The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  When Harvey was in, Castro Camera became less a business establishment than a vest-pocket City Hall from which Harvey held court. The barest minimum of space was devoted to the skimpy camera supplies. An old overstuffed maroon couch was stretched in front of the store’s large bay window, next to the old barber chair where The Kid sat much of the day, lapping at the hand of any customer who had a penchant for mutts. Harvey could often be found on his frumpy couch when new Castro residents came to find where to look for apartments, what to do with a lover who had an alcohol problem, or how to find that first job. Local merchants discovered that Harvey was the man to go to if police took too long to answer a suspected burglary or if the sewer overflowed; Harvey always knew whom to call at City Hall, or the reporter to buzz with the proper story of moral indignation if nothing was done. The store’s large picture windows displayed announcements of upcoming demonstrations, environmental protests, commission hearings on Castro issues, or neighborhood meetings. Petitions for a host of causes, from whale-saving to gay rights, cluttered the beat-up counter. At night, Harvey took the addresses from every check cashed at the store that day and put it on his political mailing list.

  Harvey loved circuses and holidays, especially Christmas, and the store’s picture window sprang to life every December with ornate holiday displays. On Christmas Eve, the window would be packed with unopened presents under a fully decorated tree; the next morning, bows, ribbons, torn wrapping paper, and empty boxes lay haphazardly about the window, to be joined by bottles of Alka-Seltzer and Anacin a week later on New Year’s Day.

  More than one young boyish-looking patron would also be surprised when they came to pick up their photos and Harvey would giggle, “I see you have a new boyfriend.” Scott had worked out a system of marking the envelopes of incoming film from men who were particularly noteworthy, while Harvey thumbed through the daily delivery of processed photos to check for names of men he’d always wanted to see in less formal surroundings. If a customer seemed indignant at the prying, both Scott and Harvey would plead they were only spot-checking photos as part of their quality control. Neither Harvey nor Scott any longer put much faith in Harvey’s once-dear devotion to fidelity. Promiscuity was practically an article of faith among the new gays of Castro Street, stemming both from the free-love hippie days and the adoption of aggressive male images. This proved particularly fortuitous for Harvey, whose sexual appetite never waned.

  By now, of course, Harvey had found a political rationale for his accentuated horniness. As a representative of the SIR publicity committee, Harvey talked to a human sexuality class at Napa State University shortly after his forty-fourth birthday in 1974. He surprised the students by saying that intensified sexuality was one of the benefits of not being able to hold hands or express affection publicly. “What happens is,” he explained, “You get inside that room and the door closes. The intensity of the relationship increases to make up for it. The sexuality of many homosexuals is one of a very intense moment. In essence, sometimes I say thank you because the repression of my outside activities has heightened my inside activities.”

  * * *

  The old Irish businesses resisted the rapid shift in the Castro area. The first skirmish came when two gay men tried to open up an antique store. The established burghers associated with the Eureka Valley Merchants Association (EVMA) were taken aback; an antique store just doors down from The Family Store where the kids go to buy their Most Holy Redeemer uniforms? The EVMA pushed the police to deny the store a resale license. The antique store won the fight, but the fracas soured relations between the old and new merchants. The EVMA would have nothing to do with the gay invaders.

  Milk took a page from his grandfather’s problems with the Rockaway Hunt Club. He assembled the younger gay merchants in the back room of a pizza parlor and resurrected a short-lived merchants group that had been organized by hippies a few years before. Harvey was dutifully elected president of the Castro Village Association (CVA), if for no other reason than nobody else wanted the job.

  Harvey quickly picked up a new slogan. While he had spent 1973 preaching that gays should vote gay, 1974 was the year he insisted gays should buy gay. At various appearances at SIR meetings and any public forum he could muster, Milk enthusiastically talked about when blacks refused to be shunted to the back of municipal buses and the policy had changed not because whites came to understand the moral problems of discrimination, but because a year-long boycott was driving the bus company into the red. “Blacks won the right to ride buses for the wrong reason,” he argued, “but they won. When you want to win, it doesn’t make a difference whether you win for the wrong reason. It’s better than not winning at all.”

