The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  * * *

  “Y’know here in Dallas, you won’t find a Baptist firm hiring even a Methodist,” businessmen counseled Harvey as he started applying for jobs. “Either change your name to something like Miller or go to work for a Jewish firm.”

  The advice startled Harvey, but he did wrangle a job as an assistant credit manager—at a Jewish-owned department store. He lost the post when his boss’s son graduated from college and needed a job. The best employment Harvey found after that was selling used sewing machines to families who couldn’t afford them. That way, the buyer made a couple payments, defaulted, and the machine was repossessed to sell again.

  The scam disgusted Milk. He complained that it was the only job they’d let a Jew have in Dallas. Joe told him he had a persecution complex. After Minnie’s first heart attack, Harvey talked more about going back to New York. Finally, at a performance of Swan Lake, Harvey announced his decision: They were going back east.

  Harvey got a job as an actuarial statistician at the Great American Insurance Company. Joe went back to gilding furniture. Between Harvey’s $140 weekly salary and Joe’s $90, they could rent a comfortable apartment at Ninety-sixth Street and Central Park West. Joe decorated the apartment in late-fifties splendor. Harvey bought a pet toucan he named Bill and got on with adoring Joe, who seemed to get more handsome every year.

  One morning Joe woke up to find a cup of hot chocolate, a glass of orange juice, and a sweet pastry sitting on the apartment windowsill, with a note: “Someone is waiting for you outside.” Across the street in Central Park stood a snowman. “Hello” was spelled out in the snow at his feet. Joe finally had his fantasy kingdom. Both knew it was going to last forever.

  On their second anniversary in 1958, Harvey wrote one of his typical love notes:

  To my Joesan,

  To me you are my warrior—

  You are my knight—

  You are my day—

  May the many many days and years pass pleasantly, happy and rewarding, for we have many years to spend together—the first two have swept by and with each I have found I love you 365 days more and 365 times harderuminiumuns.

  Your dollbabysan,

  Harveysan.

  If there was oppression of homosexuals, it wasn’t of any concern to Joe or Harvey. They had a beautiful apartment, a box at the opera, season tickets for the ballet, and regular trips to the beaches of Puerto Rico. Who was oppressed?

  Joe’s mother died suddenly after that second anniversary. Soon after, doctors told Minnie Milk she had only a few years to live. Not one to waste a minute of it, Minnie insisted that she and Bill move to Manhattan so she’d at least have something interesting to look at out her window. She started taking up all the interests she’d been putting off, began guitar and singing lessons and got active in senior citizens’ groups.

  For Christmas, Minnie knitted Joe and Harvey matching afghans and crocheted booties. The pair did everything as a couple; they were treated as a couple; but Harvey insisted it would kill his mother if he ever brought up the fact he was gay.

  Milk still had his unpredictable moments. At a Manhattan restaurant in the late fifties, a patron muttered “faggot” one night when Joe and Harvey walked by. Milk reached over a divider, grabbed the offender’s collar, started shouting epithets of his own, and shook the man until his chair trembled. Joe was embarrassed. And surprised.

  Harvey was far more militant on any matter relating to Jews. Joe invited a German friend to dinner one night and Milk quickly turned the conversation to the Holocaust. What did the guest think about Buchenwald? When Joe’s friend said he didn’t know about the death camps until after the war, Harvey flew into a rampage: “How could you have lived in Germany and not known what was going on?” he shouted. “How could you not have been aware of the carnage? Huh? Were you deaf? Dumb? Blind? Huh?” Joe was now convinced Harvey had a persecution complex. Harvey told Joe he was anti-Semitic.

  Harvey reserved virtually all his affection for Joe, however, having few friends beyond an older man he worked with at Great American, Harvey’s surrogate father figure. Harvey had Joe’s teeth capped, took endless rolls of photos of Joe’s finely tuned body, and showered him with small gifts. Harvey confided that a plastic surgeon had developed a certain fondness for him shortly after Milk’s release from the navy. He’d fixed Harvey’s nose, but Milk turned down the suggestion that his oversized ears be tucked in, thereby saving the feature that political cartoonists would later find so useful.

