as a mental experience. And I was home from the hospital and Harvey had heard that this had happened. And lo and behold, There was a knock at the door, and I went sort of like floating to the door. door because I wasn't feeling well at all and he was standing on my doorstep with a dozen roses and he said well can I get you anything do you have enough food in the house do you have milk do you have food I'll do your grocery shopping and I knew him by name as he knew me but I didn't know him well enough for having to do my grocery shopping but that's the kind of concern he was and you know you could relate to Harvey on on on many levels one level was his sense of humor which I liked, you know, and, and, uh, you know, making fun of things that sometimes were very heavy, which was how I was brought up. But also, I didn't feel like an outsider with Harvey. I felt like someone of worth, you know, and some respect, the teacher thing. And if I was, in fact, feminine, or if I was, in fact, you know, didn't always speak in a certain syntax, or if I said, you know, fuck that asshole over there, you know, he's really a jerk. You know, Harvey didn't go, you know, this is not a good gay image. So that mentally. The human factor. At first, Harvey Bernard Milk showed few signs he would make history. 22nd, 1930. The second son of middle-class Jewish parents. He grew up in Woodmere, Long Island. A kid with the big ears became, in high school, an ordinary student. A practical joker and a regular guy. Or so his friends thought. Then she joined the Navy. Then he began a career as a stock analyst on Wall Street. What was not on the resume was his homosexuality, which Harvey Milk had known about since he was 14. In the 1960s, Harvey Milk took a step off course and befriended avant-garde theater people, then worked his way into a producing job on Broadway. By the beginning of the 70s, Harvey Milk had marched in anti-war demonstrations, burned his Bank of Merricard and protest, and emigrated to San Francisco. He and lover Scott Smith settled down and opened a camera store on Castro Street, in a quiet old neighborhood soon to become known as the Castro. Harvey Milk threw himself into neighborhood politics. When he dubbed himself the mayor of Castro Street, the idea stuck. In 1973, he tried to make it official by running for the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco's city council. To many, Harvey Milk seemed more like a joke than a candidate. Well, first time I heard of Harvey was one of these conventions at the Labor Council, and we're voting on who we're going to support in our union. We get together with other union delegates. talk over who we were going to support. And we supported a guy that I didn't know at that time, Harvey Milk. And we were talking with the people, and somebody said, he's gay. I said, okay. And I thought, holy Christ, how are we going to go back to our union and go back to where we work and tell guys that we supported a fruit? You know, and I thought, my God, this is, what's labor coming to, you know? And then we found out that he got Coors beer out of all of the gay bars in San Francisco. And this Coors beer boycott, which labor has been trying to do throughout the United States, especially in San Francisco, or Labor Town, really hadn't been too successful. You know, I met Harvey for the first time. I mean, I had read about him and had heard a lot about him, but that was the first time I really met him. And it was a rather strange meeting because Harvey was talking about all these visionary things about the oneness of man and thinking about all the great things that needed to be done, not only in San Francisco, but throughout the country. And I said to myself, gee, this man is never going to make it. Between 1973 and 1976, Harvey Milk ran for political office and lost three times. But in each race, he garnered more and more votes, enough to establish himself as a broker for his neighborhood and the growing gay community. In 1975, neighborhood actors... Activists like Harvey Milk found a strong supporter in their new mayor, George Moscone. Moscone had campaigned on the conviction that a city is enriched by more than downtown development. As the new mayor, Moscone showed respect for his city's many neighborhoods, cultures, and peoples. My late father was a guard at San Quentin, who I was visiting one day, who showed to me and then explained the function of the death charge. chamber. And it just seemed inconceivable to me, though I was pretty young at the time, that in this society that I had been trained to believe was the most effective and efficient of all societies, that the only way we could deal with violent crime would be to do the ultimate ourselves, and that's to governmentally sanction the taking of another person's life. Moscone and his allies, including Harvey Milk, set about designing a plan for neighborhood people to run the city they lived in. The plan, called district elections, would allow candidates for supervisor, such as Harvey Milk, to run from districts rather than the city at large. They had this crazy idea that they're going to change the form of government the way we elect our officials in this town. There was one meeting that was supposed to be behind this guy Harvey Milk's camera store. And so I went to the meeting and I kind of thought, what the hell am I doing here with all these fruits and kooks? Behind the camera store, a little crummy camera store, nothing like Brooks. It was a little crummy camera store and in the back was this little crummy room with a bunch of worn out old sofas and chairs and a bunch of people in jeans and Levi's and... Harvey Milk was there, and he's not, he doesn't dress in a distinguished manner. He just looks like, and he's working stiff. The way he handled the people there, some of the people get kind of emotional and outrageous, and he would control them and calm them down and get the thinking going a certain way, and very, very impressive. The voters of San Francisco decided to give the district elections plan a try. In the Castro, a new kind of politics was taking shape. More and more men and women were arriving in San Francisco every day to take up the gay life. The Castro was booming. Each summer, Harvey Milk helped organize the Castro Street Fair, where the neighborhood celebrated its very existence. Harvey Milk realized that the castor was ready to elect its own representative to City Hall. In 1977, Milk launched his fourth political campaign, this time for the Board of Supervisors from the newly created District 5. There's just too many candidates, the vote is split all over the place, and there's too many things happening nobody knows about. There are at least seven candidates with a shot at capturing the heart of the city, District Number 5. The Liberal vote is split between three main candidates and many less. lesser ones. One main is Terence Hallinan, an attorney with endorsements from Democrats and Labor. Hallinan splits the liberal vote with two gays, lawyer Rick Stokes and Castro Street businessman Harvey Milk. I think when it comes to a matter of who came first, that's That's fairly easily provable. I don't think anyone ever heard of Harvey Milk until he ran for office in 1973. Any single neighborhood issue or city issue for the last five years, you found Harvey Milk taking a stand, one way or the other, but taking a stand. Every candidate claims to know of polls showing him the winner or running strong. But the one candidate who seems to run best of all has very low visibility. That's the one named Undecided. In San Francisco, Linda Schacht for Channel 5 Eyewitness News. When he decided to run for supervisor, he did call me, and I went in to meet with him, and we just hit it off instantly. That very first day, he asked me if I would run his campaign. I was 23. There's this punk kid who knows nothing about campaigns except that I loved them. What he offered me was an opportunity. He had no money. But he was a very difficult person to work with. He did have temper fits where he would just be like a little kid sometimes for no good reason except that he was probably exhausted. Getting involved in that campaign was so special, especially after the number of campaigns that I had been through with the Democratic Party and kind of the normal type of politicians and the normal kind of campaigns. that campaign was anything but normal. One day I was in there, into the campaign headquarters, and I'm looking around at this motley group of people. It was a lot of fun, but give me a break. And I said to Harvey, I said, well, who's that? And there's this desk over in the corner. It's really dark. I don't think there's a plug back in that corner. There's a telephone. I remember seeing the lights on the telephone, which is like the brightest thing in that corner. And he says, she's really good. Her name is Ann Cronenberg. She's really good. And I'm looking at her and thinking, oh my lord, your image here. He's trying to run, you know, in a very big district. He'd run in our neighborhood and anything goes in our neighborhood. But when you get out, you know, you kind of have to kind of blend in. And I looked at Ann, and here she was, you know, like a big dyke with the motorcycle clothes on. And then there's John with his three-piece suit, and there's little Michael Wong, who Harvey always called his Lotus Blossom. And a couple of old ladies that would be in there, too. Bless their hearts. And then people silk screening on the side, and you can smell the ink, and, you know, all this hubbub. And he's trying to run a business in the front. Everything happened. In this long, dingy camera store, everything from Save the Whales to Get Elected. We had volunteers in all different shapes and sizes from Medora Payne size up to 70 year old women who wanted to be doing something. Maybe they couldn't be walking precincts but they wanted to do something for Harvey. It was a nice mix of people. He never stopped, and he did most of everything himself, which meant, you know, every day he was out in the street to hit the morning rush hour and the afternoon rush hour. He'd walk precincts, he'd go to shops, you know, door to door. At the age of 47, on his fourth try for public office, Harvey Milk was elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. When Harvey got back to the campaign headquarters that night, people went crazy. He rode up on his, not his motorcycle, my motorcycle. They all got off the bikes and Harvey was just encircled with people. I mean, the The feeling there was just one of such total joy. And it was more than just, you know, a candidate winning. It was the fact that all of these lesbians and gay men throughout San Francisco who had felt like they'd had no voice before, four now had someone who represented them. Just feel so good for milk. But when feeling good for milk, you're feeling good for yourself. You know, this was elation, just absolute elation. Harvey never, ever drank. But that night, you know, the champagne was flowing freely and he picked up one bottle of champagne and poured it all over himself. It was incredible. We can hear it. We can't really see too much, but it looks and sounds to you and to me like New Year's Steve on Market Street, a place called... And the reason for all this merriment and gaiety, if you pardon the pun, is the man standing to my right, the first gay supervisor elected in San Francisco. His name is Harvey Milk. First of all, congratulations. And I've never seen anything like this, Harvey. Oh, it's all over the city tonight. What does this mean, your election, your activity now on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco? Does that mean as many straights are concerned that maybe the gays are taking over San Francisco? Are you going to be a supervisor for all the people? I have to be. That's what I was elected for. I have to be there to open up for the dialogue, for the sensitivities of all people, for all the problems. The problems that affect this city affect all of us. It was really a monumentous occasion. You know, he had been waiting at that point for four years for that victory, and I think it was very sweet for all of us. Thank you, San Francisco. All right! I first met Harvey Milk when I was sent to do a story on this guy out in the Castro who had a camera store who was running for supervisor and he was getting a lot of attention so I had to go out there and do an interview with him and I thought, oh brother, a guy who owns a camera store, what could he know about politics or anything and I know he was going to be a dud. But I got out there and he was full of life, he was a great speaker and I was... I was impressed on the spot and it made a good story. It's as if he knew, you came here with an attitude that I was just a homosexual with a camera store and I'll show you. And I thought he did. He was much more impressive than just that kind of image. This will be the first time in many years that we've seen so many relatively new faces on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And this is probably because it's the first time in a long time that supervisors have been elected by district instead of citywide. Harvey Milk, a homosexual, the first devout women's rights advocate, Carol Ruth Silver, the first Chinese-American, Attorney Gordon Lau, the first black woman, Ella Hill Hutch, and Dan White, a city fireman who gave up his job to take his seat. After the formal swearing-in ceremony, the board elected Dianne Feinstein to be its new president. In a six to five vote, Feinstein beat out Gordon Lau. But then we got the first taste of the new politics. Someone suggested the board vote again to make it unanimous for Feinstein. But newcomers Milk and Silver refused. They stuck to their votes for Lau to cheers from their supporters. And just about everyone at City Hall today was agreeing on one thing. They may be a lot of things, but they probably won't be dull. It was interesting to see that Harvey did not vote for Dianne Feinstein to be president. And it really shocked many of us in the audience because we said, wow, here was this gay supervisor who really didn't have to do it and maybe might be committing political suicide and yet he was standing up for what he believed and making a very strong statement. And it was clear what Harvey Milk represented on that board. He represented change. He was different. He was different from the conservative majority on the board of supervisors. Lost in the hubbub over the rise of California's first publicly gay official was the election of Dan White, another kind of neighborhood populist. Dan White has worked and lived virtually all his 31 years in this southeastern section of San Francisco. The neighborhood problems are the city's problems. You see, the transportation, the crime, the education, the taxes, these are problems that we're all going to have to... Saul. Hello, Ann. Come on out here and say hello. Dan White comes across as the kind of son almost any mother would be proud of. Ann was one of my big, big supporters here. A lot of the ladies here are getting their hair done. Clean cut, respectful to his elders, and seemingly possessed of small-town values. When was the last time you heard a San Francisco politician talk about setting up neighborhood athletic teams? And then when we get the best team, we will challenge, say, Harvey Milk's district to a game of softball where they have champs out there. In a sense, you could say it's old-fashioned, but it's old-fashioned values that built this country. To