The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  Though thoroughly conventional, he sometimes took a maverick path, escorting a black woman friend to a school dance if he felt like it. One of his better friends was a black basketball player who, like Milk, took up the somewhat suspicious pastime of jotting verses of poetry.

  But that was about as suspicious as Milk ever got. Most of his grades were B’s or C’s as he plodded on. By his senior year, he was State College News sports editor. That gave him the chance to travel with the basketball team, which lost all but four or five games in Division IV that year. “We have the pleasure without the pressure,” quipped Milk about his team’s unwillingness to win. On the way home from the games, Harvey could always be found in the back of the bus, the life of the party.

  That was Harvey. Nobody knows what he did on those weekends away from campus. On a job application thirteen years later, Harvey told of a 1950 disorderly conduct arrest in Albany. No one got suspicious when he abruptly resigned his job as sports editor in the middle of his senior year. Everybody liked Harvey and when he was handed his diploma on a warm June day in 1951, he just left and nobody ever heard from him again.

  * * *

  The camaraderie of the class of ’51 stuck, especially with the alumni of the Kappa Beta fraternity and Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority. Many kept in touch, sporadically updating addresses and gossip about other grads. Instead of ending up as the intelligentsia of tomorrow, they went on to teach in grade schools and junior colleges around the country.

  Paul Buchman spent a lot of Tuesday and Thursday nights working with Harvey on the State College News sports section. He’s fond of telling the story of how Life magazine surveyed the college graduating classes of his era, rating their subsequent contributions to American life on a scale of zero to four. The class of ‘51 was the only zero, Buchman says. “We weren’t the lost generation, we were the blank generation. The class of ‘51 didn’t have any unusual characteristics. We didn’t have anything that stood out. We fell into a rut that had no character at all. Harvey and I were just like that—we were ordinary.”

  Doris Brody from Hillel ended up marrying Harvey’s barracks-mate Howard Rosman and they settled back in Valley Stream, two LIRR stops south of Woodmere. “He was never thought of as a possible queer—that’s what you called them then—he was a man’s man,” recalls Mrs. Doris Rosman. “In our day, of course, people were thought to be gay if they were effeminate—or if they announced it. Of course, nobody announced it in those days.”

  Another alumnus who kept in contact moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and supplied classmates with newspaper clippings about Harvey’s budding political career. Christian Lievestro didn’t have a hard time imagining what Harvey’s life had been like at Albany State. “Harvey was discreet—and sensible,” says Lievestro, class of ‘50. “We didn’t know about each other being gay. Of course nobody did in those days. You certainly never talked about it or let on because you were there to be a teacher, and it could destroy your chances at that.” Gay life was a melange of “chance encounters” and “incidental things,” he says. The braver gays joined the glee club where drunken parties might lead to that one desparate moment of gratification, followed by the days of regret, and, more saliently, fear that the secret would get out.

  But Lievestro found that by the late 1970s, most of his Albany State contemporaries seemed downright proud of Harvey Milk. He was one of the few remarkable people from the class of ‘51. Some of Harvey’s fraternity brothers even seem somewhat hurt that Milk never reached back. Sure they didn’t end up Nobel laureates as they had once hoped, but they were from the liberal middle-class Jewish mold. They didn’t call gays queers anymore. They wanted to pat Harvey on the back. He’d always been a winner.

  Harvey had something special even back then; politicians later called it charisma. “Like I’m talking to you now. His face and his laugh come perfectly to mind, even though I haven’t seen him in thirty years,” says Doris Rosman. “In fact, I haven’t seen anyone who has seen him since we graduated.”

  * * *

  Harvey makes such a handsome sailor. Who to match him up with?

  The question buzzed through the wedding reception as Harvey grabbed girl after girl to dance them through the celebration of Robert Milk’s marriage. Robert and Audrey were a handsome couple, but Bob suffered in comparison to his tall, athletic younger brother, who looked positively dashing in his navy dress whites. The women marveled at his grace and humor. Everybody talked excitedly of how he actually put on those windowed helmets and thick wet suits like you see in the movies, to be dropped thousands of feet into the deep, silent ocean.

