The events of November 27, 1978, in San Francisco City Hall, have reverberated forward in time to this day, and in a somewhat

improbable way. Then San Francisco supervisor, Dan White, a veteran, a former police officer, and a

former firefighter, a relatively conservative Democrat who once rescued a woman and her baby from a

seventh floor apartment during a fire, and who was then lauded in the city newspaper as a,

quote, all-American boy, end quote, held the position of city supervisor at the same time as a man

named Harvey Milk, an openly gay man at a moment in time when the

Bay Area was a hotbed for LGBTQ-related civil rights activity. So Milk had a great deal of support

with the more progressive Bay Area residents, while White's supporters were primarily of the business and real estate-owning

variety. On November 10, 1978, Dan White resigned as city supervisor, and although things between him

and Harvey Milk had initially been pretty good, they'd done a lot of work together and shared

generally overlapping views and politics,

but by this point, things had soured a bit, in large part because they had differing ideas about

gay rights and about how large and how quickly the city should grow. White's resignation,

however, seemed to be primarily the consequence of financial issues that he was experiencing.

The supervisor position did not pay very well, and his former job as a firefighter came with a far better salary.

White had also recently opened up a baked potato stand at Pier 39, so kind of an immobile food truck at a hopping location full of foot

traffic, but the stand never became profitable, which added to his money issues. Within that same

week, the mayor, a man named George Moscone, indicated that he planned to fill White's seat on the board of supervisors himself,

rather than having another election to fill the seat. And this mayoral seat filling would have

tilted the political leanings of the city board toward the more liberal side of things,

which is something that White's supporters, who came from a relatively conservative

part of the city, did not want to see happen. They encouraged him to get his seat back, to

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