by Randy Shilts
“Excuse me,” the old man says. “I’m just from a different generation.” But it’s also the generation Harvey Milk came from, he stresses. Once, a long time ago.
* * *
Harvey was one of the lucky ones of his generation. At least he had lovers, knew other gay men, and could pursue sex and romance. These alternatives were available only to gays who lived in a handful of major American cities. Most homosexuals simply lived without. But even the lucky ones like Harvey paid the price of vigilance for their liberty. The constant fear of the loose phrase, the wrong pronoun, the chance moment, the misspoken word that might give it all away.
three
Judy Garland’s Dead
“I came to New York so I could suck cock.”
John Galen McKinley delighted in telling Harvey that this was the sole explanation of why at sixteen he decided to quit high school, jump a Greyhound bus, and leave rural Hagerstown, Maryland, for the gay scene in Greenwich Village he’d heard rumors of.
Milk’s friends immediately noted the physical resemblance McKinley bore to Joe Campbell. The mix of Scottish, Cherokee, and French-Canadian blood in Jack’s background yielded deep sultry eyes, thick dark hair, and a compact build. Lodging came easy in New York, first with Tom O’Horgan, an entertainer who had made a small mark in the lounge circuit by telling jokes as he strummed a harp. By 1963, O’Horgan had gone bohemian and was trying his hand at experimental theater. McKinley had lived with O’Horgan for only a few weeks when he came in one day to announce that a handsome businessman twice his age was vying for his affection.
O’Horgan dismissed the news, thinking Jack was trying to make him jealous. He was relieved when the suitor materialized, since he was already worried that the sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. If Jack was indeed dangling the new boyfriend merely to tempt O’Horgan’s devotion, Jack had vastly underestimated his new pursuer’s tenacity.
Within a few weeks, McKinley moved into Harvey Milk’s Upper West Side apartment. They bought a dog they named Trick, a cat they called Trade, and settled into a middle-class domestic marriage. At thirty-three, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.
Only months before, the insurance job had become so unbearable that one payday Milk collected his check, walked out at lunch, cashed it and never went back. Harvey never bothered with niceties like two weeks’ notice once he made up his mind to do something. He finagled a job as a researcher in the information center of Bache & Company, a Wall Street investment firm. The job allowed him to use his sharp memory, his knack for math, and, most significantly, his uncanny intuitions about social and business trends that could influence investment futures. He rose rapidly. Within a year he was the information center supervisor. Soon he was issuing a daily report that provided updated tips for Bache’s offices throughout the country.
Milk’s success intrigued Monty Gordon, the man who had hired him. Gordon had spent years watching the men who took the entry-level jobs in the information center. He could instinctively pick out who would make it on Wall Street and who wouldn’t. Harvey had covered up the years of drifting on his job application, concealing his jumps from teaching to Dallas by saying he had worked years at his dad’s store. Nevertheless, from the first day Monty Gordon met Milk, he had one assessment—Harvey was a drifter, not cut from the Wall Street mold. He might wear three-piece suits, but Milk seemed somehow unsettled, as if he still didn’t know what he actually wanted to do with his life. You could always depend on Harvey, Gordon thought; he’d always get the job done with flair and a personal touch, and his advice was literally making millions—for other people. But as for Harvey himself, Gordon sensed that he was uncertain, still not committed to any course. It was a race between talent and wanderlust, and Monty Gordon was betting against talent.
Milk kept his sexuality a closely guarded secret at work. Only one person managed to break the barriers between Harvey’s personal and professional life and it wasn’t by Milk’s own choice. Jim Bruton, a Bache vice-president, met Milk when Harvey approached him for authorization to open an investment account as a guardian for a younger man who was his ward. Bruton, a perceptive and urbane man, could barely contain his smile as he looked Milk sternly in the eye.
“What’s this guardian crap?” he asked. “What you’re really talking about is opening an account for the boy you’ve got living with you. Right?”
Milk broke out laughing, and tore up the forms he had carefully filled out. “Okay, I guess we’ll start this over.”
