by Randy Shilts
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By the opening of the 1980s, San Francisco had spent a half decade in turmoil unmatched by any other American city of that period: Moscone’s 1975 election coup, the 1976 enactment of district elections, the attempts to repeal district elections and recall the city’s major officials in 1977, the first district-elected board, the gay unrest of Orange Tuesday and the midnight marches, Peoples Temple, the assassinations, the riots, and the ultimate reinstatement of citywide elections. All this had wearied both conservative and liberal activists, and few responsible politicos were eager to push any new initiatives as the decade opened. Wounds from the long battles may not have completely healed in subsequent years, but neither did they fester. The city remained bound together by the curious sentiment that San Franciscans of all stripes share—that San Francisco is somehow a special city. Still, when reformers sometimes talked late into the night and wearied of the gossip about contemporary politicians, their conversations often drifted into memories of the Milk-Moscone years which, in reflection, seemed a bright, magic epoch which was not likely to happen again soon.
The loss of so many liberal advances made during the brief Moscone-Milk era kept some of the more suspicious bandying conspiracy theories about the assassinations. Many of Harvey’s closest friends remained convinced that George and Harvey had been the victims of a byzantine conspiracy, plotted by those who had millions of dollars to gain by taking city government out of the hands of neighborhood-oriented liberals and returning power to the more steady moderation of a Dianne Feinstein. Signs at gay demonstrations sometimes carried such mottos as, “I’d like to see Joe Freitas’ Swiss bank account.” Examiner reporter Russ Cone, a veteran of a quarter century on the City Hall beat, took a more prosaic approach and wrote a long story tying the killings to conservative policemen’s fears about Moscone’s proposed settlement for the police discrimination suit. Killing Moscone effectively ended chances for the mayor’s pro-minority settlement, Cone wrote, while “taking out the ever-present irritant, Milk, was insurance that six votes for the Moscone settlement would not exist” on the board. The Examiner declined to run the account, so it was published in a Los Angeles-based magazine. Nor was any major publication interested in Warren Hinckle’s hypothesizing about the role of political chicanery and homophobia in Dan White’s prosecution. Hinckle had to make a living and he soon found other subjects to fuel his ongoing fires of moral outrage. Since the San Francisco media assiduously avoided analyses of the troublesome implications of the killings and trial, the entire Dan White affair soon slipped into an uneasy niche in the public memory. Occasionally, however, spray-painted across a barren wall in the Castro, appeared the question: “Who killed Harvey Milk?”
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The disparate currents of history and personal aspirations drove the enemies and lovers, friends and cronies of Harvey Milk toward their own destinies:
Dan White was sentenced to the maximum imprisonment for his dual convictions of voluntary manslaughter—seven years, eight months. Upon entering state prison, White was examined by psychiatrists who decided against prescribing therapy since, they said, Dan White had “no apparent signs” of mental disorder. White’s expected parole date: January 1984. He reportedly plans to move to Ireland after his release.
State Senator John Briggs returned to Sacramento and, though any plans for statewide office were shattered in the Prop 6 landslide, he easily won reelection in 1980. A year later, however, he stunned the capitol by announcing that he was going to resign and become a lobbyist. “Have you heard of job burnout? I’ve done it,” he told reporters. “You aren’t going to have me to kick around anymore.” The San Jose Mercury best summed up the reaction of both conservatives and liberals to the impromptu resignation with a two-word editorial that simply said, “Good riddance.”
David Goodstein largely withdrew from gay politics after Milk’s death and devoted most of his energy to organizing his own idiosyncratic marriage of the gay and human potential movements. Patterned after Werner Erhard’s est, Goodstein’s Advocate Experience gave him the opportunity to be guru to thousands, even after his failure at becoming a political leader. Jim Foster, meanwhile, aligned himself with Harry Britt to become an important fund raiser in Britt’s future campaigns. The role he had fashioned in national politics at the 1972 Democratic Convention helped bolster his party status to the point that he was northern California chairman for Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. Rick Stokes returned to his law practice, shunning most involvement in local gay politics.
