The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  * * *

  Campaigning in a staunchly middle-class neighborhood, Milk makes the rounds of coffee shops, dutifully tagged by a Chronicle reporter assigned to make sense of this unlikely politician who calls himself the mayor of Castro Street.

  In a coffee shop, a middle class man and woman recognize Milk. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you over in…” She seems embarrassed to mention Milk’s neighborhood. But she says, “I hope you make it.” Her companion shakes Milk’s hands and observes that “we need to see some new faces at City Hall.”

  Another surprised coffee shop customer has never heard Milk’s name before and jokingly asks if Harvey is running for dairy queen. Harvey laughs the question off, didactically telling the reporter, “If I turned around every time somebody called me a faggot, I’d be walking backwards and I don’t want to walk backwards.”

  * * *

  Harvey Milk, at last, was a serious candidate. He was taking on six incumbent supervisors who were all seeking reelection. His real opponents, however, were downtown business interests. “As a small businessman, I intend to fight for the needs of small businesses rather than solely for the interests of downtown,” he said when he announced his campaign in March 1975. He accused the incumbents of having “distorted priorities” and promised that his “priorities would be reoriented to the people and not to the downtown interests.”

  Milk outlined a four-point program to revitalize city neighborhoods. He wanted the 300,000 commuters who daily came from suburbia to work in corporate high-rises—and used expensive city services—to start paying a “fair share” tax to finance the fire and safety services that so drained city coffers. He sharply criticized City Hall’s assessment policies, which drastically underassessed the hotels and skyscrapers of powerful campaign contributors, leaving small homeowners to pick up the tax bill.

  Harvey’s strongest tactical allies came from unions. Mayoral hopeful Supervisor John Barbagelata had thrust labor against the wall by putting a number of anti-union initiatives on the city ballot, rolling back municipal employee pensions and pay scales. The propositions horrified the once-powerful unions, but they were convenient vehicles for dozens of hellfire and brimstone speeches by incumbents who were fanning public outrage over a recent police strike.

  Harvey was one of only two supervisorial candidates in the entire city to back labor 100 percent. Allan Baird introduced him to labor leaders, advertising the fact that Milk was committing virtual political suicide by backing the union cause. Milk had discarded the bohemian flavor of his first campaign for three-piece suits he bought secondhand from a Castro district dry cleaner. Milk’s no-nonsense straightforwardness impressed the union men.

  “I know the guy’s a fruit, but he shoots straight with us. Let’s support him.” Cigar-chomping union boss George Evankovich was not a man to take alliances lightly, so Stan Smith, the new secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, had to take his advice seriously. Evankovich had organized workers since he was an unschooled sixteen-year-old miner in Butte, Montana’s silver pits. His enthusiasm earned him an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. After braving the front lines of civil rights marches for his heavily black local, he wasn’t going to lose much sleep if the boys down at the Labor Council didn’t like the endorsement.

  Stan Smith had just taken over the 22,000-member Trades Council, which was the umbrella group for the city’s thirty-five hard-hat unions. He was wary about going out on a limb, but both Baird and Evankovich recounted Milk’s good deeds for labor, from the Coors boycott to his current pro-labor stands. “The guy’s our friend,” Evankovich concluded. “You don’t screw your friends.”

  Evankovich arranged a lunch with Smith and Milk. Harvey’s humor quickly won the leader’s support. Besides, Smith was no stranger to the city’s gays. As a teenager, he and his high school buddies used to hang out at gay bars—those taverns were the only saloons desirous enough for young customers to overlook drinking age laws. Evankovich, for one, thought the true test for Milk would come when he had to rub shoulders with the guys he needed to walk precincts and do the grass roots “Jimmy Higgins” work.

  “That guy has charisma,” Evankovich told his labor buddies, as he saw Harvey campaigning. “A lot of our guys think gays are little leprechauns tip-toeing to florist shops, but Harvey can sit on a steel beam and talk to some ironworker who is a mean sonuvabitch and probably beats his wife when he has a few too many beers, but who would sit there and talk to Harvey like they knew each other for years.”

