Parts 1 through 5 (all):
San Francisco's Shameful History: The Railroading of Young Steven Nary
California, What's the Matter with
General
© Jack Cashill
WND.com - October 2007
Although much of my new book, “What’s the Matter With California,” is humorous, this is one story from that book which is not. Parental discretion is strongly advised.
Steven Nary: Part I
Although much of my new book, “What’s the Matter With California,” is humorous, this is one story from that book which is not. Parental discretion is strongly advised.
On a steamy morning this past July, I drove 200 miles south from San Francisco through California’s hot and unlovely Central Valley to visit a man whose handful of supporters call “Billy Budd.”
The analogy works but not perfectly. In the Melville story of the same name, the young American sailor Billy Budd is undone by his own innocence and condemned by a cold, blind justice. Steven Nary, the young American ex-sailor I was about to visit, was also undone by his own innocence but was condemned by a justice neither cold nor blind.
Nary resides within the walls of the cruelly named Pleasant Valley State Prison (PVSP) a few miles outside the squat, dusty town of Coalinga. This has been his home for most of the nearly twelve years he has been incarcerated.
While waiting to be processed, I asked one of the correctional officers how he liked the Coalinga area. “Hate it,” he shot back. His seemed to be the consensus opinion. Although the temperature climbed only into the mid-90’s the day I visited—a relief, apparently—the sky hung heavy and close, the smell of fertilizer inescapable.
In the last twenty-five years, the inmate population in California state prisons has increased an astonishing seven fold. Just about ten years old, PVSP already has twice the population it was built to contain.
The overcrowding causes problems, like the near constant rumbles between the prison’s various ethnic factions. The day before I arrived the skinheads had gotten into it with the Nortenos--American Hispanics from northern California. As a result, authorities had put this Hispanic faction and all whites in lockdown, a not at all unusual occurrence.
Had it not been for the intervention of the Catholic chaplain, I would not have gotten to see Nary at all. The chaplain used his good graces to get me through the yard and into Nary’s cell block, where Nary and his “cellie” were spending at least 23 hours a day in indefinite lockdown.
The officers in the cell block obliged us further by allowing Nary to leave his cell and meet me in the counselor’s office. Nary surprised me. I had imagined him as the gangly, pimply eighteen year-old of his 1996 mug shots. This impression had been reinforced by our correspondence: he writes with the openness and enthusiasm of an adolescent. I had thought of him and even referred to him as a “kid.”
When he emerged from the cell, however, he looked every bit a thirty year-old man and then some. He combs his graying hair back now. His acne has yielded to a rugged scarring. On greeting me, his face revealed not a flash of openness or enthusiasm.
This was understandable. The cell block’s once open center was crowded with bunk beds and restless with the heavily muscled cons who had made it theirs—all of them white, all in lockdown. No one smiles in this world. No one shakes hands.
At about 6-5, his frame filled out, Nary walked around the bunk beds—not even the guards cut through--with the quiet dignity and athletic grace one might expect of the prison’s best basketball player. Were he to wear a suit and walk down a city street, he would turn heads. Gary Cooper would play him in the movie.
It is highly unlikely, however, that anyone in California would dare make a movie of Nary’s life. That they would shy away from so compelling a story is one symptom of what’s the matter with California. That Nary has spent so much as a day in prison is a more ominous symbol still.
His undoing began on Saturday evening, March 23, 1996. That fateful night the18 year-old apprentice airman went looking for his regular carousing buddies on the U.S.S Carl Vinson, then berthed at the Alameda Naval Air Station across the bay from San Francisco. Two of his fellow sailors were on vacation, however, and two were on leave, so Nary decided to go in alone, the first time he had done so. Bad move.
As usual, Nary took the Alameda bus to the BART and the BART into San Francisco. From the Montgomery Street Station, he walked up towards the Palladium, a co-ed dance club nestled amidst the porn shops and strip joints in the city’s storied North Beach district.
San Francisco has been dazzling soldiers and sailors like Nary since the Gold Rush. Indeed, ministers were calling the city “Sodom by the Sea” even before that phrase implied a certain sexual proclivity—though that proclivity has been long and well represented.