Robert Milk turned up in San Francisco on the first anniversary of his brother’s assassination. He gave reporters copies of a poem he had written bemoaning his brother’s death. Later, however, he took to asking writers to pay him for interviews he granted about his early memories of his slain brother.
Joe Campbell determined to have a career as he entered his mid-forties, and joined a surveyer’s crew in Marin County. After Harvey’s death, Jack McKinley became a born-again gay liberationist, drunkenly ranting about gay politics as he moved from cheap hotel to cheap hotel. One friend says he wrote his family to announce his homosexuality; an older brother sent him a religious tract explaining the finer details of damnation awaiting sodomites. On February 14, 1980—St. Valentine’s Day—McKinley was drunk, playing a tape of one of Harvey’s political speeches, and threatening to jump off a ledge of Tom O’Horgan’s loft apartment on Broadway. Several minutes later, somebody noticed McKinley was no longer on the ledge. His broken and bloody body was found on the street, eight stories below. He was thirty-three years old, the same age that Harvey had been when the pair first fell in love in 1963. A portion of his ashes were scattered into the Hudson River off Manhattan; by his request, the rest were cast off the Golden Gate Bridge, a few miles from where Harvey’s ashes had been scattered more than a year earlier.
Scott Smith fell into a grave depression after the killing of the man who had guided his personal and professional life since he was twenty-two. Since most media attention focused on the political heirs of Harvey Milk—who had long considered Scott to be little more than the camera store’s clerk—Smith became increasingly embittered in the months after the assassination, complaining that he had never gotten due credit for propping up the business that gave Milk his political base. As executor of Harvey’s estate, Scott was saddled with Milk’s debts but none of the recognition. Friends hoped Smith’s anxieties would lessen as time distanced him from Harvey’s brutal end. But they didn’t. Finally, the city’s public health director, a longtime admirer of Harvey’s, helped Scott find some counseling, and Smith began reconstructing his life, two years after the assassination.
Milk’s last series of boyfriends fared better than his lovers. Billy Wiegardt became manager of a gay bar on Polk Street. Bob Tuttle moved to San Francisco and fell in love with a business executive from Sausalito. Doug Franks spent much of the year after the killings heeding Harvey’s advice about opening a greater “sphere of love” with pluralistic nonmonogamous relationships. Within a few months, Doug was simultaneously dating three men and two women. As Harvey insisted, Doug was honest about his multifaceted romancing with each participant. As Milk hadn’t predicted, however, this candor engendered disaster. The men turned out to be stuck more on the heterosexual models than the heterosexuals themselves, and soon split with Doug to seek a monogamous male mate. The women hung on longer but became disgruntled when the ménage narrowed to a threesome and both women left him. Franks went back to school to finish his graduate degree.
Frank Robinson toyed with writing a book about Milk but gave up on the idea and continued writing science fiction in his Castro area home. San Francisco never seemed the same to Tom Randol after Milk’s killing, so he moved to New York City and built stage props for Tom O’Horgan’s various theatrical ventures. Medora Payne left San Francisco to complete high school in England. Carl Carlson gained unwanted notoriety as the only person who had seen Dan White summon Harvey to his death. The
resulting publicity over his ties to the gay leader cost Carlson his job as an airline pilot, and he launched plans to found the first gay charter airline. Dennis Peron continued to deal marijuana and continued to get arrested for it. Finally, in 1980, he ran for supervisor on a marijuana legalization platform and garnered an impressive tally of votes, though not enough to win. The 1976 Assembly race forever soured Michael Wong on the promise of running for office, so he stuck to working for issues instead of people in his continued political activity, championing a range of causes, from neighborhood issues to anti-nuclear energy work. The ballot described his occupation as “agricultural products distributor.” John Ryckman met the unlikeliest fate of all Harvey’s friends. After his lover died, he took to spending his spare time with an old friend who had recently lost her husband; they were married several months later and Ryckman frequently joked to friends that he wished Harvey could have come to the wedding to give him away to his bride.
