The Gay Man Who Saved Ford’s Life
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But by explaining how he had grabbed Moore’s arm once he saw the gun, Sipple established that he had nothing to do with the attack itself. In fact, Sipple saved the president’s life. Sipple was modest when the Secret Service came to understand how useful he had been. “Don’t mention any of that stuff about the Marines,” Sipple said. Investigators took down Sipple’s contact information and released him.

OLIVER SIPPLE was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1941. His father George was a pipe fitter. George and his wife Ethel, a devout Baptist, had eight children. Sipple grew up to be a handsome teenager and a star football player. He was also dyslexic and had trouble reading. He left school in eleventh grade. Eventually, he moved to New York’s West Village. By 1975, one would have been hard-pressed to imagine that this overweight, emotionally unstable person was the golden boy of the West Village in 1963. The former football star looked like a blond Roddy McDowell, the actor who played Joe in Lassie Come Home, and it was a look that he cultivated. He had the same expressive features, large brown eyes, and open smile. He was also deeply unhappy—unhappy that he couldn’t read very well, that he’d dropped out of high school, and that he was gay.

Also living in New York in the early 1960’s was a Long Island-born insurance agent named Harvey Milk. Physically awkward with a large nose and big ears, Milk was ill at ease around his office. Bright, hardworking, and well dressed, he seemed unsettled to his colleagues, while his Brooks Brothers suits and his wingtip shoes rendered him a little square to his friends in the West Village. He was in his thirties then and still trying to figure out what to do with his life. He’d been in a seven-year relationship with Joe Campbell, the handsome and effeminate friend of Andy Warhol and the inspiration for the Sugar Plum Fairy in Lou Reed’s 1972 song, “Walk on the Wild Side,” but the two had broken up in 1962 (though they continued to correspond for years thereafter). Campbell soon met Billy Sipple, the new boy from Detroit, and the two fell in love. The three of them sometimes went out together to places like Kelly’s, the gay bar in Greenwich Village where Sipple and Campbell met.

When Campbell and Sipple announced that they were moving to Ft. Lauderdale, Milk was supportive. They found an apartment on Fourth Avenue in the Sailboat Bend neighborhood, but both of them had trouble finding jobs. Milk sent them a series of letters, some funny and light, often urging them to be more responsible. “I don’t think you should spend the money to take a vacation to New York,” Milk wrote to Campbell and Sipple in March, 1964. “What is here? Who is here to see? Diego, Art Loeb, your father, Kelley’s? To use the money for clothes, a new bike, a nickel bag, would be wiser. If you two really want to make a go of it in Florida why return to someplace you left? Save the money and put it towards making Florida your home.” Milk was concerned that his friends’ irresponsibility was affecting their chances for success. “No one is going to hold your hands any longer,” Milk wrote, but he continued to help them out when things got desperate. When Sipple and Campbell ran out of money in 1965, Milk flew down to Miami and gave them some cash to cover the rent. While taking a low-key attitude toward repayment, he instructed them: “when you have a few extra bits of bread then send it and keep a record of the amount.”

One day, either because of their frequent quarrels or the difficult financial situation, Sipple didn’t come home. He took his few possessions and flew back to Detroit. Campbell went to New York and wound up in intensive care at Columbus Hospital after a botched suicide attempt, which required an emergency tracheotomy. Milk stayed at the hospital and nursed Campbell back to health, puzzled as to why Campbell would bother trying to kill himself over someone like Sipple. Sipple was good-looking and nice enough, but let’s face it, he wasn’t all that bright (Milk had diagnosed his reading problem as dyslexia).

In 1967, Sipple enlisted in the Marines. In June 1968, he was sent to Vietnam. He fought in Operation Scotland II, a campaign in Khe Sanh, a village a few miles from North Vietnam and Laos. In December, he suffered shrapnel wounds and was in the hospital for months. In August 1969, while recuperating in Saigon, the Viet Cong bombed his hospital and he suffered additional injuries. The U.S. Marines classified him as fully disabled, suffering from both physical and psychological injuries; he was discharged with a full disability pension in 1970. In 1973 he moved to San Francisco.

San Francisco in 1973 was one of the few places in the world where someone like Bill Sipple could feel relatively comfortable, where one could go to the doctor’s office and most of the patients in the waiting room would be gay. Sipple earned extra money as a swamper, cleaning up at the end of the night in local gay bars. He worked at the Cockpit, a bar in the Tenderloin area managed by a drag queen named Sweetlips. He also cleaned up at several other bars, such as the Red Lantern and the Gangway. “I don’t think I could handle it every day,” Sipple once said. “I’d be fine for awhile and then somebody might say something to me and boom.” He got nervous around loud noises or when people mentioned Vietnam. Then he would retreat for a while to receive treatment at the VA hospital. But with his pension he lived comfortably enough in a small apartment that he shared with a merchant marine on Van Ness Avenue in the Tenderloin.