As early as the Spanish American War, as AIDS historian Randy Shilts observed, “Resourceful gays staked out Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, as a cruising zone and there shopped among the always numerous sailors for satisfaction.”
Juan Pifarre, a 53-year old Argentina native, was one such shopper. He had started the evening at a friend’s house in the iconically gay Castro district where he and they had a few drinks.
Pifarre left his friends about 10 P.M. Sometime that evening he also did at least a few lines of cocaine. He then drove to that most of unlikely of places for a middle-aged gay man, the Palladium. He got settled in before Nary did.
Nary had stopped at a restaurant for some pizza and a pitcher of beer. He had only started drinking some months before, and the Palladium was notoriously tough on underage drinkers.
Although 6’ 4’’ and a high school basketball star, Nary had come to the Navy shy and virginal. Gloria Hernandez, his high school’s assistant principal, and Mark Morrison, its athletic director, both spoke of Nary as an easy-going, mild tempered kid, who got along with everyone at a school that was perhaps 2/3 Hispanic.
Cathedral City High school, by the way, is located on the world’s only street named in honor of Dinah Shore, just a few miles east of Palm Springs, California.
After eating, Nary ran into a Navy buddy, Chaylon Hoffman, on the long line outside the Palladium. Hoffman, who was over 21, suggested that the pair go to a nearby store and get some beer and this they did, a 40-ounce malt liquor for each.
The two young sailors walked around talking and drinking, finished their 40s, and bought two more. In their mindless wanderings, the pair ran into a bevy of girls outside of a restaurant and started chatting them up.
More than a little drunk, Nary dropped his half finished bottle, which brought the proprietor out to chase them off. Pissed, in both senses of the word, Hoffman threw his bottle into the restaurant and took off running. Nary followed in hot pursuit.
In their dash to freedom, the two young men got separated. Nary headed back to the Palladium where he figured he would find Hoffman. Not seeing Hoffman inside, Nary came back out to look and then went back in again.
He tried dancing but was still too unsteady so he sat down by himself and watched. After some time an older Hispanic gentleman with two young girls joined him at the table. A few minutes later the two girls left, and the man sidled over to Nary, now just drinking Cokes.
As Nary would testify at his trial, the man asked him a whole series of questions about himself, who he was, where he came from, and what he did.
Juan Pifarre was more than twice as old as the average patron at the Palladium. He was old enough to be the father of Nary’s mother. He also may have been the only guy there looking for other guys.
If sex or companionship were what he wanted, Lord knows there were a hundred other clubs in San Francisco that promised a dramatically safer and easier score than this one. Pifarre obviously wanted something more.
The girls Pifarre sat down with had put Nary at ease. He suspected nothing. After Pifarre and Nary got to talking, Nary mentioned that he had to leave to catch the last BART back to the ship. Pifarre offered him a ride.
“He seemed like a nice person,” Nary testified, “trusting person, and I’d get back to the base sooner.” Nary accepted the offer. It would be the last ride the lanky teenager would take as a free man.
Steven Nary: Part II
The Navy had taught Steven Nary a good deal in the six months he had been in the service. It had even taught about some of the dangers he would face in the Bay Area, like violent crime and venereal disease and earthquakes.
The Navy had taught him nothing, however, about the often cruel and indifferent forces that comprise California’s cultural tectonics. No one knew enough to teach him.
In many ways the state’s culture mimics its geology, including the omnipresent fear of a “big one.” During the course of its brief human history, cultural island after island has rammed up and into the state.
In May 1979, San Francisco had experienced its first significant rumble from the shifting of the gay plate. Half a year earlier, Dan White, a troubled young former police officer, abruptly resigned from the city’s Board of Supervisors. On the advice of Harvey Milk, the city’s first gay councilman, Mayor George Moscone refused to reinstate White when he petitioned to get back on. White snapped. He shot and killed them both and promptly turned himself in.
The murder cases went to trial the following May. The White team had no defense to speak of. They just lined up a swarm of psychotherapists and hoped that something someone conjured up would stick.
One famously argued that White had eaten too much junk food—Twinkies in particular—and this caused homicidal surges in his blood sugar. On May 21, 1979, the jury came back with its verdict: voluntary manslaughter on both counts. White would likely be out of jail in less than five years.
