by Randy Shilts
Milk frequently jawboned his volunteers straight off Castro Street if enough hands were not on board to get a task done, or if the volunteer was cute enough to warrant attention. Everybody got a task. Joggers were conscripted to run in marathons, wearing their “Harvey Milk vs. The Machine” T shirts. If a volunteer had nothing more than good penmanship, the worker went straight to the piles of personalized thank you notes Milk habitually sent out. Even eleven-year-old Medora organized a fund raiser geared for Milk’s growing preteen constituency, and she proudly plunked the $39.28 she raised on the Castro Camera counter, dutifully reminding Ryckman to make sure it was properly reported on the campaign contribution forms.
The campaign, however, marked the first time Ryckman had to allow the business of serious politics take a backseat to practical joking. A close look at the issue of campaign posters, for example, revealed that Milk sometimes threw out the standard “Milk for Assembly” logo in favor of the more direct tag of “Ministry of Propaganda.” Someone bought a Mr. Machine toy robot for the camera store and Ryckman walked in to find his candidate entertaining Medora by holding mock debates with the obdurate wind-up toy. Soon, everyone was calling Wong the “little yellow lotus blossom.” Wong got even by dubbing Ryckman, “Ms. Ryckperson.” Ryckman tried to escape the Marx Brothers ambience by cordoning off his work space in the rear of the camera shop with some ancient swagged-back velvet curtains he ferreted from an old trunk. He noticed only several days later that Danny Nicoletta had put a sign over this office entrance announcing: Fortunes Told, 10¢—With Lipstick, 50¢. Amid the continual pranks, more than one Teamster volunteer shook his head with amazement as he walked in the headquarters to find an eleven-year-old bossing around a new Milk worker three times her age and clad in full leathers, while the candidate loudly insisted that Michael Wong should really be doing the laundry instead of the direct mail campaign.
* * *
The early months of campaigning inspired an optimism Harvey had never known in his previous ill-fated efforts. Ryckman connected Milk to what he called the NYJ—New York Jew—network in San Francisco, and though the machine had scared most contributors away from Milk, the few Harvey did gain made this the best financed campaign of his career. Milk’s uncanny ability to grab the limelight continued to get the campaign favorable press coverage. At one fund raiser at the end of a long and bitter city strike, Harvey even managed to get his lone supporter on the board of supervisors, Quentin Kopp—a rabidly anti-labor spokesman—and a Teamsters official to shake hands with Harvey smiling on. Of course, Harvey made sure the handshake didn’t occur until a news photographer was standing by.
It was too much to expect the Toklas club to even come near endorsing Milk, whom they had opposed in the two previous campaigns, but a cadre of Milk supporters there managed to deny Agnos the endorsement by a one-vote margin. The local California Democratic Council’s endorsement was a cinch for Agnos, except that the vote took place in a grade school right next door to marijuana marketeer Dennis Peron’s restaurant. Peron enlisted all ninety-five of his employees to vote that day, since Harvey had long ago formed them into their own Democratic club, and Agnos lost that endorsement. The odd thing that Harvey’s friend Frank Robinson noticed was that the political victories that stirred Milk most came not from powerful political organizations but from the bus stops he worked every morning.
“Everything could be going against him, but he would come back to the headquarters jubilant because he had persuaded one old lady to vote for him,” Robinson recalled later. “It was as if every person he won over represented an important victory. Here he was, a gay and a Jew—a street radical at heart—and he was able to convince some little old lady that he was a decent human being worth voting for. Those moments meant more to him than anything else in the world.”
The only victories that rivaled his conversions at bus stops occurred when Milk brought a gay person into the political fold. Slowly, they straggled in, many to become the political leaders of the future. Tall, blond Dick Pabich wandered into the headquarters one day willing to do something, anything. At twenty, he was too young to know the times of Vietnam protests and civil rights marches. He had spent his college years at the University of Wisconsin as a glitter queen, affecting the then fashionable androgyny of David Bowie and Lou Reed. But the ongoing parties of his chic set, first in Madison, then in San Francisco, engendered only ennui as the fad passed. Harvey showed particular interest in Pabich—only later did Dick learn that the candidate liked thin, young, blond men—and sent him out doing what Milk considered the most valuable chore of any campaign, registering voters. Within a few weeks, Pabich found himself making decisions with Harvey’s inner circle, amazed at how casually this unorthodox politician delegated responsibility.
