The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  That was it. The country was going to hell in a handbasket. Liars and crooks at its helm. Bureaucrats could run roughshod over small businessmen. Teachers weren’t being allowed to do their jobs. From all over the city, meanwhile, came stories that the 1973 elections had started to engender the traditional pre-election cleanup. Harvey figured he could win with gay and hippie votes alone. Just before the filing deadline, Harvey decided on his eleventh-hour candidacy.

  In early August, an old hippie friend of Scott Smith’s from New York, Tom Rando, silk-screened the campaign posters: “Milk Has Something For Everybody.” He painted the word “soap” on the side of a crate and, with a handful of supporters, walked up to a small plaza on Castro Street where Harvey Milk stood on the soap box and announced his intent to run.

  “I am forty-three years old now and I can do one of two things,” Milk told a gay interviewer shortly after the announcement. “I can concentrate on making a lot of money while I enjoy perhaps another ten years of active gay life. Then, after fifty-three, I can just coast. Call the whole thing good. Or I can get involved and do something about the things that are wrong in this society. I’ve got to fight not just for me but for my lover and his next lover eventually. It’s got to be better for them than it was for me.”

  Harvey was now a politician.

  * * *

  Politics? Why politics?

  Joe Campbell stood in Castro Camera and tried to figure out what Harvey was trying to accomplish with all this politics crap. Nothing about Harvey jelled with his first lover, the man he had met seventeen years ago at Riis Beach, except that he seemed as horny as ever. Why politics? Why, for that matter, a camera store? Harvey didn’t know anything about cameras, he thought. Why not sell greeting cards or pets?

  Harvey wanted Joe to work in his campaign, so Joe had driven down from nearby Marin County to see Harvey in his new store. Milk told him enthusiastically about his campaign as an openly gay candidate for supervisor. Joe didn’t know what Harvey was getting at with all his talk about oppression, discrimination, and liberation. Joe never felt oppressed. Sure he’d been beaten up as a kid, but he had come to learn that was to be expected if you joined a group held in contempt by society. He’d moved to his farm in Marin to get away from all that homosexual bull.

  I can’t think of one homosexual who would not prefer to be a heterosexual if they had the choice, Joe thought. Here was Harvey, talking about being gay in newspapers, living in a gay neighborhood, and trying to be some gay messiah. Joe couldn’t believe that he really meant all that gay liberation stuff; Harvey was just running to get attention, Joe thought. No, he was not going to work on the campaign.

  Joe’s apathy exasperated Milk. Harvey was convinced that Joe was among those so oppressed they didn’t even know they were oppressed. Joe acted as if it were his own fault that he got beat up, not society’s. Society, that was the problem, he railed. Somebody had to change society; I’ll be the one to do it, he insisted.

  The more the two talked, the more they realized they had drifted apart. Harvey thought Joe was too wrapped up in himself to care about society. Joe thought Harvey was still suffering from his persecution complex. He just talked about gays now instead of the Holocaust. The only thing Harvey said that made sense to Joe was when Campbell asked Milk why he had established his store at a run-down place like Castro Street. “I like to sit in the window and watch the cute boys walk by,” Harvey said. That sounded like the old Harvey.

  * * *

  “Why should I endorse you, Harvey?”

  Jim Foster had heard about the fast-talking, long-haired political novice through the grapevine. He didn’t take the candidacy any more seriously than Joe Campbell did.

  “You should endorse me because I’ve been active in the gay movement and the Democratic Party,” Harvey said.

  “There’s an old saying in the Democratic Party,” Foster explained. “You don’t get to dance unless you put up the chairs. I’ve never seen you put up the chairs.”

  Milk didn’t argue, but he was clearly taken back by Foster’s candor. Foster had enjoyed playing the role of Mr. Gay San Francisco ever since his convention speech had gained him local prominence a year before. It rankled him that some hippie would come out of nowhere, having put in no work in any local gay organization, and decide that he would be the gay spokesperson. He, not Harvey Milk, had been the one working to build San Francisco gay power for ten years. He decided to get the goat of this unskilled newcomer.

