The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  McKinley, now the Hair stage manager, returned to visit Harvey in Dallas. He was no longer the cute young boy Harvey had known. His thick dark hair tumbled around his shoulders. He was wearing an unlikely outfit of beads, bells, fringed boots, and a transparent shirt with puffy medieval sleeves. Hippies were taking over New York, but Dallas had never seen the likes of it. Joe Turner, for one, thought Jack looked like an erotic dream of Genghis Khan.

  The old problems persisted, despite the new image. Turner visited Harvey one night during Jack’s stay to find Milk uncharacteristically subdued. Jack had taken a knife and locked himself in the bathroom, swearing he would kill himself, Milk explained. As Turner left, Harvey assured him, “Don’t worry. He’s done this before.”

  Harvey asked for a transfer back to New York in 1968, growing dissatisfied with his life in Texas. He soon resigned from Bache. His boss, Monty Gordon, was not surprised. After five years with the firm, Milk was still a drifter, Gordon thought, still unsure of what he wanted to do when he grew up.

  The times clearly were eroding Milk’s conservatism. With both McKinley and O’Horgan preoccupied with Hair, Milk found himself surrounded by some of the most outrageous flower children on the continent. Harvey started assimilating the new countercultural values, which spurned materialism, eschewed conformity, and mocked orthodoxy. With each month, Milk’s hair became a little longer. With each political argument, his views became more flexible. With each new apartment, he discarded more of the tasteful furniture, stylish decor, and middle-class comforts he had cherished since first settling down with Joe Campbell in 1956.

  McKinley got the job as stage director for the San Francisco production of Hair. Harvey followed and took a job as a financial analyst on Montgomery Street, the heart of the city’s financial district. When friends asked how Harvey could continue to put up with Jack’s drinking and periodic suicide threats, Harvey would make a bawdy comment about Jack’s finely curved buns. Indeed, the sexual bond was one of the few connections the pair had. Their house was adorned with large blowups of this unclad aspect of Jack’s anatomy.

  Though Harvey quickly came to love the more laid-back pace of San Francisco, his relationship with McKinley deteriorated steadily. One night, McKinley stormed out of a performance of the campy Cockettes when he saw Harvey flirting with another young man. Milk ended up taking that man home, only to be awakened by a soggy, mud-covered McKinley who claimed he had thrown himself off a pier near Fisherman’s Wharf. Rather than falling to a lover’s death, Jack landed in four feet of water and the oozy floor of San Francisco Bay. Frustrated, Jack started wildly throwing punches at Milk and could only be restrained when Harvey literally tied him up and threw him in a closet.

  The next morning, Harvey unbound Jack. McKinley marched to the kitchen table where his competition was munching on a piece of toast. “You’ve been fucked and fed,” McKinley shouted. “Now leave.”

  By then, Harvey had had enough. Though Jack had little formal education, his quick wit and easy charm had earned him success as a Broadway stage manager. He was no longer a helpless sixteen-year-old who needed a protector. Tom O’Horgan offered Jack the job as stage manager of his new play, a rock opera based on the life of Jesus Christ. Jack moved back to New York. Harvey moved in with a group of “Hair” cast members and stayed in San Francisco; that, he said, was where his future lay.

  * * *

  “I would love to be mayor of San Francisco.”

  Harvey’s new roommate, Tom Eure, knew Milk had a weird sense of humor, but he had a queasy feeling that Harvey wasn’t joking when he made that observation over breakfast one morning. The newspapers were full of talk about the 1969 municipal elections. “Yes,” Harvey stated conclusively. “I want to be mayor.”

  Harvey’s new found liberalism was rankled by San Francisco politics. Downtown business interests controlled City Hall, he complained. Gays had no voice in city government at all. No matter how liberal that new candidate Dianne Feinstein sounded, Milk wasn’t convinced she would do much to substantively change the problems. Eighteen years earlier, Harvey had decided he could help stop the communist tide in Korea; now, he could save San Francisco too.