  Minnie and Bill Milk, both in their mid-fifties, watched their sons proudly. Their eldest son was married, and tonight Harvey, who still worshipped Minnie, showed himself to be every inch a lady’s man. The other relatives nodded approvingly and agreed. But, they added, Harvey better start thinking of a wife. He’s only got another year in the navy and it’s time he got his feet out of the water and on the ground. As Harvey methodically swung each girl across the dance floor, the relatives pondered the question: Who?

  Other Albany State grads generally found the military to be a less than desirable aftermath to their comfortable liberal arts education, but Harvey saw the history of the world hinging on the outcome of the Korean War. He knew that he could make a difference.

  At extended dinner-table arguments, he held that the communists were this far from grabbing all of Asia. They had to be stopped. Robert argued that the country had seen enough blood in World War II. Harvey, Bob thought, was just another flag-waver. Like his father, Harvey only got more stubborn in arguments. Harvey would join the navy, like his mom and dad.

  Milk signed up just three months after graduation. His navy record shows a fast-paced advancement. Within eight months of enlistment, Milk landed a stint at Officers Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. The navy record Milk described on a job application showed that he rose rapidly through the ranks: communications officer, lieutenant junior grade, and served as chief petty officer of the U.S.S. Kittiwake, a San Diego—based aircraft carrier that cruised the Pacific. Harvey was always convinced he got the assignment because he coached his ship’s wrestling team to a championship.

  Harvey’s first love in the navy was deep-sea diving. Before his stint was over, he was even teaching younger sailors how to master the unwieldly, old-fashioned diving suits on the ocean floor.

  Harvey later told voters that despite all his accomplishments, the navy dishonorably discharged him after discovering his homosexuality. To be sure, exposure was a constant threat to his career. Like all branches of the service, the navy discharged thousands of gays on the most flimsy evidence. The fifties anti-gay pogroms drove untold numbers to lead lives of disgrace and sometimes to commit suicide. But the Harvey Milk of this era was no political activist, and according to available evidence, he played the more typical balancing act between discretion and his sex drive.

  The latter frequently won out. Harvey’s officer status allowed him the privilege of his own apartment off base in San Diego. He and his gay friends partied away their weekend passes there, cruising the main strip near the base for hitchhiking sailors. The huge numbers of military men leaving for Korea strained San Diego’s standard housing. Thousands slept on the concrete floors of the local YMCAs. “Hey, sailor, do you want to sleep on a concrete floor or a bed?” asked Harvey Milk, the patriot, after a perusal of the available material. The guests often would not know that Milk’s apartment had only one bed until they walked in the door.

  For all the promise Milk showed as officer material, his enthusiasm for the service rapidly dimmed. When he ran into his old Bayshore High basketball buddy Dick Brown in Manhattan, Milk seemed far less the gung-ho sailor of the early days. In Tokyo he ran into a Kappa Beta alumnus, Max Fallek, and complained about all the bullshit. Why did he have to take orders from so many demonstrable assholes?

  This, of course, didn’t stop the manly young sailor from drawing e
very ounce of theatricality from his natty dress whites. At his brother’s wedding reception, he properly charmed all the eligible young ladies and then announced he had to leave early to get back to his ship. As the band blared “Anchor’s Aweigh,” Milk cocked his head, tipped his hat and, with a stiff military salute, marched out the door in tempo. Harvey always had a sense of staging, Bob thought.

  Harvey knew by then that his future was not with the navy. He was too headstrong for the bullshit. For the first time in his life, he had also spent a considerable amount of time whooping it up with other gays. He knew a better life waited in the civilian world. Harvey lasted his three years and eleven months, getting the usual month cut off his enlistment because of his model behavior.

  * * *

  The flirtation with danger. All the experts in the 1950s insisted that this indeed represented a key characteristic of the homosexual species. They obviously loved flirting with danger. They must love it, since, after all, being a homosexual meant facing so much danger.

