How Getting Married Made Me An Activist

When Garland first started teaching at Grant in 1967, homosexuals lived in an America where they could be arrested just for being in a gay bar. "We were all closeted then," he recalls. It would be two more years before one such bar raid, at the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village, would spark gays to riot, an event that launched the modern-day gay-rights movement. But even after the Stonewall riots, police harassment of homosexuals continued for many years. On Labor Day 1974, San Francisco policemen beat dozens of gay men who were standing outside the popular Toad Hall bar in the city's Castro district after one ignored an officer's order: "Off the street, faggot." The incident helped galvanize the gay community behind a Castro Street camera-store owner who had aspirations of becoming the first openly gay man elected to office in a major U.S. city. His name was Harvey Milk.

As part of my gay-history lesson, I went to a preview screening this past week of "Milk," a new movie being released Nov. 26 that stars Sean Penn as the gay-rights activist. Watching Penn dissolve into the role of the endearingly nebbishy San Francisco city supervisor who urged gays to come out of the closet and flex their political power, I was transported to an era I had lived through but didn't comprehend at the time. I had no idea who Harvey Milk was when I was in junior high (I was more preoccupied with Farrah Fawcett), though even if I had, I would have been too frightened to express any interest in what he was doing for fear someone might think I was homosexual—something I was loath to admit even to myself back in those days.

I had good reason to hide what I was feeling. In 1977, the pleasant redhead I recognized from commercials as the pitchwoman for Florida orange juice was suddenly all over the media, railing against the evils of homosexuality. "Homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit," Anita Bryant declared as she launched a campaign to roll back a gay-rights ordinance that had been enacted just months earlier in Dade County, Fla. "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards." What I didn't know at the time—probably none of us could have comprehended it—was that Bryant had, for the first time, rallied born-again Christians around a specific piece of legislation. And once they tasted victory that June, there was no turning back.

Bryant's triumph was a stunning loss for the nascent gay-rights movement. "Gay leaders had made a vast mistake in 1977 by underestimating the intense dedication of the legions of born-again Christians," the late journalist Randy Shilts wrote in his biography of Milk, "The Mayor of Castro Street." But the loss brought gays together like never before. To shouts of "Two, four, six, eight, separate the church and state," they marched through the streets of San Francisco, with Milk at the lead, shouting on his ever-present bullhorn. Gays weren't about to let it happen again, and they were ready when Bryant and her followers set their sights on California the next year.

My teacher Mr. Garland remembers that battle well. "They wanted to fire all the gay teachers," he says, recalling California state Sen. John Briggs's ballot initiative to prevent gays and lesbians from working in the public schools. SAVE OUR CHILDREN FROM HOMOSEXUAL TEACHERS, one newspaper ad for the Briggs initiative screamed. (That sentiment was echoed to great effect this fall in a Prop 8 commercial featuring a young girl informing her horrified mother, "Guess what I learned in school today? I learned how a prince married a prince, and I can marry a princess.")

Milk and the other gay-rights leaders pulled every string they had with their Democratic allies (President Jimmy Carter even urged Californians to vote "no"), but "the thing that helped to defeat it was Ronald Reagan coming out against it," Garland recalls. "Homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles," the former California governor wrote in September 1978. "Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this." Why did Reagan—the man who revived the Republican Party by welcoming into the fold the very forces supporting Briggs and Bryant—go to bat for gays? Briggs said it was because Reagan was part of the "Hollywood crowd," though Shilts, in his Milk biography, reported, "Gay insiders credited Reagan's help to the fact that he had no small number of gays among his top staff."

But the gay community's joy over the defeat of Briggs would be short-lived. A few weeks after the election, Milk was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone by Dan White, Milk's conservative nemesis on the Board of Supervisors. When White was convicted in 1979 of manslaughter—not murder—San Francisco gays took to the streets in what became known as the "White Night Riots."