White Night (May 21 1979) protestors at San Francisco’s City Hall, angered by the verdict of Dan White’s trial for the 1978 assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.
Bay Area Reporter, June 21 1979
The White Night Riots were often known as ’Bloody Monday’ at the time.
On this day, 21 May 1979, the White Night riots occurred in San Francisco when LGBTQ people reacted angrily to the killer of Harvey Milk not being convicted of murder. Milk was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US, who was shot and killed along with the mayor George Moscone, by former police officer Dan White, using his service revolver. Numerous serving San Francisco police officers wore t-shirts declaring “Free Dan White”, and contributed to his defence fund, which reportedly raised up to $100,000. Despite later admitting that the murders were premeditated, in court White used his now-infamous “Twinkie defence”, which was that eating junk food showed he was in a poor mental state. So rather than being convicted of murder, he was only convicted voluntary manslaughter. Upon hearing the verdict, a crowd of 500 mostly LGBTQ people began marching down Castro Street calling others to join them and heading to City Hall. By the time they arrived, the crowd had grown to include thousands of people, and they attacked the building, smashing windows. Police waded into the crowd, beating people with batons, and the crowd then began burning police cars. As one man set light to a vehicle, he told a reporter: “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies.” In retaliation for their humiliating defeat, police attacked a gay bar later that night, screaming homophobic abuse, shattering windows and beating drinkers and passers-by, injuring many. By the end of the night’s events, 61 police officers and over 100 members of the public had been hospitalised. Dan White ended up serving only five years in prison, but he killed himself shortly after his release. * We have produced some items commemorating LGBT+ struggles against the police like this to help fund our work, check them out here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/lgbtq-historyhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1992944904223983/?type=3
Your reminder that we are approaching the 43rd anniversary of the White Night Riots of 1979 (aka Bloody Monday) on May 21.
This is when lgbtq and allies rose up in rage at the lenient sentence of Dan White (former politician and cop) for assassinating Supervisor Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone on November 27 1978.
A protest turned into a fully justified rage of anger which saw City Hall attacked and set on fire, and dozens of police cars torched.
Some liberal types (gay and straight) whined afterwards about the vandalism and violence.
Dan White’s actions were mostly motivated by right-wing homophobic hate. As gay friendly as San Francisco was becoming by this time, there were still serious ongoing problems with violent and sometimes lethal homophobic assaults, arson, and discrimination. The SFPD (police) were still harassing, abusing and assaulting LGBTQ people. Former cop Dan White murdered two people in cold blood and a (factually) all-straight jury gave him the most lenient sentence they could.
Such gross injustice was an act of violence, it enabled homophobia, and violence was the appropriate and proportional response. And this has been proven right since.
Non violence is always preferable but often not appropriate.
I’ve been reading a lot of things from the 1960s and 1970s in recent years regarding LGBTQ rights and civil rights. People need to look in to their/this history. Most LGBTQ today have no idea how bad things were, in many cases still are, and generally may well be again (and that’s not taking into account the rest of the planet beyond North America, Australasia and Western Europe). Some of what I’ve encountered by digging around is almost beyond belief. Ignorance and complacency is as much our enemy as anything/anyone else.
As far as we’ve come, we are not remotely “out of the woods” yet, LGBTQ and/or non-white people (obviously I would have thought, but…)
What has this got to do with abortion?
A lot.
However you feel about abortion, we must protect and defend people’s rights over their own bodies. Nobody has the right to dictate what you, I, or anyone does with their bodies, if it is your choice, if it is consensual. Nobody has the right to force an unwanted pregnancy (or force an abortion for that matter). It can be reasonably argued that forcing people to carry and give birth to an unwanted child is as abusive as rape. And if the pregnancy is an actual product of rape, it’s all the more horrific.
The focus on the overturning of Roe v Wade needs to be the main focus of course, but it also needs to be pointed out that this is just one part of a slippery slope, a harmful and backwards decline of real progress.
Once abortion is denied, it won’t be long before every other long fought for right is stripped away.
Abortion rights are everyone’s concern whether you are male, female, non-binary, LGBTQ or straight, a US citizen or not. This will effect everyone eventually.
And there is almost no inappropriate response to the severity of this threat.