After the verdict, an anti-death penalty coalition organized a protest march. It quickly went south on them. How far south? How about thousands of angry gay men marching down Market Street chanting “Kill Dan White” south.
When the marchers reached City Hall, their behavior shocked San Francisco. They broke windows, burned police cars, and injured 61 cops. To be sure, the video of the “White Night Riot”—a cold-blooded pun on the recent Jonestown carnage--wasn’t about to make the anti-death penalty highlight reel.
That night, however, gays finally did establish themselves as a serious force in the area’s cultural tectonics. They had the power to influence, to elect, and now to intimidate. From that time forward, in any case of controversy involving a gay, no judge or jury in the city could fully forget the White Night Riot especially if that gay were also a prominent ethnic leader like, say, Latino activist Juan Pifarre.
Pifarre had come to San Francisco from Argentina in 1968 as a 26 year-old on a student visa, and he never looked back. According to probate records, Pifarre married a female San Francisco activist “purely out of convenience.” The sham marriage allowed Pifarre readmission to the United States after a return trip to Argentina and eventually legal residence. The couple stayed technically married so that the woman “could receive health care benefits” through Pifarre’s employers.
In February 1987, the 45 year-old Pifarre, then San Jose’s affirmative action officer, acted a bit too affirmatively in the presence of an undercover officer in the restroom of San Jose’s Bernal Park and was promptly arrested.
Being both Latino and politically wired, Pifarre never feared for his job. According to the San Jose Mercury News, he took several days sick leave to recover from his ordeal, requested a job reassignment, and remained on the payroll. In 1996, Pifarre was still working for the City of San Jose, now as a senior analyst in its Finance Department.
By this time Pifarre had established himself as something of a mover and shaker in San Francisco politics. As publisher of Horizontes, a Spanish language paper that he launched a decade earlier, Pifarre had real presence in the Latino community and serious pull at City Hall.
According to San Francisco Supervisor Susan Leal, Pifarre frequently took his beefs about Latinos in general and the Mission District in particular to the supervisors. ''He often held very strong opinions,” said Leal in obvious understatement.
In the Bay Area, few citizens seemed as royally entitled as Pifarre. Somehow he managed to juggle his publishing and protesting with an aggressive social life, a cocaine jones, and that full time job in San Jose, a tough fifty-mile slog south of his home in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill.
According to a spokesperson for the city of San Jose, he was considered, ''a very valuable employee.'' According to probate documents, Pifarre was the sole proprietor of a newspaper “worth a considerable amount money” (sic) and into which he had poured “ten years of his time, sweat, money and knowledge.” Busy guy.
San Francisco had witnessed its first major tectonic clash on the Hispanic just months before Nary and Pifarre met. In early 1995, activists prodded their plate forward when they urged the Board of Supervisors to name one of the city’s streets in honor of the late farm organizer Cesar Chavez.
It was not as if San Francisco had ignored its brief Spanish heritage. Indeed, the area has almost as many streets named after Mexicans as Mexico City.
For the young and restless, however, history does not count. "Most of the Spanish names in the city are of saints or conquistadors,” said San Francisco State administrator, Ed Apodaca. “It's hard for the kids to relate to that. Cesar Chavez was a real-life, flesh and blood hero." In contemporary California, “hero” is code word for a guy on our side of the political fence.
Had the activists chosen to rename Peralta Street or Pacheco or just about any street other than Castro Street—they knew better than to mess with Castro—the move would have met with negligible resistance. But they didn’t. They went after the three-mile long “ Army Street.” Said activist Eva Royale, “It’s fitting that a military name be replaced by a name dedicated to peace.”
Always eager to make a show of its peacenik airs and ethnic enlightenment, the Board of Supervisors blew off the protests of the affected business people and voted 11-0 to approve the change.
Unexpectedly, at least for San Francisco, the citizens fought back. Certainly, the businesses on Army Street had economic reasons to resist the change, but they alone did not have nearly the clout to do what happened next.
"San Franciscans to Save Army Street" recruited 18,000 of their fellow citizens to sign a petition—twice the needed number—and forced an election to undo the name change. The campaign that was followed was brutal.
