The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  The centerpiece of Milk’s legislative agenda remained his ordinance to discourage the real estate speculation that was running rampant throughout San Francisco, especially in the Castro. Harvey worried that the spiraling housing prices would force the poor and minorities out of the city. Milk went right to the belly of the beast and delivered the announcement of his anti-speculation tax to the San Francisco Board of Realtors. The group wasted no time in singling Milk out as their most formidable political foe. Still, conceded one Milk critic, “With Harvey, you never had to worry about a knife in the back. He gave you a frontal assault.”

  The Pentagon’s announcement that it planned to close the city’s Presidio military base had Board President Feinstein racing to shore up unanimous support for a resolution pleading for the complex’s continued operation. Harvey stood as the lone dissenter, insisting the base’s spacious grounds would be a dandy park and that the housing could better be used for his favorite special interest group, senior citizens. Besides, he confided to one friend, he’d seen too many lives wrecked by the military and its anti-gay pogroms; the less San Francisco had to do with the services, the better. The base ultimately remained open, but the freshman supervisor’s anti-military posture only confirmed the editorial writers’ view that Supervisor Milk was indeed a disappointment.

  Though Milk and his closest board ally, Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, ended up on the losing side of many a 9–2 vote, Harvey proved an effective ward healer once in office, practicing his own alderman brand of realpolitik to perfection. He saw to it that the once-weekly sweeping of Castro Street stepped up to a daily cleaning. He successfully thwarted the closing of the neighborhood’s library branch, saying that cutting back on library services in a time of tight budgets was to cut “the bone, not the fat” in government. When the school district wanted to shut down the neighborhood grade school, Harvey fought to keep the school open and won; he still held true to his dream that the Castro could be the neighborhood where gays and straights could live together. Not one to get caught in abstruse political theory, Milk proudly counted fifty new neighborhood stop signs as one of his major accomplishments. He instructed his new City Hall aide, Anne Kronenberg, to give complaints about fixing potholes a top-priority status. “They might not remember how you voted on appropriations,” he told her, “but every time they vote, they’ll always remember that pothole in front of their house.” Such matters represented the heart of politics to Harvey Milk. Even Harvey’s most bitter opponents soon had to admit that Harvey was not the disaster they had predicted he would be.

  As his early months in office wore on, Harvey gained greater confidence and poise. He reined his once galloping pace of speech to a reasonable canter. The formerly frenzied waving of arms gave way to a calmer, more confident gesture of one arm, index finger extended, which photographed better. He did his board homework meticulously. When a friend went to rouse him for a 2 A.M. emergency one morning, he found Harvey wide awake in his pajamas, reading the complicated city charter. Veteran Supervisor John Molinari thought Milk was acting driven at times in his effort to keep up on all the issues before the board, as if he had to prove that he was more than just a gay supervisor.

  Harvey’s good humor started outshining his natural abrasiveness, so that even while he was often in the minority of board votes, few colleagues disliked the politician with a penchant for puns and one-liners. Michael Wong found a thoroughly ecstatic Milk when he visited City Hall in March. Harvey recounted his excitement at a recent fund raising dinner.

  “Mike, you should have been at the dinner,” he enthused. “I told the audience, and a lot of Chamber of Commerce types were there, that the candidate I supported for President in 1976 was a populist named Fred Harris. When the polls showed he was within striking distance of winning [his senate seat], the oil companies sent him a check for two thousand dollars. His manager said, ‘Fred what should we do with the money?’ Fred told him, ‘Screw them and send it back.’ The manager pleaded, ‘But we need the money.’ Fred said, ‘Okay, deposit the money and then screw them.’ And that’s what I’m doing tonight.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Mike, they were stunned,” Milk giggled. “No one knew what to say and finally they started to clap.”

  “Same old Harvey.”

  “And you know what else?” Harvey pulled out a jar of jelly beans which, because of his sweet tooth, was never far from his mouth. “I’m getting the board addicted to jelly beans. Every time they come in here, I feed them one, then another, then another. They’re all hooked. And Dianne and Quentin [Kopp], let me tell you they’re both assholes. They think they’re so high and mighty. What I do is leave my door open when I’m on the phone and when I know that Dianne or Quentin is outside, I yell real loud, ‘Shit, goddamn it, fuck’ and all that street talk. It bugs the shit out of them.”

