9/29/23

 Friday, September 29, 2023

In bed at 9:25. up at 8:35 after a night of pain.  62°, mostly cloudy, till 3 p.m., then sunny,  high of 70°.  AQI=41, wind S at 3 mph, 1-10/16. DPs 56-62.  The sun rose at 6:18 & will set at 6:36, 11+50.

Dreadful night of GERD, back pain, peripheral neuropathy pain in the big toe on the left foot.  Part of the night was spent on brr.  Painful getting in and out of bed, in and out of brr. . . I fell asleep on the tv room recliner midday and my back has seemed almost 'normal' this afternoon, though a bit stiff.

Diane Feinstein, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Dan White.  Sen. Diane Feinstein has died at age 90.  She came to political prominence in November 1978 when former police officer and former county supervisor Dan White climbed through a basement window at City Hall with his loaded pistol and extra ammunition, went to Mayor Moscone's office, and murdered him, and then county supervisor and prominent gay activist Harvey Milk.  White 'finished each of them off' with close shots to the head.  It was about as premeditated and cold-blooded a double murder as one could imagine, but a San Francisco jury found White guilty of voluntary manslaughter based on 'diminished capacity' which was based on White's so-called 'junk food defense' or "Twinkies defense, which meant he would be released from prison in 5 years.  The community, and especially San Francisco's gay community, were outraged at the jury and at the way the prosecutors handled the case.  In any event,  Diane Feinstein succeeded Moscone as mayor of San Francisco and in 1992 was elected to the U.S. Senate where she served until her death yesterday.

    On January 9, 1984, Dan White was released from Soledad prison. The details of his release and his destination upon release were tightly guarded secrets.  I was in San Francisco for the annual law school conference.  I had a room at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square.  Union Square was the site of a huge afternoon rally attended by outraged members of the local gay community which I attended as an onlooker.  There was another rally that evening in the Castro District.  Speakers at the Union Square rally called for the assassination of Dan White.  They were enraged and they called for White's blood.  I had never seen anything like it in my life, thousands of people calling for, expecting and demanding the murder of another person.  My most vivid memory is of the gay activist and drag-nun Sister Boom-Boom holding up and then throwing out into the audience a package of Twinkies shouting "This this and eat it, this is my defense!" referring the Mass's words of consecration and to White's defense of diminished capacity to form premeditate and form malicious intent because of a mood disorder caused by eating too many Twinkies and drinking too much Coke.

    White committed suicide in his garage on October 21, 1985.