The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  * * *

  Harvey knew better, but he hoped he might actually win one of the five seats up for grabs on election day. He assembled a dozen friends in a Chinese restaurant after the polls closed to await election results. Bigger names like Dianne Feinstein and John Barbagelata carried the day. Harvey came in tenth in a field of thirty-two candidates, polling seventeen thousand votes.

  That was an impressive tally, pundits noted, especially for a candidate who had everything going against him—long hair, homosexuality, and gay moderates’ antipathy—not to mention the fact he spent only $4,500 on the entire campaign, a pittance compared to most candidates. The political analysts had been looking toward the Milk campaign as a clinical study of whether a gay vote actually did exist. Harvey’s seventeen thousand votes showed that it clearly did.

  Harvey beat out all challengers in the heavily gay neighborhoods around Castro and Polk Streets. He was the top vote-getter in the precincts around San Francisco State University and swept the “brown rice belt” of hippie voters. Milk was hoping for broader appeal, but even he was surprised at the intensity of support he got from the constituencies that swung his way. On a precinct-by-precinct basis, Harvey either won big or lost big; that’s how people responded to him.

  The effort to establish district election of supervisors also failed. But two facts were not lost on Milk. First, the highest vote totals for district elections came not from traditionally liberal areas but from the city’s gay neighborhoods. A look at the voter returns from the district that would have been carved around Castro Street showed why. Had the district elections plan been in effect for the 1973 race, Harvey Milk would have been elected a member of the board of supervisors from the Castro district.

  Milk’s concession speech lashed out at gay moderates who had supported liberal friends over a gay person. Liberals’ toleration, he said, was “a crumb thrown to keep us happy, to let us feel that we are getting something when in reality we should be getting our freedom.

  “I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted. I have a lot more to drink. For that reason, the political numbers game will be played. I know the rules of their game now and how to play it. All human beings have power,” he concluded. “You are just one person, but you have power. That makes power so significant.”

  Two weeks after the election, Milk cut his hair. Milk also swore two oaths to himself: he would never smoke marijuana or go to a San Francisco bathhouse again. “I decided this was all too important to have it get wrecked because of smoking a joint or being in a raid at some bathhouse,” he told a reporter years later.

  Michael Wong barely recognized Harvey when he ran into Milk at a political event. Michael was relieved that Harvey did not appear to know how he had subverted the political endorsements. Harvey was as affable as ever. “I cut it all off to get more votes,” Harvey said. “You have to play the game, you know.”

  six

  The Early Invaders

  Everybody’s worried the neighborhood isn’t like the old days. Hell, Allan Baird thought, it’s more like the old days now than it’s been for a good fifteen years.

  The son of two Scottish immigrants, Baird was born just seven blocks from the central Castro shopping strip in 1932. That’s the farthest from Castro Street he ever lived. The gentle slopes surrounding the street seemed to cut the neighborhood off from the rest of San Francisco, lending the cozy, working-class area all the trappings of a small, insular town. As Baird started the two-block walk from his house—where his wife Helen had lived forty years—to Castro Camera, he looked at the neighborhood that was changing so much. There on the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, he hawked newspapers as a kid during World War II. Across the street, the Walking Book, in his wide-shouldered double-breasted suits and white fedora hat, used to take the morning bets, cutting seriously into Jack MacCormack’s booking operation in the back of the nearby cigar store. The Little Man’s Store used to be down the street; it had done a booming business in bootleg gin during Prohibition.

  The city maps had always called the area Eureka Valley, but to most of the people who lived there, it was just Most Holy Redeemer Parish. The Catholic Church dominated every facet of the neighborhood’s life from the schooling of children to the family picnics and weekly bingo games. Wives stayed at home to take care of their large broods; families stayed here generation after generation; God was in His heaven, and, most Castro residents would agree, He was probably Irish. And now it was all changing.

  The coming of the downtown skyscrapers heralded the end. This had always been a working-class neighborhood of longshoremen, stevedores, factory workers, and cops. But the blue-collar workers had to move to where the new factories were. By the 1950s, the kids no longer wanted to live in a big city anyway. Some of the old people stayed, but the later generations moved to subdivisions near San Jose, buying into the ranchhouses of the new American dream. The small-town ambience faded fast. Stores went out of business. Houses stood vacant. Then, came the whispers.

