The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts

Author:Randy Shilts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

thirteen

Willkommen Castro

“On this spot, four days ago, a young citizen was murdered because he was a homosexual”

Ribbons in the colors of the Catalonian province, yellow and orange, laid silently on the street next to the cardboard flowers by the hand-scrawled epitaph. It had been years since Cleve Jones fulfilled his adolescent dream and come to San Francisco for his first San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Like most of his friends, he too had been swept up in the tide of militance after the Anita Bryant controversy. Weeks after Orange Tuesday, he had left his Castro Street apartment to take a hitchihiking tour of Europe. In Barcelona, he had heard there would be a rally, here, where the blood of a gay man had spilled just four days before. The fledgling Spanish gay activists were cautious as they first approached the spot. This was the first gay demonstration since the death of Francisco Franco, they explained to Cleve; that meant the first gay demonstration in Spanish history. Ever.

Slowly, the momentum grew as Jones and a cadre of the braver gays marched down Los Ramblos from the waterfront to the Catalonian provincial capitol. From nowhere, La Guardia Civil appeared, firing rubber bullets into the crowd. Jones turned to see bullets tear off the scalp of the woman marching at his side. Blood, broken glass, and tear gas filled the streets. Rather than surrender, the gay protestors launched into an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the police through the winding alleys and lanes of Barcelona. They took the chairs and tables from sidewalk cafés and built barricades, taunting the police to fire on. Cleve threw his first rock. The street fighting in Barcelona excited his long latent anger even more than the frenzied chanting of the San Francisco demonstrations after Orange Tuesday. When the days’ fighting waned, he wrote a long letter enthusiastically recounting the day to a friend; the letter was widely reprinted in gay papers across the country. When Jones returned to Castro Street that fall to work in Harvey Milk’s supervisorial campaign, he still talked ecstatically of that day in Barcelona. He had suddenly realized that the gay movement meant more than an annual parade and that it would soon be bigger than anyone imagined; too much anger simmered beneath the surface, all over the world.

Jones couldn’t have come to a time and place that could better nourish that conviction. A sense of gay manifest destiny gripped San Francisco by 1978, as if it were ordained that homosexuals should people the city from sea to shining bay. Harvey’s bold public role as Castro Street’s neighborhood supervisor—and the national publicity he garnered as the city’s gay spokesperson—certainly fueled that attitude. But the import of the San Francisco gay phenomenon had implications far beyond the pillared walls of City Hall, and the gays of San Francisco saw themselves as the avant-garde of a burgeoning national movement.

Dade County marked the beginning, not the end, of organized opposition to the gay civil rights cause; the issue moved to the forefront of the nation’s social agenda.

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