  “There’s another old saying in the gay movement,” Foster continued. “We’re like the Catholic Church. We take converts, but we don’t make them Pope the same day.”

  Harvey now thought Foster was patronizing him. Foster didn’t care. He and his allies, respectable professionals like David Goodstein and Rick Stokes, had worked out a plan. They had to claim their power gradually. Stokes’s community college board campaign was a good first step. It did not reach for too high an office. Stokes had not stressed his homosexuality in any aspect of the campaign, except, of course, to gay voters. Stokes, therefore, got the support of “our straight liberal friends.”

  Our liberal friends. In recent years, they had become the key constituency that gay moderates courted throughout the country. Starting in the early 1970s, gay moderates had been shaping the gay liberation movement into the gay rights movement. All we want are equal civil rights, simple legal reform, the moderates stressed. You get that, they figured, by showing liberals that you’re decent respectable people, just the same as they are except for a few bedroom gymnastics. Liberals clearly were much more comfortable with this approach. The word liberation made them uneasy. By keeping the topic of gay sexuality a private, bedroom matter, liberals also did not have to confront the reality of gay sexuality, something that still made them uncomfortable.

  We have to be realistic, gay moderates insisted. Liberals held many of the trump cards and gays couldn’t afford to alienate them. Besides, Foster worried, a brazen attempt to seize something as powerful as a supervisorial seat might bring the iron fist of the Alioto administration down even harder on gays.

  “No,” Foster told Harvey, “It’s not time yet for a gay supervisor.”

  “When is it ever going to be time?” Harvey stormed after he left the meeting. He was convinced gay moderates had lost sight of the forest for the trees. In pushing for this or that legal reform, they had lost their grasp of the larger goal of changing the overall way that society viewed and treated gays.

  Harvey had a simple prescription. Gay candidates for public office are the best tool for advancing the gay movement, he reasoned. They create newsworthy leaders who can both articulate grievances and serve as role models for younger gays. His candidacy was good for the gay movement. To be against his candidacy was to be against the gay movement. Harvey began saying this to gay groups: Jim Foster and his allies were against the gay movement. They were more concerned with coddling their liberal friends—and securing their own personal power—than with changing society, he said. The liberals would never give gays power, Milk argued. “You’re never given power, you have to take it,” he repeated over and over again.

  “Masturbation can be fun, but it does not take the place of the real thing,” Milk fumed in a column for the Bay Area Reporter. “It is about time that the gay community stopped playing with itself and get down to the real thing. There are people who are satisfied with crumbs because that is all they think they can get when, in reality, if they demand the real thing, they will find that they indeed can get it.”

  Harvey’s angry outbursts at Foster and the gay moderates only solidified their opposition to him. The gay Alice Toklas Democratic Club did not even come near endorsing him. Many Toklas members resented Milk’s candidacy. They had spent years doing shit work in the gay movement and this interloper decides that after living in the city a few months, he can take over. “Come back when you pay your dues,” many told Milk. That, in turn, infuriated Milk further.

  Drag queens, ho
wever, did not share the moderates’ disdain of Harvey. They had no investment in respectability. Jose Sarria proudly put his name at the top of Milk’s endorsement list. He pushed his cohorts to do the same, harrumphing that he had been years ahead of his time. The drag queens needed to look no further than their “I am a boy” signs to see the reason for a campaign for gay power in the city. A number of other gay bar owners, similarly angered at the police, signed up for Harvey. Milk’s link to his other major constituency came with the support of Dennis Peron, a marijuana dealer Harvey had tricked with at a San Francisco bathhouse in 1970. Peron had become the local guru to the city’s considerable population of potheads. If nothing else, Peron’s appearance guaranteed what he called “the brown rice vote.”