  Life for Harvey and Joe fell into predictable patterns. Every Saturday, the pair took laundry to the Chinese cleaners and ran errands. Every Sunday, they slept late, ate Harvey’s matzoh meal pancakes, and lay in bed, reading the Times.

  It would always be that way. Joe thought so even after he withdrew from Harvey sexually, not understanding Harvey’s voracious sexual appetite. Joe had always considered sex little more than an easy way to get attention. Harvey, meanwhile, threw himself into the act like he was some marathon runner in the last days of training for the big race. He could never get enough. Joe felt he was a device for Harvey’s pleasure and pulled back. Harvey pleaded and begged, shouted and threw tantrums.

  Dissatisfaction faced Milk on all fronts by late 1962. His job was boring and there was nothing Harvey hated more than being bored. He had to make a break. He decided to quit and get a new job. Joe was ironing shirts one afternoon when Harvey walked in the room.

  “Have you thought about moving out?” he asked with characteristic tact.

  “Yeah,” Joe said, “but I don’t want to.”

  “Maybe you better think about it some more.”

  Joe moved out a few weeks later. That was how Harvey’s longest relationship ended. Harvey regretted the decision immediately. He sent long notes imploring Joe to come back: “Now that I can no longer see or hear you, I have no desire to fight for a job, no desire to make it good, no desire for anything.”

  Joe knew Harvey would make it; he’d just select somebody else.

  “What did Helen Keller’s parents do to punish her?”

  “Rearrange the furniture. You told me that one yesterday.” Craig Rodwell looked at the alarm clock next to his phone. Sure enough, it was 9:30 exactly.

  “No,” giggled Harvey, pausing dramatically.

  “Okay, okay. What did they do?”

  “They made her read the waffle iron.”

  With boyfriends like Harvey, who needs an alarm clock? thought Craig as he pulled himself from bed. The relationship certainly had its advantages, especially for a boy who had run away from the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago at seventeen to savor big-city homosexual life in Manhattan. Besides the frequent love notes, there were Harvey’s personally guided Sunday tours of the museums, Saturday nights at Milk’s box at the opera and cozy evenings in his Upper West Side apartment where Harvey struggled for just the right texture in the sauce for the chicken and broccoli. Every morning at precisely 9:30 A.M., Rodwell got his wake-up call so he wouldn’t be late for his ballet classes. The calls always opened with one of Harvey’s sick jokes.

  Harvey’s good humor faded only once in those early romantic days of his relationship with Craig. Harvey mentioned watching Joe Campbell move out of the apartment a few months before, pulling his possessions out the building’s front door while Harvey watched from their apartment window several stories above. “I wanted to jump out the window to follow him,” Harvey told Craig. But Harvey didn’t dwell on the past and Craig spent most of his time being utterly enchanted by his new boyfriend.

  For twenty-two-year-old Rodwell, meat loaf had previously been the most exotic item of his cuisine and Chicago Cubs games were the closest he ever got to cultural events. The affair with Harvey came straight from a Hollywood romance, with Milk cast as the ardent, cultured, witty, and, by Rodwell’s standards, rich suitor. In all, Harvey seemed a Prince Charming.

  Though Milk was only ten years Rodwell’s senior, he genuinely enjoyed the role of teacher and charmer. It w
ould be to such boyish-looking men in their late teens and early twenties that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life. But this relationship would be different, haunted—and ultimately doomed—by strange new ideas that tied homosexuality to politics, ideas that both repelled and attracted the thirty-two-year-old Milk.

  * * *

  A soft September breeze blew in from Lake Michigan. The cherry tops of Chicago police cars converged on the corner of Clark and Schiller, dazing fourteen-year-old Craig Rodwell. He spent two or three nights a week on this strip. Always the same. He’d walk aimlessly around the block until he caught the eye of a passerby or a man slowly driving his car down the street. Tonight he had picked up a forty-year-old Italian dishwasher who had taken him to a nearby fleabag hotel. Afterward, they had washed—the first time Craig had ever seen scented soap—and the older man was politely walking Craig to the elevated train stop.

