Page 200 - Some Dance to Remember

170 Jack Fritscher

to City Hall escalated to a determined walk to a fast trot to a running
righteousness when the angry citizens reached City Hall to find hundreds
of police in full riot gear cordoning off the Civic Center Plaza. It isn’t
very pretty what a City without pity can do. Very quickly the situation
became primitive. The seventies resurrected the radical sixties. By mid-
night the protest turned into a hard-fought, running street fight between
gays and baton-wielding cops. The screaming crowd chanted “Avenge
Harvey Milk!” On the steps of the same City Hall where, six months
earlier, mourners, on the night of the murders, had held gently flickering
candles, this night they stormed the doors of City Hall, rushing up the
stairs, tearing the wrought iron from the doors and smashing it through
the glass, throwing uprooted burning bushes into the marble halls. They
lit copies of the evening Examiner with its bold headlines of the verdict
and ran down the sidewalk torching nine of the police cars parked at the
curb. The black-and-whites sat in a long blazing line, flames and smoke
circling their revolving red lights, their sirens moaning like dying beasts.
Dianne Feinstein, throughout the siege, held her ground in the very
office where a bullet had killed Moscone and made her mayor. Supervisor
Carol Ruth Silver appeared on a second floor balcony holding a single
candle. She was a vision. She tried to speak, but was struck in the mouth
by a flying rock. Her voice was lost in the roar. She withdrew. Demonstra-
tors kicked over the row of a dozen newspaper vending machines, includ-
ing Ryan’s rack selling Maneuvers. They tossed the heavy stands across the
concrete moat surrounding the basement level of windows through which
White had crawled to enter the building to shoot Moscone and Milk.
Even as the City Hall battle raged, other cop droids, goon squads,
anonymous, with badges removed, headed for 18th and Castro. The cops
launched a baton-wielding assault on the Elephant Walk bar, wreaking
revenge, randomly bludgeoning employees and beating customers. San
Francisco went into meltdown. Human blood ran in the gutters.
It was dawn before the police regained City Hall.
Rubble, strewn from Turk Street to Market Street, let the City know
that hell hath no fury like faggots scorned. If the legendary Stonewall Riot
had let New York and the world know that gay liberation was born, the
White Night Riot let the City and the world know that gay liberation had
come of age equal to any in a world of violence and terrorism.
“Gays,” a wounded demonstrator, doing Peter Finch in Network,
screamed into a Live Eye TV camera, “are mad as hell. And we’re not
going to take it anymore!”
The next morning, Milk’s successor, gay Supervisor Harry Britt,

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