And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

president of the city’s most powerful grass-roots organization, the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.
    The organizational power that he helped build had kept a gay seat on the board of supervisors after Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978 for a one-time Methodist minister and Milk crony named Harry Britt. Bill Kraus had replaced Britt as president of the Milk Club and now worked as his aide in City Hall. He had also managed Britt’s reelection campaign in 1979, securing his reputation as the city’s leading gay tactician.
    The city’s gay community was acquiring a legendary quality in political circles with influence far beyond the 70,000-odd votes it could boast in a city of 650,000. For the past three months, emissaries for presidential candidates had scoured the Castro neighborhood for votes. As other cities followed San Francisco’s blueprint for political success, a national political force was coalescing. Bill Kraus and Harry Britt were leaving in two weeks for New York to be Ted Kennedy delegates to the Democratic National Convention. With seventy delegates, the convention’s gay caucus was larger than the delegations of twenty states. This year, they would make a difference.

    The gay parade had grown so mammoth in recent years that a good chunk of downtown San Francisco was needed just to get the scores of floats, contingents, and marching bands in proper order. While the parade assembled, Gwenn Craig smiled as she watched the young men mill near Bill Kraus, all thinking of some excuse to approach the famous young activist. Friends had teased Bill about his thirty-third birthday just days before; he was “l’age du Christ,” somebody had joked. Bill was scarcely the scruffy malcontent with whom Gwenn had spent so many leisurely afternoons in Castro Street cafes. His once-shaggy hair was now neatly cut, and his thick glasses were replaced by contacts, eliminating an owlish stare and revealing startling blue eyes. His body was superbly toned. He carried himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals he was articulating.
    Bill Kraus was even beginning to cut his own national reputation. Just two weeks earlier, he had delivered an impassioned plea for a gay rights plank to the Democratic Platform Committee, which was hammering together a party agenda to present at the Democratic National Convention in July. Bill had delivered the address as a gay rights manifesto, articulating the goals of the nascent political force. Gay papers across the country had written up the performance for the issues being distributed on the gay pride weekend.
    The gay rights plank, Bill Kraus said, “does not ask you to give us special privileges. It does not ask anyone to like us. It does not even ask that the Democratic party give us many of the legal protections which are considered the right of all other Americans.
    “Fellow members of the Platform Committee, what this amendment asks in a time when we hear much from prominent members of the Democratic party about human rights is that the Democratic party recognize that we, the gay people of this country, are also human.”

    The San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band blared the opening notes of “California Here I Come,” and the parade started its two-mile trek down Market Street toward City Hall. More than 30,000 people, grouped in 240 contingents, marched in the parade past 200,000 spectators. The parade was the best show in town, revealing the amazing diversity of gay life. Clusters of gay Catholics and Episcopalians, Mormons and atheists, organized for years in the city, marched proudly beneath their banners. Career-designated contingents of gays included lawyers and labor officials, dentists and doctors, accountants and the ubiquitous gay phone-company employees. There were lesbian moms, gay dads, and homosexual teenagers with their heterosexual parents. Gay blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians marched beneath banners