Bruton and Milk struck a warm friendship. Bruton was surprised to learn that his gregarious colleague had few close friends, lavishing virtually all his affection on his lover, Jack McKinley. Through the office grapevine, he also learned that however bright Milk was on business trends, he was downright callow when it came to cultivating professional relationships. In conferences, Milk would stubbornly stick to his own idiosyncratic ideas about economic trends, arguing bitterly with older executives who took their bearings from more orthodox business wisdom. Milk frequently ended up being right and didn’t refrain from saying I told you so.
Bruton privately agreed that his friend was often smarter than his superiors, but he spent hours blasting Milk for his lack of tact. “That’s not how you play the game if you want to get ahead,” Bruton insisted. Milk, however, heeded only his own advice.
Milk and Gordon became the Laurel and Hardy act of the Bache offices at 51 Wall Street and Milk’s humor came to compensate for his poor marks in office politics. Harvey’s ability to deliver Henny Youngman one-liners was the perfect foil to Gordon’s drier wit. The company promoted Harvey rapidly over the years, frequently breaking its own salary policies to reward him with large annual raises.
Harvey used his income to share the good life with Jack. Like a patient father, Harvey intoduced Jack to opera, ballet, museums, and, of course, the reams of love notes and romantic poems he churned out. To Jack, it was love out of a Leslie Gore song. For all the flippancy that marked his sassy character, Jack fundamentally needed someone to take care of him and he had found the perfect protector in Harvey Milk.
Harvey took a new apartment in Greenwich Village. The flat had the bonus of overlooking the townhouse where opera star Leontyne Price lived. Milk spent hours at the window trying to catch a glimpse of the diva. He would occasionally play her records at high volume and after every aria applaud loudly, shouting “Bravo” out his open window.
Tom O’Horgan, meanwhile, had started producing experimental plays in his Lower East Side loft and at Ellen Steuart’s fledgling Café La Mama. Harvey jumped at the chance to take a firsthand role in theater after so many years of watching ballets and operas. The bright McKinley showed a talent for tending to the technical aspects of theater and learned the basics of stage managing in O’Horgan’s plays. The three became an indivisible trio: the teenaged high school dropout, the avant-garde director, and the Wall Street businessman. Harvey occasionally slipped O’Horgan a loan as he encouraged him to be more ambitious and take on a major production. While McKinley was learning his career and O’Horgan was setting his sights for his future, Harvey Milk, the only established professional in the bunch, was rubbing shoulders with an artistic community whose bohemian lives were thoroughly different from his own rigid conventionality.
Nothing brought out the incongruities of Harvey’s new peer group more than political discussions. A hard-boiled conservative in the laissez-faire capitalist mold, Harvey and Jack spent much of the fall of 1964 rising early so they could distribute Barry Goldwater leaflets in New York City subways. Harvey even managed to talk Joe Campbell, his first lover, into campaigning for the Arizona Republican. Jack began to doggedly mimic Milk’s stubborn arguments for Goldwater, much to the dismay of their theater friends, who considered such views only slightly more contemporary than the pterodactyl.
Joe Campbell also found himself at the
center of a network of avant-garde friends who clustered at Joe’s hangout, Kelly’s Bar. As New York’s best-known hustler bar, Kelly’s had become the watering hole of Manhattan’s new trashy chic set. Campbell traveled on the fringes of the Andy Warhol crowd, where he was dubbed the “Sugar Plum Fairy,” the name rock ‘n’ roller Lou Reed later called Campbell in Reed’s paeon to the New York hustling scene, “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Harvey could never completely abandon his protector role with any of his former lovers, and he occasionally dropped by Kelly’s to see Campbell. Campbell’s trendy friends were amazed that Joe had spent nearly seven years with Milk. The staid businessman didn’t seem enough—attractive enough, rich enough, and certainly not chic enough—to warrant the attentions of the dazzling Sugar Plum Fairy.
