QEWW Public Reading, September 2018

Here's the piece I read at the end of my first cycle in the Queer Elders Writing Workshop that is sponsored by Openhouse:

You Gotta Give them Hope

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person elected to political office in California. My path intersected his in the 1978 campaign against the Briggs Initiative. In a backlash against early ordinances banning discrimination against gay people, State Senator John Briggs had authored a proposition requiring school districts in California to fire gay teachers and any teachers who advocated for gay civil rights, in the classroom or elsewhere. When early opinion was strongly in favor of the initiative, gays and our supporters mobilized against it.

At the time, I was an officer in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a San Francisco coalition of gay rights activists within various religious communities – Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Jewish. We visited congregations and held services to counter the ignorance and invective that were being used by proponents of the initiative. Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart were debating Senator Briggs. The No on 6 Campaign, the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative, and similar groups all over the state joined the fray.

And we won. On November 7, 1978, Prop. 6 went down in flames, roughly 60% to 40%. And we celebrated. And there was backlash.

I was working for the California appellate court on November 27 that year. My desk was in a large room with windows overlooking the San Francisco City Hall. Somebody noticed a fleet of police cars converging on City Hall, and most of us watched for a while and wondered what was happening.

Eventually we learned that former Supervisor Dan White had brought a gun into City Hall and had killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Gay and straight, most of the city was in mourning. I joined a candlelight vigil outside City Hall that night, and lessened my grief by sharing it with friends.

Harvey had been a member of my synagogue, and I attended his memorial service. Eerily prescient, he had recorded a testament to be played in the event of his assassination. It included the line, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” A bullet did kill him, and nobody should lurk in a closet ever again.