  * * *

  With the fervor of a convert, Milk staked out the turf of the populist Democrat, the champion of the little guy against the big institutions, be it big business or big government. Few familiar with Milk would ever accuse him of blaming the problems of the world on pat talk of dialectics or economics. Drawing from his Republican roots, Milk could talk a convincing fiscal conservative line. He called for the city to put revenues in high-interest accounts. He excoriated the poorly managed public transit system, insisting he would pass a law to force all its bureaucrats to take buses to work every day.

  Milk thrust himself into the core of the city’s progressive elements as well, when he decried the push to make San Francisco a major tourist and corporate center. He strongly backed a ballot proposition that would replace the city-wide, at-large board with district elections. The current city-wide board, he argued, favored moneyed interests, since only candidates who could get financial backing from downtown business could afford the costly city-wide campaign. A district board would be more beholden to the dying neighborhoods.

  “I want a city that is not trying to become a great bank book, a major money center,” Milk told an endorsement session of the longshoreman’s union. “It’s true there are no statistics to quote, no miles of highway to brag about, no statistics of giant buildings built under your administration. What you have instead is a city that breathes, one that is alive and where the people are more important than highways.”

  As for the notion that his fiscal conservatism was inconsistent with his civil libertarian stands against the vice squad and marijuana prohibition, Milk waxed, “It takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.”

  Few candidates could match Milk’s eloquent speeches. Unfortunately, not many people listened. It would only be years after Harvey’s death, for example, that Dianne Feinstein realized that the hippie at candidates’ nights with her in 1973 was the same man with whom she later served on the board; Harvey wasn’t the kind of candidate pundits call serious. Ally and adversary agreed that his pony tail was Milk’s major liability. Harvey conceded that his shaggy appearance hurt his appeal, but he feared that getting it shorn in mid-campaign would look like he sold out principle for expediency. “I entered the campaign with it, I’ll end it that way too,” he said stubbornly.

  * * *

  Michael Wong wanted desperately to be San Francisco’s first elected Chinese supervisor. In grade school, teachers prodded Michael to be more polite, like the other Chinese-American children. Wong noticed his demeanor was no more impolite than what passed as standard behavior for WASP kids. Trying to be equal, he figured, meant being uppity. Michael decided he liked being uppity, even if the significant Chinese-American community was the least uppity minority of the city’s population. If the lack of representation of gays at any level in city government was an injustice, the gross underrepresentation of Chinese-Americans proved one of San Francisco’s grossest travesties. Only power would solve this problem. The twenty-two-year-old Wong was among the new generation of liberal Democrats who would try to change things. Wong wisely foresaw that gays would hold the future balance of power in the city’s increasingly polarized politics. He carefully built bridges to the city’s established gay leaders. He heeded their advice on matters pertaining to the gay community, his future constituents.

  “It would be disastrous for the gay community if Harvey Milk ever received credibility,” Jim Foster told him. “Maybe if we just ignore him, he’ll go away,” hoped Jo Daly, a leading Toklas lesbian. Rick Stokes assured Wong that Milk “had no support in the gay community … he’s running on his own.” Eager to shore up his links with gay leaders for his own political future, Wong helped torpedo endorsements for Milk from the environmentalists in San Francisco Tomorrow and later sank any chance of an endorsement from San Francisco Young Democrats, Harvey’s likeliest constituency, by citing the objections of the entrenched gay moderates. And Michael Wong was just one among many politicos who had ambitions that included gay votes and, therefore, the gay leaders. The cards were stacked against Harvey. He’d earned the emnity of the moderates, who actively campaigned against him. His appearance turned off many more voters. Harvey Milk, in 1973, was running against Harvey Milk.

  * * *

  The complex political machinations would have buried a less tenacious novice. Like any good Broadway producer, however, Harvey knew the success of any show ultimately lay with the reviewers. The candidate courted the press. He had a major San Francisco peculiarity going for him. Though the two daily papers maintained a conservative posture on their editorial pages, both based their news format less on traditional journalistic considerations than on what they felt people liked to read. Early on, the newspapers realized that their readers lapped up stories about gays. While other American newspaper editors snickered about San Francisco’s idiosyncratic press and roundly ignored the fledgling gay movement, San Francisco’s dailies braved charges of sensationalism and jumped to cover the gay community. Gays were good copy. In 1973, therefore, Harvey Milk was also good copy.