  Milk took to promoting his new theories through the CVA with all the flair he had once demonstrated in pushing Broadway shows. He read in the newspaper one morning that Polk Street, a heavily gay area, was planning a street fair. Castro Street was not going to be outdone, he decided, so Milk cajoled the other CVA members to organize a Castro Street Fair. Over five thousand came to the first fair in August 1974. The street hadn’t seen a crowd like that since the festival celebrating California’s centennial fifteen years earlier. An Italian liquor store owner who had decried the gay onslaught rushed to Castro Camera the next day to tell Milk breathlessly he had sold three times the booze on that one Sunday than on any other single day in his decades of business. It was as if he just figured out that homosexuals liked ice-cold cans of Bud like anybody else. He signed up as a CVA member.

  The fair earned CVA citywide attention and a growing membership. Harvey decided it needed the respectability of having established institutions as members. The street’s two banks were ideal new members: one was a branch of the gigantic Bank of America, the other a branch of the Irish locally owned Hibernia Bank. Executives at both branches rejected Milk’s suggestion that they join. Most of the CVA members avoided Bank of America because of its bad-guy image as the world’s largest bank, so Hibernia held most of the area’s gay money. Harvey carefully wrote a letter to the Hibernia branch explaining that the CVA annual dues were $20 a year and that his research showed that Hibernia’s central offices budgeted money for that branch’s neighborhood involvement. “We strongly urge you to send the $20 to join our group,” Harvey wrote. Instead of signing the letter with the CVA members’ names, Milk had each business affix their bank deposit stamps to the bottom of the request.

  Rarely have the words “for deposit only” produced such quick results. Hibernia’s $20 dues came in the return mail. Harvey took his newly revised list of CVA members to the Bank of America branch manager, mentioning he would hate to have it get around that B of A was anti-gay. The branch signed on.

  By the end of 1974, politicians began coming to CVA meetings. Membership swelled. The political possibilities titillated Harvey, who rarely looked further than the next election. He pushed his friends into being voter registrars. Customers in Castro Camera were rarely greeted with a pitch to buy film; instead, the first question was, “Are you registered to vote?” If the unwary patron said no, Harvey would issue a harsh and incredulous, “Why not?” Registering voters was no mere passion with Harvey, it became an obsession; Harvey considered his most important accomplishment of 1974 to be the registration of 2,350 new voters for the governor’s race. Surrendering the right to vote was, to Milk, like surrendering the chance to make a difference in the world. Each person can make a difference, he stormed. That was the precept that fueled everything he did and formed the basis of his realpolitik philosophy. All of Milk’s alderman activities, meanwhile, confirmed this and taught him more about the workings of the City Hall. The more he learned, the angrier he got at the distance that had grown between the downtown-oriented city government and the picturesque neighborhoods that were withering from neglect and, sometimes, abuse.

  * * *

  “I asked you where you got those bruises.”

  The police badge shimmered in the darkness of the paddy wagon. Minutes bef
ore, the two young men had been standing inside Hamburger Mary’s, a popular gay hippie restaurant. Two police officers had simply walked in, beat them to the floor with their billy clubs, and hauled them into a paddy wagon where they pummeled them more.

  “I asked you where you got the bruises,” the officer repeated.

  “I don’t know.”

  The officer delivered another blow to his prostrated victim’s stomach. “I didn’t hear that.”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  At the police station, an officer ordered the pair to strip down and they were beaten further. “He got a funny look each time he hit me,” one of the victims said when he recounted his story to a gay paper. “It was like all his frustrations were coming out. He would call me ‘fag’ or ‘queer’ and get this weird look on his face and then hit me.”

