Erotic City by Sides Josh;

Author:Sides, Josh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Murdering Robert Hillsborough

In the early hours of Wednesday, June 22, 1977, Robert Hillsborough, a professional gardener who spent most mornings planting rainbows of hyacinths at one of San Francisco’s finest children’s playgrounds, was savagely murdered in the Mission, making him the nineteenth gay man killed in as many months because of his homosexuality.46 His young Latino assailant stabbed him fifteen times, piercing his heart, lungs, and liver, and left him to bleed to death at Nineteenth and Lexington. Pensive and mild-mannered, Hillsborough seemed like the last person anyone would have expected to die so violently. It was partly the horrible incongruity between Hillsborough’s serene life and ghastly death that made his name a rallying cry for gay activists both locally and nationally. Widespread outrage among gays and lesbians in San Francisco contributed to an unprecedented attendance of 250,000 at that weekend’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, making it the largest demonstration for gay liberation that had ever taken place in the United States. A makeshift shrine on the steps of City Hall, adorned with many of the floral varieties Hillsborough loved so much, became the virtual wailing wall of the 1977 Gay Freedom Day Parade.47

After an evening out on the town with his lover, Jerry Taylor, the thirty-three-year-old Hillsborough had pulled his light blue Land Rover into a late-night hamburger stand known as the Whiz-Burger on Eighteenth Street and South Van Ness, just blocks from their apartment on Nineteenth and Lexington. After receiving their food, Hillsborough and Taylor sat in their car, ate, and hugged. A waitress at the Whizburger testified that the four assailants—John Cordova, nineteen, Thomas Spooner, twenty-one, Michael Chavez, twenty, and Richard Ojeda, sixteen—got out of their car, apparently to confront Hillsborough and Taylor for their public display of homosexuality. Shouting “faggot,” Cordova punched Hillsborough repeatedly through the opened driver-side window. Hillsborough backed quickly out of the lot, shouted “Fuck you, you fucking punk,” and swerved out onto Eighteenth to head home. Apparently unbeknownst to either Hillsborough and Taylor, the assailants gave chase, attacking them when they got out of their car at their apartment building. When Taylor did not fight back, the teens turned their rage to Hillsborough, who struggled in vain to fight them off. In a final savage moment, Cordova pulled out a knife and began stabbing Hillsborough to death. “Oh my god,” Hillsborough gasped in his last words, “what are you doing to me?”

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