by Randy Shilts
Tom made Harvey associate producer of Inner City in the hope that Milk’s background in finance could make him a serious Broadway producer. Like any good boss, Milk promptly got his boyfriend Scott on the payroll, where he worked under the stage manager, Galen McKinley. The play was based on the controversial Inner City Mother Goose by Eve Merriam. The book was then the second most banned work in America. An Orange County teacher was fired for simply loaning his copy to a student. The play enumerated the injustices of urban life and seemed well-suited for Harvey’s new left-leaning politics.
The critics had little use for the iconoclastic O’Horgan, however, and panned the play. Audiences were wildly enthusiastic but small. Keeping the play afloat required hyperactive fund raising by Milk. He hit up his old friends at Bache, many of whom did not even recognize their former colleague when he turned up at 51 Wall Street.
The play’s two other co-producers, meanwhile, were horrified that O’Horgan was using some aging hippie as his representative to the project. Fights between Milk and the play manager escalated rapidly. The management was horrified at the blatant marijuana smoking of the cast. The play was probably one of the only Broadway productions to have to issue a policy statement that pot could be smoked only in the second- and third-floor dressing rooms since the gallery had begun to stink of weed. Every week, the stage manager would plead that the play was broke and issue a notice giving Equity actors warning that they would soon be fired. Every week, Milk would delight the cast by tearing down the notice, swearing he would raise the money to keep the play open.
The play’s three-month run lasted into 1972, but events conspired to drive it to an early end. Richard Nixon was about to be reelected president. The country was tiring of incessant gripes about injustice. The counterculture was losing steam. Social conscience became passé. Broadway audiences didn’t want to see plays about blacks in ghettos. They wanted musicals with lots of nice dancing.
Feeling he could do no more, Harvey left the production and moved to San Francisco. Scott Smith had to stay behind until the play closed. Smith’s mailbox was soon crammed with daily letters from Harvey explaining in detail why Smith had to join him in San Francisco as soon as Inner City folded. On the back of a Dots candy box, Milk assured Scott that San Francisco had many movie theaters they could enjoy. Another handmade card insisted Scott should move because his shoulder-length blond hair would dry faster in the California sun.
Once reunited, Milk and Smith picked up a mutt from the pound, named it The Kid, climbed into Milk’s 1967 green Dodge Charger and spent nearly a year driving through California. They lived meagerly off their unemployment checks, usually tossing their sleeping bags under the redwoods of the state park to which they were closest. When the unemployment checks stopped coming, they returned to San Francisco, lived on their income tax refunds, and frittered away their afternoons on massive jigsaw puzzles.
Harvey’s old roommate Tom Eure had never seen anybody throw himself into jigsaw puzzles with such passion as Harvey. Day after day. Night after night. Harvey stood over the puzzles, trying to get the complex, confusing pieces to fit together. Somehow.
“Harvey, what are you going to do for money?” Jim Bruton asked when he visited Harvey and Scott in San Francisco. “Aren’t you almost out?”
“Yes.”
“How are you going to get more?”
“I don’t know,” said Harvey. He didn’t think the subject needed to be discussed any more.
“What are you going to do for a living?” Bruton persisted.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“And you know what?” Bruton observed years later when he recounted the conversation. “I think he was happier than at any time I had ever seen him in his entire life.”
four
Sodom by the Sea
If this little book should see the light after its 100 years of entombment, I would like its readers to know that the author was a lover of her own sex and devoted the best years of her life in striving for the political equal and social and moral elevation of women.
—Laura De Force Gordon, May, 1879 (Found in time capsule at San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, April 22, 1979, on the flyleaf of Gordon’s book “Great Geysers of California.)
“United we stand. Divided they catch us one by one.”
A warm breeze rustled through The Black Cat bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on a soft October night in 1951. Hazel the piano player had just announced last call and Jose, in his usual sequined gown, stepped forward to deliver his nightly oration.
“Remember, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. The crime is getting caught,” he shouted. “Let’s all stand up and form a circle.” The crowd slowly went into a formation. “For one moment, I want you to stand and be proud of who you are.”
With an evangelist’s fervor, Jose led the chorus:
God save us nelly queens
God save us nelly queens
God save us queens.…
Moments later, the sergeant at the old Hall of Justice across the street motioned to the prisoners of the gay tier. “There’s your leader,” he laughed, pointing out the window.
Below, Jose had moved his sing-along to The Black Cat’s front door, where they could look up to their friends who had been unfortunate enough to be caught in that week’s sweep of gays. Small figures on a sidewalk, singing up to their friends behind the bars: “God save us queens.”
Decades later, grown men would break into tears when they remembered those nights in the 1950s, singing to their friends in jail. No one else could possibly have cared about the queens, in those lonely days, they explain, except maybe God.
* * *
Generations before people like Harvey Milk went west to build a political movement that would one day capture the nation’s attention, a homosexual underground thrived in San Francisco. The early settlers dubbed the cosmopolitan city “Baghdad by the Bay,” but ministers throughout the West quickly gave the town another nickname, “Sodom by the Sea.”