  Then the police cars swept upon them. The older man insisted he was Craig’s uncle, but a fatherly patrolman took the frightened fourteen-year-old aside and sternly ordered, “Tell me the truth right now.” Craig did. The older man got a four-year sentence for his “crime against nature.” Craig got two years’ probation.

  Craig had spent most of his childhood in a private boys’ school playing doctor and, later, necking among boys. It seemed natural, even romantic. Only when thrust into the Chicago public schools did he learn that the nature of his sexual longing was taboo. The contradictions tore at his conscience. Here he and the many Jewish kids at the liberal high school were cheering on the blacks who demanded to go to white public schools in Little Rock. Even if you were different, you were equal, his civics teacher told the class. Craig was different too, but instead of being equal, he was called a faggot. He saw a gentle Italian man go to prison for four years, his life destroyed. It made him angry. Anger bred defiance.

  He kept cruising the streets and struggled to graduate from high school a year early. By August 1958 Rodwell, seventeen, was on his way to the one place where he heard other queers lived, Greenwich Village. He set up housekeeping with a buddy he had met in his first weeks at the YMCA, Collin, a teenager taking refuge from Helena, Arkansas. He soon learned that gay life in New York was no less risky than Chicago.

  One night of cruising at the popular Washington Square park in the Village brought Rodwell face-to-face with a police officer. “Keep moving, faggot,” the officer tersely ordered.

  “This is harassment of homosexuals,” objected Rodwell, with less discretion than valor. That night in jail police filed by Rodwell’s cell to examine this defiant homosexual like some exotic curiosity. “Whats’a matter, lose your purse?” one asked. “Whats’a matter, lose your dress?”

  “Whats’a matter,” Rodwell shot back, “never seen a faggot before?”

  Charges, of course, were dismissed. They generally were in such cases, since the purpose of arrests was not the enforcement of any particular law but the broader social goal of keeping homosexuals in their place. The ongoing scrapes with the police did, however, give Rodwell some radical notions that kept him sparring with the tall, urbane man he met months later cruising Central Park West.

  “Yes, Harvey, you’ve got a great job, a nice apartment, all the kitchenware a queen could ever dream of,” Craig argued. “Everything but the chance to be openly who you are, like a normal human being.”

  “I can’t let it out—it would kill my parents,” Milk insisted adamantly.

  “Excuses, they’re all excuses,” retorted Rodwell, pointing out that the United States would be in far shorter supply of living mothers if that were the case.

  “When you get older, you’ll understand,” snapped Harvey, using the line with which he usually concluded such arguments.

  The mushy romantic moments dominated many more days of the relationship than the arguments, but the debates kept arising. Harvey seemed intrigued with Rodwell’s ideas, though he frequently shuddered when Craig suggested such things as holding hands in public. In more abstract conversations, Craig argued that if only homosexuals banded together and pushed for equal treatment, as blacks were doing with their march on Washington, things could change.

  Rodwell became active in the Mattachine Society, New York City’s only gay group of that time. Chapters had been popping up since 1950, named after the Italian Matachinos, the court jesters who, behind a mask, could speak truth to otherwise obdurate rulers. Rodwell decided he’d help bolster attendance at meetings, so he and his Arkansas roommate hand-wrote notices of upcoming Mattachine events and dropped them in at the Greenwich Village apartments that bore two male names on the mailbox. The unsolicited leafleting infuriated Milk.

  “You shouldn’t do that to people,” Milk shouted. “Getting those in mailboxes will make people paranoid that everyone knows about them being gay.”

  “You’re just thinking about how you would react if it showed up in your mailbox and you thought somebody might suspect you were gay,” Rodwell later remembered arguing back.

  Harvey loved to argue and, like his father, he was pigheaded. This proved especially true in politics. A staunch conservative, Milk was then looking forward to Barry Goldwater’s getting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. That could get the true conservative message out to the nation, he thought. His fiercest argument with Rodwell was not about gay equality, but President Kennedy’s move against the steel companies. The raw use of federal power in the economy made Harvey’s blood boil. Rodwell ended the argument by calling Harvey a fascist and stomping out of the apartment.

