The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  Men like Jim Foster, David Goodstein, and Rick Stokes were deemed the young Turks of the San Francisco gay movement of the early seventies. Their peers constantly reminded them that they could make far more money if they dropped this troublesome homosexual cause and used their considerable talents in business. They, however, had confidence that they were the political wave of the future. Since they were often the first gay leaders politicians had ever heard of they developed connections that later activists like Harvey Milk could only envy.

  * * *

  The great corporate and tourist center, that was to be San Francisco’s future. The city had once been known as a blue-collar town, a typical ethnic big city with a bustling port and a heavy industrial base. But in the 1960s, it all started changing, almost imperceptibly. The port started withering. Manufacturing moved to the suburbs. The city government did little to stem the flow and instead insisted that San Francisco needed to strike a new path. It would be a headquarters for major corporations. The city could also put a greater emphasis on tourism.

  The city’s blacks, Latins, and working class began to feel the pinch. Blue-collar workers followed their union jobs out of San Francisco. Amid great promises of urban renewal, the city bulldozed giant tracts of the black Filmore neighborhood. The new housing that was to renew the decimated area was never built, so there were that many fewer blacks in the city. The office workers who would fill the new corporate skyscrapers certainly were not about to live in San Francisco, so 1.6 billion dollars was sunk into the ultramodern Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which daily sped the workers from the suburbs. By coincidence, a main line of the subway cut down Mission Street, the center of the Latin neighborhood. The years of digging there drove many businesses into bankruptcy.

  The election of the charismatic Joe Alioto as mayor in 1967 only accelerated these changes. Real estate developers and unions both contributed heavily to his campaign. In return, he made sure the massive high-rises kept reaching above the once-quaint San Francisco skyline. Wealthy hotel owners were ecstatic about the new emphasis on tourism, so they supported Alioto and like-minded members of the board of supervisors.

  The city’s neighborhoods, meanwhile, were dying, as workers fled to suburbia and City Hall focused its attentions on downtown and tourism. Alioto adeptly kept minorities in line by handing out a minority training program here or a new public mall there. But the change to a white-collar city bred one result that even the wisest hotel owner or real estate developer could not have predicted. The growth in service-oriented corporate jobs came as the success of SIR and gay politicking were dramatically inflating San Francisco’s already considerable reputation as a gay center. Gays began trekking westward in greater numbers, and since homosexuals reflect the overall make-up of society, this newly mobile group was largely white and middle-class, with at least a few years of college education. It would have been harder to find a segment of the population more suited to fill the thousands of new jobs in the skyscraper corporate headquarters and tourist industries.

  The gay population soared. In any other plan, such white-collar workers could have been counted on to vote conservatively and not worry too much about what was happening to blacks, Latins, and inner city neighborhoods. But gays were a sorely disenfranchised group who could not afford the luxury of voting their pocketbook or ideology. They had to vote on survival issues, and survival was no small task for San Francisco gays. Though charming and affable, Alioto ruled the city with an iron hand. He even refused to appear on his City Hall balcony since critics were quick to note that in such poses he bore a striking resemblance to Benito Mussolini. The comparison certainly held true for gays. Alioto was, above all, an Italian Catholic politician with his sights set on higher office. To shore up his Catholic constituents in San Francisco, he dearly wanted to bring a cardinal’s hat to the city. And you didn’t get red hats by allowing perverts to run wild.

  Police bore down heavily on gays who, afraid of bar raids, took to finding sex in public parks. By 1971, police were arresting an average of about 2,800 gay men a year on public sex charges; the same year, only sixty-three such arrests were made in all of New York City. The number of men harassed in the crackdown was many times this official arrest statistic, since it was common knowledge that a $30 payoff to the police usually let the transgressor escape with only a stern warning.

  Many of the arrests were thrown out of court once information surfaced about the common police tactics of entrapment. But sentences meted out for gay offenses were sometimes higher than those given out for rape, armed robbery, and even manslaughter. According to one gay newspaper, 110 men were sentenced to fifteen years to life for the crime of “sodomy and oral copulation”—in 1971 alone.

  Supervisor Feinstein easily galvanized gay support for her run against Alioto for mayor in 1971. She had kept a moderate voice as a supervisor, however, and could not get enough liberal or conservative votes to win. Gays were still smarting over the 1971 police crackdown after the elections. Many felt the hit-and-miss endorsements at SIR candidates’ nights weren’t doing the job. Embattled liberal Democrats around town were organizing into Democratic clubs, however, so Jim Foster organized his SIR political committee into the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club.

  Foster, the club’s president, knew the group needed a bold stroke to establish itself on the political horizon. The chance came in early 1972 during the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern. McGovern had issued a seven-point gay rights plank that satisfied virtually every demand the fledgling gay movement was making, from upgrading dishonorable discharges to banning discrimination against gays. The California primary shaped up as a crucial battle for McGovern. To get his name at the top of the ballot—a slot worth several percentage points—the South Dakota senator needed to be the first candidate to get all of his nominating petitions into Secretary of State Jerry Brown’s office.

