The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  The texture of the new Castro immigrants was changing as well. The counterculture had faded. Many former flower children had tired of street life and geared their ambitions toward careers. At Paperback Traffic, this meant that sales of once-popular titles like Be Here Now and Siddhartha fell off, and patrons started demanding the latest hardbound best-sellers. The low demand for second-hand paperbacks barely justified continuing that line of business. By then publishers were churning out gay books, so it was not unusual for the store to be ordering fifty or one hundred books a throw, an unheard-of volume a few years back. The astounding success of the store, and many others like it, forced the laid-back former hippies to pick up business acumen. Merchants like Lowell and Tatum cut off their shoulder-length hair, started worrying about once-obscure issues like cash flow and overhead, and took to finding their inner peace through formal meditation instead of the hopes for the imminent New Age.

  This did not mean that business merchants and immigrants alike did not sense that something vital was indeed growing in the Castro. Something clearly was happening. In 1975 and 1976, however, it was just hard to tell what that something was. All that was clear was that wave after wave of gay men were descending on Castro Street. They were not counterculturals who had moved to San Francisco to be hippies and then found the Castro. They were people from all backgrounds who had come to Castro Street to be gay , and they had a lot to sort out.

  * * *

  Hit the cue ball just so and it’s gonna be number six in the corner pocket. Smartest thing Toad Hall ever did was put in the pool table. What would the National Merit Scholarship people think if they saw me now? Or the other guys at the Port Arthur Methodist Youth Fellowship? Or the Methodist minister from Clover, South Carolina, and his daughter Fran? My wife.

  Harry Britt leaned over the table, peering at the intransigent six ball that stood between himself and the next guy up, a stud in cowboy boots, plaid shirt, and button-fly Levis, with the bottom button provocatively unhitched. That guy’s hot. No doubt about it. Not that Harry tricked around a lot. But there he was at Toad Hall, almost every day for the three years between 1975 and 1977, even on Chistmas Eve when nobody went to gay bars. What would they all think now?

  Harry had spent all his life being good. He was president of the Port Arthur Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) and then regional MYF president. He liked the MYF because it was the one environment where men did not expect him to live up to the macho ideal that so intimidated him. Harry was on the debating squad, served in student government, and won the only National Merit Scholarship in his part of West Texas, the first year they were given out. He went off to Duke University because it looked like all the colleges he had seen in the movies. He was fraternity president. Still his life had no focus, no direction. He sped through college in a little over three years, and he couldn’t decide on a major. His life didn’t seem to fit together. Somehow.

  Then came Fran, the daughter of his Methodist minister. He married Fran; that’s what he knew he was supposed to do. He even became a Methodist minister, holding parishes in Port Arthur, then Chicago. He compounded his acts of goodness there by living down the street from Martin Luther King, working in the civil rights movement, pleading for integration of his Community United Methodist Church on West Fiftieth Street. Harry Britt had spent his entire life being good, like many others; the secret still burned deep within him. He had worked so hard to justify his existence; he had known all that time that he was vile in the eyes of God, of himself, always lusting after the handsome young guy across the aisle. By the time he was a thirty-year-old preacher in Chicago, he had bloated out to 270 pounds and was smoking four packs of Old Gold Straights a day.

  But then an assassin pumped a bullet into King’s neck and the parishioners at Community United Methodist were horrified, not so much at the murder, but over the fear that rampaging black rioters would cross over Ashland Avenue and burn their houses. Fear overcame moral indignation. Harry spent hours riding the elevated trains in Chicago’s South Side just to be around blacks. He knew he had to pull out of all of it, his marriage, his church, his entire past life.

  He kept telling himself he didn’t come to San Francisco to be gay. He came because of Esalen and the human potential groups who could provide him with a guru. His life had never had direction, maybe a guru could provide it. He watched Jim Foster address the Democratic convention on TV in 1972. That marked the first time Harry Britt ever saw a human being stand up and say he was gay. Harry knew he was too, but still he wrestled hard against the truth for another two years, until in 1974 he answered an ad in the Berkeley Barb. “I’m coming out and scared,” Bob’s classified read. Harry answered the ad and the pair cautiously sidled into their first gay bars. Harry needed only a few months before he shifted into the intense gay life of the Castro. Finally, he got to do something he never thought would happen in his lifetime—he made love to a man.

  He’d been on Castro Street ever since. For Harry Britt, being gay in the Castro in 1975 meant buying a sun lamp, losing one hundred pounds, joining a gym to pump up his sagging pectorals, and changing from glasses to contact lenses. His Texas twang and lean Castro look made him a hit at the pool tables. Since he’d taken a night auditor’s job at the Hilton, he had all day to shoot pool at Toad Hall, walk through the Twin Peaks bar for a draft and then saunter past the stores, window-shopping both the wares and the salesmen. Harry was less concerned with whoring around to make up for lost time than with trying to fully integrate himself for the first time. After living over thirty years under the assumption he’d never experience a moment of passion, much less love, just seeing such a panoply of available partners was enough to set a guy’s head spinning.