  The two were charged with drunk and disorderly conduct and, of course, resisting arrest. Their stories held up under polygraph tests and the charges were dismissed. As usual, no disciplinary actions were taken against the police officers.

  * * *

  The hard-working Irish families of Most Holy Redeemer parish had long supplied the San Francisco Police Department with a high proportion of its tough Irish cops, so there were few officers who did not have a parent, aunt, or cousin muttering about the gay invaders. Police had held little fondness for the Haight-Ashbury degenerates in the first place, but the idea that long-haired, dope-smoking, anti-war fags could get so uppity as to try to take over a neighborhood, their neighborhood, was galling. Allan Baird noticed a police cruiser or a hawkish motorcycle cop became a fixture on the corner a block from his home at Nineteenth and Castro. Police had never viewed the quiet residential intersection as a high-priority target before, but suddenly Baird started noticing that cars with pairs of white, long-haired males were routinely being pulled over. “Going down to the Midnight Sun?” the policeman would ask politely. If either man showed any glimmer of recognition for the name of the gay bar, the officer slapped the driver with a ticket and ran a warrant check to see if any outstanding tickets could land his prey in jail. On weekend nights, cadres of officers ran sorties into the district, sometimes rounding up groups of four or five gays, dragging them to a nearby park, handcuffing them and then beating them senseless with their nightsticks. According to an account in one gay newspaper, the police managed to hospitalize three men on one foray alone, one with his skull split open. The trio were charged with “trespassing in a park” and resisting arrest; the charges, of course, were later dismissed.

  The confrontations peaked at bar closing time in the early morning hours of Labor Day, 1974. Tensions had already run high with police that weekend. In two days alone, police sweeps of the local park had put nineteen gay men in jail. Still, the sidewalk outside the popular Toad Hall bar bustled with men out to make their last-minute choices when a police car pulled up next to a patron walking down Castro Street. “Off the street, faggot,” the officer shouted.

  When the young man just glanced back and slowly walked away, two officers leaped from the car, threw him to the pavement, and started beating him with their billy clubs. Like clockwork, a paddy wagon rolled up to the curb and the cops hurled their unsuspecting victim in the back. Police reinforcements suddenly appeared from all directions, most keeping their badge numbers well hidden. Dozens of gay men were knocked down and beaten. Fourteen were herded into paddy wagons and taken to jail. The heinous charges that brought about the massive police action—obstructing a sidewalk.

  Harvey Milk dubbed the victims the Castro 14 and headquartered their defense fund in his store. Rick Stokes filed a $1.375 million lawsuit against the police. Tensions boiled over at a neighborhood hearing of the police community relations board when Milk horrified staid gay moderates by calling the police “pigs.” Galvanized at last by a brazen issue, gay radicals joined the chorus as well and police officials got a crash course in future shock. Castro gays weren’t a bunch of Judy Garland fans who would take a beating and sulk back to their lace-lined apartments just because Joe Alioto wanted to get a red hat for the city’s Catholics.

  Police brutality in the Castro area dropped markedly after the incident, but Milk used the fracas to underscore the need for building a tight neighborhood political base. “I pay my taxes for police to protect me, not persecute me,” he wrote in his column for the Bay Area Reporter. Milk’s temper flared further when the Board of Supervisors frustrated his attempts to raise a defense fund by passing an ordinance requiring all such organizations to register and obtain permits—from the San Francisco Police Department. Milk typically ended his tirades with a pitch for gays to register to vote and “no longer hide, but join together and use Gay Power.” The Castro 14 furor sealed the neighborhood’s reputation as the new homosexual hot spot. What in 1973 was a seedy, out-of-the-way hamlet was, by the beginning of 1975, coming alive with new business activity that was gaining the grudging appreciation from even the stodgiest of old neighborhood merchants. It was ironic that two of the men who shared the most similar view of what the Castro could become were as different as the beer-bellied teamster Allan Baird and the militant gay, Harvey Milk.

