The Whole World is Watching, Part 2

by John Byrne Barry | Nov 17, 2021 | Sausalypso

This is Chapter 12 of my novel-in-progress, Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, and I’m sharing it because it requires less context than most chapters. The protagonist in this chapter is Tin Alley, the first woman chief of police in Sausalypso, an affluent town on San Francisco Bay north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

(Here’s my six-word over-simplified summary of the novel: Lazy hippie houseboaters resist greedy developers.)

It’s the late 1970s and Sausalypso city leaders and developers are attempting to evict the hippies and squatters who are living in a ragtag houseboat community in the mudflats along the waterfront. Chapter 11, “The Whole World is Watching, Part 1,” recounts a skirmish in the harbor, where the police come by boat to serve eviction warrants and are met with an exuberant resistance by the scrappy houseboaters, who fight them off with oars and then go limp when they are arrested. 

The book is fiction, but based on real events. As you’ll see in this chapter, Chief Tin takes part in the White Night Riot, which happened in real life in the spring of 1979, when jurors settled on a manslaughter verdict for Dan White, the former San Francisco supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall in November 1978.  

I’m writing fiction so I can fudge facts and make up characters, but I aim to capture as much of the zeitgeist as possible, so I’d love to hear from anyone who was there. (Actually, I welcome your feedback even if you weren’t there.)

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The Whole World is Watching, Part 2

I’m on Castro Street, in the street, surrounded by a throng of agitated protesters, itching to march down Market to City Hall, to vent our outrage over the Dan White manslaughter verdict. When I get jostled from behind, I clench my fists and spin around, but it’s a smiling man in a pink ballerina outfit and he raises his hands sheepishly and winks. Sorry, he mouths. 

I’m jumpy as all get out from a punishing day, in uniform, arresting protesters in Sausalypso, so it’s unsettling to be out of uniform, a protester myself, in San Francisco, where I once lived and worked. I remind myself why I’m here. These are my people. 

And by my people, I mean gay people. Like me. I’m not here as a police officer tonight, but as a gay person, as a lesbian, surrounded by other gay people, noisy and angry gay people. 

When my friend Justine called me, she said the whole Castro was on edge.

I have never experienced anything like this before, this large gathering of gay people, chanting, singing, shouting, crying. 

Sure, I’m angry, but I’m also excited to be angry.

Behind me, the chanting grows more impassioned. “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.” Like the houseboaters this morning chanted. Except it feels totally different.  

The righteousness of being here, protesting a grave injustice, is visceral. At this moment, there is nowhere I’d rather be. Even though it’s cold and foggy and the wind cuts through my three layers.

We’re at the top of the hill, in front of the Twin Peaks Tavern, which Justine tells me is owned by a lesbian couple, and is significant because it has floor-to-ceiling windows. You can see us. We can see you. No hiding in the closet here. Not the first gay bar, but the first with clear glass windows.

This is the corner where, not long ago, Harvey Milk used to shout, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Have I come out? Not in Sausalypso. Not with my foster parents. Only with a few friends, like Justine, who I haven’t seen in ages, but always send a card to on her birthday.

I catch a whiff of barbecued meat, then it’s gone. Also garbage, car exhaust, pot, and sweat. 

It’s not night, not yet. But I see lights coming on in the windows climbing Twin Peaks. 

When Justine called me, two hours ago, I was gritting my way through the paperwork from the evictions and arrests at Aquarius Harbor, and, as dinnertime approached, finally eating the tuna sandwich I packed for lunch. I wish I had eaten more. My stomach is growling again. 

“We’re gathering for a protest this evening,” she said, “I want you to join us.” The Dan White verdict, that he got off with manslaughter, which means about eight years max, was a travesty of justice, she said. I was exhausted, and looking forward to some mindless TV and an early bedtime. 

“Where shall we meet?” I said.

Darkness hovers, and we ease into our march down Market Street, filling the street for five, six blocks, down to the Safeway sign. There are so many of us, we move slowly. It’s a traffic jam of people. A phalanx of police officers stand erect on the curb, their faces tight and tense. I’m grateful I’m not one of them. The street vibrates under our stomping feet.

A police officer’s job is to keep their distance from all these intense emotions. That was my job this morning. But not tonight. Squelching my feelings is no way to live in this moment.  I don’t know anyone here but Justine, but I feel engaged, enraged, part of a movement, part of a community. 

How many of us are here? I’m not sure. I’ve become better at counting crowds over the years, and this morning at the Aquarius Harbor protest, I counted two hundred, between the houseboaters and the police and the journalists and the onlookers. A huge crowd for such a small sliver of land between Bridgeway and the bay, and it seemed even larger with the cardboard cutouts — even though we knew they were cardboard. 

There are five times as many people here now, at least a thousand, maybe twice that, and ahead, more protesters stream in from Noe Street, from 16th Street.

Above the crowd are rainbow flags and hand-scrawled signs. “Avenge Harvey Milk.” “A travesty of justice.” ”Twinkies my ass.”

I’ve never taken part in a demonstration, not ever. I’ve only been on the other side. Even when I was an outlaw, working at Sally Cal’s cathouse on Nob Hill, I was a sheriff of sorts — a peacekeeper, at the least. 

