Out for Good by Dudley Clendinen & Adam Nagourney

Author:Dudley Clendinen & Adam Nagourney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

June 1978, San Francisco

Harvey Milk, elected in November 1977 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, had as keen a sense of politics in California as anyone. He was convinced that a Briggs victory was inevitable, particularly as he watched the senator adopt Anita Bryant’s playbook. Briggs named his committee California Defend Our Children. In places like Balboa Park in San Diego, Briggs supporters would campaign by asking strangers: “Do you want to protect your children against molesters?” Briggs, like Anita Bryant, distributed literature displaying headlines about homosexual child molestation cases. He also printed leaflets which linked his death penalty and teacher initiatives, showing a teenage boy lying in a pool of blood and stating: “You can act right now to help protect your family from vicious killers and defend your children from homosexual teachers.” Briggs’s speeches were also often indistinguishable from Bryant’s in Miami. “We can’t accept you as normal people because you are not normal people,” he said. “The only way they can get children is to recruit our children. I can’t think of a better setting than the classrooms.”

In “Deviants Threaten the American Family,” a column for the Los Angeles Times, Briggs wrote: “Children in this country spend more than 1,200 hours a year in classrooms. A teacher who is a known homosexual will automatically represent that way of life to young, impressionable students at a time when they are struggling with their own critical choice of sexual orientation. When children are constantly exposed to such homosexual role models, they may well be inclined to experiment with a life-style that could lead to disaster for themselves and ultimately, for society as a whole.”

The one thing worse than Briggs winning the state of California would be Briggs winning the city of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk decided that, at the very least, he would try to stop that from happening. Milk accepted nearly every invitation that came to speak against the initiative, or to debate Briggs, and he delivered memorable attacks on Briggs at both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Gay Pride Parades that June. Almost 350,000 people marched in San Francisco, the turnout swollen by Briggs and Bryant. The marchers walked behind a banner that read “Human Rights Are Absolute.”

“My name is Harvey Milk—and I want to recruit you,” Milk announced to the crowd after riding the parade route in an open-topped car, wearing a white T-shirt and flowered lei. “I want to recruit you for the fight to preserve democracy from the John Briggs and Anita Bryants who are trying to constitutionalize bigotry. We are not going to allow that to happen. We are not going to sit back in silence as 300,000 of our gay sisters and brothers did in Nazi Germany.”

• • •

Milk was not alone in his pessimism. David Goodstein had considered this a losing cause from the start and became more convinced he was right as the summer approached. There was no reason to believe that California voters would defy a clear national trend.

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