Sipple went with his friends to the Red Lantern bar on Golden Gate Avenue the night after the incident at Union Square. They slapped him on the back and bought him drinks. He had saved the President’s life. Surely that was worth a couple of extra rounds. Sipple’s identity had not hit the major newspapers yet, but the news had rippled through the Castro, which operated like a small town. Later, The San Francisco Chronicle would describe Sipple as a “battle-hardened, quick-thinking ex-marine”—hardly the stereotype of a gay man in the mid-1970’s.

His old friend Harvey Milk, who had moved to San Francisco in 1972, congratulated Sipple on his recent exploits. Reconnected with his old mentor, Sipple was happy to do things for Milk—who was now running for office—such as distributing campaign literature, helping with voting registration, and providing food for the other workers who congregated at the Castro Camera Shop, the headquarters for Milk’s near-perpetual campaign for public office. Sipple never appeared terribly interested in Milk’s issues and displayed no passion for gay politics; he was just a guy who hung out in a gay neighborhood and wanted to help his old friend. Milk’s projects became the center of Sipple’s social life.

Milk’s unofficial “staff” was at the Red Lantern that night to celebrate Sipple’s newfound celebrity. Joe Campbell, who had also moved to the Bay Area, was there as well. For Harvey Milk, Sipple’s heroism was a godsend. Milk took it upon himself to bring gays into mainstream American political life. That was why—almost since he had moved to San Francisco—he had been running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk’s political career was based on the premise that gay men and women were the next group of Americans that needed to be incorporated into the melting pot. At long last, the Castro had a mainstream, Main Street, hero; Sipple proved the American hero could be gay.

Still, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, Sipple was mysterious. He hadn’t spoken to any reporters but—because police had recently captured heiress-turned-revolu-tionary Patricia Hearst—San Francisco was swarming with reporters that week. There were rumors that he was homeless or that he was an alcoholic. Milk decided that America needed to know about Sipple’s social and sexual life. He decided to tip off Herb Caen, who had written a daily gossip column since 1938 and was a San Francisco institution. Most of Milk’s advisors thought this disclosure was appalling. Milk saw it as too great an opportunity to pass up. “That guy saved the President’s life,” he said. “It shows that we do good things, not just all that ca-ca about molesting children and hanging out in bathrooms.”

Milk called Caen and told him Sipple would be at the Red Lantern on the evening of September 23. That night someone from Caen’s staff visited one of the city’s most popular gay bars. The next day, in the fourth paragraph of his column,Caen reported:

One of the heroes of the day, Oliver “Billy” Sipple, the ex-Marine who grabbed Sara Jane Moore’s arm just as her gun was fired and thereby may have saved the President’s life, was the center of midnight attention at the Red Lantern, a Golden Gate Ave. bar he favors. The Rev. Ray Broshears, head of Helping Hands Center and Gay Politico Harvey Milk, who claim to be among Sipple’s close friends, describe themselves as “proud—maybe this will help break the stereotype.” Sipple is among the workers in Milk’s campaign for supe.

The day after Caen’s column appeared George Sipple, Billy’s older brother in Detroit, went to work as usual. As he punched in at the Ford Motor Company, he was greeted by insults from his colleagues, who had read in The Detroit Free Press that the man who saved President Ford’s life was a known member of the San Francisco gay community. Ethel Sipple, Billy’s mother, was put down by her church friends. Within a day, she had gone from being incredibly proud of her son for saving President Ford’s life to deep confusion and disgust about this revelation.

Elsewhere, Sipple’s sexual orientation was not much of a secret. He lived in a gay neighborhood with another man. His name had appeared in Data Boy, Pacific Coast Times, and Male Express (admittedly publications his family members were unlikely to read), where he had been identified as a member of “the community.” He was perfectly open about his sexual orientation and would tell anyone who asked that he was a gay man. But he had never told his family. Soon after the column appeared, Sipple held a press conference, appearing with a Baptist minister and his lawyer, John Wahl (who also represented Milk in many of his legal affairs). “I want you to know,” Sipple said, “that my mother told me today she can’t walk out of her front door because of the press stories.”

Sipple was otherwise a very private person. He operated behind the scenes; his political work was an extension of his friendship with Harvey Milk. Now people in Iowa and Maine were talking about him as a “gay hero.” His mother and father professed their love but said it was just too hard for them to deal with this new information. They stopped communicating. Sipple predicted that he would have to spend more time in the VA hospital from all the excitement, and he was right. “My sexual orientation has nothing to do with saving the president’s life,” Sipple said. “Just as the color of my eyes or my race has nothing to do with what happened in front of the St. Francis Hotel.” When asked by journalists if he was in fact gay, he refused to respond.

Sipple sued Caen, the Chronicle, and six other newspapers for invasion of privacy, alleging that “the papers published private facts by disclosing that Sipple ‘was homosexual in his personal and private sexual orientation.’” This resulted in his family abandoning him, among other damages, and entitled him to compensatory and punitive damages. Chronicle Publishing offered him $100,000 to drop the lawsuit. His lawyer advised him not to take the settlement because he hoped Sipple could get more through the lawsuit. Sipple sued for $15 million.