  Maybe it was Mrs. O’Malley talking to Mrs. O’Shea over the cod at the open-air fish market. It could have been Mrs. Maloney fretting to Mrs. Asmussen, who was a good friend even though she was a Lutheran. The word went out. A former police officer, not a good Castro boy, but—the housewife flicked her wrist, raised her eyebrows, and, after a meaningful pause—a funny one, bought The Gem bar. And he’s probably going to make it over for his crowd. Real estate agents were already writing obituaries for the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood over the hill. The hippies came in and wham, there went the neighborhood. Now the gays were going to do that too, right here in Most Holy Redeemer Parish.

  Baird never saw anything like the panic that followed the establishment of the first gay bar on Castro Street in the late 1960s. The stolid Irish families sold their Victorians at dirt-cheap prices, fearing greater loss if they waited. By 1973, the numbers of gays moving into the neighborhood amounted to an invasion. That’s what the old-timers called the new men of Castro Street—invaders. Now it was 1973 and Baird figured at least half the people moving in were gay, while more and more of the old-timers sold out.

  A hard-working German family used to live where Harvey Milk’s Castro Camera was now. Baird remembered playing in the back lot as he stepped inside the shop’s door. He’d heard that Harvey Milk was the man to talk to if you wanted to work with the gays. The other guys at the Teamsters hall might think I’m crazy, Baird thought, but it’s worth a try.

  “I’m Allan Baird, a representative of the Teamsters and director of the Coors beer boycott in California.” Allan began formally.

  “I know who you are,” Harvey smiled. Allan realized he didn’t need to be formal.

  “I know you’re the spokesperson for the gay community here and I think I can use your help.”

  The beer drivers’ local was striking the six major beer distributors who adamantly refused to sign the proposed union contract. “These guys are like me,” explained Baird, who had trucked newspapers before working his way into the Teamsters hierarchy. “They can’t be out of work long.” So far Baird had enlisted a group representing over four hundred Arab grocers and the federation of Chinese grocers who would boycott scab drivers. If gay bars chipped in, they could win it.

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Harvey, pausing to add one condition. “You’ve got to promise me one thing. You’ve got to help bring gays into the Teamsters union. We buy a lot of the beer that your union delivers. It’s only fair that we get a share of the jobs.”

  Baird liked Milk’s straightforwardness. After years in the give-and-take of union politics, the beefy teamster thought he could spot a bullshitter. Harvey Milk was no bullshitter. Baird grew more impressed when he later learned Milk was in the middle of his campaign for supervisor. Any other politician would have asked for an endorsement, he thought. Milk just asked for jobs.

  The project gave Milk a chance to test out his new theories about achieving gay power through economic clout. He enlist
ed his friend, gay publisher Bob Ross, to help connect him to bar owners and started buttonholing support for the boycott. Baird was amazed at Milk’s ability to get press attention for the effort; Milk enjoyed the symbolism of tying gays to the conservative Teamsters union.

  The boycott worked. Gays provided the coup de grace shot to the already strained distributors. Five of the six beer firms signed the pact. Only Coors refused to settle. Harvey used the refusal as a basis to launch a more highly publicized boycott of Coors beer in gay bars. Baird was surprised not only at Milk’s success, but by the fact that Harvey was as outraged at Coors discrimination against Chicanos as by the fabled Coors antipathy to gays. This guy’s got a national philosophy, Baird thought.

  At a Colorado meeting with arch-conservative William Coors, Baird warned the executive about the success of the gay boycott and about the persuasive gay leader who had just made an impressive showing in the local supervisorial race. These guys are getting more powerful, Baird warned, and they’ll be on the unions’ side. Coors acted astonished by the talk. He didn’t come out and say it, but Baird felt he could tell what Coors was thinking by the sneer on his face: Community. What the hell is a gay community?

