by Randy Shilts
The crowd cheered at the sight of the winner while television crews got ready to go live from the headquarters of the upset winner who had polled the highest tally of any nonincumbent supervisorial candidate in the city, making him the first openly gay elected official of any big city in the United States. Harvey had beaten both Terrance Hallinan and Rick Stokes by a better than two-to-one margin, garnering 30 percent of the vote against his sixteen challengers. Rick Stokes, Jim Foster, and Art Agnos came down the street to make their traditional concession handshakes, but Milk would not even let them inside the store. “It’s too crowded,” he said curtly.
“This is not my victory, it’s yours and yours and yours,” Harvey exhorted to the wildly cheering crowd. “If a gay can win, it means that there is hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight. We’ve given them hope.”
“Harvey for mayor,” someone shouted and the crowd cheered more.
The next morning, Harvey and his cohorts were back on Market Street, smiling and waving, with their last human billboard, freshly crayoned signs that simply said, “Thank You.” The drivers, fresh from seeing the morning Chronicle with the picture of the motorcycled Milk and Hongisto on the front page, waved back and honked their horns wildly. During red lights, Harvey jogged between cars to accept congratulations and shake hands. Trolley drivers rang their congratulations. Just like a Rice-a-Roni commercial.
When the traffic rush subsided, Harvey pulled Harry Britt over to the side. He was writing a note to Mayor Moscone, Harvey explained, just in case, well, anything happened. The letter would list the people Harvey wanted to replace him, and Harry should know that his name would be among them. Britt was surprised because he and Harvey had not been particularly close personal friends. They did seem to agree instinstinctively on political matters, but their relationship hadn’t gone much beyond politics. Harry thought Harvey’s disclosure was somewhat depressing and quickly dismissed the conversation, convinced that the rush of victory had kept Milk awake all night and left him emotionally drained. When Harvey told his friend Frank Robinson about the planned letter, Frank told him he was being downright morbid, attributing the political “will” to the black streak he had long ago noticed running on the underside of Milk’s otherwise humorous demeanor.
It was well past midnight a week later when, after an exhausting day at the camera shop, Harvey slumped over a cassette recorder to tape the three messages he simply entitled “In case.” Harvey listed who was and who was not acceptable as a successor. There was a chilling anatomical specificity to it all when Harvey’s recorded voice was later heard saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
* * *
Congratulations poured in from around the country in the days after the election. “Thanks to you that kid in Des Moines just bought a ticket for San Francisco,” teased one friend. “Supe at last, supe at last, thank God Almighty, supe at last,” wrote another. A sixty-eight-year-old lesbian who had been a San Francisco schoolteacher since 1932 wrote poignantly, “I thank God I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.” Her one regret was that she didn’t live in District 5 to savor the victory as a constituent. Days later, Harvey added the finishing touches to his hope speech when he emerged with a vaguely apocryaphal tale of a sixteen-year-old boy from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who called to thank Harvey for giving him hope that he could make something of his life. No more talk of Dayton or Des Moines. For the rest of his career, Milk’s hope speech talked of a sixteen-year-old boy from Altoona, Pennsylvania. There were other letters too, dozens of them, like the one addressed simply to “Milk the Faggot.” It concluded with the cheery sign-off: “Maybe, just maybe, some of the more hostile in the district may firebomb your store or may even take some pot shots at you—we hope!!!”
* * *
The Irish Catholic cop-turned-politician and the gay Jewish neighborhood politico. The media like quick, easy juxtapositions that can be translated into the brief ninety seconds generally alloted to each television news story. The elections of Harvey Bernard Milk and Daniel James White to the board of supervisors were the natural peg to the election follow-ups. On one level, both typified the ultimate goal of district elections—to reflect the diverse citzenry of the city. Dan White reflected his working class, traditional native San Francisco district, just as Harvey Milk reflected his hip, heavily gay, non-native district. The contrast was too tantalizing for the television producers to pass up. In the weeks following the election, White and Milk made a number of joint appearances on local talk shows. Both warmly praised the other. White even publicly assured Harvey that his brochure’s comments about “social deviates” referred to junkies, not gays. Milk began privately telling friends that he might be able to work with the conservative White.