  In the fifties going to a gay bar in just about any city in the United States meant grappling with the possibility of a raid by police. Just serving a homosexual a drink in states like New York and California represented a crime for which a bar could be shut down. Raids engendered a host of messy ramifications, since police rarely let such an arrest pass without calling the victim’s employer to solemnly explain their employee was in a business frequented by homosexuals. The fear of bar raids pushed many gays into cruising parks, making themselves easy prey for plainclothesmen out to chalk up arrests for soliciting for deviant purposes. In California that meant permanent registration with the police as a sex offender.

  More savvy homosexuals took to socializing at home with large private parties. These parties, too, were sometimes raided. Few of the charges from parks, bars, and parties ever stuck, of course. But what the hell? The queers were kept in line. A number of policemen’s families could also count on steak dinners from the practice, since there were always enough men with pocket money to persuade an officer that the court docket need not be cluttered by minor offenses.

  Suicides were a common postscript to the raids and subsequent exposure as a homosexual. The suicides, like the enticement to danger, only served to prove that homosexuals were a self-destructive, unstable lot, a cancer on the social body. These certainly were not the kind of people who should be permitted responsible positions in society, much less a license to socialize freely. You could not legislate against the existence of homosexuality, but you could legislate against the practice. You could send police to places where homosexuals “recruited” the young, or places where “community morals” were flaunted. You could do this, and it was routinely done.

  Harvey Milk, for one, did not like to live dangerously. At a raid, he’d be the guy slipping out the back door, not arguing with the police. Like most men of his generation, Milk assiduously stuck to the double life he had carefully followed since his high school days. To family, friends, and colleagues, he was Harvey Milk the joker. In college and in the navy, he was always an ordinary guy. Maybe a little stubborn when he argued politics, or when he argued anything. But other than that, Harvey was a funny, friendly, guy.

  Yet, during those early years, Harvey was wrestling against a strong urge to bring all facets of his life together. Though his life bore all the trappings of a gay everyman, he could never settle into the double life homosexuals were supposed to lead and for his first forty years, he was something of a drifter. It was as if Harvey spent his first four decades trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up. All the while, he delicately walked the tightrope that kept him above the danger, that thin line stretched between the poles of sexual desire and conventionality.

  It was August 1955 when Harvey got out of the navy, but the world had changed little since the day he had been arrested in Central Park in August 1947. Being homosexual was still dangerous business. Harvey would not flirt with danger. He soon found a lover.

  * * *

  The hot July sun darted on Joe Campbell’s mischievous dark eyes, entrancing Harvey Milk, who lay near Campbell and his friends at the gay section of Riis Park Beach in Queens. With his thick dark hair combed back, except for the waterfall curl on his forehead, the nineteen-year-old Campbell looked a lot like James Dean, only more handsome, and Harvey couldn’t take his eyes off him.

  Campbell had first started wending his way toward the gay subculture in 1945 amid the tattered seats of the Southland Theater on Chicago’s south side. Sometimes, he looked up to the theater’s ceiling, where stars twinkled down and clouds drifted lazily by, and he pretended he was in a fantasy world, some kingdom beyond care. Not in the Southland Theater, ducking under old men’s coats for a quarter.

  That was nine-year-old Joe Campbell’s introduction to gay life. Under the coats for a quarter, staring up at the theater’s ceiling at the projected images of stars and clouds, wishing himself into a magic kingdom.

  The guys started beating him up because he liked playing with girls. Joe always envied the girls, who could play house and be the people who were taken care of, protected. The guys’ favorite trick was to take Joe, whack him around some, and then stick him headfirst in a garbage can. Joe learned he could get attention, even affection and a quarter, from the men who sat nervously in the Southland Theater. That’s what being homosexual meant—getting attention without getting beat up.

  Even without the daily fights, Joe was fated to a hard childhood. His father had died in 1937 when he was a year old, leaving his wife, Theotha Campbell, to bring up the five children alone. Theo was strong, so she managed; her staunchly fundamentalist family in Tennessee reminded her that her name, after all, meant “from God.” Theo moved often. Joe, the youngest, lived in a half dozen cities in as many years after his sexual awakening in Chicago. When Joe was fourteen, the family finally settled in Jamaica, Long Island.