  Baird kept his end of the bargain. Gays started driving for Falstalf, Lucky Lager, Budweiser, and soon all the distributors, except, of course, Coors. The biggest recruiting problem came not from biased employers, but from gays who found it hard to believe that there would be companies who were openly not discriminating against them.

  “Those guys in the gay community are real powerful. I don’t think you understand their power yet,” Baird told Teamsters officials. “They can turn something on and off just like that.”

  The officials liked Baird’s work, but some worried that Allan might be turning queer himself. “He does live just a few blocks off Eighteenth and Castro,” one speculated. “Just how close are he and this Harvey Milk anyway?”

  Back in the neighborhood, the growing friendship between Allan Baird and Harvey Milk caused no small consternation. The wizened old housewives had known Allan for years, as well as his wife Helen, since her parents had run the Greek restaurant next to the Castro Theater in the 1920s. “Is your husband a fag?” one neighbor bluntly asked her.

  The massive gay influx clearly was driving people to extremes. Baird saw gays as the new generation of residents and small businessmen who would revitalize a neighborhood that had been going to pot since the white flight of the 1950s. Most of his neighbors, however, were convinced the gays would come in, wreck the district, and then just go away, the way the flower children had destroyed the Haight.

  Where were all these gays coming from, any way? they asked.

  * * *

  Fortunately, older men found him cute.

  That would be good for free drinks and a few dinners in those first difficult months.

  Cleve Jones knew he was different long before the guys at Tempe High School in suburban Phoenix realized it. Once they did, Cleve had to learn how to bend over at just the right moment, affecting the right posture of pain, while still avoiding the full force of the punch that ground him into the locker room’s tiled walls. When simple brutality grew tedious, Jones’s classmates took to dunking his head in the toilet. Cleve became insecure. The slight Jones faked a lung ailment to escape from two years of gym classes. Even a five-minute oral report for English class would have him dry heaving in the bathroom for an hour. Cleve, everyone knew, was the class sissy.

  Vaguely aware that his effeminacy stemmed from an infirmity he did not understand, Cleve slipped into the library of his father, a psychology professor at Arizona State University. Jones reached carefully into the shelves and looked under “H” in his dad’s compendium of psychological disorders. He found homosexuality cross-referenced to a chapter discussing genital deformities and hormonal imbalances. The experts told him why he got beat up in gym class. Homosexuals, they said, were “injustice collectors,” as if injustices fell randomly from the sky and were magnetized toward a genetically predetermined human subspecies. In another generation, Jones might have then resigned himself to be another hapless miscreant doomed to liaisons in the Phoenix Greyhound depot.

  During his sophomore year at Tempe High, however, Cleve read a small item in the back pages of the Arizona Republic. In New York City, homosexuals had rioted a few weeks before. Now they were actually forming organizations. Just think. Organizations for homosexuals. Cleve started reading the back pages more carefully and picked up more snippets. In San Francisco, homosexuals were influencing elections, coalescing into gay neighborhoods and even holding parades. From the age of fifteen on, Cleve Jones decided he had only one goal—to move to San Francisco and march in a Gay Freedom Day Parade. The beatings continued, of course, but Jones was courageous enough to scrawl the metaphor of his adolescent defiance on his notebook: “Jesus Christ had limp wrists. Nails do that to you.”

  Jones hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1973, just weeks after his eighteenth birthday. That first night he ended up wandering the streets of the seedy Tenderloin district and was lucky enough to trick with Joey, a seventeen-year-old hustler from Mexico. As they climbed the stairs to Joey’s room in the Grand Hotel, they walked through a hallway where a transvestite had killed himself that morning; his blood still stained the wall. A half dozen other seventeen- and eighteen-year-old hustlers shared the room; they let Cleve sleep on the floor in his sleeping bag until he got settled. Jones found a job as a bicycle delivery boy downtown and learned how to get free drinks and dinners from older men who liked his boyish looks. Every night, Cleve, Joey, and the rest of the gang rendezvoused at Bob’s Burgers on Polk Street. Those hustlers who had had a generous trick that day treated the less fortunate to a cheeseburger and fries.