  The city’s more staid Democratic clubs decided to hold chic wine and cheese parties at midnight on the first possible day they could circulate petitions. “Nobody in their right mind is going to get out of bed at midnight to sign some goddamn petition,” Jim Foster argued. So, when the key night came, Foster divided his Toklas club members into two groups. The first cadre went into gay bars before midnight, furiously registering new Democrats. At twelve, the second group recruited all the newly registered Democrats to sign McGovern petitions.

  Before the bars closed that night, the gay Democrats had gathered over one-third the Northern California signatures McGovern needed to get on the ballot. Gay fund raisers, meanwhile, made gays a key part of the McGovern campaign money efforts. With such results, liberals quickly welcomed the new club into the Democratic fold. Most of the city’s major liberals supported Stokes when he made a run for a seat on the local community college board of directors in November 1972. Milk would later criticize the candidacy, noting that for all the heavy-weight liberal endorsements, Stokes seemed to downplay his homosexuality in campaign literature, but Stokes polled an impressive 45,000 votes—not enough to win, but a showing that surprised political analysts.

  By the end of the year, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against gays by city contractors. Supervisors were timid at first. “Does this mean that contractors have to hire men who wear dresses?” the bill’s sponsor, Dianne Feinstein, asked Del Martin when Martin first suggested the law. Virtually all the board members were Democrats with an eye for higher office, so only one supervisor, future mayoral hopeful John Barbagelata, opposed the measure.

  * * *

  “What the hell is this propaganda?”

  Jim Foster was about to take the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. An NBC newscaster was among the Alabama delegates, asking about the Humphrey backers’ attempts to delay speeches for the proposed gay civil rights plank to the party platform. “As far as I’m concerned, they could take them off the convention and I’d be very happy,” said delegate Fred Fo
lsom.

  The political pundits couldn’t believe what McGovern was about to let happen. They knew nothing about the petitions in the California primary or McGovern’s private pledge to give gay rights a full floor debate. They were stunned that McGovern was going to let two speeches for gay rights air on national television the same night he was to appear to accept the Democratic nomination. Just another example of McGovern’s bumbling, they decided.

  “We do not come to you pleading your understanding or begging your tolerance,” Foster began. “We come to you affirming our pride in our life-style, affirming the validity to seek and maintain meaningful emotional relationships and affirming our right to participate in the life of this country on an equal basis with every citizen.”

  In even, forceful sentences, Foster ticked off the encyclopedia of injustices against gays. He condemned the “brutal and ruthless” purges of gays in the armed forces. He noted the $12 million which the Civil Service Commission spent each year investigating suspected homosexual employees. According to government regulations, a homosexual was not even permitted to push a broom down the halls of the Smithsonian Institute or hang pictures in the National Gallery.

  If police enforced laws against heterosexual bars with the vigor they employed against gays, Foster said, “there would not be jails in the United States big enough to hold all the prisoners.” All this bred a terrifying fear, he said, leading to “the most devastating fear of all—the fear of self-acceptance.”

  Foster knew the plank would never pass, but he relished the irony of the occasion. He had been disgraced by the American military he had sought to serve, and then harassed in hundreds of smaller ways in almost every aspect of his life. Tonight, he was debating public policy before the Democratic convention and a national television audience. Things were changing faster than he had ever imagined possible.

  “These are not conservative or radical issues, these are human issues,” he concluded. “Regardless of whether this convention passes this plank or not, there are millions of gay brothers and sisters who will say to the Democratic Party, ‘We are here. We will not be still. We will not go away until the ultimate goal of gay liberation is realized, the goal that all people live in the peace, freedom, and dignity of who we are.’”

  * * *

  Castro Street? Sounds like a Cuban tourist resort.

  Harvey kept joking as usual, but by the end of 1972, both he and Scott knew they had to get serious. Their income tax refunds were running out. They needed to find a cheap place to live. They heard that apartments were cheap over on Castro Street, the main strip in an old Irish neighborhood gone to seed. Two gay bars there were doing booming business catering to gay hippies like themselves.

  They moved into a Castro Street apartment and tried to figure out what to do for money. Harvey had the brainstorm when he dropped off a roll of film at a neighborhood pharmacy, only to have the pictures come back ruined. They would open a camera store, he told Scott enthusiastically.

  Scott reminded Harvey that neither of them knew much about film or cameras. Harvey, however, was already taken with the idea of having his own little neighborhood shop, just like his grandfather Morris and his parents. If it flopped, the worst that could happen is that they’d have to work downtown. The pair took their last $1,000, spent $500 on buying up supplies and the rest on the first payment on a five-year lease for a Victorian storefront on Castro Street. They moved in upstairs. The store’s 2,500 square feet gave them plenty of room to work their jigsaw puzzles too. On March 3, 1973, Harvey put the hand-carved shingle in the window: “Yes, We Are Very Open.”

  “Harvey spent most of his life looking for a stage,” observed Tom O’Horgan years later. “On Castro Street, he finally found it.”