  Harvey even called a number of wealthy friends together for a dinner to discuss their possible campaign contributions. They all kept straight faces as they gently persuaded Milk that success would be, well, improbable. Harvey’s political fantasies drifted elsewhere. Ironically enough, by the time the board elected in 1969 sought reelection four years later, Harvey would be making his debut in city politics.

  By 1969, after a successful run as the Sugar Plum Fairy in the hustling scene, Joe Campbell had also moved to the Bay Area. Joe was now thirty-three and felt burned out. The feeling that he was in some exclusive club faded as the gay milieu became more assertive and open. He had a hard time understanding these younger homosexuals, since he had increasingly come to regard his homosexuality as an inconvenience. It was the reason he had gotten beat up all the time as a kid. Though useful in his youth, his sexuality was now more a complication to social acceptance, so he grew his hair long, moved to a farm in Marin County and, to use the term fashionable then, dropped out.

  Harvey’s hair was beginning to inch toward his ears as well, but he was too much the New Yorker to go the mellowed-out route. Milk was falling more into the urban hippie frame of mind, going to anti-war marches and spending his time with his flower children friends from the Hair cast. Every weekday morning, however, he would don his three-piece suit and wingtips to join the business world.

  By the early months of 1970, the country was as bitterly polarized as it had been since the Civil War. Families divided not over mere political issues of liberal and conservative, but on profound questions of values, materialism, patriotism, war and peace. Harvey had lived forty years trying to corral his nonconformist instincts into everything a Jewish boy from Long Island was supposed to do, from leading an upwardly mobile career to settling into insular middle-class marriages. Nothing was more emblematic of the split in Milk’s life than the dichotomy between his home, where he lived with Hair cast members, and his job, working among the most establishment of institutions.

  The break came the day the United States announced the invasion of Cambodia, April 29, 1970. Spontaneous demonstrations broke out on college campuses and in major cities across the country. The escalation infuriated Milk. He blamed the nation’s major corporations for fostering the conflict, because war was good for business. During his lunch hour, Milk joined protestors at the Pacific Stock Exchange. In a burst of characteristic theatricality, he jumped in front of the crowd and angrily burned his BankAmericard, denouncing big business. This gesture got a thunderous ovation, since it came from a member of the three-piece-suit species that generally had no use for such statements. A few minutes later, Harvey was on the phone to his friend Jim Bruton at Bache in New York. Jim was hardly surprised at the news. For years he’d seen Milk getting bored with the establishment life. Jim had long thought Harvey was in a constant hurry to go somewhere, though he didn’t know where he was going. Severing his ties with the business world would at least force the issue, but Bruton couldn’t resist goading his old friend.

  “Now, what the hell did you do that for?” he asked.

  “That’s what I felt about it,” said Milk. “I’m sick of putting up with the crap.”

  Milk talked briefly of opening a Jewish delicatessen in San Francisco. But Bruton figured that Harvey wasn’t really worried where his money would come from. As Jack McKinley was fond of saying about Harvey, “She didn’t know what she’d do next, but she knew she’d do something.” Harvey seemed much more concerned with the unpleasantness of getting fired for the first time.

  “I’m just sitting here waiting for somebody to say something,” he said.

  The ultimatum came that afternoon. Cut your hair or quit. Milk refused to do either and was fired. Tom O’Horgan summoned his old friend to Los Angeles to help him put together a film about Lenn
y Bruce, a dead comic who had once roamed the night club circuit with O’Horgan. Even as he watched Harvey pack, roommate Tom Eure thought to himself, “He’ll be back. He loves San Francisco too much to stay away. He fits in too well.”

  The film project fell through. Harvey drove back to New York along Route 66 through the Southwest. He was pale and shaken when he appeared at Jim Bruton’s door days later.

  “It was just like out of Easy Rider,” he told Jim. A bunch of rednecks taunted Milk’s hippie appearance at a Texas truck stop. Not one to suffer in silence, Milk snapped back and, he said, almost got his head blown off as the locals chased him out of town.

  “I thought that was it—the end I’ve always seen coming,” Harvey told Jim. “I thought it was all over.”