From the start San Francisco attracted an unlikely conglomeration of adventurers, vagabonds, bohemians, and assorted misfits. The city was a wild town that could challenge the world’s rowdiest ports. Among the whorehouses of the early Barbary Coast were the forerunners of gay bars, small elite restaurants with all-male staffs and very private booths.
Necessity, if nothing else, forced a see-no-evil attitude toward homosexuality. Between 1848 and 1858, San Francisco leaped from being a backwater hamlet of one thousand to become a major metropolis of fifty thousand—and virtually all the gold-seeking newcomers were men. The late twentieth-century homophile vogue of denoting sexual inclinations by colored handkerchiefs, for example, dates back to those Forty-niner days when raucous miners used hankies to separate male and female roles for their all-male square dances.
The scandal sheets of a more Victorian America fretted about the city’s unnatural vices in the 1880s. In England, Oscar Wilde noted, “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be last seen in San Francisco,” an observation that undoubtedly said as much about Wilde’s company as it did about the city’s magnetism.
The Spanish-American War infused new excitement into the city’s gay scene when San Francisco became home port to the thousands of men bound for the Philippines. Helpful young soldiers learned they could make extra money if they escorted admiring older men around the Presidio military base—and earn more if they proved serviceable.
The earthquake shattered San Francisco’s bawdier side when church leaders came forward to warn that the shaker obviously represented God’s wrath on Sodom West. A clean-up campaign swept away the Barbary Coast. Prohibition later closed any sub rosa gay bars that may have survived. 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.
Dangers abounded. Some plucky navy men would dress in their tightest blues and memorize license
numbers of cars that sputtered slowly by. From motor vehicle records, the voter registrar, or the city directory, the military men could trace the cruiser’s address. Before the week was out, many a hapless victim would receive an extortionist’s invoice, casually mentioning that if payment were not promptly received, both family and employer could expect revealing mail.
Gays who escaped blackmailers had to run the gauntlet with “Lilly Law,” as police were known among gays in the 1930s. Police knew that one Market Street theater was a popular pit stop for wandering gay men, so authorities routinely assigned seats there to the most comely police cadets. Once a gay man sidled into the next seat, the cadets would wriggle their legs suggestively. After the preliminaries of fellatio, the plainclothesman would suggest that the pair meet outside for more fun. In the darkness of the theater, the gay cruiser would not know the policeman had painted mercurochrome on his penis. The artistry, however, was obvious to vice squaders who stood in the lobby, arresting any man who emerged with telltale red lips.
The wealthy managed to stay above such trouble in this era. Templeton Crocker, the scion of the city’s prominent banking family, reportedly headed local gay royalty, throwing lavish parties and surrounding himself with pretty young men. Other famous characters fluttered in and out of the tea dances and private parties where each guest was carefully vouched for. A homosexual septuagenarian fondly recalled decades later how in his youth, no less than the Catholic archbishop had “gently laid hands” on him.
Parties, street cruising, and theater blow-jobs, however, could hardly be described as the norm for San Francisco gays before World War II. These players were the lucky ones. Most gays of that time did not even have words to describe the longings they felt, much less any awareness that others like them existed. The ones who did understand their malady generally stuck to propriety, becoming the archetypal bachelor uncles and spinster aunts, the secret of their moral depravity gnawing at them until death.
A movement for homosexual equality had grown in Germany since the 1880s, arguing for legal reforms and greater public awareness about homosexuality. That ended when Hitler methodically exterminated its leaders and rounded their followers into Level 3 concentration camps. Ironically enough, America’s move to squash Hitler began the historical processes that would turn San Francisco from a town that only tolerated homosexuality to the international gay Mecca.
The sheer scope of the war’s social effects were staggering. Some sixteen million men joined the armed services during the war. It marked a social dislocation unprecedented in American history. Men were uprooted from generations-old family centers, pulled outside the ken of their peers’ values, shunted anonymously through big cities in almost exclusively same-sex environments—all of them streaming toward points of debarkation from which they might never return.
When Allan Berube of the San Francisco Gay History Project interviewed dozens of such soldiers later, he found most had similar stories. For the first time in their lives, they heard a new word—a word that not only defined the difference that had lurked secretly within, but also indicated that others like themselves existed. If the word didn’t come from fellow G.I.s, the soldiers learned it from gay cruisers who frequented the parks, depots, and YMCAs used as makeshift sleep sites for servicemen. Many a California gay had his salad days in San Francisco then, since the city was the major point of debarkation for the Pacific theater.
The military speeded San Francisco’s growth into a gay center. The second world war marked the first conflict in which the armed services tried to systematically identify and then exclude homosexuals. In the process of examining the nearly 36 million men eligible for service, thousands were found to be homosexual and classified as such by the draft boards. The tens of thousands more who escaped this early classification faced a tougher fate in the service. Purge after purge of gays in various branches condemned thousands to the “blue discharge,” named for the blue paper upon which homosexual discharges were written. The discharge was stamped with a large H and guaranteed the bearer the status of persona non grata, especially during the patriotic war years. The Department of Defense still refuses to say how many thousands were subjected to this ignonomy. The action, however, created an entire class of social outcasts who were public homosexuals. Some committed suicide, but most tried to start quiet new lives. Returning home was an improbable option, with all the messy questions it would raise. Most of the men discharged from the Pacific theater were processed out in San Francisco, and that’s where they stayed. By the end of World War II, the military establishment had given San Francisco a disproportionately large number of identified gays.