  Harvey manipulated every obstacle into a press advantage. The Golden Gate Democratic Club, for example, never bothered to hear the presentations of minor candidates like Milk before starting to vote on endorsements. Milk frantically sought out another aggravated—and appropriately newsworthy—candidate who felt slighted by the tradition. Days later, the papers ran the doleful story of how snotty liberals had aced out candidates Harvey Milk and Alfred Seniora from getting their fair say. This was no average pair, Harvey reminded reporters: Milk was a gay Jewish hippie Democrat and Seniora was a heterosexual Arab Republican. Injustice bands together the most anomalous of adversaries, Milk declared, knowing full well it was the unlikely pairing, not the injustice, that would entice editors to assign the story. Milk ladled out a series of quotable comments. Snorted Harvey, “They care as much about democracy as John Mitchell cares about justice.”

  The staid Democrats retorted that neither the gay hippie nor the Arab grocer deserved serious consideration. Harvey Milk couldn’t even get the backing of other gays; ask anybody in the Toklas club. As he read the angry responses, Milk only chuckled. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but just spell my name right,” he told Scott. “And it’s hard to misspell Milk.”

  Seniora provided the copy for Harvey’s next press release too. Seniora had been very impressed with Harvey’s campaign flyer, which listed Milk’s stands of twenty-five major city issues; in fact, he was so impressed that he reprinted the fliers, replacing Milk’s name with his own. The trick would have infuriated most candidates, but Harvey didn’t get mad; he just issued a press release. The fact that an Arab, Republican businessman could use the same campaign flier as a gay Jewish Democrat hippie showed that Harvey Milk had a unique ability to “bridge ideologies” with his campaign and that the “need for a new direction in our leadership is far more important than Milk’s homosexuality.”

  By the end of the campaign, Harvey and Scott Smith worked out an intricate map that they used on their frequent press release runs. The map sketched out precisely which obscure alleys and legal U-
turns were needed to make an efficient circuit to every television station and newspaper in San Francisco. Various press releases announced the formation of Street Artists for Milk and the Performing Artists for Milk, chaired by Equity member Scott Smith. A dishonorably discharged sailor, Tom Randol, chaired the Veterans for Milk Committee, and the press release sorrowfully told a story about how Harvey Milk had been booted out of the navy for being gay. He had not suffered this disgrace, he told a later campaign manager, but he knew the story would make good copy.

  If anyone said something to Harvey about his fondness for such stunts, he would gesture wildly as he launched into a lecture. “Symbols, symbols, symbols,” he insisted. Sure, he had not been kicked out of the military, but he had a dozen friends who had had their lives muddled by anti-gay purges in the services. The point of the story was to let people know that service personnel routinely do get kicked out. Besides, he once confided, “Maybe people will read it, feel sorry for me, and then vote for me.”

  * * *

  Politics as theater.

  It became one of Harvey’s favorite topics of conversation. A continent away, Harvey’s friends from Broadway were reveling in Harvey’s stories about his candidacy. Eve Merriam, author of Inner City, sent Harvey his first campaign contribution, her own “buck for luck.” Harvey had always been involved in political plays like Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Lenny, she thought, but he never could find a niche in theater since he wasn’t interested in acting or producing. “Politics seemed the next logical step,” she later observed. “If he couldn’t do politics in theater, it made sense that he would try to do theater in politics.”

  “Harvey, why on earth are you doing that?” asked his old friend Jim Bruton.

  “Somebody has to do it,” Harvey snapped back. “It might as well be me.”

  Jim came to San Francisco to pitch in with the campaign. He could tell Harvey was finally realizing that purpose he had talked about so many years ago on a beach in East Hampton.