Harvey’s cohort from the Coors boycott, lifelong Castro denizen Allan Baird, lost a round of internecine Teamster politicking and returned to drive a truck for the San Francisco Chronicle. Within a few years of Harvey’s death, he began to give up on the dream he and Milk had once discussed, about making Castro Street a model neighborhood gays and straights could peacefully share. Not many heterosexuals stuck around. By 1980, there weren’t enough Catholic kids in the parish to justify Most Holy Redeemer’s School, so it graduated its last class and closed down. The blustering expansion of the Castro business district had transformed the gay Oz into a homophile Fisherman’s Wharf with bars and boutiques catering to gay tourists. The Castro became more tourist trap than small town. The Castro Clone became a caricature against which younger gays started revolting, just as the early Castro immigrants had revolted against the effete homosexuals of the 1960s. But few minds reared in rebellion anymore, about anything. The thousands who still came to the Castro from all over the world had their eyes set upon the smorgasbord of beautiful men, not on the panoply of injustices about which activists had once complained. Few on Castro Street talked of a new age, a better order, or a changed world. The dream of the Castro became a victim of its own success.
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So it also went with Harvey’s political legacy. The Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club quickly grew into the largest Democratic organization in California and one of the most potent and sought-after groups in San Francisco. The club’s leadership soon learned the art of power-brokering and compromise. They learned how to be responsible gay leaders, how to play ball with political bosses and machines. It became a matter of some debate whether a candidate who abrasively refused to play the game with powerful machines—a man like Harvey Milk—would be endorsed by the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.
Virtually every aspect of the San Francisco gay community laid claim to some part of Harvey’s legacy. Gay Jews used Harvey to eke out greater acceptance from the city’s Jewish establishment, while the Gay Atheist League published a number of essays discussing Milk’s atheism. Harry Britt was a socialist, so he frequently raised Harvey’s memory to defend his socialist positions. Gay Democrats used Milk’s status as a martyr to weasel concessions from the local Democratic party, while gay Republicans spent no small effort noting that the Democratic establishment had opposed Milk through most of his political career. Some of Harvey’s closer allies found great convenience in the fact that dead leaders can be counted on to say the most quotable things at the most timely occasions. Brochures were frequently dressed up with stirring Harvey Milk quotes written long after the supervisor’s demise.
Harvey’s political cronies prospered, to be sure. Though Anne Kronenberg pulled back from gay politics, she was appointed to a good-paying job in the Feinstein administration. Harry Britt’s gay militance and unbending leftist politics easily made him the city’s most controversial politician, but he carved a solid constituency among the city’s reformists and emerged as one of the top vote-getters in the citywide election of supervisors in November 1980. Cleve Jones quickly took Harvey’s place as the most media-wise—and impish—gay politico, and earned a job as an aide to the California assembly speaker, the first openly gay legislative aide in the country. The appointment, by Assemblyman Agnos, spawned speculation that Jones might one day be the first machine-anointed candidate for the assembly seat Harvey had futilely sought. Jim Rivaldo and Dick Pabich teamed to form one of the more successful political consulting firms in the city, shoring up ties with some of the very establishment politicians who had so spurned Milk in his lifetime.
Harvey’s successors proved adept at learning the skills of marketing candidates. By the 1980 election, for example, they helped engineer the citywide election of Harry Britt’s roommate-turned-aide to the community college board, implementing a strategy much like Rick Stokes’s campaign for the same post eight years earlier. The campaign relied on heavyweight political endorsements; the candidate’s brochures did not mention his homosexuality or discuss complicated issues of hope or teenagers in Altoona, Pennsylvania. As Harvey had once said of Rick Stokes’s campaign style, “You can either buy name recognition or you can earn it”; within two years of Harvey’s death, his political disciples had learned the art of buying it.
