In Gay District, Many Call Suicide Fitting

For many in this city’s large and politically influential gay community, the news that Dan White had taken his own life was seen as a fitting end to a nightmare that has haunted San Francisco for seven years.

“I feel a great sense of relief and release,” said Rick Pacurar, president of the 400-member Harvey Milk Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club.

In the city’s heavily gay Castro district, the San Francisco Examiner’s red banner headline proclaiming “DAN WHITE DEAD” was taped to many shop windows. But there were few expressions of outright joy. Many said they felt sorry for White’s family.

Moreover, many said the epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which has touched so many in the homosexual community, had made it impossible for them to celebrate anyone’s death--even that of a perceived enemy.

“It’s like a Greek tragedy,” Shawn P. Kelly, 29, said. “This is a just and fitting end.”

It was this city’s gay community, after all, that staged a candlelight march the November day seven years ago that White, himself a former supervisor, shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay elected official. And it was the gay community that erupted in a window-smashing, police car-burning riot May 21, 1979, the day a jury found White guilty of manslaughter, not murder.

But it was, with few exceptions, business as usual along Castro Street Monday night.

“Until now, we’ve been unable to put White’s crime behind us,” Pacurar explained. “We tried, but he kept pouring salt on the wound. He never expressed remorse to the survivors of his victims. As a former police officer, he enjoyed special privileges in prison. And then he had the nerve to move back to the city.”

“It was justice,” added Dick Pabich, a former Milk aide who saw White enter the politician’s office the day of the murders and heard the fatal shots.

Pabich, now a political consultant, said he will quietly mark White’s death by opening a bottle of Chivas Regal Scotch that the killer gave Milk shortly before the double killings. White had given a bottle to each of his fellow supervisors on the birth of his son.

Pabich came upon the bottle while cleaning out Milk’s office and took it home, promising to open it the day White was convicted of murder. When that day never came, the bottle remained unopened.

“It’s sitting in my house and I’m going to open it,” Pabich said. “I haven’t been sitting here clamoring for his death, but this seems a fitting close to the story.”

Scott Smith, Milk’s former lover and partner in a camera store, called White’s suicide “a bizarre twist worthy of the ‘Twilight Zone.’ Some may call it justice, but true justice would have been done in the courtroom. The fact remains that our criminal justice system let White get away with murder.”

But some gays said White’s suicide provides evidence that the five years he spent in prison were only the beginning of White’s punishment.

“If the point of punishment is that someone should suffer for a crime, then he was punished,” said Jim Rivaldo, a gay political consultant who was friends with Milk. “The unresolved business of his fate has now been resolved. Whether he got away with the crime is secondary to the point that he did suffer for it.”

The depth of feeling in the gay community underscored Milk’s role as a martyr in the battle for homosexual rights. Milk and Moscone were responsible for the passage of San Francisco’s ordinance providing equal housing and employment rights for the city’s estimated 70,000 gays.

But beyond his legislative contribution, “by his very example he showed us that gays could be good and productive people, making contributions to society at all levels,” Pacurar said.

Even the San Francisco Police Department, where White once served, has been touched. About 100 department members are lesbians or gay men, and a lesbian sits on the city Police Commission.