The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  Agnos dug into Milk’s weaknesses, using the expertise he had learned in the speaker’s office: direct mail campaigning. Every other day for the rest of the campaign, a new district-wide mailer hit the post office accenting Agnos’ work in liberal social programs, especially to the city’s minorities. One brochure juxtaposed a year-by-year rundown of Agnos and Milk’s past activities. Art’s side was graced with the many bills he had drafted as a legislative aide. On Milk’s side there were few accomplishments of any note; those that did merit attention were often pointedly preceded with the blunt phrase “first up-front gay.” The barrage of mailers was unprecedented in city politicking.

  * * *

  As Harvey felt the momentum slip from his campaign, his fights with Scott grew more frequent and bitter. “You fucked it up,” he would shout at Scott when his lover made the slightest error. “You’ve ruined everything.” From there, Milk would launch into one of his tantrums, while Smith, whose Mississippi background bred a less abrasive demeanor, sat quietly absorbing the abuse, knowing he was the only person Harvey could shout at so vehemently and still count on loving the next morning.

  That, however, was when Scott became sure the passion had ebbed from their relationship. Maybe it had been happening for years and they hadn’t noticed it between the campaigns and the extracurricular flings, but it was gone now. Outside the Castro Camera window, scores of handsome young men strode by casually every day, all day, and twenty-eight-year-old Scott was always trapped inside, constantly stuck in a store that barely showed a profit, constantly campaigning for a forty-six-year-old lover who grew more harried with each race, and the races never ended. Scott had fallen in love with a man who excelled in gourmet dinners, slept under Redwoods, rarely missed a Broadway opening, fell into trances during Mahler operas, and never let a circus go by. Now it was all politics. Scott agreed with the politics, and had devoted three years of his life to helping Harvey, but Harvey still wasn’t the carefree, footloose hippie he had fallen in love with at a subway stop in Greenwich Village in 1971. Somewhere during the campaign, Scott stopped sleeping with Harvey and moved into his own bedroom.

  One night, Michael Wong went upstairs to Harvey and Scott’s apartment to fix a can of soup, the only dinner he could fit in between his nine-to-five job and the six hours he spent every night at the headquarters. He found Scott slumped in a chair, exhausted from the long hours of campaigning and simultaneously running the business. Wong saw pictures of Harvey in what looked like theatrical costumes. It surprised Mike. Like most of Milk’s friends, Wong had no idea Harvey had had anything to do with Broadway. Harvey always seemed too tied up in the present to discuss the past.

  “Did Harvey use to be in plays or something?” he casually asked Scott as he made his soup.

  Scott was nodding out at the kitchen table and didn’t answer.

  “So, Scott, do you and Harvey intend to move to Sacramento?”

  Smith shook his head no.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Scott?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think you and Harvey are going to last?”

  Scott quietly answered in one word. “No.”

  Scott excused himself and went off to bed. Wong looked around the apartment, which reflected the dishevelment of Harvey’s personal life. Piles of studies, commission reports, and unopened bills covered the tables. Boxes filled the corners. He paused to think how Harvey’s friends knew so little of the man’s personal life; it was as if he didn’t allow himself a personal life.

  The store suffered again through the campaign. Every extra cent went to putting out the next leaflet or buying the next roll of stamps. Poverty was nothing new to Milk. “I just eat a lot of eggs,” Milk lectured Tom Randol. “When you can’t eat the best, eat eggs.” It was only late in the campaign that a Pacific Heights matron confided to John Ryckman why Harvey’s suits always looked so threadbare. He bought them from a charity secondhand store she ran; he hadn’t paid more than $10 for a suit in years. “And the guy never complained once,” Ryckman said later, shaking his head. “It was always the campaign, beating the machine.”

  The news of the death of Harvey’s father could not have come at a worse time, just when the campaign came into the home stretch. Milk had always been closer to his mother, but the death forced him to return home and see the brother from whom he had been estranged so many years. The fact that Harvey could convert senior citizens on bus stops but never his own brother frustrated him. Both were too bullheaded to change. There was the preliminary argument about cremation.

  “You burned my mother, you’re not going to have my father,” Robert told Harvey, according to Harvey’s later account to friends.

  Tory Hartmann later recalled the sadness in Harvey’s eyes when he returned from the funeral with the story about the good relationship he had struck up with his nephew. The way Harvey told it, he overheard his nephew say to Robert, “Uncle Harvey’s a real open-minded guy. Why can’t you be more like him?”

  “You better be glad I’m not anything like him.”

  * * *

  The first serious death threat came in a twelve-page letter signed by a man claiming to be from the Black Muslim Temple 26. “Harvey Milk will have a dream journey and nightmare to hell, a night of horror,” it warned in childlike handwriting. “You will be stabbed and have your genitals, cock, balls, prick cut off.”

  In later years, Milk grew callous to the many threats, but this first graphic letter frightened him. Bomb threats soon after forced him to hold staff meetings far in the back of the store. The “dark destiny” was no longer a figment of a melodramatic imagination.