  The announcement that the giant Building and Construction Trades Council joined the Laborers Union and Baird’s Beer Truck Drivers local in endorsing Harvey Milk had the hard-hat hiring halls buzzing. The council was supporting only two candidates—a gay and a feminist. Bullheaded labor leaders like Evankovich weren’t going to let Milk’s virtues go unextolled. Evankovich set up a meeting with Leon Broschura, head of the firemen’s union. Broschura was impressed that Milk had done his homework on the fire department’s needs, and by the fact that Milk’s face appeared at every major candidates’ night in the city. The guy might not win this time, Broschura thought, but he’s somebody you’re going to have to reckon with in city politics. While firefighters’ unions in New York City and Chicago led the fights to squash gay civil rights laws in their cities, the San Francisco Fire Fighters local endorsed Milk’s effort to be the nation’s first openly gay city official.

  Harvey relished the symbolism of gaining the endorsements from the city’s three most macho unions—teamsters, firemen, and hard hats. When the city’s Union Labor Party held its endorsement night, Harvey walked away with the highest tally of any supervisorial candidate. Publicly, Milk waxed on about how he was bringing diverse peoples together; privately, he enjoyed seeing the shock on his gay volunteers’ faces when groups of beefy firemen and teamsters trooped into the camera shop to fold fliers and stamp envelopes.

  Harvey’s labor supporters pleaded with the old-line labor leaders who ran the Labor Council to give him the backing of all the council members. “He ain’t gonna win and besides, we don’t need those gays,” an official told Evankovich. The younger Broschura implored the council for Milk. “You guys got to move with the times,” he said. “When the horses come down to the finish lines one of these days, he’s going to be among the winners.” But the leadership wouldn’t budge.

  A mammoth hook and ladder truck appeared in front of Castro Camera after Milk lost the council endorsement. Harvey’s new friends were going to cheer him up. “C’mon out Harv’—we got somethin’ to show ya,” the driver shouted. On the end of the truck, two fireman had chalked a slogan on the back of their black rubber coats: “Make Mine Milk.”

  The 1975 municipal elections proved a watershed year for San Francisco city politics. The social conflicts that had been building during the Alioto administration erupted into the mayoral race. San Francisco faced a profound turning point.

  By city charter Mayor Alioto could not seek a third term, so he stepped aside to resume his multimillion-dollar law practice. The conservative Democratic coalition that had kept him in office crumbled.

  Blacks yearned for change. Their Filmore neighborhood had once been one of the most thriving black cultural centers west of New Orleans. Leveled by urban renewal, its people sank into despair. By 1975, the most influential man in the area was a charismatic minister who preached his own mixture of populist Christian theology and Marxist politics out of a converted synagogue he called the Peoples Temple. The blacks who flocked there had lost their neighborhood; they were not needed in the sparkling glass and steel skyscrapers in downtown; their hopes lay in the sermons of the Reverend Jim Jones. He, in turn, could order hundreds of volunteers to work tirelessly for the candidates of his choosing.

  The Latino Mission district’s businesses had never recovered from the digging up of the central shopping strip for the Bay Area Rapid Transit. Younger Chin
ese-Americans wanted better conditions for the tens of thousands crowded into Chinatown, one of the nation’s most appalling ghettos.

  The city’s more conservative voters in the sprawling west side residential neighborhoods also wanted change. They already had had to suffer through the tide of hippies in the late 1960s; now they were seeing the Castro neighborhood being swiftly taken over by gays. Property taxes spiraled, though the homeowners saw few additional services for the added money. The revenues, they complained, were going to support minorities in the east side of the city. The police strike had left them madder; the pushy city unions seemed to be getting out of hand.

  Altogether, the city was ready for what one newspaper called “a bloodless civil war.”