I’m tired and wired, and the cacophony is overwhelming, yet I’m caught up in my own thoughts. About my past in the city, about my hesitance accepting my sexuality, about my unlikely escape to the relative quiet of Sausalypso. 

I am forever grateful to Sally for taking me in when I ran away from my foster home at fifteen, and putting me to work changing sheets and washing dishes and cleaning toilets and never once pressuring me to become a working girl. She knew better than I did that wasn’t something I would be good at. And when she instructed me, once I had graduated to greater responsibilities, to pass out envelopes of cash, I followed orders.

I lived in the city when I worked for Sally, but it’s been decades, and I rarely passed through the Castro, which back then was a sleepy working-class neighborhood full of Scandinavians and Irish, and wasn’t even called the Castro. That was long before it became a gay enclave, long before I became a police officer, long before I realized men didn’t interest me.

Justine is also a police officer, and totally out as a lesbian — though she wasn’t when I first met her, umpteen years ago, when I was I was the bagman for Sally Cal and she was a rookie cop. Back then, she was out as a defiant black woman — her parents immigrated from Jamaica. She was on the city police force for years, and now she’s a lieutenant for BART, the new transbay railroad that links the City and the East Bay and she makes way more money than I do.

Again, we chant, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.” Then, “No justice, no peace.” There’s more anger, more fist shaking, more out-of-control emotions than this morning. Two men climb on the roof of a bus and pull down the pole that connects it to the overhead electric wires. We walk around the marooned bus. The passengers exit. Several join the march.

We’re riding the rapids of a swollen river, and every block another stream of protesters swells the surge. 

Above the chants I hear honking horns. We’re blocking traffic. On Noe, a driver climbs out of his car and wags his middle fingers at us, his face contorted in rage. 

This is not a time to be questioning myself, but could it be that I have hidden in my closet because I don’t want people to hate me? When I see this man’s rage, my shoulders clench, even though he’s a hundred feet away and he doesn’t see me or know who I am.

But he may not hate us for being gay. Maybe it’s because we’re blocking traffic and he’s in a hurry. Someone he loves is waiting. He’s picking up his daughter or son from daycare.

Dan White’s trial has been on the front page of the Chronicle for the past week and I knew a verdict was imminent, but the confrontations at Aquarius Harbor have been dominating my attention. And draining me. I forgot about the trial until Justine called.

Six months ago, White, a former San Francisco police officer, resigned his county supervisor seat and when he wanted it back, Mayor George Moscone said no. So White climbed through a window at City Hall, shot the mayor, and then shot Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the country. 

He faced a double premeditated first-degree murder charge, an open-and-shut case. But the defense brought in psychiatrists insisting he was hopped up on junk food, that the night before the murders, when he knew the mayor had denied his request, he binged on Twinkies and watched TV.

I never expected a jury would buy that.

Justine has made friends while I’ve been lost in my thoughts, and she’s explaining to them that it was never about the Twinkies. “That gave the jury an excuse,” she says. “The jurors were Dan White’s peers and they feared, as he did, that the old guard, the San Francisco they grew up in, run by the Italians, the Irish, and most of all the sanctimonious Catholic Church, was being replaced by hippies and gays and liberals. Damn right it is! They had to convict him — he confessed, after all — but they went for manslaughter, because they understood. Maybe even sympathized.” 

I keep chanting as we march, but I’m operating on two channels, one sharing the pain and fury of my community, which feels clean and sharp, the other percolating on who I am, how I got here, and what a long, strange trip it’s been. That feels uncomfortable.

I feel surprisingly at home here, as if the uniform I took off earlier is a costume. When I go back to work tomorrow, I won’t be the same person. Being police chief is my job, but being here, surrounded by other gay people, angry about injustice, this is my life.

We turn left on Polk, connect with another river of protesters flowing in from South of Market. The wind whips through the canyon of tall towers and I pull my jacket tighter. Our chants echo off the buildings.

We veer right on Fell, at the corner of City Hall, and I follow a pack of men who grab hold of the hood of an empty police car and rock it up and down.

The man in the pink ballerina outfit, who winked at me on Castro Street, climbs onto the hood and then the roof of the car. I’m right behind him. “Avenge Harvey Milk,” he chants, “Avenge Harvey Milk.” We should leave. I should leave, or intervene, but I get on the roof and join him.

A man in a hooded sweatshirt with his face covered by a mask pulls a brick from his pack and smashes the side window of the car. It shatters, doesn’t break. He whacks the window again. Now it breaks. 

I come to my senses and climb down from the roof, but the whooping men rock the car even harder and I lose my balance and fall. Into the arms of a surprised young man with bright red hair. He sets me on the ground, and immediately a police officer yanks me away, and handcuffs me to a lamppost. I try to explain I’m the Sausalypso police chief, that I’ve never been arrested before, that I’ve never even marched in a demonstration before, that I don’t condone vandalism, but he shoulders his way back into the crowd and arrests the ballerina. Now there’s a whoosh of flame and the police car is burning. 

First, I’m afraid the car will blow up and engulf us in flames and I try, in vain, to free myself from the cuffs. Another officer sprays the car with a fire extinguisher, and the flames die down, and I decide I’m going to lose my job, never find another one, but I’m not going to die from a car explosion, only from humiliation and shame. 

Then it starts raining, and I am soaked until I can’t possibly get any wetter.