  * * *

  “This is for gays only.”

  Allan Baird couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He and Helen had taken Helen’s mom out for a night on the town for her birthday. Since his mother-in-law had lived in the neighborhood fifty years, Allan thought it would be fun to take her for a drink at the central institution of the new Castro, the Toad Hall bar. The bouncer wouldn’t let the trio in.

  “Wait a minute,” Baird argued. “I worked in the Coors boycott. I’m a personal friend of Harvey Milk’s.”

  “Sorry,” the doorman repeated. “This is a gay bar.”

  “This is discrimination,” Baird shot back. “I’m not part of the problem. You shouldn’t be doing things like this.”

  Allan and Helen ran into Harvey a few days after the incident. The three went to the Elephant Walk bar for a drink. The Elephant Walk had drawn awe from gays around California since it was one of the first gay bars to actually have large plate-glass windows looking out on the street. Harvey liked the symbolism of the bright open bar, after gays had spent so many years in dark, windowless toilets. Allan and Helen liked the bar since it was one of the few places on Castro Street that drew an even mix of gay and straight patrons.

  “It’s important that a place like this exists,” Allan said, after telling Harvey about the problem at Toad Hall.

  “You’re right,” said Harvey. “We need more of it. No gay person or straight person should feel self-conscious about going anywhere. That’s what Castro Street should be all about.”

  Allan liked the way Harvey talked about Castro Street. For all the complaints his neighbors came up with, Allan thought Castro Street was getting more like it used to be when he was a kid; for the first time in years, it seemed like a small town again where everybody knew each other and said hi on the street. Now Castro Street could also show that gays and straights could live together and get along just fine. He’d learned it could be done from Harvey; he was convinced his neighbors could learn too. That’s why the incident at Toad Hall bothered him so much. It boded poorly for his vision.

  * * *

  During the 1973 campaign, Allan gave Harvey a pen-and-pencil set. “You’ll need it once you get to City Hall to sign bills,” he told Milk. Harvey now confided he was going to run for supervisor again. The problems with the police and the unresponsiveness of City Hall to the predicaments of the neighborhoods hadn’t changed any in two years, he said. Allan was excited about Harvey’s second try for office, because Harvey seemed to care not only about Castro Street but about all San Francisco. The guy even had a national perspective on things. Allan pledged to introduce Milk to more union leaders. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll get to use that pen yet.”

  seven

  The First Skirmish

  “Whaddaya mean you’re thinkin’ of endorsin’
this Harvey Milk guy? For Chrissakes, I’m supposed to go back to work and tell the guys we endorsed some goddamn fruit for a supervisor. Ya gotta be kiddin’.”

  Jim Elliot had been a union man since 1949. His talk was thick with the hard, gutteral brogue that marked the native San Franciscan’s Chicago-like accent. His fingernails were rarely without the black residue from his years of fixing lawn mowers and tractors at Golden Gate Park. The idea that he might have to go back to the 2,300 mechanics in his machinist local and try to foist some fruit as their candidate for supervisor seemed downright mortifying. But here he was at the San Francisco Labor Council’s endorsement meeting, hearing serious talk from good union men like himself about why they should endorse Harvey Milk for supervisor.

  “Who the fuck is this fruit that we should even think about endorsin’ him?” Elliot asked.

  “Hey. Harvey Milk’s the guy who’s been gettin’ Coors beer out of gay bars,” a Teamster quickly retorted.

  The very words “Coors beer” was enough to make any good union member shut up and listen. Here’s this fruit who got Coors beer out of gay bars, Elliot thought. How many bars have the big macho labor guys gotten Coors out of? Still, Elliot was among the union stalwarts who successfully thwarted Milk’s endorsement by the Labor Council that day, but the support Milk was gaining from union regulars made him follow the candidate’s career more closely. “It kinda makes you think,” he told his wife when he got home.