  Craig should have seen the end coming. Harvey was too set in his ways. It came soon after Rodwell made a Labor Day trip to the gay cruising section of Riis Park. About twice a year, police swept down on the gay section, enforcing an archaic law that demanded male swimmers be clad in suits that extended from the navel to over the thigh.

  “This is harassment of homosexuals,” Rodwell shouted. He was promptly arrested for both indecent exposure and inciting a riot. In court, the judge glanced down at the young man and dismissed the incitement charge. What about the other offense? Craig started to explain how the police routinely used the charge to harass homosexuals. Homosexuals? At the mention of the offensive word, the judge slammed down his gavel. Nothing more need be said. Rodwell went to jail for three days.

  During Craig’s disappearance Harvey kept nervously calling Collin to see when his young paramour would resurface. Rodwell still recalls the curious look that crept across Milk’s face when he saw his head—the police had shaved it. Craig explained about jail and the angry judge.

  “Harvey never wanted to talk about it much, but I could see he was terrified by what I had done,” Rodwell recalled. “Here he had this carefully constructed life. Everything was in its place. He was terrified that someone might find out he was gay because he was going with me, and I was branded.”

  The early morning wake-up calls became less frequent: every other day, then twice and then once a week. Then no more. Harvey Milk shifted his attentions to other young men with less troublesome ideas; he had carefully compartmentalized his life for years and he wasn’t about to change now. Craig Rodwell was alone and confused.

  Dazed, being lured into a sweet, comfortable sleep. So relaxed. But he had to get the note. The note. He had to put it where Collin would find it. For two weeks, Craig Rodwell had carefully planned that moment. He quit school, gave his two-week notice on the job, bought a bottle of turenol and then waited for Thursday night, when Collin went to Times Square to catch his usual diet of bargain 1930s movies.

  Collin had left an hour ago. Everything went fine. But the note. Craig had taken half the bottle, fifteen pills, and then remembered he had left the note on a chair. The note instructed Collin to call Craig’s aunt, so his mother would not have to hear the news from the police. God, Craig hated the police. Collin might not see the note on the chair, so Craig had to put it on the living room table. Jesus, he was tired. He’d finish the pills when he got back from the chair.
He had to get the note over to the table.

  * * *

  A boring double bill, Collin thought, so he left the theater early. He found Craig stretched out between a chair and the living room couch. Craig remembered waking up hours later in Bellevue Hospital where a police officer stood over him, waiting to take a report. The sight of a cop infuriated him so much he bolted upright in bed, breaking the restraints. Months of sedatives and shock therapy followed. Rodwell groped for a purpose and it finally occurred to him. He would do something for the gay movement.

  Harvey visited Craig once in the hospital. Rodwell next saw Milk where the pair had first met, cruising Central Park West. Ever the pragmatist, Harvey suggested an afternoon tryst. “I was still so madly in love with him,” says Rodwell. “I got such a thrill out of saying no.”

  * * *

  “Yes, I used to sell insurance with Harvey Milk, back almost twenty-five years ago.” The septuagenarian’s voice is tired and worn now, but the crankiness subsides for a moment as he falls back on his old memories. He was one of the few people with whom Milk had both a professional and personal friendship from the 1950s through the 1960s, the kind of gay father figure that many young homosexual professionals seek out early in their careers.

  “I was sick once, in the hospital for two weeks. Harvey came in every single day with all the paperwork I needed. Kept me up to date at work in the hospital and then nursed me when I got home. He was a kind man, so gentle.”

  But he doesn’t have anything to say about the Harvey Milk people read about in the newspapers. That was a different person. What does politics have to do with homosexuality? The old man is afraid that by talking he might be exposed. It’s not that he has any family left. No friends to shock either. As far as exposing his lover, well, they were together for twenty-three years and he passed on a few months back. He’s retired, so there’s no job to lose. It’s just that their condition wasn’t anything he ever talked about his whole life, so why start now? All homosexuals his age wanted to do was live undetected, be grateful if they passed, and then die, he explains. That should be easy to understand.