in which a then-eleven-year-old and sometimes unclothed Brooke Shields played a prostitute. (Two years earlier, Playboy Press had published nude photographs by the aptly named Gary Gross of a painted, vamping Shields at the age of ten in a book titled Sugar and Spice . In 1978, British photographer David Hamilton published Young Girl , a collection of prettily prurient photographs of half-undressed pubescent girls; as Hamilton’s stock-in-trade for years, these images were everywhere as posters and books. On February 1, 1978, forty-four-year-old film director Roman Polanski decided to skip bail and headed for France after being charged with raping a thirteen-year-old girl he had plied with champagne and Quaaludes. (His implied excuse was that everyone was doing it.) Some defended him on the grounds that the girl looked fourteen.
In 1978, former beauty queen and right-wing demagogue Anita Bryant was crusading against basic rights for gay men by portraying them as child molesters, among other things. In California, Bryant’s campaign led to the Briggs Initiative on the state ballot on November 6, 1978, which would have banned queer people from working as teachers. Thanks to a groundswell of gay men coming out to their friends, family, and co-workers and great organizing work, the Briggs Initiative lost, a final victory for San Francisco supervisor and statewide organizer Harvey Milk in a year when people ofcolor, women, and gay men pressed hard for their rights. The first annual Take Back the Night march of feminists against pornography—pro- and anti-porn feminism was one of the debates of the times—took place the same month.
It was a violent time, and there were so many kinds of violence to choose from. On October 11, members of the Bay Area’s Synanon cult nearly killed a lawyer helping some former members by putting a rattlesnake in his mailbox. On November 18, the mass murder–suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, of 918 members of the San Francisco cult, the Peoples Temple, constituted the largest single violent loss of American civilian lives before 9/11. And on November 27, a disgruntled and deranged former policeman assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Milk in the same City Hall where the cloned vegetal menaces of Invasion of the Body Snatchers loaded trucks with proliferating alien pods. The horror movie would be released on December 20 that year.
Another 1978 ballot included a much more famous proposition, known then as the Jarvis-Gann Act, now as Proposition 13 (the initiative that froze property taxes and required a supermajority to vote in tax increases; the measure began to starve California’s educational system, libraries, and other county and city services). That one won on June 6, bringing on the beginning of the taxpayer revolts of the past three decades and the beginning of the end of a half-century of economic leveling. Proposition 13 was the narrow wedge of the economic violence that would weaken public institutions, undermine social safety nets, and bring back dire poverty on a grand scale over the next few decades. During the 1970s, the long movement toward economic democratization went into reverse so that, by 2010, the United States would return to the level of economic disparity of 1928: 23 percent of the nation’s wealth would be concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of its population.
The same ruthlessness of capital brought about, after several years of resistance, the August 4, 1977, eviction of the elderly Asian residents of the International Hotel in downtown San Francisco, amid huge throngs, violence, ladders, mounted police, and dismay. The eviction was carried out by the police at the behest of a developer intent upon building somethingmore lucrative on the site, a project that never came to fruition. The low-income residential I-Hotel had housed a gallery and some activist organizations, as well as those vulnerable seniors. It had been a key location for the
In 1978, former beauty queen and right-wing demagogue Anita Bryant was crusading against basic rights for gay men by portraying them as child molesters, among other things. In California, Bryant’s campaign led to the Briggs Initiative on the state ballot on November 6, 1978, which would have banned queer people from working as teachers. Thanks to a groundswell of gay men coming out to their friends, family, and co-workers and great organizing work, the Briggs Initiative lost, a final victory for San Francisco supervisor and statewide organizer Harvey Milk in a year when people ofcolor, women, and gay men pressed hard for their rights. The first annual Take Back the Night march of feminists against pornography—pro- and anti-porn feminism was one of the debates of the times—took place the same month.
It was a violent time, and there were so many kinds of violence to choose from. On October 11, members of the Bay Area’s Synanon cult nearly killed a lawyer helping some former members by putting a rattlesnake in his mailbox. On November 18, the mass murder–suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, of 918 members of the San Francisco cult, the Peoples Temple, constituted the largest single violent loss of American civilian lives before 9/11. And on November 27, a disgruntled and deranged former policeman assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Milk in the same City Hall where the cloned vegetal menaces of Invasion of the Body Snatchers loaded trucks with proliferating alien pods. The horror movie would be released on December 20 that year.
Another 1978 ballot included a much more famous proposition, known then as the Jarvis-Gann Act, now as Proposition 13 (the initiative that froze property taxes and required a supermajority to vote in tax increases; the measure began to starve California’s educational system, libraries, and other county and city services). That one won on June 6, bringing on the beginning of the taxpayer revolts of the past three decades and the beginning of the end of a half-century of economic leveling. Proposition 13 was the narrow wedge of the economic violence that would weaken public institutions, undermine social safety nets, and bring back dire poverty on a grand scale over the next few decades. During the 1970s, the long movement toward economic democratization went into reverse so that, by 2010, the United States would return to the level of economic disparity of 1928: 23 percent of the nation’s wealth would be concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of its population.
The same ruthlessness of capital brought about, after several years of resistance, the August 4, 1977, eviction of the elderly Asian residents of the International Hotel in downtown San Francisco, amid huge throngs, violence, ladders, mounted police, and dismay. The eviction was carried out by the police at the behest of a developer intent upon building somethingmore lucrative on the site, a project that never came to fruition. The low-income residential I-Hotel had housed a gallery and some activist organizations, as well as those vulnerable seniors. It had been a key location for the
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