White Night Riot Anniversary

People had the mayor, the board of supes, the chief of police and three hundred cops holed up in their last stand and surrounded by burning police cars.

It felt like having your first orgasm on Christmas, the Fourth of July and your birthday, all at the same time, right after they announce you've won the lottery, and just then the Big One hits.

Had anybody had the stomach to knock aside the pacifists who linked arms in front of the main door (which was being bashed open with parking meters), the mob would have massacred the whole lot. Everybody was up for a righteous, bloody massacre. Nobody had the stomach to smack aside pacifists, though. Odd thing, that. Sez a lot.

Help arrived, just at that moment. Every cop in an hour's drive, except for the dispatchers, had rushed to rescue their brethren from "a bunch of goddam faggots." The SFPD will never live it down.

Queers started it, alright. There's no mistaking that. But let's not forget the most significant part of the evening: everybody piled on. Everybody! I saw people who looked like they had just left the opera, dressed to the nines, fight the cops alongside teenage Tenderloin homeboys. The cops had clubbed them by "mistake," and they were mega-pissed. I saw an old woman, gray as a tombstone, and kids who couldn't have been twelve. They looked like they lived in the neighborhood. I came all the way from Oakland, and I'm mainly a breeder. Tear gas is addictive.

It wasn't about Harvey Milk. It was about life as we know it. White's sentence was just the last straw.

There are an awful damn lot of us. The powers that be are *scared* of us, damn scared. They barely keep the lid on now.

Something to think about next time a straw breaks.

Not a suggestion.