The lawsuit lasted for almost nine years and Sipple never got a dime. In 1984 the California Supreme Court decided that Sipple’s “homosexual orientation and participation in gay community activities had been known by hundreds of people in a variety of cities,” citing time spent in the “Tenderloin” and “Castro,” among other gay venues, concluding that his “sexual orientation was already in public domain and … the articles in question did no more than to give further publicity to matters which appellant left open to the eye of the public.” The Court also found that the outing did not constitute “sensational prying” but was instead motivated by “legitimate political considerations, i.e., to dispel the false public opinion that gays were timid, weak and unheroic figures.”

Soon after the assassination attempt, a letter came from President Ford, and Sipple was delighted. The letter read: “I want you to know how much I appreciated your selfless actions last Monday. The events were a shock to us all, but you acted quickly and without fear for your own safety. By doing so you helped to avert danger to me and to others in the crowd. You have my heartfelt appreciation. Sincerely, Jerry Ford.” Sipple mimeographed the letter and sent a copy off to Milk with a note: “To Harvey, a good friend. Oliver W. Sipple.” Sipple never confronted Milk about his role in making his sexual orientation public. He may not have figured out that Milk was the source.

After Milk was assassinated in 1978, Sipple attended the funeral at the San Francisco Opera House, grieving in the section roped off for Milk’s friends. Campbell and the other New York friends were there, too. Friends were surprised at how fat the former football star had become. Campbell spoke to his many friends at the funeral and even talked to Milk’s brother Robert, awkwardly leaning over to inform the Long Island banker that “Harvey left a lot of fractures in his life. He was rash and left a lot of things behind. We’re just some of the fractures.” But Campbell avoided making eye contact with Sipple. There was so much to say, but so little he could explain, that he avoided the erstwhile man of his dreams.

ALL THESE DISAPPOINTMENTS took their toll, and Sipple adopted a well-traveled method of coping. “I have a lot of stress and I take it out on booze,” Sipple said. Many nights he would sit at Reflections or the New Belle Saloon, Polk Street gay bars that he frequented, and complain to his friends about what Herb Caen had done to him. “I fought in Vietnam with the Marines and I got hurt,” Sipple said, “and now I’ll be remembered just for being a faggot.” He spent almost a decade like this, waiting for the decision in his lawsuit. Fifteen million would make it all worthwhile. When the California Court of Appeals finally reached a decision, even Sipple’s lawyer was bitter, saying his client would have been better off if he’d let Moore kill President Ford.

After that, Sipple declined rapidly. He weighed almost 300 pounds and would go to Queen Mary’s Pub on Church Street on the first of each month and treat everyone to drinks. Friends thought he probably spent his whole disability check in one evening. He would then be penniless the rest of the month and his friends would loan him money. In later years he borrowed money to contribute to AIDS fundraisers, which began to constitute his friends’ social lives. He always paid back the loans as soon as the next check came in.

On February 2, 1989, a friend found Oliver Sipple dead in his apartment on Van Ness Avenue. His body was in a reclining chair in the living room of his 334-dollar-a-month apartment, surrounded by empty cans of 7-Up and a bottle of Jack Daniels. His body had bloated to twice its normal size. The coroner, who ruled that Sipple died of natural causes, estimated that Sipple had died about ten days earlier. The television was still on.

Sipple was 47 years old. His friends were surprised when they learned this, as he looked like he was in his sixties. His funeral, organized by Alexander Hamilton Post 448, San Francisco’s predominantly gay and lesbian American Legion Post, was quite small. Only about thirty people attended the closed-casket service at Sullivan’s, a storefront funeral home next to a motor lodge in the Castro neighborhood. One of Sipple’s brothers came from Michigan. Some of his bar friends were there, too, but most of the visitors were reporters. Sipple regularly bought rounds of drinks for more people than that.

When Gerald Ford was asked in 2001 whether gay couples should receive the same benefits available to married couples, he replied, “I don’t see why they shouldn’t. I think that is a proper goal and, hell, I think they ought to be treated equally. Period.” Perhaps Sipple’s role in his life had something to do with Ford’s expansive response. By then, gays were on the way to being “normalized” in a way that would have pleased Harvey Milk. But back in 1975, making this fact public arguably ruined Sipple’s life. Milk had used Sipple as an example to show that gay men could be heroic and brave. But despite his action on September 22, Sipple was not at root a brave person. He was instead a rather conventional person who didn’t like to draw attention to himself. That made him a terrible candidate for the role Milk thrust upon him—something Milk ought to have known. Everything in Sipple’s past suggested that he wouldn’t handle that sort of responsibility well. What made Milk think that Sipple, who had left his boyfriend’s apartment in 1965 without leaving a note or returning for his things, would be a good symbol for gay liberation?

In the end, Sipple was a guy from Detroit who went to New York when he was young and confused and met some interesting people, men like Harvey Milk and Joe Campbell. To be sure, he had some fine qualities. He was the sort of man who would pay back the money his friends loaned him. He would buy rounds for the whole bar when he had the cash. “What’s a hero?” Sipple asked in 1975. “It’s just a word.”

Daniel Luzer, a senior editorial fellow at Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco, is working on a book about the Bay Area in the 1970’s.