me, this is what society is all about. If you see someone in trouble, you go to help them out. Dan White says nobody's going to ignore his corner of the city anymore. Dan White and Harvey Milk became symbols of the new district election system. Dan White, a fireman, a native San Franciscan, Harvey Milk, a small businessman, and a gay immigrant. Milk's victory sparked euphoria among his supporters and a sense of something new arriving at City Hall. He wanted to meet Carter. He thought that was very important, and I think he even brought a photographer along, even though Carter didn't want to be photographed with a gay person. And Ruth Carter Stapleton was, you know, the evangelical sister, was carrying on a mission on gays. She told Harvey that she could convert him and that even though he was Jewish, if he gave himself to Jesus Christ, that his homosexuality would disappear or something. And he made a couple of very wry comments. And one of them was that I think they shook hands. And he said, I'm surprised that you shook my hand. And she said, why? And he said, because you never know where my hand's been. Isn't that awful? Well, she just looked at him. She was just starstruck. I mean, what could she say? Before Harvey was elected, I can remember looking at City Hall and feeling like that was not my place. I didn't belong there. I wasn't welcome there. I didn't feel comfortable there. And the people who were on the Board of Supervisors were names you read about in the newspaper, not people you would expect to see in the grocery store. much less have a conversation with on a personal or human level. And Harvey was really part of changing all that. We're interviewing Harvey Milk. What's it like being a so-called in-person as opposed to having been an out-person for a number of years? Being one of them? Yes. Incredible. The establishment. The white power establishment, non-gay, very wealthy establishment, have to deal with me. It's an incredible position. Excuse me. Cut. I have a slight cold. Take two. Want to repeat that, please? Sure. Go. In San Francisco, as in any place else, you have the blacks and browns fighting, and you have the Filipinos not talking to the Asians, and they all hate the gays, and so forth. And that has existed. And we've had, over the years, have fought for the crumb. But I think because of... election of district elections and this particular board and myself we've overcoming a lot of those problems there's tremendous harmony developing it's not perfect by any means the citywide level I think it's vital that the minority the traditional ethnic minorities, and the gays and the feminists linked together. Possibly the rank-and-file union, not the union leaders, the rank-and-file, linked together to form a very solid, strong coalition so that we can influence the total direction of the city. As supervisor, Harvey Milk had the political skills to advance the issues that neighborhood people cared about. Ren can... Control, limiting high-rise development, public transportation. and the rights of senior citizens. The biggest crime in this city is the fact that there's some government elected officials who don't care about senior citizens. And they got news for them. They're going to grow old and be a senior citizen themselves or drop dead. Maybe I liked Harvey because almost everything, anytime he'd make a speech about anything, I agreed with him. So then I thought he was a great man because I agreed with what he talked about. But you could hear where he was coming from. He was coming from people positions. If it had to do with parks or it had to do with schools or it had to do with police protection, anything that affected little people. It wasn't only for gay rights. He was for gay rights because that is a minority. But there's other minorities. There's handicapped people. There's senior citizens. And so there's more and more. You start listening to him and getting involved with him because, gee, this is the kind of guy that is going to talk about you. Harvey said that if anyone solved the dog shit problem in the city, that they could be elected mayor. And so he started in the first month of being in City Hall to come up with some kind of ordinance to take care of dog shit. And he knew that the Pooper Scooper ordinance, along with a few other things, would really give him good press. He was a master at figuring out what would get him covered in the newspaper. And so the day of his press conference for the Pooper Scooper ordinance, he went out early and planted some shit. on the lawn so that after his press conference he knew just where he was going to stand, that he would step in it. Supervisor Milk took to the grassy lawn at DuBose Park this afternoon to publicize the new law. Under the ordinance, dog lovers who don't clean up can be fined. I think what happened is what happened in New York, that people use their own ingenuity, their own ideas, their own concepts. Some people are using their pie tins, some people are using the Wall Street Journal, and other people are using their doggie-doos and shovels. Milk put his foot down to emphasize that the city intends to enforce, and you guessed it, in Supervisor Milk's words, this really is the bottom line. Harvey Milk's stand on which voting machine? The city should purchase was a critical role. At that time, George Moscone favored Votomatic. And Harvey really was quite vocal. And he said the city should go with Votomatic because non-English speaking citizens, particularly those who are elderly and who have experienced discrimination, can exercise their right to vote in the most accessible manner. He locked heads with Quentin Kopp. and Dianne Feinstein over the issue. And I was tremendously impressed because Harvey never once called us and said, is this the right machine for the Chinese community? He knew that it was the right machine and he didn't have to call any one of us and say, gee, I want to remind you folks that I'm doing you this great favor and I want you to be indebted to me. The issue closest to Harvey Milk's heart was a gay rights bill for San Francisco. What the Gay Rights Ordinance in San Francisco's main focus is, is to prevent the people who are already employed who are gay, who if they want to come out and break down the stereotypes, prevent them from being fired. For example, you'll see in this Gay Day parade, a group of at least 30 gay doctors. That is the tip of the iceberg. In the Bay Area, there are hundreds and hundreds of gay doctors. Most of who are closeted because of a fear of loss of jobs. In San Francisco, they can, quote, come out and not have to worry about their jobs. And that's the main focus of our ordinance. Supervisor White says people are getting angry, and he believes that anger could lead to a backlash that will wipe out all of the gains the gays have made thus far. You can have someone that's a transvestite, a man that, for his sexual kicks or orientation, whatever you want to call it, loves to dress up as a woman. If he is a qualified teacher, he can go into any school, or he can go into any business, and they can't refuse him. Ten supervisors voted for the gay rights bill. Dan White cast the only dissenting vote. Mayor Moscone enthusiastically signed the bill into law. We got lots of hate mail, and it started out that the hate mail really upset me. Again, I just was not prepared for that at all. I mean, people saying awful, awful things, just nasty, disgusting things. And it was Gay Freedom Day, and I was driving the car in the... And Harvey was in it. I was terrified. I was afraid someone was going to take a shot at him. And Harvey said it could happen any day, at any place, at any time. And I'm just not going to worry about it. The statement that the Gay Day Parade is no more. No more will we be harassed. No more will we be staying in our closet. The people from all over the state and all over the country, for them to see 100, 200, 300, 400,000 gay people and friends marching through the downpour. area. This is our city too. They will go back to Des Moines, Iowa, to Richmond, Minnesota, to Santa Cruz. They will go back and say, my God, 300,000 gay people and their friends marched. And you know, I almost think I saw my son there. What did you see that you thought was obscene? Well, I see naked men walking around, naked women walking around, which doesn't bother me as far as my personal standards of nudity or what, but it's not proper. Many people do not approve of outward... displays of sexuality, be it heterosexuality or homosexuality. And this is a point I stand firm on and I think the gay community themselves would find hard to refute the statements I'm making now. And this is a problem. We wouldn't allow it for any other parade in San Francisco and it should not be allowed for the gay parade. They want to bring their sin out of the closet and parade it on the street and be called respectable, decent, natural people. It's not decent. It's not respectable and it's not natural. And by the way, God doesn't make people that way. Don't blame God for that. Who wants the children? And I'll tell you who wants your children. The homosexual crowd wants them. In 1977 and 78, gay rights measures were being repealed across the United States. In California, lawmaker John Briggs took a further step. Every homosexual, every lesbian... mounted a campaign for Proposition 6, a statewide measure to deny homosexuals their jobs in public schools. Now, what Proposition 6 is really all about is the right of parents to determine. who will be teaching their children. We don't allow people who believe in practicing bestiality to teach our children. We don't let prostitutes teach our children. And the reason we don't is because it's illegal to be a prostitute. But it's not illegal to be a homosexual in California. Proposition 6 brought the issue of homosexuality into the homes of millions of Californians. and it thrust Harvey Milk into a statewide space. There are already laws on the books to protect our children. Everybody from superintendents of schools, Wilson Riles, to Jerry Brown, to newspaper editors across the state agree that indeed we have the laws to protect our children. I was born of heterosexual parents. I was taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society with television ads and newspaper ads. Fiercely heterosexual. a society that puts down homosexuality. And why am I homosexual if I'm affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there'd be a lot of nuns running around the streets today. Harvey knew that he had to have, or that the gay community had to have, some kind of a repository for money so that groups that were fighting the Briggs Initiative would have the, you know, could get funds in order to do the things that they had to do. And I ended up being his co-chair of the United Fund to fight the Briggs Initiative. And that began our association, which over those months, when Proposition 6 came into being, became a real close association, and I got to know him. on a level that I had never anticipated. Nobody took Harvey Milk very seriously when he first ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973. But last year, Milk won election to the Board of Supervisors. ...supervisors where he's the first openly gay city official in the United States. And representing the Bay Area Committee against the Briggs Initiative is Sally Gearhart. Gearhart is a lesbian, a former high school teacher, and now a speech professor at San Francisco State University. I remember that just before that debate, we had had a lot of talk, Harvey and I, about how we would dress. And we had agreed that the image that we wanted to project was sort of Mama and Papa USA. As neat and conservative as we possibly could. So a half hour before we start to leave for the television station, Harvey calls me and says, I've lost my earrings, dear, whatever shall I do? And I freak out thinking, oh, my soul. You yourself say that the heterosexual is the child molester. And if in your statements here, in all these newspapers and tonight, that child molestation is not an issue, if it is not an issue, why do you put out literature that hammers it home? Why do you play on that myth and fear? Same thing with VD, Harvey. We put out publications about VD so you can avoid it. This is campaign literature. Yes, we're trying to keep people from falling into that trap. We're trying to prevent it by pointing it out. And by the way, I don't make the statement that 95% of all the heterosexuals commit... What percent is it? I don't know. You tell me. The state says 90 to 95%. Well, I've never seen that in writing. I don't make those statements. You do. You even says here... We are not talking about child molestation. The fact is... At least 95% of the people are heterosexual. If we took heterosexuals out and homosexuals out, you know what? We'd have no teaching. No child molestation. So you're saying that the percentage of population is equal to the percentage of child molestation? No. There's no difference. I'm not saying that at all. That's what you just said. No, no. I'm saying that we cannot prevent child molestation, so let's cut our odds down and take out the homosexual group and keep in the heterosexual group. Why take out the homosexual group is more than, you know, overwhelmingly it is true. that it's the heterosexual men, I might add, who are the child molesters. I believe that's a myth. I've never seen... Oh, senators! The FBI! The National Council on Family Relations! The Santa Clara County Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center, and on and on and on. Sometimes I think what we were faced with in Proposition 6 was not so much a conflict of values as two sets of fears. The incredible fears that the gay community had, all of us, That here we were being stomped on by what was turning out to be the moral majority. I mean, our very lives were being, you know, threatened. The ways that we live, what our lifestyle is. And our reaction was extreme. And it should have been extreme. But then when you get into the other person's shoes, you figure that there was a lot of fear on the part of the fundamentalists as well. I mean, when you've lived your entire life believing in a certain social structure, believing in certain sex roles, believing in the ways that men and women should relate to each other. Believing in the family. You know, believing in what God, what you believe God says should be the way human beings should relate within the family structure. And all of a sudden, there are these perverts out here saying that there are ways to live that are different from that and that furthermore it's great and beautiful and true and good. Then you're threatened. And the very fabric of what this nation is supposed to be made up of... in the eyes of the fundamentalists, was actually being attacked, or is actually being attacked by gay people. In August, four months before the election, opinion polls predicted that the majority of California citizens would vote for John Briggs' Proposition 6 and against the rights of gay teachers. We had lost repeatedly, every time the gay rights had been up for a vote, we had lost around the country, usually by huge margins. Almost everyone thought we were going to lose, and lose badly. I don't remember anyone being optimistic. We were so pessimistic, or at least I was, and a lot of other people were, that we thought we might even lose San Francisco. Malcolm Briggs' support lies in Southern California, so his appearance here was more symbolic than functional. He