An early poll showed that though half the voters were undecided, the half who had made up their mind favored Milk over Agnos by a two-to-one margin. Harvey knew for sure that he was making a major impact on the district the day he got a phone call from one of the most politically influential preachers in California. He was interested in helping Harvey canvass the precincts in the heavily black Hunters Point neighborhood. Harvey pulled Michael Wong aside after he got the call.
“Guess who is coming down here this weekend to work Hunters Point?” Milk asked Wong.
“Who?”
“That was the Reverend Jim Jones on the telephone. He apologized for not knowing I was running and said that he did not mean to back Art Agnos as much as he was doing.” Harvey could barely hold back his giggle. “He told me that he will make it up to me by sending us some volunteers.”
“He’s helping Agnos and now backing you?” Wong asked incredulously. Jones was known for being politically savvy, so the notion of jumping candidates in mid-election seemed very improbable.
“Of course not,” Milk retorted impatiently, as if Michael should have known better. “Jones is backing Agnos and giving him a lot of workers, but he wants to cover his ass, so he’ll send us some volunteers too.” Most politicians would do anything to get at the Peoples Temple volunteers who, for some reason, seemed so devoted to their leader. Jones’ duplicity, however, only irritated Milk.
“Well, fuck him,” Milk decided. “I’ll take his workers, but,” warning Wong for future reference, “that’s the game Jim Jones plays.”
A few days later, Jones’s confidante Sharon Amos called Harvey’s friend Tory Hartmann and asked her to drop off a whopping 30,000 brochures at the Temple. Hartmann and Tom Randol loaded up Randol’s pickup and took the fliers to the converted synagogue in the middle of the desolate Filmore district, which had been devastated by urban renewal a decade before. The pair started unloading the boxes when a gruff guard emerged from the locked door.
“What do you want?” he barked.
“We’re just dropping off these brochures,” Hartmann assured him, trying her best to keep a chipper tone.
“Just put them down right there,” said the guard, gesturing to a spot well outside the locked compound.
“No, that’s all right,” said Tory as she unloaded. “We’ll carry them inside.”
The guard went inside, deliberated with superiors, and finally admitted Hartmann and Randol. As they carried the boxes in, they saw the door of each room was guarded by men who stood at attention, staring dead ahead like the soldiers at Buckingham Palace. This is a church? Hartmann thought.
Both Tom and Tory were relieved when they sped back toward the Castro. Tory later confided her anxieties to Harvey, who dropped his normally jocular tone to give her some deadly serious advice.
“Make sure you’re always nice to the Peoples Temple,” he admonished her. “If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They’re weird and they’re dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.”
Tory was involved in a number of Democratic Party causes and kept tabs on the party nationally through her friendship with San Mateo’s Congressman Leo
Ryan. She began mentioning her experience with Jones to a number of her other political friends. Hartmann was worried. Jones was, after all, a major political force on the scene now that Mayor Moscone had made him chairman of the Housing Authority, an incredibly powerful position for a man who oriented his work toward the same poor who used public housing. District Attorney Joe Freitas, meanwhile, had made Jones’s top lieutenant, Tim Stoen, an assistant district attorney and even assigned him to investigate allegations of voter fraud—quite a choice assignment considering Peoples Temple itself was the brunt of many of these charges. Tory’s political contacts, however, only reassured her of what a marvelous new fixture Jim Jones was on the political scene. He could turn out so many volunteers, just like that. It seemed they’d do anything for him. “Nobody wanted to listen to me,” Hartmann said later. “It was like I was telling a joke but there wasn’t any punchline.”
* * *
“Harvey’s a friend. You don’t screw your friends.”