  Supervisor Dianne Feinstein hoped the studied moderation she’d followed in her six years in city politics would give her the broadest base of any candidate. Most pundits gave her a strong chance of grabbing a first-place showing in the election. Liberal neighborhood activists had long ago soured on Feinstein, accusing her of indecisiveness at best, or at worst of being a puppet of the downtown business interests that so generously filled her campaign chests. She retained some of her gay support from wealthy upper-crust gays and managed to simultaneously assuage fears of middle-class voters by noting her strong support for tough law enforcement. Another major asset came from the Hearst Corporation, owner of the afternoon Examiner, which regarded Feinstein with a reverence generally reserved for virgin mothers. Any story that might have any possible tangential relationship to city government,—and many that didn’t—usually carried a Feinstein quote.

  Observers rated Supervisor John Barbagelata as having only an outside chance at capturing the mayoralty. The fifty-six-year-old realtor came from solid Italian stock, the last angry man of the city’s west side. The feisty maverick entered politics in the late 1960s because of his outrage at the degeneracy of Haight Street. He quickly emerged as the board’s foremost conservative, the sole vote against Feinstein’s 1972 gay rights ordinance and the friend of real estate developers. Unlike Feinstein, Barbagelata was a true social conservative, the voice of the frustrated silent majority. “Gay people don’t have what I have,” he characteristically told one newspaper, “somebody to cook your meals, somebody to love, somebody to share your burdens and frustrations with.”

  George Moscone emerged as the clear liberal choice. Moscone was part of a new breed of ethnic politicians who had been emerging in San Francisco since the late 1960s, more concerned with abortion and marijuana reform than with getting a cardinal’s cap. They eschewed the Catholic conservatism of old-line ethnic politicos like Joe Alioto and were among the first figures to reach effectively to black, Chinese, Latino, and gay voters. Once considered something of a radical, Moscone had worked his way from the Board of Supervisors to the California senate where, after one year, he became senate majority leader. Most analysts were aghast that Moscone would give up the powerful post to run for San Francisco mayor. To such questions, Moscone simply explained that ever since he’d played boccie ball in the parks of his childhood Italian neighborhood, he’d wanted to be the mayor of the municipality that he’d always described with the four-word appellation, “the world’s greatest city.” Besides, he confided to Jim Foster, “Sacramento is boring as hell.”

  Moscone entered the campaign as the strident proponent of neighborhood power, decrying the “Manhattanization” developers had wrought with their skyscrapers and corporate headquarters. He turned his back on well-heeled campaign contributors by refusing to accept any campaign gift over $100. Never had the city’s hard-core left and neighborhood activists been offered a candidate who so eagerly articulated their vision of the city’s future; they united in a coalition few thought could be built.

  The city’s other major races saw a similar emergence of liberal candidates. Sheriff Richard Hongisto was gliding toward easy reelection despite his controversial term. In the district attorney’s race, the incumbent, who so enthusiastically prosecuted gays, waged an uphill campaign against two liberal candidates, both of whom courted gay voters.

  * * *

  Michael Wong looked around the camera shop, stunned. In all the papers, he had read so much about the scores of volunteers Harvey Milk had working in his low-budget campaign. Harvey’s campaign now had a near-legendary quality, derived from Milk’s list of unexpected endorsements. Commuters on various mornings would frequently encounter his block-long stretches of human billboards, lines of smiling faces holding up “Harvey Milk for Supervisor” signs. The human billboards were good theater, Harvey decided. Wong had gotten to know Milk from working on Senator Fred Harris’ presidential campaign. He was, by 1975, impressed enough with the candidate’s resourcefulness to surrender his earlier misgivings and come down to the Castro Camera headquarters to join the cadre of volunteers he’d heard so much about. The camera shop, however, was empty. Wong leaned over the counter to Scott Smith.

  “Where are the volunteers?”

  “There are none,” Scott whispered, as if worried someone might overhear. “The ones we have are out leafleting.”

  Wong was shocked and took the matter to Harvey. “The press wanted to say we had volunteers,” Milk reasoned. “Who wants to dispute that?”

  “But Harvey,” Wong pleaded. “You should have told us that you needed help. We would’ve come down. A lot of Harris people would have.”

  “I know that. A lot of them helped me get the human billboards out,” assured the candidate, adding, “besides, I couldn’t take the chance of letting the press or the Toklas people get wind that we had less than a great campaign going. This way, the media is happy and I’ll get elected because of it.”

