The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  St. James forwarded a warning to Mayor Moscone’s office. In August, she heard that Moscone had gotten a bodyguard.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe it,” sputtered an aide to another supervisor as he tossed the morning Chronicle across a table in the City Hall lunchroom. “Every time you pick up the paper, there’s Harvey doing something new. How in the the hell does that guy do it?”

  Like any good dramatist, Harvey Milk knew that the success of any show depended on good press. Milk’s own flair for the theatrical as well as his well cultivated media connections quickly made Harvey the best covered supervisor in San Francisco. “Harvey and newspapers were made for each other; they were bound to have a love affair,” said Harvey’s friend, Frank Robinson, later. “For the papers, it was like having their own Flo LaGuardia in their backyard.”

  Even the routine rotation of the city’s acting mayorship among supervisors became a front-page media event for Harvey once Mayor Moscone went on a Europeon vacation. As soon as the mayor’s limousine chauffeured him to City Hall, Milk bounded into the Mayor’s office and called a press conference, explaining to reporters that he was the first openly gay—albeit acting—mayor in the United States. This gave one more occasion for Harvey to talk piously about that sixteen-year-old from Altoona, Pennsylvania. Once the public pontification was completed, Milk spent the rest of the morning privately speculating to friends on the merits of the mayor’s massive desk as a seduction site for any of a number of handsome young City Hall bureaucrats. For lunch, Harvey took Pabich and Kronenberg to Castro Street, keeping the mayor’s limousine parked conspicuously in front of the restaurant. He later amused reporters when he opened a friend’s new delicatessen with the quip, “I am the only mayor who is cutting the ribbon and then wearing it.” The picture of Harvey behind the mayor’s massive desk made page one in the afternoon Examiner.

  Thinly veiled queer joking has always been considered good copy in San Francisco newspapers and Harvey was always quick to oblige. One gossip writer listed him as the “number one most ineligible bachelor of San Francisco” while columnist Herb Caen joked that Dianne and Harvey were fighting it out to see who got to be City Hall’s official Avon Lady. When Jarvis-Gann budget cuts started squeezing the city coffers, Milk proposed legalized gambling in San Francisco. The plan had no chance of gaining approval, but it did make page one, permitting Harvey to retort to the plan’s critics with, “Let he who is without sin cast the first dice.”

  The media coup of the year and the issue that best symbolized Harvey’s theories on how government should work, centered on the mundane subject of dog feces. Survey after survey showed that sidewalk dog droppings were San Franciscans’ biggest complaint about city life. Milk, therefore, sponsored a bill requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets, waxing philosophically that, “It’s symbolic of all the problems of irresponsibility we face in big, depersonalized, alienating urban societies.” Privately, Harvey lectured Anne and Dick, “Whoever can solve the dogshit problem can be elected mayor of San Francisco, even President of the United States.” Years later, some would claim Harvey was a socialist or various other sorts of ideologues, but, in reality, Harvey’s political philosophy was never more complicated than the issue of dogshit; government should solve people’s basic problems.

  The proposal, of course, got more fan mail than any other act Milk made as supervisor. For television cameras and newspaper photographers, Harvey gave demonstrations, using ersatz turds, of how his “pooper scooper” bags worked, concluding the news segments by stepping into some of the real stuff himself. Harvey walked away from the demonstrations with dirty shoes, but his picture went national on the A-wire. Only a few of his closest friends knew that he had spent an hour that morning walking up and down a park, finding a demonstration site that had the appropriate piles of dog droppings to sort-of-accidentally step in when the cameras arrived. Mayor Moscone publicly decried the fact that Milk’s dog turd stories were making page one, while his stories about serious city problems were lucky to get to page eleven. Still, the story epitomized what Milk wanted to accomplish in office. “All over the country, they’re reading about me and the story doesn’t center on me being gay,” he said. “It’s just about a gay person who is doing his job.” That, to Milk, was education.

  Harvey’s board colleagues were no more immune to the supervisor’s pranks than the press. Milk frequently bandied with Chinese-American Supervisor Gordon Lau, partly because Harvey could never resist doling out ethnic slurs and partly because Milk figured that a gay-Chinese alliance could control the city one day, since both groups were migrating to San Francisco in such large numbers. When Harvey complained of being broke, Lau joked that he should do what every other gay in town was doing and become a realtor. “Then I could sell to all your Chinese cousins,” Harvey deadpanned. When conservatives once dallied too long at the podium, Harvey turned to Lau to comment, “We’ll fix them. We’ll get all your guys to buy property from my guys and we’ll be all set up.” One day Milk plaintively asked Gordon, “When are you going to do my laundry?” Lau joked back, “When you redecorate my office.”