It was a rule labor leader George Evankovich stuck by, but it fell on deaf ears at the San Francisco Labor Council, which wanted nothing to do with the fruit candidate. A few union leaders kept their unions with Harvey—the Laborers, Fire Fighters, Teamsters, and the massive Building and Construction Trades Council—but most pulled into line for Agnos. Nobody knew much about Agnos, that was true, but they had to keep in good with Burton and McCarthy. They couldn’t risk the wrath of the Democratic Party’s cartel that was behind Agnos.
That’s the way it worked with virtually every special interest group in the city. Milk stood by stunned, as group after group endorsed Agnos, even though many of the leaders privately conceded they hadn’t heard his name until just months before.
* * *
“I’ll tell you why I can’t stand Harvey Milk.”
His face blushing, his arms waving about his roly-poly figure, David Goodstein was having one of his tantrums again. Even his reverence for Werner Erhard and his erhard seminars training (est) couldn’t keep Goodstein from controlling his temper. Goodstein’s employees at the Advocate offices in San Mateo didn’t even have to casually stroll to the coffee machine to eavesdrop on this one. His voice resounded through the partitions of the nation’s largest gay paper. Goodstein had purchased the biweekly only two years before and his penchant for mixing journalism with his idiosyncratic theories of gay activism had by now earned him the nickname “Citizen Goodstein.” That this nobody camera shop owner was tangling with “our liberal friends” infuriated him.
“Harvey Milk’s goddamn crazy. He can’t be trusted. He’ll embarrass the shit out of us.” Goodstein’s normally sociable terrier, Minnie, huddled in a corner while her master’s tirade continued. “He’s just an opportunist.”
When Goodstein learned that his old Pacific Heights friend Anne Eliaser had donated money to Milk, he quickly got on the phone. “Why are you doing this off-the-wall thing?” he fumed. “Harvey is a crazy man.”
Eliaser found herself in the curious position of being a heterosexual trying to explain to the nation’s major gay publisher why it was time gays themselves, not just their liberal friends, hold public office.
Jim Foster was angry at the whole tenor of Harvey’s anti-machine theme. Sure it’s a machine, Foster thought, a machine that finally got that fascist Joe Alioto out of office; a machine that got a district attorney who stopped prosecuting gays like they were Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, a machine that made it legal for gays to have sex in California for the first time in 102 years; a machine that had made the first gay commission appointments in the nation’s history; a machine that was carrying gay civil rights legislation in Congress. It’s a machine all right, Foster thought, remembering back on the years of bar raids and police harassment he had experienced over a decade before Harvey Milk even moved here. But it’s our machine for a change, a machine on our side.
Rick Stokes had more pragmatic concerns. He had specific gay civil rights legislation he wanted passed in Sacramento. Even if Milk did win—a very doubtful possibility, he thought—Milk would have the instant emnity of the all-powerful Speaker McCarthy. An assemblyman sitting on the sanitation committee could do little good for changing the laws for lesbian custody cases, or anti-gay job bias, Stokes thought, while Assemblyman Agnos would immediately sit at the right hand of McCarthy from which he could judge the quick and the dead among legislative proposals.
Virtually every major gay leader endorsed Agnos, usually with a vitriolic denunciation of Milk. They even imported State Representative Elaine Noble, the openly gay legislator from Massachusetts, to come all the way from Boston to tell San Francisco gays why they did not need an openly gay legislator from California. Milk shouted carpetbagger, and the corps of Castro Street workers for Milk were generally speechless at the sight of the nation’s foremost lesbian leader opposing Milk, a man with whom she had neither talked nor met. “It’s easy to explain,” an Advocate editor said at a Noble fund raiser for Agnos. “She wants to run for U.S. Senate in 1978 and she’ll need all these gay leaders to raise money for her out here.” Milk’s Castro volunteers may have been committed, but they certainly had little to offer Noble’s campaign chest, so the gays with the Agnos campaign, with the prospect of money for Noble in the future, got the advantage of running full-page ads in gay papers heralding Noble’s endorsement.
With characteristic hyperbole, Milk compared the gay establishment to Nazi collaborators, insisting that gays’ priority should be electing the first gay candidate in California, not a liberal friend. “Since these self-appointed ‘leaders’ lack the courage to run for public office themselves, they then MUST try to destroy anyone who does run for office unless that person is blessed by them,” he wrote. “You don’t dictate to us by going to four or five ‘gay leaders’ and making a deal,” he told one reporter. “These leaders can’t deliver. They are not going to deliver the votes of the people on the streets.”