Campbell was amused at Milk’s attempt to juggle his stolid bourgeois values with the new peer group Harvey was finding among the least traditional folk in New York. “Here Harvey is trying to lead the perfect middle-class life with the perfect monogamous marriage and the upwardly mobile Wall Street career,” Campbell thought, “But he can’t get away from the fact that he’s a faggot and a Jew. He’ll always be Minnie’s boy.”
Harvey worried incessantly that Campbell might seduce Jack. At one point, he even presented Joe with a statement that solemnly swore that Joe would never go to bed with Harvey’s newest ingenue. He refused to sign, but Joe’s new romantic interest allayed Harvey’s fear. Joe fell head over heels for a younger man he met at Kelly’s, Oliver “Bill” Sipple. The pair soon left New York to set up housekeeping in Fort Lauderdale.
Then Joe crashed his motorcycle. Billy couldn’t get a job. Within months, they were broke and Harvey had to fly down to loan them enough money to pull through the next few difficult months.
* * *
The final heart attack struck when Minnie was preparing a Thanksgiving turkey for a Lower East Side mission. Harvey ordered a traditional white Jewish shroud for Minnie’s funeral—and then had her body cremated, spreading her ashes on the Atlantic Ocean. The cremation infuriated the more orthodox Robert Milk. Harvey later told friends that upon learning of the cremation, Bob had accusingly shouted, “You burned my mother.”
Harvey had never been particularly close to either his brother or father, so the fracas at Minnie’s death did little more than finalize a split between Harvey and the male members of his family. Harvey never had much to do with his family after that.
* * *
A sunny July afternoon in 1964, just the kind of day that made Jim Bruton glad he’d invested in his East Hampton house. Jim and Harvey spent the afternoon in an exhausting volleyball game. Despite Milk’s athletic prowess, his team had lost, largely because of the vigor of a strong, handsome opponent in his mid-fifties.
“You’ll end up just like him if you keep exercising,” Bruton told Milk. “You’ve kept your body in shape so far. You’ve got a quick mind. Keep it all in shape and you’ll be as attractive as he is twenty years from now.”
“No, he’s over fifty,” Harvey said matter-of-factly. “I’ll never make it that far.”
Jim thought Harvey was gearing up for one of his sick jokes. “The only way you’ll go before you’re fifty is if you finally get somebody at the office so mad that they’ll push you out a window on Wall Street,” he joked.
“No, really,” Harvey insisted. “Something will happen before then.”
Jim knew Harvey had a tendency to be melodramatic, but this talk was taking it a little far, he thought.
“Harvey, we all have that kind of feeling now and then. It’s nothing to take that seriously.”
“I’ve known it since I was a kid,” Milk persisted. “I’ll never make it to fifty. There’s just something sinister down the road. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there.”
That’s how Bruton recalled the conversation years later. Harvey was almost nonchalant about a conviction Bruton considered morbid. Milk never dwelled on the point, but it occasionally came up during the years of their friendship. After a whirlwind week of going to opera, ballet, and theater performances, the pair retired to the Russian Tea Room next to Carnegie Hall one night where a somewhat dazed Bruton mentioned they had partied four of the last seven nights.
“Harvey, while you’re doing this, you’re not putting any money away,” Jim warned. “You’re blowing your future. You should invest your money in a house or something.”
“What for?” Milk asked. “I’ll never live to enjoy it.”
Bruton looked at his friend incredulously.
“I’ve got to live fast,” Harvey said. “I know I’m not going to live long.”
Maybe it was these forbodings that kept Milk’s own compass set strictly on the present with little regard for either the past or future. Harvey sometimes told the story of how he had bought Minnie a handsome set of porcelain dinnerware on one of his many leaves in Japan. He returned home to find that Minnie had given the new dishes a place of honor in her china cabinet while she kept on using the plain dinner sets that had withstood decades of use in the Milk family. Harvey shouted that he had bought his porcelain for Minnie to use, and not to save in some cabinet. Milk promptly ran through the kitchen collecting every old dish in the house and then proceeded to smash them. “Now,” he humphed, “You have to use them.”