  “I knew then,” Wong wrote in his diary, “that Harvey was a great media manipulator.”

  Milk did indeed keep the media happy with his flamboyant campaigning, always ready to give reporters an outrageous joke or a quotable jab. Harvey seemed ubiquitous in the campaign, especially considering he had less money than any major supervisorial candidate in the race. The campaign’s strength lay not in the mythical legion of volunteers, but with a small cadre of supporters who worked protracted hours. A group of politicos from more disparate origins would be hard to find, even in San Francisco.

  Harvey quickly nicknamed Wong “my little yellow lotus blossom.” Wong, not familiar with the homosexual penchant for campy nicknames, took to telling Milk that he was “a credit to your proclivity.” Wong recruited other volunteers from the Fred Harris campaign. Deputy Attorney General Arlo Smith, the highest civil service officer in the San Francisco branch of the attorney general’s office, often spent evenings stuffing envelopes. He sometimes ran into another Milk volunteer who had an intimate knowledge of the criminal justice system, Dennis Peron.

  Peron was now running a marijuana supermarket from his bustling apartment a block down the street from Castro Camera. True to the most karmic of 1969 values, the long-haired Peron held that he was providing a valuable community service, and offered free joints to anyone who walked in his door. He then fed his thousands of dollars in profits into an organic restaurant catering to an odd assortment of hip gays and left-over flower children. At Harvey’s urging, Peron had organized his ninety-five employees into a Democratic Club. Their Island Restaurant was always available to Milk for campaign dinners and fund raisers.

  Harvey recruited more volunteers from the many disaffected who were moving to Castro Street. A pensive Harvard graduate, Jim Rivaldo, wandered into Castro Camera one day and mentioned his uncle used to be a New York assemblyman; Harvey put him to work handing out fliers. A mild-mannered thirty-nine-year-old, Frank Robinson, started coming into the shop to pet The Kid. Frank started spending more time at Castro Camera because it reminded him of the days he had spent as a kid hanging out at his neighborhood alderman headquarters in Chicago. After several visits, the man mentioned he was the co-author of The Glass Inferno, the book upon which the film Towering Inferno was based; Harvey put Robinson to work wri
ting his speeches and campaign fliers.

  Scott Smith had his hands full as Harvey’s campaign manager. Somebody had to take care of the store, so Harvey and Scott almost casually turned over the shop to a youthful twenty-year-old art student who had drifted to San Francisco from upstate New York. Danny Nicoletta had the right combination of hippie idealism and naiveté to guarantee trust—and the slight build Harvey found so attractive in young men. That Harvey often turned over major responsibilities so casually worried some friends. The entrenched gay leaders, they noted, got their power by entrusting important decisions only to proven allies with experience and track records. Milk insisted that his campaigns could train a new corps of activists. A committed novice from the streets was worth a dozen old-timers, he said.

  * * *

  “I’m very disappointed in you, Michael,” Jim Foster told Michael Wong when he learned Wong was working in the Milk campaign. An angry Duke Smith, a close ally of the Foster-Goodstein clique, chided Wong further. “All of you will realize what a nut he is if, God forbid, he should ever get elected.”

  The antipathy gay moderates had held in the 1973 election turned into open hostility in 1975 when it looked like Harvey Milk actually had a shot at capturing a supervisorial seat. To all politicos who would listen—and many, impressed by the burgeoning numbers of gays, did—the Toklas activists fretted about the bad image that the maverick camera store owner would give all the city’s gays. The fact that Milk had taken the politically suicidal route of bucking the anti-labor tide by chumming up with rednecks like teamsters and hard hats was in itself proof of Milk’s naiveté, if not outright insanity. Once again, the Toklas club and most of the gay leadership shunned Milk’s candidacy, backing incumbents. As was the case in virtually all of Milk’s campaigns, Harvey drew little support from lesbians, who distrusted his alliances with drag queens and also noted that Harvey had few, if any, close lesbian friends. A few people, like Jim Foster, publicly endorsed Milk but privately derided enthusiastic supporters like Wong.