  Joe walked down to a neighborhood park one night and stumbled on a group of teenage boys who called themselves funny names like Miss Thing and Lady Burma. They easily welcomed Joe into their clique and soon receded further into the park where, under the eaves of an aging bandstand, Lady Burma modeled a rayon taffeta gown with a plunging backline. He had just lifted it from Woolworth’s that day.

  That was the first time Joe realized there were other boys like him. He wasn’t just some isolated kid who had happened to find a couple of horny men with quarters to spare. Joe’s new friends took the adolescent to Greenwich Village and showed him that there were, in fact, many more men like themselves. Not all of them wore taffeta gowns, either. Many of them were at first reluctant to approach a boy who looked barely past puberty, but Joe had dark, intense eyes that bespoke vulnerable sensuality and a firm, muscular build that gained better definition as each month brought him nearer manhood. He soon became popular.

  By the time he was fifteen, Joe had dropped out of P.S. 170 in Queens and taken a job as a Western Union delivery boy. He learned about the hustling scene where boys his age could earn far more than a quarter for their efforts. He was taken in by a bar owner and discovered, for the first time, what the good life could be like. Being a homosexual meant being a member of a small exclusive club, something you had over everybody else, finally.

  When Joe Campbell went to Riis Beach one hot July day in late summer in 1956, he didn’t notice the tall, handsome man with the finely sculpted nose on the blanket next to him, as he and his friends talked excitedly about meeting at a bus depot before hitting a Jamaica gay bar that night. Joe did not remember seeing the athletic older man at the bus depot either, or on the bus. He does remember their first dance, the warm moist spot that spread near the man’s zipper, the embarrassed apology, the next morning when the man virtually ordered Joe to have sex with him, and the quick decision that Joe Campbell was the lover he was looking for. A few weeks later, Joe left home and moved into Harvey Milk’s apartment in suburban Rego Park.

  Joe, nineteen, had at last found someone to
take care of and protect him. Harvey Milk, twenty-six, found someone who needed him. “It was a selection basically,” Joe Campbell said later. “Harvey selected me and I was in the market to be selected.” That was how Joe and Harvey started what would be the longest relationship in either of their lives.

  Harvey taught math and history at Hewlitt High School near Woodmere, coaching basketball every day after school. Joe painted gold leaf on the ornate furniture with which gays of the 1950s liked to decorate their apartments. Even after they were living together, Harvey courted Joe with gushy love poems and impromptu gifts. Notes were addressed and signed with “-san” suffixes to both names. They spoke baby talk to each other, adding strings of nonsense syllables like “-uminimuns” to every word, as they cooed away their evenings in front of the television.

  They quickly settled into a safe middle-class marriage. Harvey accepted nothing short of complete monogamy. Their outings were to the opera, ballet, and museums—not gay bars. Harvey was accepted into Joe’s family. “We had a Jewish man here in this house once, standing right where you’re standing,” explained Joe’s grandmother hospitably when the lovers took a trip to the Campbell family hometown of Veto, Alabama. “Of course,” she added, “he was invited in by my father. That must have been, well, fifty years ago.”

  The topic of homosexuality of course never arose during visits to either Joe’s or Harvey’s families. Joe Campbell still thought that Bill Milk seemed uncomfortable around him. But Minnie was concerned that the young man looked skinny, so she cheerfully made sure Joe kept eating when the new couple visited the elder Milks’ household.

  For all the stability Milk gained in his domestic life, he remained unsure about what to do professionally. He quickly tired of teaching. Besides, that was a risky career that could easily be destroyed by even a rumor of homosexuality. He had never liked New York’s cold weather, so, by June 1957, Harvey told Joe they would be moving to Dallas. Joe spent that summer working as a Good Humor man. Harvey hawked fruits and vegetables for a cousin’s business. They saved up enough money to buy a push-button Plymouth Savoy in September and they were on their way.