Harvey Milk killing

One day last November, I was having the pleasure of fiddling with this book and that newspaper, as you do when you're on holiday in a hotel. I was in San Francisco and I was waiting to be picked up by a friend for an afternoon down the peninsula among the fairways and the cypresses and the eucalyptus trees.

It was noon and I turned on the telly to get the midday news and weather. And a very wobbly, drunken picture came on, to the accompaniment of panicky cries. The cameras were in City Hall because there was about to be a meeting of the mayor and the councillors, or supervisors, as they're called. It never happened but the cameras showed us the aftermath of a gruesome incident which had wrecked the prospect of a meeting. 

What we saw were supervisors ducking into rooms, policemen barring people at the end of corridors, weeping secretaries and a very handsome, very shaken lady, Dianne Feinstein, who'd suddenly become acting mayor and was standing up before a hubbub of reporters and rocking cameras to tell us about it. 

It seems that a man named Dan White who had resigned as a supervisor because he couldn't, with a large family, possibly make ends meet on an annual salary of $9,000, that's £4,500. He'd had a date with the mayor, Mayor Moscone, well only a few minutes before noon, he'd walked into a back entrance of City Hall and thus evaded the security check at the front entrance which would have shown him to be carrying a gun. He walked into the mayor's office, told him to get down on his knees and shot him dead. White then dashed down the corridor into the office of a harmless sitting supervisor named Harvey Milk and shot him dead, too. White was then out of the building and in his car and driving round town in a quiet daze. He was soon picked up and he was charged with murder. 

There was never any doubt that he had done the killings. The question of motive was the great thing and that was gone into very quickly and pretty persuasively because Dan White and his two victims were all very well-known men in the city. Dan White looked like an all-American boy, clean limbed, a sportsman, born and brought up in a San Francisco fringe district, what they call a neighbourhood boy. He became a policeman and he worked his way up to run for city office and in time became a supervisor. 

A month or so before the shootings, he'd resigned for the reasons I mentioned. Mayor Moscone was just about to appoint another man in his place when White asked to see the mayor. He said he'd changed his mind, he wanted his job back. After a rather strained meeting, the mayor said he was sorry 'no'. White went home and thought it over and then, on that November morning, he took out his revolver, pocketed some extra bullets – and that was a big point with the prosecution in trying to show premeditation – and went off to City Hall and the murders. 

Killing the mayor, Moscone, however atrocious, was not difficult to understand. But why the harmless supervisor, down the hall, Harvey Milk? Harvey Milk was no threat to White's job at any time. He was a well-liked and able man, but he was also a homosexual. In fact, in a city where there are over 75,000 enrolled homosexual voters, he'd been appointed by Mayor Moscone to pay special attention to the needs of the homosexuals. The peculiar status of Harvey Milk was what riled Dan White. Dan White was alarmed by homosexuals. He hated them and often said so publicly. And at some moment long ago, or while he was packing his gun or just after he'd shot the mayor, perhaps, he headed for Harvey Milk to perform his symbolic slaying. 

Well he came to trial and last Monday he was found guilty. He'd been charged with first-degree murder and the prosecutor had asked for the death penalty. But the jury, seven women and five men, could find no evidence of premeditation and they found him guilty of something called 'voluntary manslaughter' – an act committed under stress. The district attorney was bitter. 'It was a wrong decision,' he said, 'the jury did not sufficiently analyse the evidence that this was deliberate, calculated murder.' A woman supervisor said she was stunned by the verdict and Mrs Feinstein, now Mayor Feinstein, said she got the word of the verdict with disbelief. 'It will,' she said, 'throw under scrutiny the whole criminal justice system.' 

Well, the effect on the city could only be guessed at but it was very swift to show itself. Once it happened it was not hard to see why it would be violent. Dan White was a self-proclaimed hater of homosexuals. He was also a policeman, or had been. He'd killed a well-loved man who was also a homosexual. San Francisco has 75,000 homosexuals who would have been less than human if they'd prayed for a mild verdict and a light sentence for Dan White. As it is, he can get, at most, seven years in prison and he will be out on parole in five years. 