called San Francisco the moral garbage dump of the nation. If they're going to lead such an open life of homosexuality that they want, Thank you. A 21-gun salute every time somebody goes by them, those people are going to be in danger of being removed from their job. People are very emotional. They don't want to listen. Look what happened in Germany. Now, Anita Bryan already says that Jews and Muslims are going to hell. You know she's got a shoppy list. Briggs said this morning that Dade County, Oklahoma, and St. Paul, Minnesota were only preliminary battles. He called his California campaign against homosexual teachers the main event. At San Francisco City Hall, Linda Schack, Channel 5 Eyewitness News. This was such a personal issue for me. This is something I did every day. And of course, the gay teacher issue is very volatile. They sit down with somebody who's It's apparent and maybe not particularly vitriolic against people, but to really say, look, this is a myth. You know, like I've been teaching for a long time. I'm not interested in getting in his pants. And, you know, that's people didn't want to hear it. You know, I mean, how do you win people over to your side on something that's so ingrained and so emotional? I mean, they're children. So even though he was a buffoon and even though he was ludicrous, he was also at least the people who advised him were brilliant because they picked on this particular issue. children. Um... It would be hard for me, if we're talking about schools, to go along with you. Any other adult thing that you do, the decorator, the hairdresser, whom I love, whom I have, I take him on every vacation that I have. I don't care what he does. You went to people's houses and you talked to them, and a lot of times, and you didn't have to have a lot of money to do some of the things, or you went to shopping centers, because a lot of it was face-to-face. And this is a very brave thing. How are you? We're volunteers working against Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative. Do you know about the Briggs Initiative? What is number six? Six. Smoking? No, that's number five. Number six would force local school districts to fire any teacher that was gay or who believed that gay people have rights like other people. And we're concerned that that would be a real attack on human rights for everybody. How do you feel about the initiative and what you do? out We don't have any definite opinion on this. No comment. Could I leave some literature with you so you can learn a little bit more about it? Are you registered voters? Yes, I have registered already. Okay, great. Sorry. I believe this is kind of personal matter. It sure is, but- Yeah, it's something that we feel real strongly about. A lot of my friends are gay teachers and they'll lose their jobs over this, so I really wish you'd give some thought to it because a lot of people will really be affected very badly by it. It's also something where once you set up one kind of thing to discriminate against one group of people, lots of times it makes it easier to discriminate against other groups of people next time around. Give it some thought. If by their silence and their doing nothing, Briggs should win. I think a lot of people are going to realize they have to make an ultimate decision. The decision is to go back in their closet real good, slam the door tight, which some will do, or burst down those closet doors once and for all and stand up and start to fight. Because if we learn from history that the struggle goes on, eventually we will win. And all the president has to do is, well, the governor, is to turn the pages of history a little faster. This message, Jimmy Carter, listen to us. You want to leave? You want to be the world's leader in human rights? Well, damn it, leave! Fifteen million gay men waiting to hear your voice! The grassroots No on 6 campaign was proving effective. One month before the election, the polls predicted a close vote. Many people had come to believe the Briggs Initiative would violate constitutional rights. A surprising array of political figures, including former Governor Ronald Reagan and Supervisor Dan White, went on record against the proposition. president carter spent less than an hour at this downtown sacramento rally as the president left the podium jerry brown whispered to him briefly and he came back for one more word of advice for voters also want to ask everybody to vote against proposition six On November 7th, 1978, Proposition 6 was defeated by a resounding 59 to 41 percent. On election night, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk joined the jubilant celebration in the Castro. Harvey Milk was at the height of his political power. Oh, that was one of the most, that was one of the most exciting nights in my life. I don't think there's any doubt about it. It must have been for most lesbians and gay men, at least in the state of California. Because it wasn't plain, even up until... until the evening of the vote that we were going to win. It wasn't plain at all. And then here was Harvey. And who had been the man who had carried the banner for gay people, you know? Who had been the man who had fought all along in his politics on the Board of Supervisors? ...particularly during the Sixth Campaign. It had been Harvey. He had been the symbol for all of us, he had been the image, and he mounted that platform, and I thought the place was gonna collapse. I've never heard such cheering in my life. To the gay community all over this state, my message to you is, so far a lot of people joined us and rejected Proposition 6, and now we owe them something. owe them to continue the education campaign that took place. We must destroy the myths once and for all, shatter them. We must continue to speak out. And most importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children and we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do, you will feel so much better. Four days after the Briggs Initiative lost, Dan White engineered his own defeat. Surprising everyone, he resigned from the Board of Supervisors. In the last year, Dan White had left. to secure a job as a fireman, been elected a city supervisor for little pay, launched a risky new business, and become a father for the first time. Dan White had entered City Hall an idealist. Unlike his flurry of friends, and his flourishing counterpart Harvey Milk, he was often frustrated by the job. White had never learned to operate in City Hall's atmosphere of backscratching and compromise. White's resignation left Mayor Moscone with the task of finding a replacement. Mr. Mayor, what's happened since Dan White has resigned? I understand you're getting a lot of phone calls and such. The phone calls and cards and letters have been coming. I will tell you, as Dean Martin used to say, I was lobbied from just about the evening that Dan White resigned all the way through to the evening. through the weekend and the phones have been ringing off the hook today. This is Supervisorial District 8, Dan White's former district. As you know, most people were very surprised when Dan quit last Friday. No one seemed to know. He didn't tell any of his fellow supervisors, nor did he tell any of his political... supporters. Obviously, you know, if the time I spent to become elected, the time I spent down at the board, the hours, the many hours I spent, I don't want to see wasted, but for now I can only deal with my family's responsibilities. Many don't agree with Dan White. They say he gave up all of his political chits when he resigned so quickly without making any arrangements for someone whom he liked and supported to take over this district. In Supervisor District 8, I'm David Fowler, Channel 5 Eyewitness News. Well, now it starts all over again, because this morning, former supervisor Dan White says he wants to be called supervisor one more time. I didn't run for election to resign ten months later. I worked awfully hard. My wife and my supporters worked awfully hard. so that I would be elected. And it was a major decision, as you can all understand, on Friday that I had to come to arrive at. But since that time, people unknown to me, plus my family and friends, have come to me and said, stated that they want me to stay in office, that they supported me to stay in office. Mayor Moscone learned from the city attorney that Dan White could not take back his resignation. It was up to the mayor to decide who would get the District 8 seat. Harvey Milk lobbied hard against reappointing Dan White. Harvey's story was that the mayor was thinking of reappointing Dan, and that Harvey went in and said, how can you possibly do that? Dan is the sixth vote on the board we need. And certainly Harvey was courageous in that stance because no one else was doing it. And there were other supervisors on the board who felt just as strongly, but they weren't going to get involved in that. I mean, what if Dan got reappointed? You know, think of the animosity. Moscone started to get word from his coalition of neighborhood groups and ethnic voters. Most of the problems are the people here. ...that they were not consulted, they might have helped, and the fact that they weren't even given the dignity of his concern bothered him. So that's obviously not the best way to go. I think a 10-month supervisor can be excused for political naivete. I'm simply saying that it may not have been the best way to go, but the issue is bigger than his style. The issue is what's fair, right, and just for the people of the District 8. White was at City Hall with his group of backers, some citizens, firemen. and a delegation representing large real estate firms. I'm overwhelmed at your support that you would take time out, you know, to come down here on a Friday at this time to show not only me, but the people of my district and the people of San Francisco that you approve of the way I'm conducting myself. But then Dan White and the shambles of his political career were upstaged by chaos of an entirely different order. The city learned of the murder-suicide of some 900 people. Most of them San Franciscans in Jonestown, Guyana. On Monday, November 27th, Mayor Moscone planned to announce District 8's new supervisor. It was not going to be Dan White. Good evening to outsiders and even to some San Franciscans. It must appear the city has gone a little insane. Just as everyone is beginning to come to grips with the mindless murder-suicide of over 900 members of the San Francisco-based People's Temple, word screams out over the radio, the television, the newspapers that another tragedy is upon us. Room 200, this is office. 3 Edward 1, 1023 for one moment. We're trying to ascertain what is happening. Room 237 please, quick. We've got an ambulance over here. We've got an ambulance. A unit over here. We've got another ambulance. We've got a neon. How many victims gone? I don't know if they're going anywhere. I'm supposed to have Harvey Milk and the mayor supposed to be DOA. As president of the board, and I'm, as president of the board of supervisors, it's my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. Oh, Jesus Christ! The... I hit him! Oh! The suspect is Supervisor Dan White. Suspect is Dan White. Is he in custody? He's not at this time. Thank you very much. No question. Attention all units, suspect named Dan White. 32 years, 6 feet, 185 pounds, wearing a three-piece brown suit, considered armed and dangerous. Attention all units, the former supervisor Dan White is now in custody. Repeating, former supervisor Dan White is now in custody. KMA 438, clear. Dan, why did you do it? Set up. Approximately 10.45 a.m., realizing he was not going to be reappointed, Dan White went directly to the mayor's office unannounced. There was a brief argument. Dan White pulled out a gun and shot... George Moscone. The mayor fell, and White fired two more bullets into his head. White then reloaded his gun. He walked to the other side of City Hall and into Harvey Milk's office. Five shots rang out. According to the coroner's report, Harvey Milk was rising, both hands out in front of him when the first shot hit. He fell. White fired three more times. He leaned over and from above put the gun nearly against Harvey Milk's head and fired a last time. The day that Harvey was killed, I was flying up to Seattle to visit my folks and It's really, I think it was the first time I had seen them since our talk about coming out. I got on the plane at 11.15 in San Francisco. Harvey was killed at 11.10, but I had no idea. And so I screamed and I came back up Van Ness Avenue and I remember thinking, people are going about their business in an ordinary way. How dare they go about their business in an ordinary way? Don't you realize the course of history has been changed? We had a black and white television, and we turned it on in the office, and, um... I think it was just too painful. You know, I mean, it was clear that he was... Both of them were dead, uh... Brutally assassinated, and I... You know, I... You know, I walked out of the office. I had the radio on and the guy came on and he said it with such a certitude, you know, like sometimes, you know, you hear things on the news and they're not going to be true. And he just said it and I knew it was true. In fact, it's interesting, later I thought, I've always kind of thought this might happen. happened and never dwelled on it or and here it was happening you know harvey milk and uh uh george buscott were shot and killed by damn right and i just screamed no like that it just kind of came out and people looked but i had a feeling that people knew why i was screaming So I drove down to City Hall. I mean, I wasn't going to sit here and go crazy. And in looking for parking, I had to park far away. So I walked past this entrance that I ordinarily would not walk, you know, past. And they were bringing out the body stead, which, you know, it kind of, well, I mean, you know, you can think somebody's dead. But, I mean, there, and I knew it was milk because I knew how tall he was, you know, and they hadn't covered, you know, part of his feet or something. And, you know, you trip out on different things and you think, God, what a big foot heart. I never really said to speak. And so then I went around to City Hall in the front, and there were these, a lot of media people. And the thing that struck me the most was, I don't know, I guess, again, this expressive southern Italian background I have. You know, I don't know, I saw people going, ah! But instead, it was quiet. It was silent. We got back and my roommate picked us up at the airport and he said there's going to be a candlelight march. Do you want to go to it? And we said of course. So he said well by now it's probably reached City Hall so we drove directly from the airport to City Hall. And there were maybe 75 people there. And I remember thinking, my God, is this all that anybody cared? And somebody said, no, the march hasn't gotten here yet. So we then walked over to Market Street, which is two or three blocks away. and look down and Market Street runs in a straight line out to the Castro area. And as we turned the corner, there were people as wide as this wide street, as far as you could see. Thousands and thousands of people, that feeling of such loss, having lost someone who was so important and something, you know, Harvey stood for something more than just him. I've been in a relationship going down with all those people, expressing your grief or what it was, but being with all those people, and it's nighttime in