  Cleve next got a job as a houseboy in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The once-legendary neighborhood had fallen into decay by 1973. The hard-core flower children had left for communes in Oregon and not very many people talked about creating the New Age any more. Jones and his young Haight friends started drifting over the hill to the run-down street where there were bars full of young gay and hippie men like himself. Those were exhilarating times to be gay on Castro Street. It was like being in a club without paying dues. The fellow émigrés tended to come from the counterculture, so Cleve shared not only a common sexuality, but the same general tastes in music, politics, and social values. Being gay in the Castro of 1973 meant being opposed to the Vietnam War, smoking marijuana, and having a more than casual interest in Hermann Hesse, Mick Jagger, Walt Whitman, and John Lennon.

  The materialism of the early homosexual gentry was passé. These new gays were not going to devote their lives to acquiring tasteful end tables and spot-lighted impressionist paintings. Orange crates and Jimi Hendrix posters did just fine. No expensive colognes, just petulia oil. The carefully tailored suits of the gay upper crust or the flamboyant silk scarves and sheer shirts of the glitterati were nowhere to be seen. Instead came a new homosexual fashion born out of the J.C. Funky secondhand clothing shore. This august institution sold army fatigues and used blue jeans for $2 a pair, flannel shirts for $1.50, and hooded sweatshirts for $1.75. The prices were ideally suited for the customers’ rejection of the work ethic. The fashions proved functional for the city’s Mediterranean climate. Fashion designers later called it the layered look; the Castro men just called it cheap.

  The new gay fashion matched a new gay attitude. The clothing spoke of strength and working-class machismo, not the gentle bourgeoise effetism of generations past. The politically conscious men of the Castro did not mince or step delicately down the street; they strutted defiantly. A sour look from a crusty Irish widow was the most valuable form of flattery.

  The smart gay money had been buying up the neighborhood’s Victorians for several years, renting long-vacant flats to groups of guys who could each afford to chip in $40 or $50 for their share of the monthly rent. The cheap leases and inexpensive wardrobes kept working time to a minimum and stre
et life blossomed. Men with mustaches, miniskirts, and high-heeled pumps could be occasionally seen picking through the vegetable bins at the produce market. Campy street entertainment from artists like the Cockettes—featuring a black drag queen named Sylvester—flourished regularly on the streetcorners where the guys assembled to cruise and smoke joints.

  The excitement sparked the imaginations of young men like Cleve Jones, who could tell the Castro neighborhood was going to go somewhere, even if he didn’t know just where. Hanging out on the street one day, Jones stumbled into a camera store where he met a long-haired merchant who had a fondness for helping the young gay refugees who were pouring into the neighborhood. Maybe it was because the aging hippie foresaw that the lively young men might later be useful in campaigns; maybe it was just because he liked lively young men. It didn’t matter, because in 1973, Harvey Milk was just a small camera shop owner and Cleve Jones was just another eighteen-year-old drifter far more interested in manning the dance floors than the barricades. But things were changing and all because boys like Cleve Jones got beat up and called sissy in high schools around the country and because a man like Harvey Milk was gaining a sense of how an unusual permutation of power, politics, and personality might rewrite the script by which gays had acted out their lives for so long.

  * * *

  “Some people call me the unofficial mayor of Castro Street.”

  Harvey first tried the title out during his unsuccessful run for supervisor. Once he threw himself into the Coors beer boycott and a host of other local issues, he always brought the title up to any reporter who happened by Castro Camera. Nobody was ever sure who the “some people” who allegedly made up the nickname were, but the appellation made good copy, so nobody groused.

  Business was slow the first months, so Milk left Scott Smith to tend the store alone on many days and went off to meet his neighbors. He methodically walked door to door on the two-block central business strip of Castro Street, introducing himself to gay and straight merchants alike. At forty-three, Harvey was one of the older gay merchants and he sometimes was the first gay businessman who tried to make contact with the neighborhood’s old-timers. He soon became an ex-officio liaison between the established Castro businessmen and the new gay merchants who were moving into the once boarded-up storefronts. What surprised many of the businessmen was that Milk never tried to drum up business with his visits; he just stopped by to chat.