Dennis Seely had been in the habit of arguing with Harvey ever since the two were neighbors on Castro Street, and Milk came to pound on Dennis’ door complaining he couldn’t hear his Mahler over the din of Seely’s Jefferson Airplane records. The sight of Harvey buddying up with White on television was no more conducive to a smooth conversation between Dennis and Harvey than had been the sound of Grace Slick’s piercing voice.
“Harvey, that guy’s a pig,” Dennis told him bluntly after he had seen a Dan-and-Harvey talk show. “I hate him.”
“Dan White is just stupid,” Harvey insisted. “He’s working class, a Catholic, been brought up with all those prejudices. I’m gonna sit next to him every day and let him know we’re not all those bad things he thinks we are.”
“Look at him,” Dennis said incredulously. “He’s never gonna be different. He’s a cop. All the analysts in the world aren’t gonna reach that guy and your yakkin’ ain’t gonna make any difference either.”
“As the years pass, the guy can be educated,” Milk argued, adding huffily, “that’s where we disagree. Everyone can be reached. Everyone can be educated and helped. You think some people are hopeless—not me.”
PART III
Supervisor Harvey Milk
twelve
Media Star
“What do you think of my new theater?”
Supervisor Harvey Milk enjoyed posing that question to his friends as he would guide them up the grand marble staircase of San Francisco City Hall, and he pointed out the dramatic proportions the building seemed to lend to whatever history passed beneath its dome. “My stage,” he would say, looking down at the expansive lobby from the balcony. From his first day in office, Harvey left little doubt that his term would be marked more by his unique brand of political theater than by the substantive tasks of the board. He managed to turn his ceremonial swearing-in into a major media event when he and Jack Lira led a procession of 150 supporters from Castro Camera down the fifteen blocks to the wide front steps of City Hall. “This is a walk of reconciliation with a nation of people,” he lectured reporters. “This is a walk that will give to many people hope.”
Mayor Moscone and a gaggle of other politicians greeted the cadre of outsiders who were about to take their seat of power at last. Milk insisted on an outdoor inauguration, saying all his supporters could not fit indoors. Besides, the pictures of Milk in front of the proud rotunda made much better television. As Harvey began to repeat the words of his oath, a gentle rain began falling. “Anita Bryant said gay people brought the drought to California,” he joked, looking up at the sky. “Looks to me like it’s finally started raining.”
“This is not my swearing-in, this is your swearing-in,” he told the crowd. “You can stand around and throw bricks at Silly Hall or you can take it over. Well, here we are.”
Milk used his first board meeting that afternoon to strike an independent path. His first legislative proposal called for the enactment of a comprehensive ban on all forms of discrimination against gays in the city. During the board’s first order of business—the election of its president—Milk tenaciously held out against the certain election of Su
pervisor Dianne Feinstein, maintaining the board should have its first minority president, the new Chinese-American supervisor Gordon Lau. After Feinstein won her 6–5 vote—the first of many 6–5 wins in the coming year—Milk refused to go along with Lau’s courtesy motion to make Feinstein’s election unanimous. The lack of tact horrified the newspapers. The Examiner ran an editorial saying Milk was off to a “disappointing start.” But the anti-Feinstein swipe delighted both liberals, who viewed Feinstein as an ally of downtown business interests, and gays, who had grown uneasy with Feinstein’s prudery. “I’m not concerned about the Emily Post attitude to life,” Harvey snapped at critics. He privately noted that the Examiner editorial had served its most important purpose, spelling his name right. And no matter what the editorial page said, the afternoon paper’s front page was dominated by one picture—Harvey with his arm around Jack, leading the march up Castro Street.