Among those leading the charge for the name change was Juan Pifarre. Although Caucasian, as were many of his fellow protestors in the Army Street campaign, Pifarre and chums had no problem charging the opposition with bigotry and racism, charges that cut deeply in this almost comically race conscious region.
The strategy paid off. The Chavez name change held. But in a city where George Bush would only get 15% of the vote, the pro-Army Street forces had gotten 45%. "It would be a terrible embarrassment to the city, and to the name of Cesar Chavez if it had gone the other way," said Apodaca. But the 45% was embarrassment enough.
The city’s Latino activists had prevailed, but they were not pacified, and the city’s nabobs knew it. A largely unseen and seemingly dormant plate had rumbled into the tectonic mix, and Steven Nary was about to get caught in the crunch.
Steven Nary: Part III
By 1996--the year in which 53 year-old Juan Pifarre ruined 18 year-old sailor, Steven Nary’s life--pornography had become what gay culture critic Daniel Harris calls a “wholesale substitute” for sex in certain gay circles.
Early in the previous decade, the VCR and AIDS had hit America just about simultaneously. The timing proved useful. The former stimulated a massive new demand for sexual videos, and the latter had made voyeurism—and onanism—a safer, if not entirely welcome or wholesome, community pastime.
According to Maureen Orth, a Vanity Fair reporter who has done the best research on this subject, gay videos had come to account for 30 to 50 percent of the entire porn video market. The wife of NBC’s Tim Russert, Orth has taken a harder look at a subject than most reporters would dare to.
In the nether reaches of the California gay underground, bootleg “candid” videos became all the rage. The videos featured performers who had no idea they were being recorded. Some of these performers had no idea they were being raped.
The producers would slip their subjects, typically young boys, a date rape drug like Ketamine, better known as Special K, sexually abuse them and record the abuse on video. When performing under the drug’s influence, the boys were said to be in the “K Hole.”
Among those who took a keen interest in candid videos was a young, half Filipino and half Sicilian San Diego native named Andrew Cunanan. Unapologetically gay, the handsome preppy captured the increasingly exotic look and life style of the young Californian.
While still in San Diego, Cunanan found a mentor in a character named Vance Coukoulis, a notorious party thrower and producer of candid videos. Court documents allege that Coukoulis would befriend young men under some pretext or another, ply them with drug-laced booze, and then have sex with them on camera.
According to the documents, “Young boys appear to be unconscious or drugged to the extent that they cannot resist the sexual advances made upon them.” Even those in Coukoulis’ circle were reluctant to take a drink from him. “People walked away from there doing things they really did not want to do,” one of Coukoulis’ associates told Orth.
A born hustler, Cunanan shuttled back and forth between San Diego and the Bay Area throughout the early 1990s, selling every which thing he could, including a wide variety of drugs, and living off various sugar daddies.
His “dark fantasies,” writes Orth, “were fueled by crystal meth, cocaine, and pornography.” His porn tastes now moved more and more deeply into sadomasochism, but at the time and place, that was hardly unusual.
San Francisco has neighborhoods and festivals dedicated to the same. Its highly public Folsom Street Fair boasts of a whirlwind of people “in their most outrageous leather/rubber/fetish attire enjoying the worlds largest and best loved Leather fair”—not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that.
In early 1997, Cunanan met a young fellow named Tim Schwager at a gay dance club in San Francisco and took him back to the hotel where he was staying. “I think I was drugged that night, or I had too much to drink,” Schwager told Orth. He recalled having “memory flashbacks of trying to fight [Cunanan] off during the night.”
This was a story that Orth had heard from other Cunanan acquaintances as well. When Schwager woke up the next morning he had three hickeys and no clothes on. “After that night,” he said of Cunanan, “I knew he had a rough side to him.”
Schwager’s comments stopped this author cold. I read them in Orth’s book late in my research, but I knew I had read comments almost exactly like these before. I thought I knew where. I went tearing through my correspondence file with Steven Nary, and Eureka! I found just what I was looking for.
Before I share what Steven Nary wrote to me from Pleasant Valley State Prison on May 15, 2006, allow me to backtrack a little to Saturday, March 23, 1996.