  The conversation shifted to Harvey’s assessment of his colleagues, including the man who had emerged as the most conservative board member, Dan White. “White, I like Dan,” Harvey insisted. “He’s learning and he and I talk a lot. Give him some time.”

  Moments later, White was walking to his office across the hall and saw Wong in Harvey’s room. He stepped in to greet Mike. Harvey took to clowning around.

  “Dan, look at this toy,” Harvey said, picking up a little statue of Mickey Mouse on a box. Harvey pushed a button and Mickey started running in place.

  “Notice how Mickey is always the nice guy and Donald Duck is always the nasty aggressor?” Harvey asked. “Walt Disney was ahead of his time. Mickey Mouse represented black people and Donald Duck represented whites.”

  Wong was stunned that Harvey would say something like that to White. Dan just smiled; Wong figured he didn’t understand what Milk was saying. The trio soon turned to talk of future politics. Wong asked Dan teasingly, “Are you going to challenge our great mayor in 1979?”

  White smiled and gave the politician’s answer. “No,” adding pointedly, “not yet.”

  After Dan left, Harvey explained that he was trying to educate his fellow freshman. “He’s basically a decent person, just uneducated,” Harvey said. “He’ll learn.”

  * * *

  “I said he was safe.”

  “Out.”

  The shortstop threw his mitt into the dirt.

  “C’mon, Dan,” another player pleaded. He wanted White to let the matter slide.

  “He was out,” Dan White pouted from the infield.

  And that’s the way the whole game went. The game was the traditional summer standoff between the board and the mayor’s office. Most of the legislators dropped any pretenses of august demeanor to lay back, drink beer, and shout at Mayor Moscone, who stopped briefly to shed his jacket, roll up his sleeves, and take a few whacks at the ball. But there was Dan White, making dramatic plays, running after every ball, arguing vehemently with the umpire, throwing down his mitt and stomping around the diamond when a call went against his team. John Molinari had to admit White was the perfect kind of guy to have on his team; a guy who hated to lose.

  The same temperament marked his brief service as supervisor. Board President Feinstein, who had always stayed close to police and fire issues, took the novice under her wing and became his political mentor, but even with her steady hand behind him, he proved a poor protégé. He hated to lose at anything. When Supervisor Molinari made a routine request that a street be briefly closed for a Columbus Day bike race, White fought him in committee because the police said it might cause an inconvenience. When the closure passed committee anyway, White delivered an impassioned plea to the board, again citing police objections. That the board would turn a deaf ear to the police stunned and outraged him. His colleagues were shocked that he would fight so passionately over such a minor issue. After he lost the board vote, he didn’t speak to Molinari for days.

  White’s biggest setback, and the one that permanently soured his relationship with Milk, came over a proposed psychiatric treatment center to be pl
aced in an empty convent in his district. Even before White was sworn in, he was eagerly lobbying against the center, echoing neighbors’ fears that the center would put “arsonists, rapists and other criminals” at their doorstep. Before learning much about the issue, Harvey indicated he would probably vote with Dan. When the final vote on the center neared, White had his 6–5 majority, but, as the gay legislator learned more about the center—and of the San Francisco children sent far away to a state hospital where they were removed from any daily contact with their families—he pondered switching his vote. “They’ve got to be next to somebody’s house,” Harvey finally decided, and tilted the majority for the center. After the vote, Supervisor Quentin Kopp reportedly saw Dan White mutter, “I see a leopard never changes his spots.”

  The loss infuriated White, who had made the center a major campaign issue in his district. He had lost, and he left little doubt as to whom was responsible for his failure. For months, White would not even speak to Harvey. The smiles with which he had once greeted Anne Kronenberg stopped abruptly. Harvey had to appoint his other aide, Dick Pabich, to serve as a liaison with White. Other supervisors noticed White stopped spending much time at City Hall; he moped and pouted during the weekly board meetings.