The formal inauguration in the elaborately carved oak-paneled board chambers was marred only when Harvey turned to introduce Jack Lira. Dan White had used his introduction time to pay tribute to his grandmother, an Irish immigrant; Harvey relished the juxtaposition of introducing his male lover, but Lira had slipped out of the room even before the meeting started, afraid of the cameras and bright lights being trained on him. “It’s well known that I’m a gay person. I have a loved one but he was too nervous to stay here and he left,” said Harvey. Milk had waited so many years for the day of his inauguration when he could stand as a homosexual to introduce the man he loved and the moment had fled him. Harvey instead used most of his introductory remarks to speak on his favorite theme. “A true function of politics is not just to pass laws, but to give hope,” he said. “There have been too many disappointments lately. The real abyss that lies not too far ahead is that day when a disappointed people lose their hope forever. When that happens, everything we cherish will be lost.”
“Hope is fine,” Feinstein said tartly in her opening remarks, “but you can’t live on hope. The name of the game is six votes.”
Even the crustiest reporters, however, did not fail to note the symbolism Milk underscored in this, the first district-elected board in the city’s modern history. Taking oaths were the city’s first elected Chinese supervisor, the first black woman, the only Latino supervisor, the first gay city official in the nation, and, from another alternative life-styles category, even the first unwed mother supervisor, Harvey’s friend and ally, Carol Ruth Silver. The inauguration also signaled what looked like the beginning of a new stability in city government after the turbulence caused first by Moscone’s election, then the passage of district elections, later the whirlwind efforts to not only repeal district elections but recall the city’s top officials, and finally the ouster of the citywide board in November. Feinstein called it “a new day in San Francisco politics”; the transition in power from downtown to the neighborhoods looked like a juggernaut now, a palace coup that could not be undone.
The best media event of inauguration day came not from Milk, but from his old nemesis David Goodstein, who sponsored a series of inaugural night parties at the city’s three most popular gay discos. Publicly, Goodstein culled jargon from his est courses to insist he wanted to provide a supportive context for Milk and, publicly, Harvey said, “If Begin and Sadat can get together to talk, so can we.” Privately, Goodstein quoted Machiavelli’s Prince, not Werner Erhard, as the reason for the parties. “I want to coopt Harvey,” he bluntly told an employee. For his part Harvey privately savored seeing Goodstein “kiss my ass,” disdaining to do so much as even ride to the parties in the same car that Goodstein rode in.
Reporter Francis Moriarty later recalled the chilling irony at the end of that evening when Goodstein kissed Milk’s hand as they parted company, saying “Goodnight, sweet Prince”—Horatio’s famous farewell to the slain Hamlet. Goodstein later denied making the statement, but Moriarty insisted the moment stuck in his mind, since the quote came just after Hamlet, in his dying breath, endorsed Fortinbras in the coming struggle for power. Goodstein would not know for nearly a year that his parting line followed Milk’s own secret taped nominations for his successor—nominations intended to squeeze out Goodstein’s closest allies, Jim Foster and Rick Stokes.
The round of inaugural partying did not end until the next night when Milk threw a formal dinner to help pay off his campaign debt. The new supervisor used the occasion to wax eloquent again about his dreams for new cities and for hope:
The American Dream starts with neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. To sit on the front steps—whether it’s a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city—is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.…
Yesterday, my esteemed colleague on the board said we cannot live on hope alone. I know that.… The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it. If the story of Don Quixote means anything, it means that the spirit of life is just as important as its substance.
When Harvey met Jack Lira, he confided to his friend Tory Hartmann, “I’ve found the love of my life.” Tory liked her gay friends because, as a Catholic, she thought they were God’s lost people, but she could never get used to their easy romancing. “Just how many lovers for life are you going to have?” she asked Harvey; like most of Harvey’s friends, she thought the politician could do much better than Lira. The night of the inaugural dinner she heard a whisper from the coat check. Jack was offended that he did not get to sit on the dais with Harvey and the important public officials, he told Tory, so he had thrown a tantrum and was hiding in the coatroom, refusing even to eat. Again, Tory had to wonder about Harvey’s choice of boyfriends.