That was the evening the 18 year-old apprentice airman ended up drunk and alone at the Palladium where he met Juan Pifarre. Pifarre had been there before. His one time attorney and neighbor, Ralph Johansen, would testify that he once defended Pifarre on an assault charge stemming from an incident at an unnamed club whose description perfectly matched the Palladium.
Apparently, Pifarre had grabbed the crotch of a 19 year-old male and asked for oral sex. This led to a fight in which both were charged with battery.
Johansen had lived downstairs from Pifarre in the Castro for 13 years until 1993. Many a night he saw Pifarre come home with what appeared to be young military types. Often he heard “lots of noise, lots of screaming,” and at least once he heard a full-blown fight that culminated in a fist going through a window.
Johansen characterized Pifarre as being “cold and angry” all of the time and often drunk. Pifarre’s behavior apparently did not change a whole heck of a lot when he moved to Potrero Hill.
There, according to trial testimony, the downstairs neighbor gave “sort of a smirk” when the police asked whether she had ever heard altercations upstairs before. In the early morning hours of March 24 the sounds of violence had frightened her to tears, but tellingly, neither she nor her husband had thought to call the police.
That March night at the Palladium in 1996, Pifarre was on the prowl. He saw the drunken young sailor and sized him up quickly. As to the girls Pifarre originally sat down with, they put Nary at ease, and the ploy worked. Nary suspected nothing. When Pifarre offered him a ride back across the Bay Bridge to the Alameda Naval Station, Nary accepted.
He should not have. His simple trust would cost him, at the very least, the next twelve years of his life.
Steven Nary: Part IV
On the drive back to the Alameda Naval Station from San Francisco, Steven Nary would testify, Juan Pifarre told him that he had been to a party earlier. There he had had too much to drink and done too much cocaine, both likely true. He wasn’t sure that he could make it across the bridge and back, likely false.
“His wife was out of town,” Pifarre told Nary. He suggested that Nary “could stay at his house. He could call some girls.” Pifarre, in fact, did have a wife, however sham a marriage that was, and Nary had seen him with girls. A naïve 18 year-old, he had no reason to be overly suspicious, and he consented.
Along the way, Pifarre pulled the car over in a commercial area, promised to come right back, and exited. When he did come back, the interaction began to change.
“He started touching my leg,” Nary testified, “and asking for a blow job.” Nary scooted away from him and pushed his hand off. Pifarre persisted, and Nary continued to resist. Pifarre then flashed some twenties he had gotten at the ATM where he had stopped.
Exasperated and still inebriated, Nary finally accepted the $40, as he claimed, just to shut Pifarre up. Nary volunteered the information about accepting the money to the police. The prosecutors would hang him with it.
When they got to the house, the first thing that Pifarre did was to offer Nary some more alcohol. Nary tells me that he declined the booze and asked for water. Pifarre went with him to show him where the glasses were.
“I don’t remember if I filled the glass up or if he did,” says Nary. After drinking the water, all that Nary wanted to do was go to sleep, and he told Pifarre this. But now Pifarre started hounding him for oral sex.
“I told him I just wanted to go to sleep,” Nary testified, but Pifarre would not let up. “The next thing I remember,” Nary testified, “was laying on the bed and him putting a condom on me and giving me a blow job.” Prosecutor John Farrell ridiculed Nary on this point:
You don’t know how your clothes got off.”
“No.”
“You don’t know how your shirt got off.”
“No.”
“And you don’t know how you’re penis got erect, right? Is that right?”
“I guess, I mean. It just happened. I was there and he was putting a condom on me and giving me a blow job.”
The scene got quickly more unsettling. Pifarre persisted, now demanding anal sex. What follows is the critical excerpt from Nary’s letter of May 15:
I have struggled with trying to understand why I let it all just happen. When I rolled over and pulled up my pants he continued to ask me if he could give me anal sex. I said no and that I just want to go to sleep. After some time, he started pulling my shorts down to force anal sex on me. He succeeded in pulling my pants down enough for him to try to continue. I felt stuck. I could not speak. I could not move, and I could not do anything. He just kept trying and trying over and over. In fact it brings me to tears as I write this because I have avoided this image for so long.