For their part, Harvey’s protégés argued that while Milk played the politics of the outsider, they were faced with the even tougher task of playing the politics of power. If some carped that Harvey’s inner circle did not remain faithful to their mentor’s populism, few argued that the successes Milk forged remained. Harvey’s political heirs shored up gay power in dozens of subtle ways not apparent on the street level. Every political endorsing organization in San Francisco knew that at least one acknowledged gay candidate should appear on any slate, right down to the conservative Chamber of Commerce which in 1980 endorsed a gay Republican for supervisor. The sight of mustachioed young men in tight straight-legged jeans became increasingly common in City Hall too, as the civil service bureaucracy started assimilating gays into its ranks, as it had drawn in so many other minority groups before. If the spirit seemed absent from the San Francisco gay politics of the 1980s, it was because the spirit that grew in the Castro Street gay community had dimmed as well. The wave of history that crested so dramatically in the late 1970s could not sustain itself indefinitely; like all waves, it fell back.
Some did occasionally remember that a glimmer of idealism had once lit up the street. Perhaps that nearly forgotten hope for a changed world helped to fuel a certain seething, undefined anger which still lurked like an inarticulate memory in the hearts of Castro Street gays, years after the drama of Harvey Milk had passed into history. In the end, however, San Francisco had a Harvey Milk Library, a Harvey Milk Arts Center, a Harvey Milk Democratic Club and a Harvey Milk Plaza on the corner where Milk had announced his first candidacy for the Board of Supervisors in 1973; but on Castro Street, businessmen were largely concerned with business, politicians were largely concerned with candidates, and homosexuals were largely concerned with sex. The old slogans were already sounding hollow the night at City Hall when police cars were exploding into fireballs and a lesbian leader shouted “Harvey Milk lives,” and somebody yelled back, “Harvey Milk’s not alive. He’s dead, you fool.”
If Harvey Milk lived on Castro Street, it was mainly in the memories of the lives he touched. Even if he did not move society the great length toward final understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, he did demonstrate one significant point: He had spent the last years of his life clinging tenaciously to the naive notion that one person could change the world. Because he so dumbly believed he could change the world, Harvey Milk did.
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To a fledgling national movement still starved for legends, Harvey Milk’s legacy was less ambiguous. In October 1979, over one hundred thousand marched on Washington as Harvey had wanted, and thousands of them carried placards and portraits invoking the slain leader’s memory. Harvey Milk had clearly become the first martyr of the young gay mov
ement. These people, of course, knew little about the particulars of Milk’s life, only what they had heard about the Harvey Milk of legend, a story that could be summarized in a few sentences: Milk was a gay leader who talked about hope, struggled for his political successes against all odds, and won. Since he was strong and found victory, he had to be killed, because, most gays knew, society does not want homosexuals to be strong and succeed. That Harvey Milk’s killer should be an all-American boy and ex-cop added poetic embellishment to this tale, for the thousands who had come to revere Harvey Milk as a martyr knew all too well that hating homosexuals is a solid part of the all-American ethos. Since the killer was heterosexual and the victim was homosexual, it only made sense to gays that the killer found succor in the criminal justice system; heterosexuals had long been free to violate homosexuals with impunity. The revenge of the White Night Riots provided a measure of success for the legend’s ending as well—for the politically committed, revenge is better than resignation.
The entire story of the life and death of Harvey Milk rang so true to the experiences of gays throughout the country because it already seemed a part of the homosexual collective unconscious, even before it happened; that it happened to one man in San Francisco was a mere formality. It had been happening for a long time. This is why a politician who had lost three out of four of his elections and served only forty-six weeks in public office ultimately became a legend. His story already existed in the lives and minds of millions of gays; had it not been Harvey Milk in San Francisco, the legend would have settled on someone else, in another city, at another time. Harvey’s sense of staging merely ensured that his legend would also prove good theater. So for years after Harvey’s death, when dull moments fell over a gay demonstration and the old slogans felt thin, someone could shout, “Harvey Milk lives,” and it would not be hollow rhetoric; Harvey Milk did live, as a metaphor for the homosexual experience in America.