  Harvey also earnestly explained to his colleagues that the reason he kept jelly beans by his desk was because many years ago, homosexuals were derisively called jelly beans. “You can’t imagine what I’ve got them believing,” he’d snicker to gay friends. Supervisor Molinari, meanwhile, took to delighting both Harvey and his audience at one Republican event by talking about how he and Harvey had died and gone to heaven. They had only one command: If they had one lustful thought, their wings would fall off. As the story went, a shapely beauty soon walked by and Molinari’s wings dropped to the cloud. When he bent down to pick them up, Harvey’s wings fell. It was a variation of an old gay joke, but the fact that Molinari felt comfortable to tell him such jokes pleased Harvey immensely; it was another triumph. Milk came to judge his colleagues less by their politics than by their sense of humor. That ultimately is what bothered him about Dan White. He didn’t seem to have a sense of humor.

  * * *

  “Here in Napa we kill cocksuckers who infiltrate city government.” Wrote another, “What will the guys of Bayshore High School class of ‘47 think of Miss Harvey now?”

  Even as Harvey clowned his way through press and politics, problems haunted his personal life. The hate mail increased with every new Milk clipping. Some of it was outright threatening. “Shoot fruit, not pool,” read one card. Others revealed many a deeply disturbed psyche: “Nobody really gives a damn if you’re homosexual. No one cares if you suck or like to be sucked or do sex in the ass. Even many who are not homos, if they have any sense, realize that under certain conditions, they also could enjoy being a homo. The right time, place, person, atmosphere, etc., etc. But to brag about it, many feel only a mentally disturbed person will.” Harvey publicly joked about the mail and Anne sometimes posted a “letter of the week.” But they took a toll. Anne noticed it one day when she fell into her old habit of musing about what it would be like forty or fifty years later when the whole group of idealistic young activists around Harvey became senior citizens. “I’ll never live to be a senior citizen,” Milk said casually. In other conversations, Harvey dropped remarks about how it would end; he always felt his would be a violent death.

  Harvey’s skimpy supervisorial salary of $9,600 a year kept both himself and his business in debt. The only reason he sustained an appropriate appearance in dress was because his friend, gay publisher Bob Ross, had an acquaintance who had died shortly after Harvey’s election. By coincidence, the dead man was Milk’s same gangly size, right down to the size 13 shoes. He also was a clotheshorse, so Harvey spent most of the year well dressed in a dead man’s clothes.

  Harvey’s biggest problem was “Taco Bell,” Jack Lira. At twenty-six, Jack had not finished high school and had learned few skills beyond how to drink massive amounts of alcohol and manage to drink still more. Even that, he did not do with élan. He maintained a comple
x love-hate relationship with Harvey’s politics. On one hand, he enjoyed the chance to be Harvey’s First Lady and sometimes pushed for invitations to dinners or events. But he was ill prepared for the social and political skills such a role demanded, so he would attend an event with Milk, become nervous, get drunk, create a loud, public argument, and then stomp out. Harvey offered to send Jack back to school; Jack didn’t want to go back to school. Harvey found Lira many jobs, doing everything from Mexican restaurant work to bottling bootleg isobutyl nitrate in a downtown popper factory. It was weeks before Harvey learned that when Jack got up every morning and left the house, he wasn’t going to work but to a Castro Street bar. Jack’s jobs usually ended with his being fired for nonauthorized absences. The feud between Lira and Scott Smith intensified as the months wore on. Harvey might have been able to keep boys back in his Wall Street days, Smith reasoned, but not on his $9,600 supervisor’s salary and the struggling camera store business that supported both Harvey and Scott. Seeing Harvey’s subsidization of Jack draining the business, Scott found his own diversions on which to spend what he saw as his share of entertainment money. The business suffered further as tensions increased; Milk privately complained to one Chronicle reporter that Scott was blowing the profits; Scott figured the profits were going to Jack’s favorite bars.

  * * *

  Agitated times were falling on San Francisco’s gay community that year, as gay rights were beaten back in referenda in Wichita, St. Paul, and Eugene and as California homosexuals prepared for the Briggs Initiative. Lira became moody at the news and fell into severe depression after seeing the television movie “Holocaust,” the story of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Hints of Lira’s troubled past sometimes emerged: the father who refused to call him “son,” a mother who only fearfully spoke to him, afraid of incurring his father’s potential wrath. A lonely childhood, turning to the lonelier world of alcoholism. Every personal and political friend Harvey had now prodded him to drop Jack. “I’m out to help people just like Jack, give them hope,” Harvey explained to political associates. “I’ve got to help him.” To his closer personal friend Tom Randol, Harvey gave a more candid explanation. “Jack is truly good sex,” he said. “When I come home to him, I don’t have to talk politics. I don’t have to talk intelligently. I don’t have to think. I can just relax. Besides,” he added pragmatically, “Where is a forty-eight-year-old man like me going to get such a hot-looking young guy?”

  Gossip flowed in some knowledgeable gay circles that Harvey indulged himself in more exotic sexual practices in these later years. Surprisingly, though, Harvey’s sex life never came under any public scrutiny and rarely emerged as any kind of an issue. That was not the case for many of the city’s political figures. The city’s worst kept political secret, for example, was that a major liberal city office holder had a fondness for black prostitutes. Though publicly portrayed as an ethnic family man, the politician’s proclivities and the mishaps that they got him into were so legendary that two newspaper reporters tailed the leader one night when they saw the official leave North Beach Restaurant in the company of a new woman friend. The pair walked to the woman’s Volkswagen in the front of SS. Peter and Paul Church—the city’s major Italian Catholic institution—where the politician got a quick blow job. Newspaper stories later that year would only obliquely talk of how the Reverend Jim Jones bragged of providing black followers to a “major public official.” The whole story, however, made the rounds at reporters’ bars. As one Chronicle staffer put it, “We got the general impression that he liked black prostitutes to sit on his lap, play with his nipples and call him daddy.”