  White’s immediate anger fell on Harvey’s pet project, the gay rights bill. At a committee meeting before Milk’s vote on the psychiatric center, Dan voted for the bill, talking at length about his experiences as a paratrooper in Vietnam. “I found a lot of the things that I had read about—that had been attributed to certain people—blacks, Chinese, gays, whites—just didn’t hold up under fire, literally under fire,” he said. “I saw men I was in combat with perform as admirably as anyone else would perform from whatever background they were. I learned right there that people have many problems—we all have our problems and the sooner we leave discrimination in any form behind, the better off we’ll all be.” When the gay rights law came for a vote before the entire board—a week after Milk voted against White on the psychiatric center—White had significantly changed his views. “According to the city attorney’s office, if a transvestite shows up at a public school with all the qualifications for teaching, they can’t refuse to hire him for an opening, even if they object to having a man dressed as a woman in their school,” White complained to one reporter.

  White was not alone in his fears. Supervisor Feinstein, whose interest with the gay leather scene bordered on obsession, openly wondered if the bill would make landlords rent to S&M cultists. “One of the uncomfortable parts of San Francisco’s liberalism has been the encouragement of sadism and masochism,” she said. “The gay community is going to have to face it. There’s a need to set some standards. The right of an individual to live his life-style in a way he or she chooses can become offensive.”

  Feinstein later regretted that she had felt obliged to publicly hold her nose while talking about gay rights, but in the end she overcame her trepidations about leathermen tenants and voted for the bill. By 1978, the political stakes were too high for any serious politician with ambitions for higher office to raise gay dander. Only Dan White voted against the measure. “A vast majority of people—I’ll use the Roman Catholics for example—have very strong beliefs,” he said. “Change is counterproductive when you force it on people. I fear that’s where the problem is going to start.”

  White later told Dick Pabich why he had voted nay. “Harvey voted against me,” he said, “so I voted against Harvey.” White also told Pabich that he had interceded months before to persuade Board President Feinstein to appoint Harvey to the committee governing the city’s bus system, a slot Milk wanted badly. He had helped Harvey; Harvey had betrayed him. That was the first time Pabich—and later Milk—ever learned of White’s action on behalf of him.

  Harvey would have preferred a unanimous vote for the bill, but the 10–1 margin was good enough, especially at a time when cities across the nation were taking up initiative repeals of local gay rights ordinances and as State Senator John Briggs geared up for his California anti-gay teachers initiative. On the day of the signing, Harvey presented Mayor Moscone with a powder blue felt-tipped pen to sign the bill, a camp gesture that assured the pair’s photo on the cover of the afternoon paper. “I don’t do this enough,” said Moscone, “taking swift and unambiguous action on a substantial move for civil rights.”

  The fracas on the gay rights ordinance kicked off a public feud between White and Milk. White steadfastly opposed every street closing or permit that involved gays. When Dennis Peron’s Castro Street pot supermarket got busted and both Milk and Supervisor Silver came to Peron’s defense, White took to the board’s floor to express his shock that Harvey would support a marijuana dealer.

  Harvey, however, still maintained that White could be “educated,” as Milk liked to put it. Harvey sometimes contrasted White with Supervisor Feinstein—the “Wicked Witch of the West,” Harvey called her—whom Milk thought politicked from a sense of noblesse oblige. He thought Feinstein was intelligent enough to take a more progressive place in city politics, while White’s conservatism stemmed from ignorance. For her part, Feinstein saw Milk as an unusual melange of characteristics. She was impressed by his tireless devotion to his job and the meticulous research he conducted on issues far beyond the realm of gay concerns. Still, the grandstanding in Milk’s showmanship at board meetings frustrated her. As board president, she had to make sure the body got on with its business and Milk’s theatrics did not always make her task easy. Feinstein hoped Milk would mellow with experience. Harvey, meanwhile, wrote her off and worked instead to curry favor with White. He attended the young supervisor’s baby shower. He tried softening White with humor. During one exchange on gays, Harvey told Dan, “Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it.” Dan White was not amused.