Art Agnos, meanwhile, learned the hazards of campaigning in the San Francisco of the 1970s. At a Sunday afternoon campaign stop at a spaghetti feed in a Folsom Street bar, Agnos was stumping for votes when a leather-clad patron shook Agnos’ hand with his right paw and grabbed the candidate’s crotch with his left. The affable Agnos smiled at the masher. “Do I measure up to Harvey?” he asked. The crowd hooted. “Ya sure do, buddy,” the leather man answered. Agnos got an ovation; he figured he walked out with every vote in the bar.
Even as the campaign grew more bitter, Art Agnos had to concede, Harvey Milk was a quick study. Though unschooled in the niceties of diplomacy, Harvey was an effective speaker who kept his sense of humor while the pair stumped together through endless candidates’ nights. It wasn’t unusual for even the most bitter opponents to review each others’ performances; after all, they heard their campaign speeches more than anybody else. Agnos later remembered putting his arm around Harvey’s shoulder as the two emerged from a particularly fierce debate and walked toward the parking lot.
“How do you feel having the machine around you?” he joked.
“Best machine I’ve ever had handle me,” Harvey quipped.
Agnos wondered how seriously Harvey took all this machine business.
“Y’know Harv’, your speech is too much of a downer,” Agnos suggested. “You talk about how you’re gonna throw the bums out, but how are you gonna fix things—other than beat me? You shouldn’t leave your audience on a down.”
Shortly after that, Agnos noted that Harvey started ending his speeches on an up note, a tone that became especially eloquent when Milk talked to gay audiences. He talked about the time when the only homosexuals he heard of were drag queens and child molesters; it was time to change that. “A gay official is needed not only for our protection, but to set an example for younger gays that says the system works,” Harvey implored. “We’ve got to give them hope.”
At meetings with fewer gays, Milk would change the words to black, Chicano, or whatever group he was wooing, but as the campaign progressed, h
e increasingly ended every speech with this call for hope. Frank Robinson soon refined it into a polished appeal that sounded as if it came straight from the orations of Hubert Humphrey. Harvey’s friends began calling the pitch Harvey’s “hope speech.”
A quick study, Agnos thought—maybe too quick. Agnos couldn’t help but be impressed, and two or three weeks before election day he was also getting worried. He called Leo McCarthy. He was sure he was trailing Milk, he told the speaker. He didn’t know how much, but he was scared. Leo laughed off the fears. Just campaign jitters, he told Agnos. But Art remembered the color-coded map Harvey was so proud of and took a poll. The results showed 25 percent for Milk, 16 percent for Agnos and the rest undecided. Leo didn’t laugh at Art’s fears any more; he was about to lose an assembly seat. McCarthy started pulling every string he could to get money for Agnos’ campaign. Just about every politician and industry in the state had to deal with the California Assembly in some way, so astonishing sums poured in from special interest committees all across California. The Friends of Leo McCarthy, the speaker’s own reserve fund, donated $11,000. A nebulous “Association for Better Citizenship” gave $4,000. Campaign committees from two neighboring assemblymen chipped in another $4,500. In the last two weeks of the campaign alone, Agnos collected an amazing $22,580—about the same amount Milk spent on his entire campaign.
Agnos focused on the weak points in Milk’s campaign. The district was one of the most liberal in the state, but to belie fears that his homosexuality might brand him a crazy radical, Harvey had made his business experience a major campaign theme. He would cast a cold businessman’s eye on the state budget, cut fat and red tape. The only two public officials to openly endorse Harvey, meanwhile, were moderate State Senator Milton Marks, the only Republican legislator from the city, and Supervisor Quentin Kopp, the board’s most conservative member who endorsed Harvey because he was planning to take on Moscone for mayor in the 1979 elections. Putting it all together, Milk was running as the more conservative candidate. Agnos was also surprised to find Harvey had downplayed campaigning in the district’s heavily black and Latino areas, assuming they would be too homophobic to support him. That left Agnos virgin territory.