On the night of May 21, 1979, it was announced that Dan White
had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the lightest sentencing possible for
his assassination of Harvey Milk. San Francisco’s heartbroken gay community
responded in a series of violent demonstrations now known as the White Night
Riots.
The San Francisco Police Department clash with protesters during the 1979 White Night Riots. In the background hangs a banner, reading “STOP ATTACKS ON LESBIANS & GAYS” (x).
When Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors in 1977 he changed American history by becoming the first openly gay person
to be elected to public office. By 1970, not only had cities such as San
Francisco become a much-needed safe haven for the LGBT community, but Harvey Milk
had ascended to icon status for the community, symbolizing hope, progress, and optimism for his
people. Harvey represented the huge population of gay men in the city, but his
campaigns also achieved a sense of solidarity between San Francisco’s gay community and
its lesbian community. He surrounded himself with popular lesbian activists
such as Anne Kronenburg and Sally Miller Gearheart. His assassination on
November 27, 1978 was met with a city-wide grief.
San Francisco residents react to the conviction of Dan White with a banner that reads “HE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER” (x).
That grief morphed into rage when it was announced that not
only was Harvey’s murderer, Dan White, receiving the lightest sentence possible,
but that he had won over the judge with the now infamous “Twinkie defense.” Dan
White’s attorney claimed that the amount of Twinkies and other junk food that
he had consumed before the assassination was a sign of his depressed mental
state, and therefore the reasoning behind his heinous crimes. The LGBT populations of San Francisco were outraged and what started out as
a peaceful march through the Castro District grew into a violent riot once the
protesters reached the San Francisco City Hall. Cars were lit on fire, tear gas
was thrown, and the SFPD went head to head with over 5,000 protesters. Dan
White’s past as a former police officer coupled with the SFPD’s history of
homophobic attacks simply added fuel to the (quite literal) anti-police fire of the
riots. When Cleve Jones, a famous gay activist from the 1970s, recalled the
night of the White Night Riots in 1984, he said:
“The rage in people’s face—I
saw people I’d known for years, and they were so furious. That to me was the
scariest thing. All these people I’d know from the neighborhood, boys from the
corner, these people I’d ridden the bus with, just out there, screaming for
blood.”
Today, the White Night Riots are remembered as a night – second only to
Stonewall – where LGBT made the world take notice of the amount of violence and visceral power
they were able to yield.
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