The massive purges of gays from the military and government during the McCarthy era—spurred by the Wisconsin senator who apparently was homosexual himself—increased the number of gay refugees in the Bay Area. A full contingent of former State Department employees moved en masse to nearby Sausalito, say gay old-timers, after anti-gay hysteria swept the foreign service.
It was in these turbulent years that the modern gay bar started. Unlike the clandestine gay speakeasies and parties of the past, these were public institutions—the first places where homosexuals could publicly assemble. Their patrons had less to lose than their predecessors. Many had already been publicly identified as gays by the military. Once plucked from the isolation of generations past, it was only a matter of time before this new San Francisco minority would begin its slow and irresistible movement toward civil rights.
* * *
Aunt Maria threw the long sequined gown on the parlor couch. “I’ve brought something for Jose to play with,” she told her sister, Delores. Jose raced into the sitting room, fingered the beads adorning the soft lame, and then ran to his mother’s full-length mirror. Jose Sarria had always been an unpredictable child and his family humored his fondness for dressing up in his mother’s and aunt’s gowns and high heels, forsaking the pursuit of baseball for his fantasies of duchesses and royal balls.
Jose and his sister fell in with the bohemian crowd of North Beach in the late 1940s. They frequently wandered into The Black Cat bar where writers like Bill Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and, more recently, Allen Ginsberg were known to imbibe. One night the pair spotted a handsome waiter, Jimmy Moore, and promptly placed a bet over who could get him in bed first. Jose invited Jimmy to an Independence Day family picnic. Toward the end of the outing, Jose’s mother decided she had at last found the perfect mate for her son. She asked Jimmy to move in with the family. Jose won the bet.
A dutiful husband, Jose would fill in for Jimmy when he got sick, adding his own colorful presence to The Black Cat as he traipsed through the bar in red high heels. Jose recognized the piano player’s background music one afternoon as the theme from Carmen and in his strong tenor started belting out arias as he delivered cocktails among the tables. Within a few months, Jose was regularly drawing Sunday afternoon crowds as he put on camp productions of his one-man operas.
The sight of Jose’s plump figure stuffed into a tight red dress campily singing Tosca proved irresistible to the growing number of San Francisco gays, and homosexuals soon crowded out the bar’s North Beach patrons. They were, Jose thought, a dispirited bunch. Jose had spent his life bucking every norm. He’d be damned if he was going to see far more conventional men wallow in self-contempt while he was having a good time. That’s when the preaching, as Sarria called it, began.
Jose saw hundreds of men getting arrested every month on specious charges, then meekly pleading guilty to whatever police alleged in the vain hope that they could somehow preserve their anonymity. In the course of his one-man version of Carmen he launched into a prayerful monologue. “When you are on your knees, praying to God in your own way, if you get tapped on the shoulder by a big blue star, remember, you swallow first.” Jose always got a big laugh when he affected a big swallow here. “And then you say—I’m not guilty and I want a trial by jury.”
The weekly operas provided the first gay news service. �
��A blue fungus has hit the parks,” he told his fans during a heavy crackdown on park sex. “It does not appear until about 2 A.M. It twinkles like a star. Until this fungus dies, it’s best to stay out of our parks at 2 A.M.”
Jose pioneered two battle cries: “There’s nothing wrong with being gay—the crime is getting caught,” and “United we stand, divided they catch us one by one.” At the end of every night at The Black Cat, he would order the patrons to stand in a circle, join hands, and sing “God Save the Queens,” sometimes flocking them outside to do a final stanza to friends across the street in jail. “For one moment,” Jose said, “be proud of who you are.”
Jose’s activity made him an urban guerrilla to San Francisco’s heavily Irish Catholic Police Department and especially to the two-man vice team of Murphy and Gallagher. The Alcohol Beverage Control Commission (ABC) took steps to close Jose’s den of insurgency.
The first salvo came in 1948 when the ABC tried to close The Black Cat because they had evidence that the establishment actually served liquor to homosexuals, a criminal act in those days. The courtroom was packed with gays in neat suits and ties the day the case finally got to trial.
“Can you point out the homosexuals in this room?” the bar’s lawyer asked the judge.
The judge allowed that he couldn’t.
The lawyer argued that if a wise judge with years of worldly experience could not pick out a homosexual, how could a mere bartender? The logic held, though The Black Cat ultimately had to go all the way to the California Supreme Court to get a court ruling affirming the right of homosexuals to peacefully assemble.
The fact that a homosexual case had dared go to court and then actually won infuriated the ABC and the vice squad. They launched what would be a fifteen-year war on The Black Cat. Feisty Jose, however, proved equal to the challenge.
The city’s thirty-five gay bars set up a network, calling each other at the first sight of a man who might be a plainclothes cop or ABC investigator. When the hapless agent came into The Black Cat, Jose would take to the stage, graciously introduce the gentleman, and ask everyone to give him a round of applause.