The reader does well to recall that Tim Schwager had had “memory flashbacks of trying to fight [Andrew Cunanan] off during the night,” and when he came to, he had no clothes on and no memory of how they came off.
Had Nary’s public defender, Bruce Hotchkiss, introduced the idea of a drugging—and there was also ample opportunity at the Palladium for Pifarre to have done so--Nary’s behavior would have made perfect sense.
At the time, the use of date rape drugs was widespread in gay society. Hotchkiss may not have known how prevalent the drugs were. Given their sensitivity on gay issues, especially in the Bay Area, the straight media have completely avoided the topic.
Still, Pifarre and Cunanan inhabited the same city at the same time, used many of the same drugs, and ran in overlapping circles. There is no evidence that they knew each other, but they shared certain lifestyle choices.
One has to wonder where Pifarre got the confidence to go to a straight club, hustle a straight kid, and expect to succeed. Some part of it may have been his skill at exploiting the loneliness and isolation of boys like Nary, especially if they were drunk. Part of it too may have been his willingness, perhaps even his eagerness, to take on rough trade. But given Nary’s behavior, the best explanation is that Pifarre drugged him.
Ironically, however, Nary is not looking for excuses. He has converted to Catholicism in prison and feels the need to accept responsibility for everything he has done, including the oral sex and the death of Pifarre.
Besides, he knows that if he goes into his first parole hearing a few years hence playing innocent victim, “This system will never let me out.” In fact, though, Nary responded to Pifarre’s assault the way any rape victim would, at least one who had a fighting chance of success and who could summon the will and courage that Nary did. Hotchkiss asked:
“What did you do at that point?”
“I then tried to push him away?”
“Were you able to push him off?”
“No.”
“What was he saying, if anything?”
“He continued to tell me he wanted to give – screw me from behind.”
“What did you do at that point?”
“I then grabbed a cup that was by the bed that had previously had water in it and hit him in the head with it.”
As Nary testified honestly, he had never been in a fight before in his life, never even lost his temper, but when he somehow got his mind back that night and his will, he fought off Pifarre like a man possessed.
Pifarre had picked the wrong kid to rape. Nary does not really remember the sequence of events, never did. At his attorney’s request, he tried to fill in the blanks as best he could, but the prosecutor walked all over him, made him sound evasive as well as violent, mocking Nary with every question.
“Well, you hit him with the mug again and again at the door, right?”
“I don’t remember hitting him with the mug again and again.”
“But you might have, right?”
“It’s a possibility, yes?”
“So, it’s a possibility you hit him with the mug, but you just don’t remember that detail?”
“After the first hit it went very quickly, so it wasn’t a matter of remembering anything.”
Although the prosecutor would portray Pifarre as small and pudgy, he outweighed Nary and was not without power of his own. His friend Raymond Sloane testified to this at the trial. “Mr. Pifarre had a bravado, had a charisma, and I think it, you know, expanded as he was drinking.” When Hotchkiss asked if Pifarre could become belligerent when he drank, Sloane answered simply, “He could.”
After the blow by the bedside, the fight shifted into the bathroom where Nary contends Pifarre tried to gouge his eyes out and where Nary countered by grabbing a towel rack and striking back.
When Nary had finally subdued the relentless Pifarre, he grabbed his clothes as best he could, fled into the early morning darkness, and eventually made his way back to the base.
Four days later, after talking to the chaplain, Nary called the police and turned himself in, not knowing that Pifarre was dead. Fearful of upsetting the Clinton administration in an election year and the host city on a gay issue, the Navy shamefully ignored its own regulations in its haste to rid itself of this now troublesome sailor.
The judge set bail at $1 million. The figure shocked Nary’s public defender because, as the San Francisco Chronicle would report, “The suspect called police voluntarily and asked to be picked up.”
Besides, Nary had “defensive wounds,” and the bail for first time defendants in a passion crime almost never exceeded $250,000.
No matter. Nary was about to learn lesson one in his unwilled study of San Francisco tectonics: don’t expect justice when you oppose two powerful cultural plates. Expect, in fact, to be crushed.