San Francisco, and a bunch of strangers around you, and you feel as safe as if you're doing your own home. And there was this black man on the corner of whatever, Noe there, and he kept shouting, where is your anger? Where is your anger? Where is your anger? And, you know, I didn't know where it was. I think that all of us at that time were in such a state of shock, you know, that I don't know if it was numbed or we were necessarily, I guess certainly I was angry, but it seemed appropriate to do this I don't know, you know, peaceful kind of internalized thing out of some kind of respect for the enormity of what happened. It was one of the most eloquent expressions of a community's response to violence that I've ever seen. And I think we as lesbians and gay men and all the straight people who were marching with us that night, and there were thousands, I think we said it. I think we said a message to the nation that night about... What our immediate response was, not violence, but a certain respect for Harvey and a deep regret and feeling of tragedy about it. Because Moscone had been our friend as well. Going down to City Hall, that... Tremendous expanse of people and I turned to John and I said Harvey would have loved this. When we kind of tried to get close to the stage and I saw friends up there and I thought oh I just can't go face anybody. You know I started to cry and everyone started to cry. It was just, it was just so touching. I'm going to start to cry now. But the um, there's a statue down there and everyone put candles. You know, several people right that following week came out of the closet because they had been there and they had seen, you know, all of the people and they had felt that they had been living a lie. Sorry, bitter stop. off i don't know if i can they really felt uh so moved that they came out to people and said did you know that i that i'm gay and um i was so touched by it because that's what harvey He stood for it, and it took his death for them to realize that they just came out. No one would fire them from their jobs because it's against the law. And they could still live a life, and yet that part of our society that is very closed could open. Thursday, November 30th, George Moscone's funeral was held at St. Mary's Cathedral. On Saturday, December 2nd, Harvey Milk's ashes were scattered into the Pacific by his friend. Today we went looking for clues to why White would kill the mayor who refused to reappoint him to his post. and a supervisor who opposed him politically. We didn't find any. For many years, the Whites lived on London Street in the southeast sector of San Francisco, which Whites served during his few months on the board and where he was raised. Among their neighbors on London Street were the Cooks. I don't know. I don't know. He must have went off to deep end or something because he was just a nice guy. Did he ever show any signs of cooking? No. He was an all-American boy as far as I was concerned. I never did see him really argue with anybody. I think he was very family-oriented. man, Catholic. He went to church all the time. He was very devoted to the job. And I don't think he had any grudge towards anybody. I don't think anybody dislikes him that I knew of. Five months after the assassinations, Dan White went on trial. Couldn't see how the trial would last more than the day. Such a cut and dry thing. You know, there was, he followed the newspapers, but no big deal. He was automatically gonna be guilty and go to San Quentin the rest of his life, you know. Anybody knew that. As the trial and the jury selection started, I sort of developed this sense of doom that justice was not going to prevail because... the jury selection process excluded gay people, minority residents, and anyone who may have had a political point of view that would be different from Dan White. And I don't want to knock the jury system because I do believe in the jury system. But once you knock all these people out, what does that leave you with? We had turned this over to be taken care of. to a system that was actually in many ways responsible for these assassinations. So there's this little feeling in your stomach, you know, when you get afraid and you think, what am I going to do? You know, personally, what are we going to do? I mean, he's in the hands of the cops. The prosecution. argued a simple motive, revenge. Detailing the facts of the crime, the state spent three days proving that Dan White committed the murders. White's own lawyers had already admitted this in their opening statement. To prove its case, the prosecution played a tape of Dan White's confession. But the tactic backfired. Some of the jurors wept in sympathy for White. I've been under an awful lot of pressure lately, financial pressure because of my job situation, family pressure, not being able to have the time with my family. The mayor never called me. He told me he was going to call me before he made any decision. He never did that. It was only on my own initiative when I went down today to speak with him. I was troubled. The pressure of my family. My son's out to a babysitter. My wife's got to work. Long hours. You know, I just was going to the mayor to see if he was going to reappoint me. just all the time knowing he's going to go out and lie to the press and tell them, you know, that I wasn't a good supervisor and that people didn't want me. And then that was it. Then I just shot him. And then it struck me about what Harvey had tried to do. And I said, well... I go talk to him, I said, you know, at least maybe he'd be honest with me. And he was all smiles and stuff, and I went in. He knew I was going to be in the airport. And he just kind of smoked at me. I said, too bad. And then... And then I just got all flushed and hot and I shot him. Now if Dan White wants to save himself from the death penalty, he's going to have to prove that he didn't plan to kill anyone that day. Prosecutors say he did premeditate the murders because on that day he put his gun on and he put a bunch of extra bullets into his pocket. Then he got into City Hall here by climbing in this window, knowing that he couldn't get his gun past the metal detector in the main entrance. Prosecutors say this shows he was planning to do something suspicious. Now, White's lawyer claims it's common for people to try to get into City Hall this way, that Dan White was only carrying a gun to protect himself, and that other supervisors, including Feinstein, have carried guns for protection. But if he was only trying to protect himself that day, why did he put all those extra bullets into his pocket? It will be interesting to see how the defense tries to explain that. You told the jury that... Although he had the gun with him, the .38, he had no intention of shooting anyone at City Hall. Is that correct? That's correct. And that other supervisors carried weapons with permits. That's correct. Well, I didn't mention with permits, but I did say that other supervisors and perhaps other City Hall personnel do carry firearms presently and have carried them in the past. Do you know if the other people who do carry weapons also carry 10 extra rounds in their pockets? I think ex-police officers and certainly police officers on or off duty carry extra ammunition, yes. And that is also why you say he reloaded after shooting Mayor Moscone? That is what I said, yes. Clarify that, though, because of his experience as an ex-police officer. Yes, I think it was more instinctive than anything else. White was portrayed as an idealist, disgusted with the corruption of politics, a man who felt the city was deteriorating as a decent place for San Franciscans to live. Defense attorney Doug Schmidt told the jury, Good people, fine people with fine backgrounds simply don't kill people in cold blood. It just doesn't happen. A key witness for the defense was Dan White's wife, Mary Ann. knew the types of pressure that Danny was under, I felt the pressure myself. And I think when this occurred, I felt more for Danny than I did for myself or anyone else. I really did. I just felt so much that I wanted to do something for him. Do you foresee a point in the future where your life can return to some degree of normalcy? Oh, yes. I firmly believe that there's something for us good that will come out of this. White's lawyers introduced the testimony of five psychiatrists to prove that he acted while in a state of severe depression, induced in part by consuming too much junk food. His attorneys argued that he had killed Moscone and Milk in the heat of the moment, and that under the law, charges against him should be reduced, from murder to manslaughter. The trial concluded in just 11 days. You do expect surprises and to be ready and open-minded for surprises. The shocking fact that he did this, they might also have the shocking fact that there was some extenuating circumstances or some reason why he was innocent. You're ready for that kind of possibility, but I thought he might get the chair. I remember rushing out of the courtroom when the news was on live waiting for the verdict, and I remember thinking to myself, try to look like you're not so shocked. Murder trial, Janine Yeomans, right here. What is it? Yes, the jury has found Dan White guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the killings of both George Moscone and Harvey Milk. That's a verdict that carries two, three, or four years on each of those counts. He also could receive two... years each for using a gun in the commission of the crime. And once again to repeat, that is the verdict that White's attorney, Doug Schmidt, had asked the jury to return. Dan White could now receive anywhere from four to twelve years in prison with a possibility of parole after two... We have received word that a demonstration has been called for eight o'clock this evening in front of City Hall to protest the Dan White verdict. I was really outraged and I was going to go down to City Hall and I didn't go to City Hall because I had to run home to take care of our kids, but I had this strong sense. I said, you know, someone has to say something. That's our justice system. He got away with it. Eight years. If you kill a public official, especially if I did, what would I get? I'm an old lady. I won't be here very much longer. And I would not like to be here and see him walk in the streets. You don't want him to get out? No. After killing two men. No. It was a challenge to your own personal value system. Again, well, you know, politically correct, I'm against capital punishment. I mean, my goodness. And then all of a sudden, you know, all you want is blood revenge. Certain people who were considered leaders, certain men and women of the gay community who were saying, saying, now, now, calm down. You know, justice will be served. Oh, come on, stop it, stop it. City hall, city hall, city hall. You know, it was like a beat, a rhythm. And going down Market Street, disrupting traffic. We want Remember Harvey Phoenix! Let's unite and we're done! 20 things have gone from good to bad to good and to very bad. There is a narrow perimeter of shaky policemen on my left over here in front of City Hall. Behind them are the demonstrators and sometimes in the midst of them are the demonstrators. Every once in a while a demonstrator, a protester will come out of the crowd, throw a piece of burning material into a police car and start it on fire. You'll get a brick in the head and you'll never know what hit you. If you look that way, you can see it coming and get out of the way. What we have tonight is a mob out of control. I think it's a tragedy. I think it's going to set... back the fight for human rights a great deal. And I must tell you that if persons are arrested for the crimes that have been committed tonight, my office is going to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. If you remember the violence... The violence that started all this was Dan White's violence. I feel that the jury was violent this afternoon by treating Dan White in a way that nobody is ever going to believe they would have treated a black person or a gay person or someone who did not fit Dan Type's image. They were saying that the spirit of Dan White, with all of its pettiness, all of its meanness, and all of its violence right below the surface, is okay. And in so doing, we're very violently attacking the memory of George Moscone and Harvey Mudd. milk. We're reacting with anger because we are angry. People were outraged because it was property. You know, this great institution of the free world. We dared. You know, you can replace a goddamn glass door. You can replace a chandelier, right? You can replace a police car. But you can't replace Harvey. Feeling the rage and the extreme emotions that seemed to be coming from all of those folks, I was right with them. I was right with him in saying, you know, there is no justice here today and anything that we do is absolutely fine. And then I thought, you know, that's not it. That's not the way. And something of a bit of a cooler head came upon me. I guess I thought about Harvey, who had said many times that he didn't want violence to follow in the footsteps of anything that happened to him. What the verdict did to our sensitivity was to say, you know, it's not important to be civil in American society. And it's not important to honor other people's right as long as you are. white and you uphold certain white middle class values because you're going to get away with murder you're going to be condoned i think if it had just been musconi that got killed I think he would have been guilty of murder and been in San Quentin the rest of his life. But sad to say, I think there's a lot of people in this world that still think if you kill a gay, you're doing a service to society. I think I'd have felt that way, too, if I hadn't been associated with Harvey and the gay community. I probably would have felt the same way. Because up until that time, I thought that the guy that was gay was just, he's not. He's not, you know, he's not us. And I remember I used to hear the cops would go into gay bars years ago and kind of rough up the gays, and I thought, what's wrong with that? You know, that's okay. And I think the majority of people felt that way, and I think a lot of people still feel the same way. And it's a shame. Dan White was released from prison on January 7, 1984. He served five and a half years and received no psychiatric treatment in prison. Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio, there's a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that she or he is gay, knows that if the parents find out, they'll be tossed out of the house, the classmates would taunt the child, and the Anita Bryans and John Briggs are doing their bit on TV, and that child had several options. Staying in a closet, suicide, and then one day that child might open a paper and it says homosexual elected from San Francisco and there are two new options. The option is to go to California, stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected, I got a phone call, and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said, Thanks. And you've got to elect gay people. So that that young child and the thousands upon thousands like that child Know that there's hope for a better world. There's hope for a better tomorrow without hope Not only gays, but those blacks the Asians disabled seniors Uses Uses, without hope, the uses give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, you've got to give them hope. Thank you very much.