  Harry had done his political number too, walking precincts for Harvey Milk’s 1975 campaign, even standing in a human billboard one chilly morning. But that was mainly because Harry thought Scott Smith was a gorgeous hunk whom he’d like to land in the sack some time. Harry did not come to Castro Street for politics, he just wanted to cruise, like the other guys he kept running into on the street who came from the same west Texas MYF camps.

  Thousands of them. The police chief estimated that in 1976, about 140,000 gays lived in San Francisco, over one in five citizens. About eighty gay men a week arrived to put down roots in the city, according to the conservative police estimate. They fueled the expanding gay business base in the Castro, but that was the most superficial gauge of their significance; they were creating a new counterculture. San Francisco had for decades been the birthing ground for America’s new social tides: the beatniks came from North Beach in the 1950s; hippies created the flower generation in Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s; the new social phenomenon of the 1970s was the gay counterculture and it was being born on the streets of the Castro neighborhood where, on every sunny Saturday afternoon, hundreds of guys like Harry Britt, Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk, and Scott Smith cruised the strip.

  The young men from Port Arthur, Tulsa, and Davenport were crowding in on the early hip invaders, and men of the new gay subculture followed their predecessors more in style than substance. Their common ground, of course, was their male gender and their sexuality. The casual practicality that dictated the Castro’s earlier fashions slipped into rigid macho conformity. The men didn’t buy plaid shirts from J.C. Funky’s for $1.50, but the expensive Pendleton variety from All-American Boy, tightly fit to show just the right tuft of chest hair. No more used jeans, but brand-new straight-legged models, pulled tight at the ass and suggestively stretched around the crotch. The fashion models were derived from the most virile male images of the society—cowboys, construction workers, and military men. Cowboy hats and Western Fryes became common. Engineer boots, keys dangling from the belt, and a shiny hard hat lent the contractor’s look. Fatigues, army jackets, olive caps, and leather bomber jackets also became de rigueur.

  The mating rituals became carefully honed as the hundreds of young men cruised the strip. Eye contact first, maybe a slight nod,
and, if all goes well, the right strut over to the intended with an appropriately cool grunt of greeting. Getting that far was three-quarters of the battle and a few sentences more were all that was necessary to complete arrangements for a tryst. But if the first stare was too longing, if the nod came off at all prissy, if the salutation’s tone was not aloof or masculine enough, then you could blow the whole thing that easy. Before long, the posturing became a caricature of the heterosexual ideal, as if this new generation of gays were out to deliver one big “fuck you” to society. Tell ‘em they’re femmy queers who need wrist-splints and lisp lessons and they’ll end up looking like a bunch of cowboys, loggers, and M.P.S. Whaddaya think of that?

  * * *

  “Harvey, they’re coming here to be free and they all look alike.”

  Haight Street camera shop owner Rick Nichols moved to the Castro in the early days. Nichols was irritated that the emerging macho conformity both amused and delighted his friend Milk. They were on the tattered maroon couch, going over the familiar argument.

  “They have to find a family here,” Milk snapped back. “They need support—they’ve never had it before. This is the first chance they’ve ever had to be free.”

  “Why are they going about it like this?” Nichols asked. “All they’re doing is fitting into another mold, finding a new conformity.”

  “They’ve been through hell, give these guys a break. This is just a necessary stage they’re going through, once they’ve done their Castro bit, they’ll go on to…” Harvey paused, not able to think of what exactly they would go to, but he dismissed the problem with a characteristically grand flourish of his hands. “They’ll go on to something else.”

  Nichols thought the new gay denizens were on the wrong track. The point of gay liberation was not to make it so gay men could be macho too, but to make macho passé altogether. “They’re not being free,” he said, “they’re just being lazy.”

  Nichols was never sure whether Harvey was as interested in the sociological implications of the burgeoning gay counterculture as he was in the vast numbers of handsome young men. The romance with Scott was slowly fading. They remained business partners and confidants, but the couple also took ample advantage of the available material, especially the young waifs Harvey had always found so appealing. Though Harvey was in his mid-forties, his sexual appetite showed no signs of diminishing.

  Scott and Harvey casually lived above the camera store. Between the campaigning, community organizing, and scores of commission hearings Milk addictively attended, he had never gotten the chance to unpack all the boxes of his New York possessions. As the years wore on, every available table and counter became buried in the reams of fliers, news clippings, and official reports, which Harvey could never bring himself to throw away. But the kitchen remained in working order and several times a month Harvey’s friends would troop to Castro Street for a multicoursed feast. Other than the circus and an occasional ballet or opera performance, cooking remained the only luxury the peripatetic campaigner permitted himself.

  For all the money made by Castro Street merchants—in no small part because Milk tirelessly promoted the neighborhood as America’s gay Main Street—Harvey concerned himself little with the mundane matters of business. Milk’s lack of interest in his commercial health exasperated bookstore owner Donn Tatum.

  “Harvey, you should get more stock. Look at all this space,” Tatum waved his hand around the cavernous store, most of which was filled with campaign paraphernalia. “You could start selling used cameras. You should see all the business stores in downtown do in used cameras.”

  Harvey dismissed the pleas with a wave of his hand.

  “If I did that, I’d have to put bars on the windows and worry about burglars,” he said.