  “How did you get out of it?” Bruton asked.

  “I ran like hell.”

  * * *

  Judy Garland lies delicately on the satin bed, looking angelic in a high-necked gray chiffon gown, her hands folded over a prayer book.

  The lines stretched for blocks around the East Side funeral home where her body lay in a glass-enclosed coffin. Thousands stood for four hours to catch a last glimpse. Many were homosexuals, swarming around the funeral home like so many shirtless ones for that last moment of reverence to the woman who seemed the metaphor for their existence: put-upon and therefore self-destructive, a victim with a nebulous vision of Oz over the rainbow.

  The next night, some of the still-disconsolate made their way to the Stonewall Bar at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Police arrived for a raid at 2 A.M. The ostensible charge was selling liquor without a license. The Stonewall had been peddling booze for three years only a few blocks from precinct headquarters, so the real offense was probably failure to pay off the police that week. No difference. This was to be a typical raid, the kind that had been going on in New York City for decades, the kind that had been coming down in every major American city for decades.

  The crowd moved out of the Stonewall and lingered on the street outside. A few drag queens campily entertained them. More men came from the other bars to see what was happening at Sheridan Square, under the bright, full moon of June 28, 1969.

  When the police began to come out with the arrested bartenders, a few people tossed coins at them. Then beer cans. Then rocks. Someone shouted, “Christopher Street belongs to the queens.” A full-scale riot erupted. The outnumbered police officers barricaded themselves in the Stonewall for protection.

  Craig Rodwell and his lover were wandering home from a bridge game when police sirens and clamoring crowds drew them toward Christopher Street. Rodwell was amazed at what he saw. The crowd was bombarding the Stonewall with bricks. Some were trying to batter down the doors to get at the police who cowered inside. Rodwell started leading chants: “Police and Mafia out of the bars” and “Christopher Street belongs to the queens.” Craig hadn’t had so much fun since he was a kid cheering the Chicago Cubs.

  Buses ferried in the city’s tactical police force to disperse the crowd. Gay rioters played cat and mouse with patrolmen through the night on the twisted narrow streets of the Village.

  When the bars closed the next night, over two thousand restless gays gathered again outside the Stonewall. Again, helmeted police returned, brandishing nightsticks and finally forming a flying wedge to break up the rioters.

  This undoubtedly was the first American riot with a schedule determined by when the bars closed and staffed by soldiers who retreated to cruise the nearby docks when the serious business was over. Craig Rodwell saw it as the opportunity for which he had long waited. By the third night of rioting, he had printed up fliers decrying both the organized crime control of gay bars and police harassment of gays. Other fliers appeared when the riots reached their fourth and final day. Newly radicalized gays soon formed the first Gay Liberation Front and talked optimistically about new ideas like gay power and even gay revolution.

  For gays like Rodwell, the burst of gay militance couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time. Ever since his suicide attempt, Rodwell had devoted his energies to trying to create the gay movement he had discussed with Harvey in 1962. He had tried working with the Mattachine Society, but quit when he met resistance to a resolution he had penned, stating that Mattachine’s position should be that homosexuality was equal to, on a par with, and no different in kind from heterosexuality. That Mattachine even hesitated to approve such a statement nauseated Rodwell.

  Few alternatives, however, existed then. Rodwell worked two summers as a Fire Island bartender to save enough money to open the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore on Mercer Street in 1967 (later moved to Christopher Street). The first openly gay business in New York, the bookstore published its own newsletter, The Hymnal, prodding gays to do things like register to vote and pressure political candidates. Harvey Milk even dropped by the store occasionally and briefly contributed a column on investment tips—written, of course, under a pseudonym.

  Once the social change movements of the 1960s hit, it seemed only a matter of time before gays would leap into the kind of militant movement Rodwell and a handful of early gay activists envisioned. For years civics classes talked about all men being created equal; it was not until the 1960s that blacks and women militantly pushed society to bring theory into practice. Traditional Christian values always talked of the curse of materialism; it was not until the flower children that a generation rejected materialism on a mass scale. “Peace on earth, good will toward men” had long been religious watchwords; it was not until the Vietnam War that millions of Americans took to the streets to make that phrase more than a Christmas card slogan.