As president of the Board of Supervisors, it's my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. Oh, Jesus Christ!

The... I hit him! I hit him!

Hold Shh. Quiet. Quiet.

The suspect is Supervisor Dan White. On November 27, 1978, San Francisco's Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in City Hall. Harvey Milk had served only 11 months on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, but he had already come to represent something far greater than his office. A year before he was gunned down, Harvey Milk tape recorded a will.

This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or the potential target for somebody who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed themselves. knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time, I feel it's important that some people know my thoughts. I stood for more than just a candidate. I have never considered myself a candidate.

I have always considered myself part of a movement, part of a candidacy. I wish I had time to explain everything I did. Almost everything was done in the eyes of the gay movement. I met Harvey like most people met Harvey, I think, in his camera store.

I had been living in the city about a year and a half, I guess, and maybe not even that long, and went into the camera store. Someone recommended it to have my film developed and was greeted by this raving maniac. He was screaming and shouting. I don't even...

know what the issue was at that point but he was screaming and shouting at someone in the camera store and I I was a little intimidated you know I thought this guy is a little too weird for me when I really got to know him was in 70 1975, I had a miscarriage and I was astounded that I had, 75 or 76, I had a miscarriage and I was astounded. I mean, it's a devastating physical experience as well as a mental experience. And I was home from the hospital and Harvey had heard that this had happened.

And lo and behold, There was a knock at the door, and I went sort of like floating to the door. door because I wasn't feeling well at all and he was standing on my doorstep with a dozen roses and he said well can I get you anything do you have enough food in the house do you have milk do you have food I'll do your grocery shopping and I knew him by name as he knew me but I didn't know him well enough for having to do my grocery shopping but that's the kind of concern he was and you know you could relate to Harvey on on on many levels one level was his sense of humor which I liked, you know, and, and, uh, you know, making fun of things that sometimes were very heavy, which was how I was brought up. But also, I didn't feel like an outsider with Harvey.

I felt like someone of worth, you know, and some respect, the teacher thing. And if I was, in fact, feminine, or if I was, in fact, you know, didn't always speak in a certain syntax, or if I said, you know, fuck that asshole over there, you know, he's really a jerk. You know, Harvey didn't go, you know, this is not a good gay image. So that mentally.

The human factor. At first, Harvey Bernard Milk showed few signs he would make history. 22nd, 1930. The second son of middle-class Jewish parents.

He grew up in Woodmere, Long Island. A kid with the big ears became, in high school, an ordinary student. A practical joker and a regular guy.

Or so his friends thought. Then she joined the Navy. Then he began a career as a stock analyst on Wall Street.

What was not on the resume was his homosexuality, which Harvey Milk had known about since he was 14. In the 1960s, Harvey Milk took a step off course and befriended avant-garde theater people, then worked his way into a producing job on Broadway. By the beginning of the 70s, Harvey Milk had marched in anti-war demonstrations, burned his Bank of Merricard and protest, and emigrated to San Francisco. He and lover Scott Smith settled down and opened a camera store on Castro Street, in a quiet old neighborhood soon to become known as the Castro.

Harvey Milk threw himself into neighborhood politics. When he dubbed himself the mayor of Castro Street, the idea stuck. In 1973, he tried to make it official by running for the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco's city council. To many, Harvey Milk seemed more like a joke than a candidate.

Well, first time I heard of Harvey was one of these conventions at the Labor Council, and we're voting on who we're going to support in our union. We get together with other union delegates. talk over who we were going to support. And we supported a guy that I didn't know at that time, Harvey Milk. And we were talking with the people, and somebody said, he's gay.

I said, okay. And I thought, holy Christ, how are we going to go back to our union and go back to where we work and tell guys that we supported a fruit? You know, and I thought, my God, this is, what's labor coming to, you know?

And then we found out that he got Coors beer out of all of the gay bars in San Francisco. And this Coors beer boycott, which labor has been trying to do throughout the United States, especially in San Francisco, or Labor Town, really hadn't been too successful. You know, I met Harvey for the first time.

I mean, I had read about him and had heard a lot about him, but that was the first time I really met him. And it was a rather strange meeting because Harvey was talking about all these visionary things about the oneness of man and thinking about all the great things that needed to be done, not only in San Francisco, but throughout the country. And I said to myself, gee, this man is never going to make it. Between 1973 and 1976, Harvey Milk ran for political office and lost three times.

But in each race, he garnered more and more votes, enough to establish himself as a broker for his neighborhood and the growing gay community. In 1975, neighborhood actors... Activists like Harvey Milk found a strong supporter in their new mayor, George Moscone.

Moscone had campaigned on the conviction that a city is enriched by more than downtown development. As the new mayor, Moscone showed respect for his city's many neighborhoods, cultures, and peoples. My late father was a guard at San Quentin, who I was visiting one day, who showed to me and then explained the function of the death charge.

chamber. And it just seemed inconceivable to me, though I was pretty young at the time, that in this society that I had been trained to believe was the most effective and efficient of all societies, that the only way we could deal with violent crime would be to do the ultimate ourselves, and that's to governmentally sanction the taking of another person's life. Moscone and his allies, including Harvey Milk, set about designing a plan for neighborhood people to run the city they lived in. The plan, called district elections, would allow candidates for supervisor, such as Harvey Milk, to run from districts rather than the city at large. They had this crazy idea that they're going to change the form of government the way we elect our officials in this town.

There was one meeting that was supposed to be behind this guy Harvey Milk's camera store. And so I went to the meeting and I kind of thought, what the hell am I doing here with all these fruits and kooks? Behind the camera store, a little crummy camera store, nothing like Brooks.

It was a little crummy camera store and in the back was this little crummy room with a bunch of worn out old sofas and chairs and a bunch of people in jeans and Levi's and... Harvey Milk was there, and he's not, he doesn't dress in a distinguished manner. He just looks like, and he's working stiff.

The way he handled the people there, some of the people get kind of emotional and outrageous, and he would control them and calm them down and get the thinking going a certain way, and very, very impressive. The voters of San Francisco decided to give the district elections plan a try. In the Castro, a new kind of politics was taking shape. More and more men and women were arriving in San Francisco every day to take up the gay life.

The Castro was booming. Each summer, Harvey Milk helped organize the Castro Street Fair, where the neighborhood celebrated its very existence. Harvey Milk realized that the castor was ready to elect its own representative to City Hall.

In 1977, Milk launched his fourth political campaign, this time for the Board of Supervisors from the newly created District 5. There's just too many candidates, the vote is split all over the place, and there's too many things happening nobody knows about. There are at least seven candidates with a shot at capturing the heart of the city, District Number 5. The Liberal vote is split between three main candidates and many less. lesser ones. One main is Terence Hallinan, an attorney with endorsements from Democrats and Labor. Hallinan splits the liberal vote with two gays, lawyer Rick Stokes and Castro Street businessman Harvey Milk.

I think when it comes to a matter of who came first, that's That's fairly easily provable. I don't think anyone ever heard of Harvey Milk until he ran for office in 1973. Any single neighborhood issue or city issue for the last five years, you found Harvey Milk taking a stand, one way or the other, but taking a stand. Every candidate claims to know of polls showing him the winner or running strong. But the one candidate who seems to run best of all has very low visibility.

That's the one named Undecided. In San Francisco, Linda Schacht for Channel 5 Eyewitness News. When he decided to run for supervisor, he did call me, and I went in to meet with him, and we just hit it off instantly.

That very first day, he asked me if I would run his campaign. I was 23. There's this punk kid who knows nothing about campaigns except that I loved them. What he offered me was an opportunity. He had no money.

But he was a very difficult person to work with. He did have temper fits where he would just be like a little kid sometimes for no good reason except that he was probably exhausted. Getting involved in that campaign was so special, especially after the number of campaigns that I had been through with the Democratic Party and kind of the normal type of politicians and the normal kind of campaigns.

that campaign was anything but normal. One day I was in there, into the campaign headquarters, and I'm looking around at this motley group of people. It was a lot of fun, but give me a break.

And I said to Harvey, I said, well, who's that? And there's this desk over in the corner. It's really dark.

I don't think there's a plug back in that corner. There's a telephone. I remember seeing the lights on the telephone, which is like the brightest thing in that corner.

And he says, she's really good. Her name is Ann Cronenberg. She's really good.

And I'm looking at her and thinking, oh my lord, your image here. He's trying to run, you know, in a very big district. He'd run in our neighborhood and anything goes in our neighborhood. But when you get out, you know, you kind of have to kind of blend in. And I looked at Ann, and here she was, you know, like a big dyke with the motorcycle clothes on.

And then there's John with his three-piece suit, and there's little Michael Wong, who Harvey always called his Lotus Blossom. And a couple of old ladies that would be in there, too. Bless their hearts. And then people silk screening on the side, and you can smell the ink, and, you know, all this hubbub. And he's trying to run a business in the front.

Everything happened. In this long, dingy camera store, everything from Save the Whales to Get Elected. We had volunteers in all different shapes and sizes from Medora Payne size up to 70 year old women who wanted to be doing something.

Maybe they couldn't be walking precincts but they wanted to do something for Harvey. It was a nice mix of people. He never stopped, and he did most of everything himself, which meant, you know, every day he was out in the street to hit the morning rush hour and the afternoon rush hour.

He'd walk precincts, he'd go to shops, you know, door to door. At the age of 47, on his fourth try for public office, Harvey Milk was elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. When Harvey got back to the campaign headquarters that night, people went crazy.

He rode up on his, not his motorcycle, my motorcycle. They all got off the bikes and Harvey was just encircled with people. I mean, the The feeling there was just one of such total joy. And it was more than just, you know, a candidate winning. It was the fact that all of these lesbians and gay men throughout San Francisco who had felt like they'd had no voice before, four now had someone who represented them.

Just feel so good for milk. But when feeling good for milk, you're feeling good for yourself. You know, this was elation, just absolute elation.

Harvey never, ever drank. But that night, you know, the champagne was flowing freely and he picked up one bottle of champagne and poured it all over himself. It was incredible.

We can hear it. We can't really see too much, but it looks and sounds to you and to me like New Year's Steve on Market Street, a place called... And the reason for all this merriment and gaiety, if you pardon the pun, is the man standing to my right, the first gay supervisor elected in San Francisco.

His name is Harvey Milk. First of all, congratulations. And I've never seen anything like this, Harvey.

Oh, it's all over the city tonight. What does this mean, your election, your activity now on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco? Does that mean as many straights are concerned that maybe the gays are taking over San Francisco?

Are you going to be a supervisor for all the people? I have to be. That's what I was elected for.

I have to be there to open up for the dialogue, for the sensitivities of all people, for all the problems. The problems that affect this city affect all of us. It was really a monumentous occasion. You know, he had been waiting at that point for four years for that victory, and I think it was very sweet for all of us.

Thank you, San Francisco. All right! I first met Harvey Milk when I was sent to do a story on this guy out in the Castro who had a camera store who was running for supervisor and he was getting a lot of attention so I had to go out there and do an interview with him and I thought, oh brother, a guy who owns a camera store, what could he know about politics or anything and I know he was going to be a dud. But I got out there and he was full of life, he was a great speaker and I was...

I was impressed on the spot and it made a good story. It's as if he knew, you came here with an attitude that I was just a homosexual with a camera store and I'll show you. And I thought he did. He was much more impressive than just that kind of image. This will be the first time in many years that we've seen so many relatively new faces on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

And this is probably because it's the first time in a long time that supervisors have been elected by district instead of citywide. Harvey Milk, a homosexual, the first devout women's rights advocate, Carol Ruth Silver, the first Chinese-American, Attorney Gordon Lau, the first black woman, Ella Hill Hutch, and Dan White, a city fireman who gave up his job to take his seat. After the formal swearing-in ceremony, the board elected Dianne Feinstein to be its new president. In a six to five vote, Feinstein beat out Gordon Lau. But then we got the first taste of the new politics.

Someone suggested the board vote again to make it unanimous for Feinstein. But newcomers Milk and Silver refused. They stuck to their votes for Lau to cheers from their supporters.

And just about everyone at City Hall today was agreeing on one thing. They may be a lot of things, but they probably won't be dull. It was interesting to see that Harvey did not vote for Dianne Feinstein to be president.

And it really shocked many of us in the audience because we said, wow, here was this gay supervisor who really didn't have to do it and maybe might be committing political suicide and yet he was standing up for what he believed and making a very strong statement. And it was clear what Harvey Milk represented on that board. He represented change.

He was different. He was different from the conservative majority on the board of supervisors. Lost in the hubbub over the rise of California's first publicly gay official was the election of Dan White, another kind of neighborhood populist. Dan White has worked and lived virtually all his 31 years in this southeastern section of San Francisco. The neighborhood problems are the city's problems.

You see, the transportation, the crime, the education, the taxes, these are problems that we're all going to have to... Saul. Hello, Ann. Come on out here and say hello.

Dan White comes across as the kind of son almost any mother would be proud of. Ann was one of my big, big supporters here. A lot of the ladies here are getting their hair done. Clean cut, respectful to his elders, and seemingly possessed of small-town values. When was the last time you heard a San Francisco politician talk about setting up neighborhood athletic teams?

