Despite the late California senator’s 1950s wife image, she became a pioneering advocate for the gay community.
The city had had an active gay underground since the Gold Rush, but local cops and state Alcohol Control Board agents alike aggressively enforced archaic public morality statutes well into the ‘70s.
In this atmosphere, Feinstein publicly sided with gay people as early as the mid-1960s, when she defended the right of women prisoners and parolees to have lesbian relationships, as an appointed member of a state criminal justice board. Although she was an early champion of gay rights, Feinstein also conducted a one-woman crusade against pornography and X-rated theatres, many of them serving gay men.
Feinstein, her arms outstretched in celebration, in her office after she was elected mayor of San Francisco, at San Francisco City Hall in San Francisco, Calif., circa 1978. | Nick Allen/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images In May that year, she stumbled in her first big crisis as mayor: Thousands of gay people and others rioted, after a conservative jury found Dan White guilty of two counts, not of murder, but voluntary manslaughter — the equivalent of vehicular homicide.
However, she quickly framed the recall as a referendum on the rogue White Panthers, winning big and ensuring her easy reelection a few months later. San Francisco’s first patient with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare disease then called “gay cancer,” and later linked to AIDS, was diagnosed at General Hospital on July 1, 1981. The city became the country’s early center of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and soon it affected 50 percent of more than 50,000 gay men then estimated living in the city, the nation’s highest per capita rate of AIDS.
Characteristically, her management of a crisis with huge impact on the gay community was not controversy-free. “She does not understand what gay people are all about,” Migden added, “but she has understood the issues of disease and death. And all other issues pale in comparison to this.”
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