* * *
Jack McKinley was a paradox, Harvey complained. At times, he was the bright, vivacious charmer Harvey had fallen in love with. But from the start, he had also been given to moody fits of depression. The psychiatrist had a word for the contradictions: manic-depressive.
Friends first attributed the problems to his background. Jack had, after all, been the youngest of a large, impoverished brood, raised on the strict backwater fundamentalism common among the poor families of rural Appalachia. The way Jack told it, the sin of Sodom was, to his family, only slightly less heinous than matricide. It was hardly a prescription for good mental health. But Jack’s problems did not fade as the years separated him from his unhappy youth. They got worse.
He started using the drugs that were coming in to vogue in the mid-sixties—marijuana, speed, and LSD. He took to drinking. He returned from binges to tell Harvey tales of sexual promiscuity. Harvey soon stopped getting jealous. That would get Jack even further depressed and he’d drink more. Early on, Jack discovered he had one trump card that was guaranteed to light the short fuse of Harvey’s temper—the suicide threat.
One night at the couple’s Greenwich Village flat, Harvey heard a clatter in the garage. He arrived just in time to cut McKinley down from the rafter. After a particularly bitter fight, McKinley and Milk were walking through the narrow Village streets and the youth simply threw himself in front of a taxi. He missed death by inches.
Harvey tried sending him to a psychiatrist. After a month of visits, however, Jack bored of the mental gymnastics and increased his drinking. Harvey thought Jack might improve his self-image if he resumed his aborted education. Jack, however, was glad to have bypassed high school and would have nothing to do with such tedium.
A tragic turn in Joe Campbell’s life gave Milk the chance to try to shock McKinley out of his suicide threats. Campbell’s love for Billy Sipple had a passion Joe had never felt for Harvey. One afternoon, he returned to their Fort Lauderdale apartment to find that Billy had summarily left him. Campbell moved back to New York and promptly tried to kill himself.
Doctors had to perform a tracheotomy to save his life. Tubes coursed in and out of various parts of his body when Harvey took Jack to see the slumbering twenty-nine-year-old. “That’s what happens when you don’t succeed,” Harvey explained tersely.
Harvey kept a long vigil over Campbell, insisting someone should be there when he awoke. As Campbell slept, Harvey ruminated about suicide, a phenomenon that would haunt his life and loves for decades. He wrote Campbell a letter, concluding with his basic assessment of existence:
Life is rotten—hard—bitter and so forth—but life is life and the best
that we have—no one should take another’s—no one should let another take his—
people in worse situations than you have come back strong—have been against worse odds and won—only because they felt that somewhere there was some reason for living—they are not sure, but they had hope.
Love As Always,
H.
When Joe awoke, Harvey had blunter advice. “If you’re going to commit suicide, you should go deep in a forest, cover yourself up with leaves and needles, then take all the pills you want.” Leaving a messy aftermath was simply bad theater. Harvey also mentioned his amazement that Joe would try to kill himself over the young unschooled Billy Sipple, and not for Harvey who had always done so much for him. The sight of Joe Campbell lying in that hospital bed breathing through a tube in his throat would return to Harvey’s mind a decade later in San Francisco when Billy Sipple made his rendezvous with history.
* * *
Harvey thought Jack might improve if he left Manhattan’s fast lane for a slower paced life, so in 1967 Milk accepted a transfer to work for Bache in Dallas. Jack lasted all of a few weeks in Texas. He quickly packed and moved back to Greenwich Village where his friend, Tom O’Horgan, had attracted enough acclaim to be asked to take over a faltering production about the budding counterculture.
In McKinley’s absence, Harvey took to courting a handsome, blond twenty-one-year-old named Joe Turner. There was the usual fare of love notes, candlelight dinners, and evenings at the ballet. Harvey talked excitedly about the incredible success O’Horgan was having with his first Broadway play, Hair.