And then when we get the best team, we will challenge, say, Harvey Milk's district to a game of softball where they have champs out there. In a sense, you could say it's old-fashioned, but it's old-fashioned values that built this country. To me, this is what society is all about.

If you see someone in trouble, you go to help them out. Dan White says nobody's going to ignore his corner of the city anymore. Dan White and Harvey Milk became symbols of the new district election system. Dan White, a fireman, a native San Franciscan, Harvey Milk, a small businessman, and a gay immigrant.

Milk's victory sparked euphoria among his supporters and a sense of something new arriving at City Hall. He wanted to meet Carter. He thought that was very important, and I think he even brought a photographer along, even though Carter didn't want to be photographed with a gay person. And Ruth Carter Stapleton was, you know, the evangelical sister, was carrying on a mission on gays.

She told Harvey that she could convert him and that even though he was Jewish, if he gave himself to Jesus Christ, that his homosexuality would disappear or something. And he made a couple of very wry comments. And one of them was that I think they shook hands.

And he said, I'm surprised that you shook my hand. And she said, why? And he said, because you never know where my hand's been.

Isn't that awful? Well, she just looked at him. She was just starstruck. I mean, what could she say?

Before Harvey was elected, I can remember looking at City Hall and feeling like that was not my place. I didn't belong there. I wasn't welcome there. I didn't feel comfortable there.

And the people who were on the Board of Supervisors were names you read about in the newspaper, not people you would expect to see in the grocery store. much less have a conversation with on a personal or human level. And Harvey was really part of changing all that.

We're interviewing Harvey Milk. What's it like being a so-called in-person as opposed to having been an out-person for a number of years? Being one of them? Yes. Incredible.

The establishment. The white power establishment, non-gay, very wealthy establishment, have to deal with me. It's an incredible position.

Excuse me. Cut. I have a slight cold.

Take two. Want to repeat that, please? Sure.

Go. In San Francisco, as in any place else, you have the blacks and browns fighting, and you have the Filipinos not talking to the Asians, and they all hate the gays, and so forth. And that has existed. And we've had, over the years, have fought for the crumb.

But I think because of... election of district elections and this particular board and myself we've overcoming a lot of those problems there's tremendous harmony developing it's not perfect by any means the citywide level I think it's vital that the minority the traditional ethnic minorities, and the gays and the feminists linked together. Possibly the rank-and-file union, not the union leaders, the rank-and-file, linked together to form a very solid, strong coalition so that we can influence the total direction of the city. As supervisor, Harvey Milk had the political skills to advance the issues that neighborhood people cared about.

Ren can... Control, limiting high-rise development, public transportation. and the rights of senior citizens. The biggest crime in this city is the fact that there's some government elected officials who don't care about senior citizens.

And they got news for them. They're going to grow old and be a senior citizen themselves or drop dead. Maybe I liked Harvey because almost everything, anytime he'd make a speech about anything, I agreed with him.

So then I thought he was a great man because I agreed with what he talked about. But you could hear where he was coming from. He was coming from people positions.

If it had to do with parks or it had to do with schools or it had to do with police protection, anything that affected little people. It wasn't only for gay rights. He was for gay rights because that is a minority. But there's other minorities. There's handicapped people.

There's senior citizens. And so there's more and more. You start listening to him and getting involved with him because, gee, this is the kind of guy that is going to talk about you. Harvey said that if anyone solved the dog shit problem in the city, that they could be elected mayor. And so he started in the first month of being in City Hall to come up with some kind of ordinance to take care of dog shit.

And he knew that the Pooper Scooper ordinance, along with a few other things, would really give him good press. He was a master at figuring out what would get him covered in the newspaper. And so the day of his press conference for the Pooper Scooper ordinance, he went out early and planted some shit.

on the lawn so that after his press conference he knew just where he was going to stand, that he would step in it. Supervisor Milk took to the grassy lawn at DuBose Park this afternoon to publicize the new law. Under the ordinance, dog lovers who don't clean up can be fined.

I think what happened is what happened in New York, that people use their own ingenuity, their own ideas, their own concepts. Some people are using their pie tins, some people are using the Wall Street Journal, and other people are using their doggie-doos and shovels. Milk put his foot down to emphasize that the city intends to enforce, and you guessed it, in Supervisor Milk's words, this really is the bottom line. Harvey Milk's stand on which voting machine? The city should purchase was a critical role.

At that time, George Moscone favored Votomatic. And Harvey really was quite vocal. And he said the city should go with Votomatic because non-English speaking citizens, particularly those who are elderly and who have experienced discrimination, can exercise their right to vote in the most accessible manner.

He locked heads with Quentin Kopp. and Dianne Feinstein over the issue. And I was tremendously impressed because Harvey never once called us and said, is this the right machine for the Chinese community?

He knew that it was the right machine and he didn't have to call any one of us and say, gee, I want to remind you folks that I'm doing you this great favor and I want you to be indebted to me. The issue closest to Harvey Milk's heart was a gay rights bill for San Francisco. What the Gay Rights Ordinance in San Francisco's main focus is, is to prevent the people who are already employed who are gay, who if they want to come out and break down the stereotypes, prevent them from being fired.

For example, you'll see in this Gay Day parade, a group of at least 30 gay doctors. That is the tip of the iceberg. In the Bay Area, there are hundreds and hundreds of gay doctors. Most of who are closeted because of a fear of loss of jobs.

In San Francisco, they can, quote, come out and not have to worry about their jobs. And that's the main focus of our ordinance. Supervisor White says people are getting angry, and he believes that anger could lead to a backlash that will wipe out all of the gains the gays have made thus far.

You can have someone that's a transvestite, a man that, for his sexual kicks or orientation, whatever you want to call it, loves to dress up as a woman. If he is a qualified teacher, he can go into any school, or he can go into any business, and they can't refuse him. Ten supervisors voted for the gay rights bill. Dan White cast the only dissenting vote. Mayor Moscone enthusiastically signed the bill into law.

We got lots of hate mail, and it started out that the hate mail really upset me. Again, I just was not prepared for that at all. I mean, people saying awful, awful things, just nasty, disgusting things.

And it was Gay Freedom Day, and I was driving the car in the... And Harvey was in it. I was terrified.

I was afraid someone was going to take a shot at him. And Harvey said it could happen any day, at any place, at any time. And I'm just not going to worry about it. The statement that the Gay Day Parade is no more. No more will we be harassed.

No more will we be staying in our closet. The people from all over the state and all over the country, for them to see 100, 200, 300, 400,000 gay people and friends marching through the downpour. area.

This is our city too. They will go back to Des Moines, Iowa, to Richmond, Minnesota, to Santa Cruz. They will go back and say, my God, 300,000 gay people and their friends marched.

And you know, I almost think I saw my son there. What did you see that you thought was obscene? Well, I see naked men walking around, naked women walking around, which doesn't bother me as far as my personal standards of nudity or what, but it's not proper.

Many people do not approve of outward... displays of sexuality, be it heterosexuality or homosexuality. And this is a point I stand firm on and I think the gay community themselves would find hard to refute the statements I'm making now.

And this is a problem. We wouldn't allow it for any other parade in San Francisco and it should not be allowed for the gay parade. They want to bring their sin out of the closet and parade it on the street and be called respectable, decent, natural people. It's not decent.

It's not respectable and it's not natural. And by the way, God doesn't make people that way. Don't blame God for that.

Who wants the children? And I'll tell you who wants your children. The homosexual crowd wants them. In 1977 and 78, gay rights measures were being repealed across the United States.

In California, lawmaker John Briggs took a further step. Every homosexual, every lesbian... mounted a campaign for Proposition 6, a statewide measure to deny homosexuals their jobs in public schools.

Now, what Proposition 6 is really all about is the right of parents to determine. who will be teaching their children. We don't allow people who believe in practicing bestiality to teach our children. We don't let prostitutes teach our children.

And the reason we don't is because it's illegal to be a prostitute. But it's not illegal to be a homosexual in California. Proposition 6 brought the issue of homosexuality into the homes of millions of Californians. and it thrust Harvey Milk into a statewide space.

There are already laws on the books to protect our children. Everybody from superintendents of schools, Wilson Riles, to Jerry Brown, to newspaper editors across the state agree that indeed we have the laws to protect our children. I was born of heterosexual parents.

I was taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society with television ads and newspaper ads. Fiercely heterosexual. a society that puts down homosexuality.

And why am I homosexual if I'm affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there'd be a lot of nuns running around the streets today. Harvey knew that he had to have, or that the gay community had to have, some kind of a repository for money so that groups that were fighting the Briggs Initiative would have the, you know, could get funds in order to do the things that they had to do.

And I ended up being his co-chair of the United Fund to fight the Briggs Initiative. And that began our association, which over those months, when Proposition 6 came into being, became a real close association, and I got to know him. on a level that I had never anticipated.

Nobody took Harvey Milk very seriously when he first ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973. But last year, Milk won election to the Board of Supervisors. ...supervisors where he's the first openly gay city official in the United States. And representing the Bay Area Committee against the Briggs Initiative is Sally Gearhart.

Gearhart is a lesbian, a former high school teacher, and now a speech professor at San Francisco State University. I remember that just before that debate, we had had a lot of talk, Harvey and I, about how we would dress. And we had agreed that the image that we wanted to project was sort of Mama and Papa USA.

As neat and conservative as we possibly could. So a half hour before we start to leave for the television station, Harvey calls me and says, I've lost my earrings, dear, whatever shall I do? And I freak out thinking, oh, my soul.

You yourself say that the heterosexual is the child molester. And if in your statements here, in all these newspapers and tonight, that child molestation is not an issue, if it is not an issue, why do you put out literature that hammers it home? Why do you play on that myth and fear? Same thing with VD, Harvey.

We put out publications about VD so you can avoid it. This is campaign literature. Yes, we're trying to keep people from falling into that trap.

We're trying to prevent it by pointing it out. And by the way, I don't make the statement that 95% of all the heterosexuals commit... What percent is it? I don't know. You tell me.

The state says 90 to 95%. Well, I've never seen that in writing. I don't make those statements. You do.

You even says here... We are not talking about child molestation. The fact is... At least 95% of the people are heterosexual.

If we took heterosexuals out and homosexuals out, you know what? We'd have no teaching. No child molestation.

So you're saying that the percentage of population is equal to the percentage of child molestation? No. There's no difference.

I'm not saying that at all. That's what you just said. No, no. I'm saying that we cannot prevent child molestation, so let's cut our odds down and take out the homosexual group and keep in the heterosexual group. Why take out the homosexual group is more than, you know, overwhelmingly it is true.

that it's the heterosexual men, I might add, who are the child molesters. I believe that's a myth. I've never seen...

Oh, senators! The FBI! The National Council on Family Relations!

The Santa Clara County Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center, and on and on and on. Sometimes I think what we were faced with in Proposition 6 was not so much a conflict of values as two sets of fears. The incredible fears that the gay community had, all of us, That here we were being stomped on by what was turning out to be the moral majority. I mean, our very lives were being, you know, threatened. The ways that we live, what our lifestyle is.

And our reaction was extreme. And it should have been extreme. But then when you get into the other person's shoes, you figure that there was a lot of fear on the part of the fundamentalists as well.

I mean, when you've lived your entire life believing in a certain social structure, believing in certain sex roles, believing in the ways that men and women should relate to each other. Believing in the family. You know, believing in what God, what you believe God says should be the way human beings should relate within the family structure. And all of a sudden, there are these perverts out here saying that there are ways to live that are different from that and that furthermore it's great and beautiful and true and good.

Then you're threatened. And the very fabric of what this nation is supposed to be made up of... in the eyes of the fundamentalists, was actually being attacked, or is actually being attacked by gay people. In August, four months before the election, opinion polls predicted that the majority of California citizens would vote for John Briggs' Proposition 6 and against the rights of gay teachers.

We had lost repeatedly, every time the gay rights had been up for a vote, we had lost around the country, usually by huge margins. Almost everyone thought we were going to lose, and lose badly. I don't remember anyone being optimistic.