  Milk sometimes mentioned that his lease expired in 1978 and that if neighborhood patterns held steady, his rent would probably double or triple. “At that point, I may have to rethink our policy of being a specialty shop,” he’d say—and then he’d be off campaigning more.

  Milk’s laissez-faire attitude about his own success did not prevent him from needling old-time merchants who had originally been so fearful about the gay influx. “How much is that building worth now?” Harvey asked a neighboring realtor, knowing full well the value had gone up 250 percent between 1972 and 1975. When the old realtor mumbled that it was probably worth more, not sure just how much though, Harvey did his best not to say “I told you so,” and put on his backslapping politico’s manner. “That’s good to hear, real good.”

  Another store owner had complained that the early gays were destroying the “family character” of the Castro. Harvey tried to affect genuine concern when he asked, “By the way, you’re not having any problems—your business is all right?” The merchant would be damned if he was going to concede that business had tripled since a gay bar had replaced the competition across the street, but he would grumble, “No, we’re doing just fine.” Harvey would nod his head with relief, as if a great burden was lifted from his shoulders. “Just checking.”

  The Italian delicatessen owner once talked of how gays were disrupting the “neighborhood balance.” By 1976, he had hired homosexual clerks and was courting the new gay business. The old man who owned the windowshade shop—and was originally horrified at the gay invasion—discovered new-found appreciation for decor-minded gays when his business soared. The young manager of Cliff’s Variety Store, Ernie Astin—the fourth generation of his family to run the emporium—had no problems with gays, and he became the only straight charter member of the revitalized CVA. In constant contact with gay merchants, Astin realized that gays were renovating hundreds of the area’s old Victorians, so he bolstered his store’s stock of building supplies. The area’s two established hardware store owners snubbed both the CVA and gay clientele and were out of touch with the new buying trends. They both went out of business when Cliff gobbled up the lion’s share of business in renovation hardware.

  The CVA’s membership jumped to nearly sixty members in one year, about half of whom were straight. Membership rolls increased another 50 percent in 1976, dwarfing the old EVMA. The 1975 Castro Street Fair drew twenty-five thousand, making it the best attended neighborhood fair in the city. About 100,000 came to bask in the August sunshine for the 1976 fair. Still, the downtown-based Council of District Merchants adamantly refused to let the CVA—by now, the best-known merchants group in the city—join and be enfranchised as an official district merchants organization.

  * * *

  The trend that most caught the eye of San Francisco was the massive facelift gays gave to a neighborhood that had been degenerating into an eyesore. The endless rows of Victorians had been little more than tract housing when they were built in the 1880s; to the Irish who stayed in the neighborhoods until the 1970s, they were just “old houses.” Unburdened by a homebody wife and 2.2 children, the gay immigrants started an unprecedented wave of private urban renewal. Block after block of high Italianate Edwardian homes burst forth in polychromatic splendor. News that a pair of men had bought the home next door would once have set shudders up Mrs. Gallagher’s housecoat, but by 1976 the same revelation sent her to the phone to euphorically report, “Guess what—gays have moved in next door!”

  The Irish who had sold out in the panic of the late sixties now kicked themselves as they saw housing prices as much as double in six months, and increase another 50 percent six months later. Between 1973 and 1976, prices of many of the solid old homes quintupled. The phenomenon engendered a new kind of blockbusting. Many of the old ethnic pensioners found they couldn’t afford not to sell their homes at the astronomical sums they were being offered, so they moved out and the neighborhood became even more gay. Real estate speculation created similar conditions in all parts of San Francisco, but in no area was the explosion as marked as in the Castro where thousands were willing to pay any price to live at last in a neighborhood where they would not be different.

  The dream that Harvey a
nd Allan Baird shared of an integrated neighborhood was taking a drubbing by 1976. The traditionalists who remembered the days when the district was called a parish had been far too stubborn to live side by side with people whom the church, the law, and the city government had always said were to be disdained and disparaged. Maybe a more educated, genteel neighborhood could have absorbed the influx and become a mix of gay and straight like Greenwich Village, but that would not be the fate of the Castro. Exacerbating the rapid change were the massive numbers of gays moving in. The high schools of America had been filled with class sissies like Cleve Jones who had suffered too much to stay in their hometowns. There had been too many wrongs; the lure of their own neighborhood was too great; their numbers would elbow out the old-timers who did not understand.

  The Alioto administration had roundly ignored the homosexual immigration, but the political potential was not lost on a wily politician like George Moscone. George became a regular at the cocktail parties of the Alice Toklas Club. Gays who, months before, could not even get an appointment with Mayor Alioto, were being charmed by Mayor Moscone at every major gay event.

  “Hey, Michelle,” Moscone shouted to a prominent drag entertainer at his first major post-election gay speech. “How come you didn’t wear a gown at the swearing-in ceremony like you promised?”

  “When you escort me down the marble stairway, I’ll wear a gown to City Hall,” Michelle shot back.

  “I’ll do that when you dress and look like Jeanette MacDonald,” Moscone quipped, adding, “And I know you’re going to answer me, ‘And when I look like Nelson Eddy, right?’”