  As White withdrew further from Harvey and his other colleagues, he became closer to the sphere of interests Harvey bitterly opposed—downtown corporations and real estate developers. White had started as an angry blue-collar populist, but he quickly turned into the great white hope of the downtown interests—a politician with a future. “The guys at the Chamber of Commerce must have sat him down and started talking about God, and Dan thought, ‘Gee, these guys aren’t so bad after all,’” said one sympathetic leader of a union that had endorsed White.

  Feinstein helped connect White to Warren Simmons, a major real estate developer who was opening a tourist development at Pier 39. The Pier 39 project had all the trappings of old-fashioned political corruption and kept the city’s muckrakers churning out reams of copy, since a number of commissioners, supervisors, and other public officials who were involved in securing approval for the project also ended up with concessions for lucrative businesses there. Simmons gave White a concession for a fried potato stand to help augment the sparse $800 monthly salary supervisors earned. According to documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI had started a probe into Dan White’s connections with Simmons to see if the concession was a payoff for political favors. Before the probe turned up any substantive information, however, Dan White had been charged with far more serious crimes and the FBI files noted that the investigation “should not be discussed outside the bureau.”

  * * *

  “How do you like Feinstein for mayor?”

  Margo St. James had gained national fame as the organizer of Coyote, an organization representing the interests of prostitutes. She had also gained frequent phone calls from a police officer she nicknamed Joe the Pig. She had gone to San Francisco City College with him twenty years before; now, he seemed to take pleasure in reaffirming her worst fears about the city’s police. A year before, in 1977, Joe had called to explain gleefully that the most right-wing police officers planned on murdering Police Chief Charles Gain. It would be easy, he said. Gain led an active social life, remained unarmed when he was off duty, and would not keep a bodyguard. St. James warned Gain who, hearing similar rumors on his own, started taking such precautions as never si
tting with his back toward the door when in a restaurant. Now, Joe the Pig had called Margo to pass on the advice that he thought Dianne Feinstein might be mayor before the year was out.

  “But Feinstein just said that she wasn’t going to run in 1979, that George was bound to get reelected,” Margo answered.

  “What if George died?” the policeman asked.

  “He’s young and healthy,” said Margo. “He’s not going to die.”

  “Remember what they were gonna do to the chief last year?” Joe asked. “They couldn’t get him, so they’ll do the next best thing and get the guy who put him there.”

  St. James was incredulous.

  “He’ll be dead by Christmas,” the police officer concluded.

  Margo was surprised by the chipper attitude the officer took toward the topic of political assassination, but she was not taken aback by the hard feelings police rank and file held against Gain and his boss, George Moscone. The mayor was pressing hard for settlement of an old discrimination suit filed by the Officers For Justice (OFJ), a minority policeman’s organization. The suit alleged that the nepotic department discriminated wildly against blacks in promotion and hiring; the SFPD was, according to one study, more racially segregated than the police force of Montgomery, Alabama. The OFJ wanted a multimillion-dollar settlement from the city and rigid enforcement of hiring and promotion quotas for minorities. Courts had long ago ordered that all hiring and promotion in the department be frozen, pending a settlement of the suit. Mayor Moscone had worked out a settlement that the Police Officers’ Association detested. Both White and Feinstein spearheaded opposition on the board. Dan White fretted to a right-wing Examiner columnist, “Once they’ve taken over the law-enforcement mechanism of San Francisco, they’ve got the city cold.” The settlement went down to a characteristic 6–5 defeat on the board. That was a precarious margin, as far as the POA was concerned. Even worse, both the mayor and the Civil Service Commission in 1978 announced that the new police recruitment drive would include a push to get openly gay cops on the police force. The POA monthly newsletter was filled with letters from members complaining about the development. No single police officer had made the decision to follow Chief Gain’s advice and step forward as gay; now, gays would be forced on the department. One sergeant wrote that any gay officers should be given separate shower rooms, a solution which, he conceded, got sticky when the matter of showering locations for possible bisexual officers had to be sorted out. Even Gain’s critics gave him credit for modernizing training and promotion procedures, but the rank-and-file discontent had seethed since Gain’s first days in office and nearly every week brought new items in gossip columns that Gain was on the way out.