We were so pessimistic, or at least I was, and a lot of other people were, that we thought we might even lose San Francisco. Malcolm Briggs' support lies in Southern California, so his appearance here was more symbolic than functional. He called San Francisco the moral garbage dump of the nation.

If they're going to lead such an open life of homosexuality that they want, Thank you. A 21-gun salute every time somebody goes by them, those people are going to be in danger of being removed from their job. People are very emotional.

They don't want to listen. Look what happened in Germany. Now, Anita Bryan already says that Jews and Muslims are going to hell. You know she's got a shoppy list.

Briggs said this morning that Dade County, Oklahoma, and St. Paul, Minnesota were only preliminary battles. He called his California campaign against homosexual teachers the main event. At San Francisco City Hall, Linda Schack, Channel 5 Eyewitness News. This was such a personal issue for me.

This is something I did every day. And of course, the gay teacher issue is very volatile. They sit down with somebody who's It's apparent and maybe not particularly vitriolic against people, but to really say, look, this is a myth. You know, like I've been teaching for a long time. I'm not interested in getting in his pants.

And, you know, that's people didn't want to hear it. You know, I mean, how do you win people over to your side on something that's so ingrained and so emotional? I mean, they're children.

So even though he was a buffoon and even though he was ludicrous, he was also at least the people who advised him were brilliant because they picked on this particular issue. children. Um... It would be hard for me, if we're talking about schools, to go along with you. Any other adult thing that you do, the decorator, the hairdresser, whom I love, whom I have, I take him on every vacation that I have.

I don't care what he does. You went to people's houses and you talked to them, and a lot of times, and you didn't have to have a lot of money to do some of the things, or you went to shopping centers, because a lot of it was face-to-face. And this is a very brave thing. How are you?

We're volunteers working against Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative. Do you know about the Briggs Initiative? What is number six? Six. Smoking?

No, that's number five. Number six would force local school districts to fire any teacher that was gay or who believed that gay people have rights like other people. And we're concerned that that would be a real attack on human rights for everybody.

How do you feel about the initiative and what you do? out We don't have any definite opinion on this. No comment.

Could I leave some literature with you so you can learn a little bit more about it? Are you registered voters? Yes, I have registered already. Okay, great. Sorry.

I believe this is kind of personal matter. It sure is, but- Yeah, it's something that we feel real strongly about. A lot of my friends are gay teachers and they'll lose their jobs over this, so I really wish you'd give some thought to it because a lot of people will really be affected very badly by it. It's also something where once you set up one kind of thing to discriminate against one group of people, lots of times it makes it easier to discriminate against other groups of people next time around.

Give it some thought. If by their silence and their doing nothing, Briggs should win. I think a lot of people are going to realize they have to make an ultimate decision.

The decision is to go back in their closet real good, slam the door tight, which some will do, or burst down those closet doors once and for all and stand up and start to fight. Because if we learn from history that the struggle goes on, eventually we will win. And all the president has to do is, well, the governor, is to turn the pages of history a little faster.

This message, Jimmy Carter, listen to us. You want to leave? You want to be the world's leader in human rights? Well, damn it, leave!

Fifteen million gay men waiting to hear your voice! The grassroots No on 6 campaign was proving effective. One month before the election, the polls predicted a close vote. Many people had come to believe the Briggs Initiative would violate constitutional rights.

A surprising array of political figures, including former Governor Ronald Reagan and Supervisor Dan White, went on record against the proposition. president carter spent less than an hour at this downtown sacramento rally as the president left the podium jerry brown whispered to him briefly and he came back for one more word of advice for voters also want to ask everybody to vote against proposition six On November 7th, 1978, Proposition 6 was defeated by a resounding 59 to 41 percent. On election night, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk joined the jubilant celebration in the Castro. Harvey Milk was at the height of his political power.

Oh, that was one of the most, that was one of the most exciting nights in my life. I don't think there's any doubt about it. It must have been for most lesbians and gay men, at least in the state of California. Because it wasn't plain, even up until... until the evening of the vote that we were going to win.

It wasn't plain at all. And then here was Harvey. And who had been the man who had carried the banner for gay people, you know?

Who had been the man who had fought all along in his politics on the Board of Supervisors? ...particularly during the Sixth Campaign. It had been Harvey. He had been the symbol for all of us, he had been the image, and he mounted that platform, and I thought the place was gonna collapse. I've never heard such cheering in my life.

To the gay community all over this state, my message to you is, so far a lot of people joined us and rejected Proposition 6, and now we owe them something. owe them to continue the education campaign that took place. We must destroy the myths once and for all, shatter them. We must continue to speak out.

And most importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children and we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do, you will feel so much better. Four days after the Briggs Initiative lost, Dan White engineered his own defeat.

Surprising everyone, he resigned from the Board of Supervisors. In the last year, Dan White had left. to secure a job as a fireman, been elected a city supervisor for little pay, launched a risky new business, and become a father for the first time.

Dan White had entered City Hall an idealist. Unlike his flurry of friends, and his flourishing counterpart Harvey Milk, he was often frustrated by the job. White had never learned to operate in City Hall's atmosphere of backscratching and compromise. White's resignation left Mayor Moscone with the task of finding a replacement. Mr. Mayor, what's happened since Dan White has resigned?

I understand you're getting a lot of phone calls and such. The phone calls and cards and letters have been coming. I will tell you, as Dean Martin used to say, I was lobbied from just about the evening that Dan White resigned all the way through to the evening.

through the weekend and the phones have been ringing off the hook today. This is Supervisorial District 8, Dan White's former district. As you know, most people were very surprised when Dan quit last Friday.

No one seemed to know. He didn't tell any of his fellow supervisors, nor did he tell any of his political... supporters.

Obviously, you know, if the time I spent to become elected, the time I spent down at the board, the hours, the many hours I spent, I don't want to see wasted, but for now I can only deal with my family's responsibilities. Many don't agree with Dan White. They say he gave up all of his political chits when he resigned so quickly without making any arrangements for someone whom he liked and supported to take over this district.

In Supervisor District 8, I'm David Fowler, Channel 5 Eyewitness News. Well, now it starts all over again, because this morning, former supervisor Dan White says he wants to be called supervisor one more time. I didn't run for election to resign ten months later.

I worked awfully hard. My wife and my supporters worked awfully hard. so that I would be elected.

And it was a major decision, as you can all understand, on Friday that I had to come to arrive at. But since that time, people unknown to me, plus my family and friends, have come to me and said, stated that they want me to stay in office, that they supported me to stay in office. Mayor Moscone learned from the city attorney that Dan White could not take back his resignation.

It was up to the mayor to decide who would get the District 8 seat. Harvey Milk lobbied hard against reappointing Dan White. Harvey's story was that the mayor was thinking of reappointing Dan, and that Harvey went in and said, how can you possibly do that? Dan is the sixth vote on the board we need.

And certainly Harvey was courageous in that stance because no one else was doing it. And there were other supervisors on the board who felt just as strongly, but they weren't going to get involved in that. I mean, what if Dan got reappointed?

You know, think of the animosity. Moscone started to get word from his coalition of neighborhood groups and ethnic voters. Most of the problems are the people here. ...that they were not consulted, they might have helped, and the fact that they weren't even given the dignity of his concern bothered him.

So that's obviously not the best way to go. I think a 10-month supervisor can be excused for political naivete. I'm simply saying that it may not have been the best way to go, but the issue is bigger than his style.

The issue is what's fair, right, and just for the people of the District 8. White was at City Hall with his group of backers, some citizens, firemen. and a delegation representing large real estate firms. I'm overwhelmed at your support that you would take time out, you know, to come down here on a Friday at this time to show not only me, but the people of my district and the people of San Francisco that you approve of the way I'm conducting myself. But then Dan White and the shambles of his political career were upstaged by chaos of an entirely different order.

The city learned of the murder-suicide of some 900 people. Most of them San Franciscans in Jonestown, Guyana. On Monday, November 27th, Mayor Moscone planned to announce District 8's new supervisor.

It was not going to be Dan White. Good evening to outsiders and even to some San Franciscans. It must appear the city has gone a little insane. Just as everyone is beginning to come to grips with the mindless murder-suicide of over 900 members of the San Francisco-based People's Temple, word screams out over the radio, the television, the newspapers that another tragedy is upon us. Room 200, this is office.

3 Edward 1, 1023 for one moment. We're trying to ascertain what is happening. Room 237 please, quick. We've got an ambulance over here.

We've got an ambulance. A unit over here. We've got another ambulance. We've got a neon. How many victims gone?

I don't know if they're going anywhere. I'm supposed to have Harvey Milk and the mayor supposed to be DOA. As president of the board, and I'm, as president of the board of supervisors, it's my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. Oh, Jesus Christ!

The... I hit him! Oh! The suspect is Supervisor Dan White. Suspect is Dan White.

Is he in custody? He's not at this time. Thank you very much. No question. Attention all units, suspect named Dan White.

32 years, 6 feet, 185 pounds, wearing a three-piece brown suit, considered armed and dangerous. Attention all units, the former supervisor Dan White is now in custody. Repeating, former supervisor Dan White is now in custody.

KMA 438, clear. Dan, why did you do it? Set up. Approximately 10.45 a.m., realizing he was not going to be reappointed, Dan White went directly to the mayor's office unannounced. There was a brief argument.

Dan White pulled out a gun and shot... George Moscone. The mayor fell, and White fired two more bullets into his head.

White then reloaded his gun. He walked to the other side of City Hall and into Harvey Milk's office. Five shots rang out.

According to the coroner's report, Harvey Milk was rising, both hands out in front of him when the first shot hit. He fell. White fired three more times.

He leaned over and from above put the gun nearly against Harvey Milk's head and fired a last time. The day that Harvey was killed, I was flying up to Seattle to visit my folks and It's really, I think it was the first time I had seen them since our talk about coming out. I got on the plane at 11.15 in San Francisco.

Harvey was killed at 11.10, but I had no idea. And so I screamed and I came back up Van Ness Avenue and I remember thinking, people are going about their business in an ordinary way. How dare they go about their business in an ordinary way?

Don't you realize the course of history has been changed? We had a black and white television, and we turned it on in the office, and, um... I think it was just too painful. You know, I mean, it was clear that he was... Both of them were dead, uh...

Brutally assassinated, and I... You know, I... You know, I walked out of the office. I had the radio on and the guy came on and he said it with such a certitude, you know, like sometimes, you know, you hear things on the news and they're not going to be true. And he just said it and I knew it was true.

In fact, it's interesting, later I thought, I've always kind of thought this might happen. happened and never dwelled on it or and here it was happening you know harvey milk and uh uh george buscott were shot and killed by damn right and i just screamed no like that it just kind of came out and people looked but i had a feeling that people knew why i was screaming So I drove down to City Hall. I mean, I wasn't going to sit here and go crazy. And in looking for parking, I had to park far away. So I walked past this entrance that I ordinarily would not walk, you know, past.

And they were bringing out the body stead, which, you know, it kind of, well, I mean, you know, you can think somebody's dead. But, I mean, there, and I knew it was milk because I knew how tall he was, you know, and they hadn't covered, you know, part of his feet or something. And, you know, you trip out on different things and you think, God, what a big foot heart. I never really said to speak. And so then I went around to City Hall in the front, and there were these, a lot of media people.

And the thing that struck me the most was, I don't know, I guess, again, this expressive southern Italian background I have. You know, I don't know, I saw people going, ah! But instead, it was quiet. It was silent.

We got back and my roommate picked us up at the airport and he said there's going to be a candlelight march. Do you want to go to it? And we said of course.

So he said well by now it's probably reached City Hall so we drove directly from the airport to City Hall. And there were maybe 75 people there. And I remember thinking, my God, is this all that anybody cared?

And somebody said, no, the march hasn't gotten here yet. So we then walked over to Market Street, which is two or three blocks away. and look down and Market Street runs in a straight line out to the Castro area. And as we turned the corner, there were people as wide as this wide street, as far as you could see.

