20 Years Ago This Past Week, Police Do The Castro Sweep
By San Francisco standards the evening of Friday, October 6, 1989 started off like any other, with a cool sea breeze buffeting the city and residents welcoming the start of the weekend. In the Civic Center area, AIDS activists had gathered to protest the lack of federal funding to deal with the deadly virus that was decimating the gay male community at the time.
But what many had expected to be another routine rally organized by ACT UP would instead result in a violent takeover of the gay Castro District that rocked the police department and reverberated throughout City Hall. The incident would become known as the "Castro Sweep" and prolong a rift between the city’s law enforcement and LGBT community that had began a decade earlier with the White Night riots sparked by a lenient sentence for the killer of the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, and Mayor George Moscone.
[MEDIA not found]
Before the night was through, the police had shut down an entire city neighborhood and arrested 53 people and injured 10. Four police officers also were injured during the several hours-long occupation of the Castro.
"Castro Held Hostage"
The headline in the following week’s Bay Area Reporter screamed "Castro Held Hostage." A photo showed a bleeding Michael Barrett lying on the ground, having been injured by a police officer wielding his baton.
As reporter Brett Averill described the incident, he wrote that what had started "as a bland plea for more AIDS funds ended five hours later with bloodied heads, mass arrests, and the specter of fully armed riot police marching through the heart of the Castro sweeping demonstrators and confused passersby from the streets and sidewalks."
Recalling that evening in an interview with the B.A.R. this week, Brian Bringardner, an out gay man who had joined in the ACT UP protest that night, described the incident as "a military occupation of the Castro."
"I just remember how terrifying and surreal the whole thing was," said Bringardner, who now works as an assistant district attorney. "They took over the entire Castro neighborhood, which had never happened before."
Gerard Koskovich, who at the time was a freelance journalist and recent Stanford University graduate, also had decided to take part in the AIDS protest, which began at the federal building a few blocks from City Hall. He said the rally had only drawn about 150 people and the plan was to march to the Castro, making stops along the way at City Hall and then the Mint building, before ending at Harvey Milk Plaza at Castro and Market streets.
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By San Francisco standards the evening of Friday, October 6, 1989 started off like any other, with a cool sea breeze buffeting the city and residents welcoming the start of the weekend. In the Civic Center area, AIDS activists had gathered to protest the lack of federal funding to deal with the deadly virus that was decimating the gay male community at the time.
But what many had expected to be another routine rally organized by ACT UP would instead result in a violent takeover of the gay Castro District that rocked the police department and reverberated throughout City Hall. The incident would become known as the "Castro Sweep" and prolong a rift between the city’s law enforcement and LGBT community that had began a decade earlier with the White Night riots sparked by a lenient sentence for the killer of the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, and Mayor George Moscone.
[MEDIA not found]
Before the night was through, the police had shut down an entire city neighborhood and arrested 53 people and injured 10. Four police officers also were injured during the several hours-long occupation of the Castro.
"Castro Held Hostage"
The headline in the following week’s Bay Area Reporter screamed "Castro Held Hostage." A photo showed a bleeding Michael Barrett lying on the ground, having been injured by a police officer wielding his baton.
As reporter Brett Averill described the incident, he wrote that what had started "as a bland plea for more AIDS funds ended five hours later with bloodied heads, mass arrests, and the specter of fully armed riot police marching through the heart of the Castro sweeping demonstrators and confused passersby from the streets and sidewalks."
Recalling that evening in an interview with the B.A.R. this week, Brian Bringardner, an out gay man who had joined in the ACT UP protest that night, described the incident as "a military occupation of the Castro."
"I just remember how terrifying and surreal the whole thing was," said Bringardner, who now works as an assistant district attorney. "They took over the entire Castro neighborhood, which had never happened before."
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