  PART II

  The Mayor of Castro Street

  five

  Politics as Theater

  Michael Wong impatiently sipped his Seven-Up as he waited for the other members of San Francisco Tomorrow, the city’s major environmental group, to show up for the year’s most important meeting. His friend Joan Irwin munched her Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner and talked casually of the many candidates expected to vie that night for the group’s endorsement in the supervisorial elections. Well before any other members arrived, however, a tall hippie with a pony tail and mustache sauntered into the room.

  “My name is Harvey Milk and I’m running for supervisor,” he said.

  Irwin and Wong knew who he was, the crazy guy Jim Foster kept worrying about. When Milk started discussing issues, however, both Wong and Irwin warmed to the candidate. He was talking their kind of politics. He would stop the helter-skelter airport expansion, he insisted, and try to block an expensive downtown development project that was tearing out large tracts of low-income housing in favor of more high-rises. As a supervisor, he would even work to municipalize the electric company and, of course, abolish the vice squad. Irwin ended Milk’s liberal litany with one question.

  “Harvey, how do you really expect to win without any money? I mean, the incumbents have so much money.”

  “Well,” Harvey quickly replied, “I figured that since I am openly gay, some father who is nuts and upset over the Texas homosexual killings will come out and shoot me.” Milk paused briefly, as if he had calculated this possible denouement on an actuarial table. “I figure that I’ll be lucky and survive and I’ll get a lot of sympathy votes, as well as the liberal and gay votes.”

  A finger-lickin’ good drumstick dropped from Irwin’s mouth into her lap. Wong choked on his Seven-Up.

  “Harvey,” Irwin asked after a moment of silence. “Don’t you think you’re going a little too far with that?”

  “Well, I’m not out to get killed,” Milk assured her, “but who knows about the crazies that run around?”

  Crazies indeed, Wong and Irwin thought. Now they knew what Jim Foster meant when he said Harvey was unpredictable, even dangerous to the serious gay political movement that had been building in the city in recent years.

  Milk went on to deliver a theatrical hellfire and brimstone populist speech that stole the show from the more seasoned politicos who sought the club’s endorsement. Milk probably could have had the club’s endorsement by acclamation—except that when it came time to vote, Irwin and Wong repeated what Milk had told them before the meeting started. Wong also noted that the established gay leadership was fretting that Milk’s penchant for off-the-wall comments would give the local gay movement a black eye. Harvey lost the endorsement.

  The night typified Harvey’s first foray into electoral politics in the 1973 elections for the board of supervisors. He was among the most issue-conscious candidates in the campaign, delighting liberals with his programs to wrest control of the city from real estate developers, tourist barons, and downtown corporate interests. He had no intention of just being a gay candidate. His fiery oration rambled at times, but still enraptured audiences. His wit and showmanship gave him all the markings of a true San Francisco character, the kind of idiosyncratic enragé that the city had long embraced as among its chief natural resources. That, however, did not mean the city was going to elect him to run the government.

  * * *

  Harvey became bored of working jigsaw puzzles as the spring days of 1973 lengthened into summer, and Harvey hated being bored. Dianne Feinstein and four other board members were up for reelection, but Harvey had not thought much about going into politics, until a pompous bureaucrat, a dedicated teacher, and an absentminded attorney general all got him so mad that he had to do something.

  A chubby state bureaucrat appeared at Castro Camera shortly after the business opened to sternly warn Milk that he could not legally run his business until he paid the state a $100 deposit against sales taxes. The pronouncement rekindled all of Milk’s old resentments about government interference in the economy. “You mean to tell me that if I don’t have one hundred dollars, I can’t run a business in free-enterprise America?” Harvey shouted. “You mean I have to be wealthy to
operate a business in the state of California?”

  The ruffled official was not about to be pushed around by some hippie camera shop owner in some run-down neighborhood, so he started shouting right back. Customers who had been waiting for film quietly exited, prompting Milk to rant further, “I’m paying your fucking salary and you’re driving my customers away.”

  The bullheaded Milk stormed around state offices for weeks, upbraiding officials and finally bargaining the deposit down to thirty dollars. Peace might have returned to Castro Camera except that a few weeks later, a young high school teacher wandered in to ask if she could borrow a slide projector. The schools were so low on funds, that it took over a month to requisition one and she had lessons to teach from it now, she said.

  Harvey went into another tirade. The city had enough money to finance endless expansion of the airports to fatten the wallets of tourist trade moguls, enough money for long freeways to service manpower needs of downtown corporations—even enough money to send arrogant bureaucrats to drive away his customers. But here was a dedicated teacher—the kind of teacher he would be if he had used his Albany State credentials, he thought—without the equipment to do her job.

  The final impetus came with former Attorney General John Mitchell’s performance at the Senate Watergate hearings. Milk kept the portable television set in the camera store every day to watch the hearings. Customers frequently came in to find the wild-eyed, pony-tailed, over-aged hippie screaming at John Mitchell: “You lying son of a bitch, you lying son of a bitch.” One friend had to physically restrain Harvey from kicking in the screen when Mitchell started droning through his “I don’t recall” responses to questions about whether he was indeed trying to undermine the democratic processes during the 1972 elections.