Thousands and thousands of people, that feeling of such loss, having lost someone who was so important and something, you know, Harvey stood for something more than just him. I've been in a relationship going down with all those people, expressing your grief or what it was, but being with all those people, and it's nighttime in San Francisco, and a bunch of strangers around you, and you feel as safe as if you're doing your own home. And there was this black man on the corner of whatever, Noe there, and he kept shouting, where is your anger?

Where is your anger? Where is your anger? And, you know, I didn't know where it was.

I think that all of us at that time were in such a state of shock, you know, that I don't know if it was numbed or we were necessarily, I guess certainly I was angry, but it seemed appropriate to do this I don't know, you know, peaceful kind of internalized thing out of some kind of respect for the enormity of what happened. It was one of the most eloquent expressions of a community's response to violence that I've ever seen. And I think we as lesbians and gay men and all the straight people who were marching with us that night, and there were thousands, I think we said it. I think we said a message to the nation that night about... What our immediate response was, not violence, but a certain respect for Harvey and a deep regret and feeling of tragedy about it.

Because Moscone had been our friend as well. Going down to City Hall, that... Tremendous expanse of people and I turned to John and I said Harvey would have loved this. When we kind of tried to get close to the stage and I saw friends up there and I thought oh I just can't go face anybody.

You know I started to cry and everyone started to cry. It was just, it was just so touching. I'm going to start to cry now.

But the um, there's a statue down there and everyone put candles. You know, several people right that following week came out of the closet because they had been there and they had seen, you know, all of the people and they had felt that they had been living a lie. Sorry, bitter stop.

off i don't know if i can they really felt uh so moved that they came out to people and said did you know that i that i'm gay and um i was so touched by it because that's what harvey He stood for it, and it took his death for them to realize that they just came out. No one would fire them from their jobs because it's against the law. And they could still live a life, and yet that part of our society that is very closed could open. Thursday, November 30th, George Moscone's funeral was held at St. Mary's Cathedral.

On Saturday, December 2nd, Harvey Milk's ashes were scattered into the Pacific by his friend. Today we went looking for clues to why White would kill the mayor who refused to reappoint him to his post. and a supervisor who opposed him politically. We didn't find any.

For many years, the Whites lived on London Street in the southeast sector of San Francisco, which Whites served during his few months on the board and where he was raised. Among their neighbors on London Street were the Cooks. I don't know.

I don't know. He must have went off to deep end or something because he was just a nice guy. Did he ever show any signs of cooking? No.

He was an all-American boy as far as I was concerned. I never did see him really argue with anybody. I think he was very family-oriented.

man, Catholic. He went to church all the time. He was very devoted to the job.

And I don't think he had any grudge towards anybody. I don't think anybody dislikes him that I knew of. Five months after the assassinations, Dan White went on trial.

Couldn't see how the trial would last more than the day. Such a cut and dry thing. You know, there was, he followed the newspapers, but no big deal. He was automatically gonna be guilty and go to San Quentin the rest of his life, you know. Anybody knew that.

As the trial and the jury selection started, I sort of developed this sense of doom that justice was not going to prevail because... the jury selection process excluded gay people, minority residents, and anyone who may have had a political point of view that would be different from Dan White. And I don't want to knock the jury system because I do believe in the jury system. But once you knock all these people out, what does that leave you with? We had turned this over to be taken care of.

to a system that was actually in many ways responsible for these assassinations. So there's this little feeling in your stomach, you know, when you get afraid and you think, what am I going to do? You know, personally, what are we going to do? I mean, he's in the hands of the cops. The prosecution.

argued a simple motive, revenge. Detailing the facts of the crime, the state spent three days proving that Dan White committed the murders. White's own lawyers had already admitted this in their opening statement. To prove its case, the prosecution played a tape of Dan White's confession.

But the tactic backfired. Some of the jurors wept in sympathy for White. I've been under an awful lot of pressure lately, financial pressure because of my job situation, family pressure, not being able to have the time with my family.

The mayor never called me. He told me he was going to call me before he made any decision. He never did that. It was only on my own initiative when I went down today to speak with him.

I was troubled. The pressure of my family. My son's out to a babysitter. My wife's got to work.

Long hours. You know, I just was going to the mayor to see if he was going to reappoint me. just all the time knowing he's going to go out and lie to the press and tell them, you know, that I wasn't a good supervisor and that people didn't want me. And then that was it. Then I just shot him. And then it struck me about what Harvey had tried to do.

And I said, well... I go talk to him, I said, you know, at least maybe he'd be honest with me. And he was all smiles and stuff, and I went in.

He knew I was going to be in the airport. And he just kind of smoked at me. I said, too bad.

And then... And then I just got all flushed and hot and I shot him. Now if Dan White wants to save himself from the death penalty, he's going to have to prove that he didn't plan to kill anyone that day.

Prosecutors say he did premeditate the murders because on that day he put his gun on and he put a bunch of extra bullets into his pocket. Then he got into City Hall here by climbing in this window, knowing that he couldn't get his gun past the metal detector in the main entrance. Prosecutors say this shows he was planning to do something suspicious.

Now, White's lawyer claims it's common for people to try to get into City Hall this way, that Dan White was only carrying a gun to protect himself, and that other supervisors, including Feinstein, have carried guns for protection. But if he was only trying to protect himself that day, why did he put all those extra bullets into his pocket? It will be interesting to see how the defense tries to explain that.

You told the jury that... Although he had the gun with him, the .38, he had no intention of shooting anyone at City Hall. Is that correct?

That's correct. And that other supervisors carried weapons with permits. That's correct. Well, I didn't mention with permits, but I did say that other supervisors and perhaps other City Hall personnel do carry firearms presently and have carried them in the past.

Do you know if the other people who do carry weapons also carry 10 extra rounds in their pockets? I think ex-police officers and certainly police officers on or off duty carry extra ammunition, yes. And that is also why you say he reloaded after shooting Mayor Moscone?

That is what I said, yes. Clarify that, though, because of his experience as an ex-police officer. Yes, I think it was more instinctive than anything else.

White was portrayed as an idealist, disgusted with the corruption of politics, a man who felt the city was deteriorating as a decent place for San Franciscans to live. Defense attorney Doug Schmidt told the jury, Good people, fine people with fine backgrounds simply don't kill people in cold blood. It just doesn't happen.

A key witness for the defense was Dan White's wife, Mary Ann. knew the types of pressure that Danny was under, I felt the pressure myself. And I think when this occurred, I felt more for Danny than I did for myself or anyone else. I really did.

I just felt so much that I wanted to do something for him. Do you foresee a point in the future where your life can return to some degree of normalcy? Oh, yes.

I firmly believe that there's something for us good that will come out of this. White's lawyers introduced the testimony of five psychiatrists to prove that he acted while in a state of severe depression, induced in part by consuming too much junk food. His attorneys argued that he had killed Moscone and Milk in the heat of the moment, and that under the law, charges against him should be reduced, from murder to manslaughter. The trial concluded in just 11 days. You do expect surprises and to be ready and open-minded for surprises.

The shocking fact that he did this, they might also have the shocking fact that there was some extenuating circumstances or some reason why he was innocent. You're ready for that kind of possibility, but I thought he might get the chair. I remember rushing out of the courtroom when the news was on live waiting for the verdict, and I remember thinking to myself, try to look like you're not so shocked.

Murder trial, Janine Yeomans, right here. What is it? Yes, the jury has found Dan White guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the killings of both George Moscone and Harvey Milk. That's a verdict that carries two, three, or four years on each of those counts.

He also could receive two... years each for using a gun in the commission of the crime. And once again to repeat, that is the verdict that White's attorney, Doug Schmidt, had asked the jury to return. Dan White could now receive anywhere from four to twelve years in prison with a possibility of parole after two...

We have received word that a demonstration has been called for eight o'clock this evening in front of City Hall to protest the Dan White verdict. I was really outraged and I was going to go down to City Hall and I didn't go to City Hall because I had to run home to take care of our kids, but I had this strong sense. I said, you know, someone has to say something.

That's our justice system. He got away with it. Eight years.

If you kill a public official, especially if I did, what would I get? I'm an old lady. I won't be here very much longer.

And I would not like to be here and see him walk in the streets. You don't want him to get out? No. After killing two men.

No. It was a challenge to your own personal value system. Again, well, you know, politically correct, I'm against capital punishment.

I mean, my goodness. And then all of a sudden, you know, all you want is blood revenge. Certain people who were considered leaders, certain men and women of the gay community who were saying, saying, now, now, calm down. You know, justice will be served.

Oh, come on, stop it, stop it. City hall, city hall, city hall. You know, it was like a beat, a rhythm.

And going down Market Street, disrupting traffic. We want Remember Harvey Phoenix! Let's unite and we're done!

20 things have gone from good to bad to good and to very bad. There is a narrow perimeter of shaky policemen on my left over here in front of City Hall. Behind them are the demonstrators and sometimes in the midst of them are the demonstrators. Every once in a while a demonstrator, a protester will come out of the crowd, throw a piece of burning material into a police car and start it on fire. You'll get a brick in the head and you'll never know what hit you.

If you look that way, you can see it coming and get out of the way. What we have tonight is a mob out of control. I think it's a tragedy.

I think it's going to set... back the fight for human rights a great deal. And I must tell you that if persons are arrested for the crimes that have been committed tonight, my office is going to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.

If you remember the violence... The violence that started all this was Dan White's violence. I feel that the jury was violent this afternoon by treating Dan White in a way that nobody is ever going to believe they would have treated a black person or a gay person or someone who did not fit Dan Type's image.

They were saying that the spirit of Dan White, with all of its pettiness, all of its meanness, and all of its violence right below the surface, is okay. And in so doing, we're very violently attacking the memory of George Moscone and Harvey Mudd. milk. We're reacting with anger because we are angry. People were outraged because it was property.

You know, this great institution of the free world. We dared. You know, you can replace a goddamn glass door. You can replace a chandelier, right?

You can replace a police car. But you can't replace Harvey. Feeling the rage and the extreme emotions that seemed to be coming from all of those folks, I was right with them.

I was right with him in saying, you know, there is no justice here today and anything that we do is absolutely fine. And then I thought, you know, that's not it. That's not the way. And something of a bit of a cooler head came upon me. I guess I thought about Harvey, who had said many times that he didn't want violence to follow in the footsteps of anything that happened to him.

What the verdict did to our sensitivity was to say, you know, it's not important to be civil in American society. And it's not important to honor other people's right as long as you are. white and you uphold certain white middle class values because you're going to get away with murder you're going to be condoned i think if it had just been musconi that got killed I think he would have been guilty of murder and been in San Quentin the rest of his life. But sad to say, I think there's a lot of people in this world that still think if you kill a gay, you're doing a service to society.

I think I'd have felt that way, too, if I hadn't been associated with Harvey and the gay community. I probably would have felt the same way. Because up until that time, I thought that the guy that was gay was just, he's not. He's not, you know, he's not us.

And I remember I used to hear the cops would go into gay bars years ago and kind of rough up the gays, and I thought, what's wrong with that? You know, that's okay. And I think the majority of people felt that way, and I think a lot of people still feel the same way. And it's a shame.

Dan White was released from prison on January 7, 1984. He served five and a half years and received no psychiatric treatment in prison. Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio, there's a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that she or he is gay, knows that if the parents find out, they'll be tossed out of the house, the classmates would taunt the child, and the Anita Bryans and John Briggs are doing their bit on TV, and that child had several options. Staying in a closet, suicide, and then one day that child might open a paper and it says homosexual elected from San Francisco and there are two new options. The option is to go to California, stay in San Antonio and fight.

Two days after I was elected, I got a phone call, and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said, Thanks.

And you've got to elect gay people. So that that young child and the thousands upon thousands like that child Know that there's hope for a better world. There's hope for a better tomorrow without hope Not only gays, but those blacks the Asians disabled seniors Uses Uses, without hope, the uses give up.

I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, you've got to give them hope. Thank you very much.

Transcript for:Legacy of Harvey Milk and His Assassination

Transcript for:
Legacy of Harvey Milk and His Assassination