It was too much for the temper of the homosexual neighbourhoods. On Monday night, the day of the verdict, thousands of people moved on City Hall, broke windows, burned police cars and started a riot in which 140 people, including 60 policemen, were injured. It was early morning before the streets had been cleared and the shell of a wing of City Hall was allowed to simmer and smoke itself out. 

To one faction of the rioters, justice had been flouted and the flouters were the police themselves. To the other, homosexuals were the sinister menace Dan White had always said they were. It was a crude, ugly show unredeemed by a decent motive on either side. And there was every prospect of another squalid showdown the next night, when a homosexual neighbourhood had been given a permit to hold a rally to commemorate what would have been the 49th birthday of the dead Harvey Milk. Mrs Feinstein took a calculated risk in not revoking the permit. She told the police to stay away at a distance and she put it up to the homosexuals to police their own rally. Her judgement was wise. Three thousand people gathered and sang and quietly paid their tribute to the dead supervisor. There was no trouble. 

I suppose there's more than a moral, a lesson in this – a lesson in what we call 'law and order' and what the founding fathers of this country called 'domestic tranquillity'. The lesson of the second demonstration, the quiet rally is, I suggest, that if you don't like a particular social group, however bizarre or offensive to your taste, if it threatens no harm to the neighbours, it's better to leave it alone. This restraint works everywhere with religious cults and self-improvement movements that may seem dotty to most people on the outside. But the trouble with the homosexual population in other places than San Francisco is that while, so far as I know, they don't threaten their neighbours in any way, a good many of the neighbours feel threatened, work on their fears, find the notion of tolerating homosexuals in public places, in schools especially, impossible to bear and invent chimeras, as a lady in Florida did last year – the chimera that a homosexual teacher is more likely to seduce the pupils than a heterosexual. And then the enmity most of all, the deep fear, boils over. 

In the Monday riots in San Francisco, I don't think there's any doubt that the threats came from both sides. This was one time when the fearful heterosexuals, chanting offensive slogans about the gays, were matched by vicious homosexuals shouting, 'Dan White is a pig. Lynch Dan White!' And, more surprisingly, 'Hang Mayor Feinstein!'. 

Now you might have guessed, if there was one public official in the clear, blameless to both sides, it would have been Dianne Feinstein who is a vastly popular mayor, who was prompt to appoint another homosexual supervisor to replace Harvey Milk and who, in this instance, didn't pause to calculate the risk in denouncing the lightness of Dan White's verdict. But here we come on a nasty aspect of San Francisco which is a continuing threat to the reputation and the public order of the city. 

San Francisco is the national factory of hardcore pornographic movies both for public and home consumption. And when I say hardcore, I ought to stress that an X-rated movie in the United States is about as horrendously pornographic as you can get. There are four categories for labelling motion pictures. G means general and suggests nothing that would harm a child, PG means there are pictures or dialogue a little rough maybe for adolescents, wherefore PG – parental guidance – is suggested. An R film is one that contains four-letter words and/or partial or total nudity, possibly some long-shot sex. An X film goes the limit of showing sexual intercourse in clinical detail. 

San Francisco makes about 40 per cent of all the X-rated movies shown in this country. Most of them are very tatty indeed, but they pour out of the small studios and improvised production companies at a fearful rate. Young people willing to perform in them naturally abound in San Francisco and, along with them, a dependable quota of so-called producers and pimps, drug pushers and the like. The city has several neighbourhoods which are glutted with what we call 'gay bars' – some of them are harmless enough, no more harmless certainly than their heterosexual equivalents. Some of them are grim. Simply, sleazy houses of assignation where homosexuals can go, meet and take their pleasure in back rooms. 

Mrs Feinstein, a beautiful lady and very far from prim, knows the city's sordid and well-deserved reputation for these things and she's dead against pornography. She'd like to clean up the peep shows and the home-movie pornography stores, the magazine stands that traffic in nothing else. Naturally she's against degraded bars, no matter what genes they cater to. And that's where the mean and vicious types of homosexual have it in for her. While threatening harm to her, they also, of course, do enormous harm to the great mass of responsible, peaceable, San Francisco homosexuals. They help to inflame and legitimise the fears of ordinary householders. 

Mrs Feinstein knows all this. She does her brave best and bides her time until the distant day when public prejudice catches up with the law and settles down peaceably with it.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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