Steven Nary: Part V
While awaiting trial in the San Francisco City Jail for the murder of Juan Pifarre, a gay man and an Hispanic activist, Steven Nary lived a cramped and useless life. His working class parents could not offer much help. The whole “nightmare” overwhelmed them.
As to Andrew Cunanan, Maureen Orth reports, “The drugs and pornography he fed on kept his cruel and domineering sexual fantasies at a fever pitch.” That pitch was about to get more feverish still.
In April 1997, a year after the death of Pifarre, Cunanan began a killing spree across America that would soon enough make him a household world.
On May 4 1997, two events of note took place. In Chicago, Cunanan seized 72 year-old developer Lee Miglin in the garage of his Gold Coast home, bound him, wrapped his head in duct tape, and severed his throat with a bow saw. Miglin was the third murder victim in Cunanan’s spree.
In San Francisco, on May 4, members of the United Satanic Apache Front seized Steven Johnson Leyba, bound him, stripped him, carved a Satanic pentagram on his back, and had a woman member of the group urinate on his open wound.
In Chicago, after the Miglin killing, authorities stepped up their pursuit of Cunanan. In San Francisco, after the Leyba outrage, authorities stood and applauded.
You see, Leyba and his performance troupe were the featured attraction at a birthday bash for gay activist Jack Davis. In attendance were the city’s political elite, including Mayor Willie Brown, Sheriff Mike Hennessy, City Attorney Louise Renne, several members of the Board of Supervisors including its president, and District Attorney Terrence Hallinan, who was overseeing the impending trial of Steven Nary.
Although further descent may not seem possible, the evening headed downhill after the ritual bleeding of the “Reverend” Leyba, an ordained minister in Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan.
None of the major newspapers would print what happened next: a woman, dressed as Pocahontas and using a Jack Daniels bottle as a dildo, actually sodomized Leyba with the bottle in full view of the audience.
Leyba, who claims to be ¼ Apache, more than enough for victim status in San Francisco, described the ritual in question as “a literal metaphor for how alcohol was forced on my people.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reporters that covered the event did so under the assumption that they were supposed to be amused. They did not know any better. The paper’s initial reporting reflects as much.
“San Francisco 49ers campaign manager Jack Davis' birthday parties are legendary for their abandon,” read the lighthearted lead, “but none compared to the wild, Caligulan scene that went down at his politically packed, 50th-year bash Saturday night.”
Although the reporters conceded that some people were “disgusted” by the “bizarre” proceedings, they gave the last word to Davis himself. ''Most people said it was the best party they'd ever been to,” he enthused. “And it wasn't anything compared to the after-party at my house.''
Cunanan was shedding no glory on his state or his orientation either. As the world knows, he made his way south and east, killing an inconvenient security guard in New Jersey en route. Once in Miami, he shot and killed the famed designer Gianni Versace before eventually turning the gun on himself.
In San Francisco meanwhile, the Nary case slugged through the preliminaries with precious little attention being paid beyond the city. Lacking an external counterbalance, the postmodern local powers, led by the District Attorney, could define the “narrative” as they saw fit.
In their rewriting, Nary was a brutal, calculating killer, not unlike Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two “homophobic” desperados that killed helpless gay Wyoming University student, Matthew Shepard, in a fit of “gay panic.”
Although Hollywood would turn out at least three TV movies about the “crucifixion” of Shepard, two of which premiered in the week before Easter 2002, the homophobic story line did not match the Wyoming reality.
As the truth began to eke out of Laramie, that line grew more and more suspect. Best evidence now suggests that McKinney, the actual killer, had previously expressed no homophobic sentiments. One good reason why is that he was an active bisexual himself. Apparently, he and Shepard, who had a known drug problem, had done meth together a number of times.
On the night in question, McKinney went on a meth-fueled rampage. He pistol-whipped the vulnerable Shepard for drug money, drove into town to rob Shepard’s apartment, and then pistol whipped a stranger who got in his way, fracturing his skull in the process.
Matthew Shepard died just four weeks before the 1998 mid-term elections. For the next four weeks, much to their own surprise, the killers were presented to America as poster children for the religious right and one more reason not to vote Republican.
Of course, McKinney and Henderson were not products of Christian culture, but of its antithesis: a crude, soulless, fatherless, sexually libertine, drug-addled, pop culture. Those who controlled the narrative, however, could shape it as they saw fit.
