On November 10, 1978, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (acting as City Council) named Dan White resigns from his position, claiming that his annual salary of $9,600 is not enough to support his family. Within days, White had a change of heart and asked that his resignation be rescinded and reinstated. At first, Mayor George Moscone agrees, but in consultation with other council members who supported liberalizing the corps, he decides not to allow conservative and Vietnam War veteran White to return.
This sequence of events may seem trivial or commonplace in the political arena. But in reality, it was to result in a double murder: of Mayor George Moscone and another member of the Board of Supervisors and gay rights activist, Harvey Milk.
During the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced major movements for the rights of the LGBTI community. One of the central figures in them was Harvey Milk, known by the nickname “Castro Street Mayor”, as before starting his political career he ran a camera shop on the street of the same name. His store became a gay gathering place and soon evolved into a meeting place for community activists.
Milk turned seriously to politics in 1973, holding a liberal agenda and advocating for the reorganization of the city’s electoral system by establishing district-based ballots, legalizing marijuana, and preventing the government from getting involved in personal matters of sexual orientation. His appearance then, influenced by the counterculture of the ’60s, was certainly unexpected for a candidate for city council: long hair, a mustache and hippie clothes.
Despite his militant speeches and the support of many members of the LGBTI community, he failed to get elected the first two times he ran for the Supervisory Board. So he changed his appearance: he got a haircut, shaved, and started wearing suits; he stopped smoking marijuana and visiting public bathhouses frequented mostly by gay men, and he started making political allies.
Electoral success was to come in November 1977, when he was elected to the Council, which was visibly progressive, including for the first time a single mother, an African-American woman, and Milk, the first openly gay politician. In the same election, Dan White, a former police officer and former firefighter, was also elected. Initially their cooperation was within the prescribed frameworks. In essence, however, they did not agree on what policy should be pursued: Milk and Mayor Mascone wanted to implement a policy that centered on residents and neighborhoods, while White believed that San Francisco could only grow with strengthening and providing facilities to businesses.
Their relationship soured when Milk voted to establish a mental institution for teenagers in White’s area, having initially agreed with the latter’s opposition to the proposal. After this incident, White voted against Milk’s every proposal.
When White resigned on November 10 and five days later asked to have his resignation rescinded, Milk and other Council liberals lobbied to keep White back and tip the scales toward the progressives rather than the conservatives who , in their opinion, served the interests of businessmen. Indeed, Moscone stated that White’s resignation had already been accepted and filed in the Council’s minutes, so there was a legal issue in the event of its retraction that would have to be investigated.
Not intending to reinstate White to the Council, Moscone found a replacement for his seat. Shortly before the official announcement of the change, on the morning of November 27, 1978, White entered San Francisco City Hall through a basement window in order to avoid metal detectors at the entrance, carrying two handguns and 10 extra rounds of ammunition. He headed to the mayor’s office, asking to speak. After he asked Moscone to bring him back and he refused, the two men argued, until White shot the mayor twice in the shoulder and chest, seriously wounding him. When he fell to the floor, White approached him and shot him twice in the head from a distance of 150 millimeters, killing him instantly.
Reloading his gun, he headed across town hall to the office of Milk, who was talking to a radio reporter at the time, and asked to speak to his old office. When Milk followed him, White shot him five times, the last of which missed a shot, and fled.
Eventually, White was arrested soon after and the public outcry was great. When his trial began, which under a law passed three weeks before the murders could have resulted in the death penalty, his defense attorneys argued that White was suffering from depression, citing a reduced charge. They claimed that a symptom of his depression was a change in his diet, and indeed a shift towards unhealthy foods, leading the press to dub his defense strategy the “Twinkie Defense”, named after a packaged sweet that used to consume White in the time before the murders.
Despite the evidence, White was sentenced to 7 years in prison as it was deemed that the murders were not premeditated and his mental state at the time of the commission was such that he could not be held fully responsible. The reaction of the people of San Francisco was immediate and decisive, as they felt that the disproportionately light sentence was due to the homophobia of the court and the jury, given Milk’s sexual identity. On the day the verdict was announced, riots took place across the city, dubbed the “White Night Riots”: citizens, mainly members of the LGBTI community, clashed violently with police forces, marking the most violent community response since the Stonewall events in New York in 1969. At the same time, the state of California tightened its diminution laws.
Milk is considered one of the most influential figures in the LGBTI community, and today organizations, schools, and even an auxiliary ship of the US Navy bear his name. In 1984, the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, while the 2008 biopic Milk starring Sean Penn was nominated for 8 Academy Awards, winning Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. However, in 1985, a year after his release from prison after five years in prison, Dan White committed suicide in his garage.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
