Crazy in Suburbia: Remember When Harvey Milk Came to Debate at Northgate High?

Contemplating a federal judge's ruling Wednesday on California's gay marriage ban got me thinking about Harvey Milk. 

Or rather, contemplating covering a pro-gay marriage demonstration scheduled for Wednesday afternoon in downtown Walnut Creek got me thinking about Milk.

Actually, I also got to thinking about Milk, the slain gay rights icon, earlier this week when I caught on TV a bit of the 2008 film, Milk, starring Sean Penn in his Academy Award-winning performance. It wasn't a great film, and some of the history might be fuzzy, but the film got me thinking about a few more things. 

First, you know how people of a certain age will say they remember where they were when they learned that President Kennedy was shot? Well, I don't remember where I was when I heard about the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco's City Hall. However, I have strong memories of that horrible week in November 1978--the Jonestown mass murder/suicide--then the slayings of Milk and Moscone. I was a sophomore at Del Valle High School. Later that year, a good friend of mine, a junior at Del Valle, came out.  

And, a year or so later, he was taking me and our other friends for tours of his new paradise, the Castro. Even as a straight female, I couldn't help but feel that something extraordinary and revolutionary was going on. Ah, but then the AIDS epidemic hit and some of that revolutionary fervor turned to crisis management. 

The second thing that both the judge's pending ruling and Milk got me thinking about was how I was very fortunate to receive evidence, from a reader of my blog Crazy in Suburbia, that Harvey Milk in fact came to Walnut Creek to participate in a historic debate.

Milk was arguing against Proposition 6, a 1978 measure that would have required public school districts to fire teachers and other employees who are gay or who openly support gay rights.

Milk has a scene, presented as a live Channel 7 TV debate, depicting a debate, said to be in a Walnut Creek high school gymnasium, between Milk and Senator John Briggs. The conservative state senator from Southern California campaigned strongly in favor of Proposition 6. In fact, Proposition 6 was known as the "Briggs Initiative."

In his biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, the late Randy Shilts described how Briggs and Milk engaged in numerous debates around the state--some in school gymnasiums.

During those debates, Briggs maintained that homosexual teachers wanted to abuse and turn children gay. Milk responded with statistics compiled by law enforcement that provided evidence that pedophiles identified primarily as heterosexual, and dismissed Briggs' points with one-liner jokes: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around."

In late 2008, I wrote a post on Crazy in Suburbia about this scene in the movie and how I was wondering at which Walnut Creek high school that debate took place.  

To the rescue: former Walnut Creek resident and Northgate High alum Jonathan Butterworth, who contacted me, saying that he, too, noticed the scene in the film and was delighted by the idea that his outwardly conservative suburban hometown might have played such a significant role in gay civil rights history.

In fact, Butterworth was so intrigued by this possibility that he did the hard work of tracking down irrefutable proof that Harvey Milk came to Walnut Creek.

"I grew up in the East Bay, and never thought of it much of a liberal bastion," Butterworth wrote me in an email. He moved from Walnut Creek to attend the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma and later studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Washington.

"I didn't give the scene that much thought until I ran across the Milk documentary The Times of Harvey Milk on Hulu.com," continued Butterworth, who said he came out in 2001. "It was an amazing film, and I was once again shocked to see that the Prop. 6 debate scene included in the film. This time however, it hit much closer to home, as I recognized the surroundings of the gym. I'm a 1998 graduate of Northgate High School, and after watching the clips in the documentary, was hell bent on finding out exactly where that debate took place."

Butterworth was so hell bent that he hit the University of Washington library and spent a couple hours scanning through rolls of microfiche of old issues of the San Francisco Chronicle.

He found two articles: "One was from Friday September 15,1978 and a debate review from Saturday September 16, 1978. The debates did in fact occur at Northgate High School."

And, Butterworth added, "it appears that Harvey got a much warmer reception from the folks in Walnut Creek than Briggs did."