When the defense tried to redefine the narrative in the Nary case, the local powers turned the very attempt against them. As one gay legal source observed, “Community activists expressed outrage at the defense tactics of trying to depict Pifarre, a well-known community activist and journalist, as a dangerous sexual predator.”
District Attorney Terrence Hallinan, feeling the heat from both the gay and the Hispanic communities, threw Nary into the fire. On a more personal level, the newly-elected DA had enjoyed Pifarre’s public support in his campaign for District Attorney.
In late century San Francisco, as Nary was about to learn, the truth mattered no more than it had in early century Selma or Scottsboro.
Pifarre was, in fact, a sexual predator with a history of violence. He had secured his permanent residency through a fraudulent marriage. He was shortchanging the city of San Jose on his working hours and on the health benefits for his “wife.” He used illegal drugs regularly, including cocaine. He was drunk often and was a mean drunk.
Pifarre had been arrested at least once for indecent exposure and on another occasion for battery stemming from a sexual molestation. He had a history of seducing young men, almost assuredly under false pretenses, and did not stop to ask for “proof.” He likely drugged them, and he had no compunction about raping them. And in San Francisco, he had juice enough to get away with it all.
Still, if Nary had been a female sailor under identical circumstances, this case would never have come to trial, not even in San Francisco. The feminist plate would have pushed harder in that sailor’s behalf than the Hispanic plate would have pushed against it.
Indeed, there was more public sympathy for a woman whose breasts had been fondled by an Assistant D.A. at the Jack Davis party than there was for Nary.
The prosecutors had hoped to stage the trial during Gay Pride week in June but settled for March 1999, conveniently just a week before the start of Russell Henderson’s trial in Laramie.
For Nary, the time was as inauspicious as the place. On one occasion during the trial, members of the audience stood up and faced the jury wearing large bright orange lapel tags saying "Recuerda [Remember] Juan," "Stop Homophobia," and "Stop Immigrant Bashing."
Judge Kevin Ryan, who would later gain notoriety after being fired as U.S. Attorney, ignored the demonstration. Later, these demonstrators lobbied the jurors as they went to and came from lunch.
John Farrell, the prosecutor, hammered the “homophobia” theme throughout the trial. Incredibly, he attacked Nary for his honest admission of feeling “disgusted” after coerced oral sex. In his summation, Farrell argued that the only kind of person “who feels bad about what they did”—meaning oral sex with another man--is the kind of “person who is homophobic.”
“Where is that rage coming from?” he asked the jury of Nary’s self-defense. “Where is the motive for all that: That word ‘faggot’ written on the board.” Farrell insinuated that the military’s presumed anti-gay ethos had reinforced Nary’s native bigotry, although there was no evidence at all that Nary ever used the word “faggot” or anything like it.
Farrell also placed a flourishing gay club scene just blocks from Nary’s Cathedral City High--when it was, in fact, miles away--to suggest that Nary may well have gay-bashed before.
Nary never had a chance. After a generation of propaganda, locals had convinced themselves that only a bigoted young man would find sex with another man something other than perfectly natural. By coming back with a guilty verdict, each juror could claim his or her rightful place in this town’s zone of decency--sensitive to immigrants and gays and hostile to a homophobic military. The temptation proved irresistible.
Without intending to, the daily journal Gay Today showed just how the tectonic deck was stacked against “hustler” and “crazed assailant” Steven Nary and his “racist” handful of supporters.
“The 2nd-degree jury verdict for Nary is really a heartening victory,” read its editorial, “especially during this week when the bogus concept of ‘Gay Panic’ is being tested again in Laramie, at the most visible anti-gay murder trial since Dan White got away with the murder of Harvey Milk by admitting to being a Twinkie junkie.”
Under the California Penal Code, an individual convicted of second degree murder “subjectively knows, based on everything, that the conduct that he or she is about to engage in has a high probability of death to another human being.” As I write, Steven Nary is serving the 12 th year of a 16-year-to-life sentence.
Cashill’s newest book, What’s the Matter with California, is available in bookstores - or you can order your autographed copy online .