  Society had long demanded that homosexuals exist with the greatest incongruity of all—to live without regard for the powerful urges of sexuality. The disharmony between body and soul had twisted the lives of generations of gays. Without the ability to express this most powerful of biological impulses, many turned against themselves in bitter, self-destructive lives. Social institutions compounded and enforced the despair on many fronts—police raids, military purges, and the omnipresent discrimination. Now all this would be challenged as gays demanded the right to live in harmony with their bodies. The birth of gay liberation on a sultry June night in Greenwich Village seemed a natural outgrowth of the Age of Aquarius. Judy Garland was dead.

  * * *

  “Do you mind critics calling you cheap, decadent, sensationalistic, gimicky, vulgar, overinflated, megalomaniacal?”

  Reporters love asking such tantalizingly combative questions. But Tom O’Horgan, as mild mannered as ever, had little desire to start a row. “I don’t read reviews much,” he answered calmly, if not honestly.

  That such a question could legitimately be asked gave a fair indication of the critical disdain in which O’Horgan was held by late 1971. That the question comprised the cover blurb of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, superimposed over a picture of the long-haired director, indicated the meteoric rise O’Horgan had experienced in the late 1960s. Within the space of three years, he had directed three of the most successful—and wildly controversial—plays on Broadway: Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Lenny.

  O’Horgan’s bohemian coterie shared the success. Jack McKinley—who now went by his middle name, Galen—served competently as stage manager for many of O’Horgan’s productions. The Times story, however, spent an inordinate amount of space discussing another member of the idiosyncratic director’s entourage: “About O’Horgan’s age, Harvey Milk is a sad-eyed man—another aging hippie with long, long hair, wearing faded jeans and pretty beads; he seems instinctively attuned to all of O’Horgan’s needs.”

  Craig Rodwell read the story with disbelief that Sunday morning. “‘Long, long hair. Faded jeans. Pretty beads!’” he thought. “Is this the same Harvey Milk?”

  As usual, when Harvey did something, he did it all the way. Though friends of the conventional Wall Street Milk could not imagine Harvey the hippie, friends of the new Milk had a hard time imag
ining how he could ever have been straightlaced. He once tried explaining his employment history to author Eve Merriam. She wasn’t sure if he were telling the truth. Still, she noticed that Milk took childish delight in his transformation. Every time he talked of his background, she saw a man impishly amused at what had happened to Harvey Milk, the nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Long Island.

  Harvey moved among the vanguard of New York’s counterculture. When it came to romance, however, he was set in his ways and he quickly found a new lover to fit his new life-style. Harvey met Joseph Scott Smith at the Christopher Street Subway stop on his forty-first birthday, the same week Lenny opened on Broadway. Smith’s Equity pseudonym was Joe Scott, but Harvey would never call him Joe. Probably, friends thought, because of the reminder of his first lover, Joe Campbell. With long blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a firm build, the twenty-two-year-old Smith proved the perfect lover for the transformed Milk.

  Smith had only recently moved from Jackson, Mississippi. Like many men his age, Smith skipped a stint in Vietnam by checking the little box on the final page of his draft medical form—the box next to the word homosexual. The deferment put Scott in league with Jackson’s small countercultural scene, since hippies were the only locals who were unshaken by Smith and his handful of openly gay friends.

  Hip life in Jackson, however, was less than scintillating. There are only so many times you can take LSD, listen to the same Moody Blues songs, and stare at the three-dimensional cover of the Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties Request album before a lusty young man yearns for greater things. When two gay friends announced they were quitting the magnolias for Greenwich Village, Smith cast his lot with them.

  Harvey was twenty years older than Smith, but his appearance and entourage were very au courant. The onslaught of invitations to opening nights and backstage parties was enough to charm any boy fresh from Mississippi. Harvey wasted no time mapping out their future. Once he finished work on O’Horgan’s new play, Inner City, they would move to San Francisco.