  That particular politician’s nemesis, meanwhile, was a dour conservative who was known around San Francisco as the town grump. The way reporters told the story, this conservative had been a fairly sociable guy until his wife ran off with his law partner. Losing both his business partnership and his wife in one blow would do in anyone’s good humor, pundits observed. Meanwhile, at least one board member was surprised when, in the course of talking to Board President Feinstein, Dianne opened her purse and a gun was nestled inside. Feinstein later publicly discussed carrying the rod as a means of protection against potential assassins. Given all this, it wasn’t surprising that Harvey’s sometimes kinky love life never got much attention; against the ensemble of the lusty liberal, the cuckolded conservative, and the pistol-packing socialite, Harvey’s quirks were hardly conspicuous.

  * * *

  You get to know a guy, really get to know a guy on the campaign trail, Art Agnos thought. You might never be friends but you watch them so much, you can practically predict just what they’re gonna do. After bitterly slugging it out with Milk in the assembly race two years before, Agnos didn’t need a crystal ball to see Harvey’s political plans. He was mending fences with all the gay leaders who had opposed him so long—Foster, Stokes, and Goodstein—while building his bridges back into the political establishment with people like Moscone and even Agnos himself. The overtures to Chinese voters were smart moves, as was the fact Milk had not let himself sit as simply the gay supervisor, Agnos thought. Milk candidly admitted to his former opponent that he wanted to make a stab at the board presidency once he got reelected in November 1979. The next step, to Agnos, was obvious. “He’s going to run for mayor,” Agnos counseled friends. “You know what? I think he can win.”

  The wiser political observers pooh-poohed the notion that Milk, a homosexual, would consider, much less run for mayor. That flew too much in the face of reality. A homosexual for mayor? But Agnos knew all too well that Harvey had no compunctions against flying in the face of reality. “That guy will one day be the mayor of San Francisco,” Agnos said.

  Harvey was less guarded about his future agenda when talking to Michael Wong. On the day of his acting mayorship, Milk ran into Wong and promptly offered his old friend a ride in the mayor’s limo. Michael could tell Harvey was enjoying his chance to play Andrew Jackson in the White House, but deferred the ride and mentioned that all the day’s publicity might lead to speculation that Harvey wanted to be mayor.

  “Who said it’s speculation?” Harvey asked.

  Wong told him he was crazy: a gay supervisor yes, a gay mayor, no. “Not even San Francisco is ready for that,” he insisted.

  “I’m not so sure, my little fortune cookie,” Harvey said. “Besides, it doesn’t hurt to let people think I’m interested in the job.”

  * * *

  Harvey proudly showed Allan Baird the pen-and-pencil set Allan had given him during the first supervisorial campaign in 1973, when Baird made his first trip to City Hall. The Teamster friends who had once worried that Baird might be queer for hanging out with Harvey were now complimenting Allan on his foresight, and occasionally trying to nudge a favor from the supervisorial friend.

  “Are you going to be the next mayor of San Francisco?” Allan bluntly asked Harvey.

  “Allan, you can be the next mayor of San Francisco, anybody can be,” Harvey said. “All you have to do is work hard and you can get it.”

  Harvey figured he had already pretty much proved that point with his election as supervisor.

  * * *

  With the specter of a statewide fight on the Briggs Initiative looming ahead, Harvey took to building a statewide political machine geared to his nuts-and-bolts approach to politics. He met the Los Angeles end of the planned machine before his election when he ran into Don Amador, a gay studies professor at a local college. With characteristic tact, Milk told him the best way to educate people about gays was through politics, not colleges.

  “How many students do you have?” Harvey demanded.

  “Thirty,” said Amador.

  “How long do you have them for?”

  “Sixteen weeks.”

  Harvey made his instant calculations. Only thirty people every sixteen weeks. “No,” he said tersely. “That’s too slow.”

  The two struck up a friendship. Once in office, Harvey lobbied Los Angeles Mayor
Tom Bradley to appoint Amador as his official liaison to the gay community. Amador got the job and Milk started persuading the teacher that he should run for office if he really wanted to educate people about gays. On a spare afternoon, Harvey jotted out his ten rules of how to win an election:

  1. Interviews with all major papers. [All was underlined three times.]

  2. Knock on all doors.

  3. Ride buses.

  4. Visit non-gay bars during the daytime and any singles bars at nite.

  5. Coffee shops and restaurants. Stop off early in morning and late at night.

  6. Shake hands.

  7. Shake hands.

  8. As few meetings as possible—just meet the people.

  9. Door to door of registered Demo’s is very best thing you can do outside of media coverage.