* * *
A huge American flag hung sternly from the balcony. The stirring fanfare of the “Theme from Rocky” blared. A handsome young man strode purposefully onto a balcony high above the crowd. It all gave Doris Silvistri the creeps. As a good friend of Building and Construction Trades secretary-treasurer Stan Smith, Silvistri got to attend more than her share of post-campaign fund raisers in the early months of the supervisors’ terms. Nothing on the circuit bothered her more than the fund raiser for Dan White in the same spacious design center Harvey had used for his dinner. When White’s turn to speak came, the balcony cleared, leaving only an oversized American flag draped in the rear, the “Rocky” fanfare and a disembodied voice introducing White. He walked stiffly across the balcony—like a robot, Doris thought.
“I’m not sure whether he thinks he’s George Patton or Adolph Hitler, but he sure makes me nervous,” Doris whispered to Stan.
Smith countered that everybody seemed to like the clean-cut young man.
“I don’t care,” Doris argued. “There’s something wrong with that man. He’s wound up too tight. Something’s wrong.” Talking personally to White did little to reassure her. “He responded like he was programmed,” she said later. “He was like a spring ready to go off.”
* * *
“I’m number one queen now. You can work with me or fight me. But if you fight me, be ready for me to do my best to make sure you don’t get reelected.”
Harvey Milk repeated this challenge to anyone who would listen. Mayor Moscone tried to start their first post-election conversation with small talk about how he could help Harvey erase his campaign debt when Harvey cut him off, pounded his fists on the mayor’s desk, and laid out the ground rules for their relationship. Harvey wanted final say over any gay appointments. He also wanted the mayor to start producing substantive results for gays. Or else.
“You’re never given power,” he had railed for five years, “you have to take it.” Milk knew his Machiavelli as well as any politico in town and he intended to use his clout as the first gay official to prove it. Moscone, for one, saw the new order shaping up in the gay community; he had bet on the wrong horse. At an open meeting with the gay co
mmunity shortly after Milk’s election, Moscone told gays to funnel complaints through Milk and that he would no longer pay heed to any “kingmakers” in the community, a direct slap at Jim Foster, who had long been called the gay kingmaker. Moreover, Moscone promised that he would appoint a gay member to the Police Commission, satisfying a demand gays had been making since the days of Jose’s Black Cat. “Whatta difference a gay makes,” touted one gay newspaper’s headline at the breakthroughs. Milk returned the favor to Moscone. By the end of Harvey’s first month in office, one political columnist observed that “Milk has become Moscone’s strongest political ally on the board.” Though the couple shared a similar liberal political philosophy, the newfound rapport between the two old foes surprised pundits both in and out of City Hall.
* * *
The new supervisor from District 5 was out to be more than the gay legislator and he used his first months on the board to build his populist image, inveighing against the interests he considered the bane of a healthy San Francisco—downtown corporations and real estate developers. He pushed for a commuter tax, so the 300,000-plus corporate employees who came downtown each day from suburbia would pay their share for the city services they used. When the Jarvis-Gann tax revolt started drying up local revenue sources, he joined Moscone in a push for higher business taxes, legislation that business-oriented Board President Feinstein managed to kill. The news that a parking garage for a new performing arts center near City Hall would replace housing units sent Harvey on a rampage. “It’s a scandal of human nature to rip down sixty-seven housing units in this day so that the wealthy can have a place to park their cars,” he lectured. “A place for an auto to rest is not as important as the need for a place for people to rest. There is a shifting of tides taking place toward the needs of people versus the needs of the auto.” Real estate developers tried to persuade Milk to support a massive downtown development project with the argument that once built, it would provide thousands of jobs for minorities. “Jobs as what?” Harvey sneered. “Janitors, waitresses, and busboys. Big fucking deal. What kinds of opportunities are those?”