  “You know I will probably be killed one of these days,” he mentioned to Tory Hartmann one evening. Hartmann was startled by Harvey’s casual tone. He acted as if that were as integral a part of his campaigning as, say, getting the firefighters’ endorsement. All part of the same game.

  * * *

  The final days of the campaign were among the most desperate and discouraging Milk would ever face. A month before election day, his poll showed he was eleven points ahead of Agnos, but the lead was shrinking with every Agnos borchure that hit the mailboxes. The newspapers that had goaded Harvey into running turned their backs on him. The Examiner and the Chronicle certainly could not endorse a Moscone-Burton-McCarthy candidate like Agnos and, of course, they deplored the machine politics, but they were not about to endorse Harvey Milk either. The Bay Guardian, an alternative newspaper, had penned the “Harvey Milk vs. The Machine” slogan and then endorsed Agnos. Only the conservative Progress endorsed Milk. One major politician says the editor did it only to jab at Moscone, leaking news of the endorsement to politicos saying, “Yeah, we endorsed the fag.” Liberals who claimed to support gays kept insisting they might like Harvey but Agnos could get more done in Sacramento. In it all, Harvey saw prejudice. Of course, they thought a queer couldn’t get things done in Sacramento; it wasn’t time yet for homosexuals to hold office. As far as they were concerned, it never would be time either, Harvey thought.

  The cruelest blow came with an unexpected district-wide blitz of mailers featuring the endorsement of California Governor Jerry Brown. In February, Brown had promised a Democratic con-fab he would not endorse any candidate in any California primary, relieving party activists of all hues, since Brown was then riding on the apex of his California popularity in his first presidential bid and could swing thousands of voters. Brown had stuck to his pledge in every race—except one. Leo McCarthy happened to be his national campaign chairman and the man who could devastate Brown’s legislative program in Sacramento. On the last weekend, a postcard from Brown arrived at the mailbox of every Democrat in the district. The sting dug deeper at a Brown for President campaign rally in Union Square, where Milk supporters—many of whom also worked for Brown—had buoyed Milk posters above the crowd with helium balloons. Assemblyman Willie Brown took the podium to say the governor would not even set foot on the stage if Milk’s signs were
not removed.

  Harvey’s friends thought such tactics stunk of the lowest machine politics, and they were ready to respond in kind. An intimate advisor came to Castro Camera one day with a tape recording of a male prostitute propositioning a major elected official who was part of the complex game of political musical chairs that had been played to clear the assembly seat for Agnos. The politician enthusiastically accepted the hustler’s wares, even though he had only been a recent and lukewarm supporter of gay rights. The tape could embarrass the entire machine and perhaps give Milk the edge, Harvey’s friend suggested. Others counseled Milk to start dropping comments about George Moscone’s reputation as a notorious womanizer with exotic sexual tastes. Milk, however, refused to use such tactics.

  * * *

  Late in the campaign, Allan Baird brought Tom Hayden by Castro Camera to help Hayden’s challenge to incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator John Tunney. Milk eagerly took Hayden in and out of shops on Castro Street to help the once-famed radical glad-hand merchants. A bevvy of television cameras soon arrived on the scene to record the two mavericks campaigning together. Baird thought it would be good P.R. for Harvey if Hayden wore a Milk button while he bandied reporters’ questions. “I don’t wear buttons,” Hayden snapped. When the cameras were gone, so was Hayden. Baird thought Harvey had been used.

  * * *

  Milk tenaciously pushed on until the end. He held his first expensive campaign fund raiser, a $45-a-plate dinner—but ended it nontraditionally when he had to ask the twenty-three attendees to follow him back to Castro Camera after the meal to help him stuff envelopes. Jim Rivaldo loaned Milk his life savings. During the 1975 campaign he had washed dishes to pay his rent while working for Harvey; now he had to nickle and dime his expenses from the Castro Camera till. I graduated from Harvard for this? he asked himself. John Ryckman nudged his lover into loaning $2,000 to Harvey’s campaign for last-minute radio commercials. Harvey begged his brother for an eleventh-hour loan, but Robert Milk would have none of it.

  * * *

  Stunned, their mouths hanging half open, Leo McCarthy and Art Agnos sat in the basement of City Hall where the election results were first announced. The early returns showed Milk leading Agnos. Unthinkable.

  At Dennis Peron’s Island restaurant, the marijuana trading upstairs was closed down for the night and the victory party’s crowd swelled as the first optimistic results poured in. “Harvey, it looks like you’re winning,” Peron said, trying to shake the shocked expression from Milk’s face. “I know,” Milk admitted. “It’s just that I’m not used to it.”

  The assessment proved premature. As the tallies came in from the outlying black and Latino neighborhoods, Agnos gained ground. The race remained nip and tuck for hours, but substantial leads in the Castro could not overcome Agnos’ minority strength. Harvey looked down at his suit and shook his head. “I guess I’ll have to be in this monkey suit for the next one and a half years—until the next election,” he told Peron.

  It was late in the night when Harvey took the podium to concede defeat. “We gave them a good fight. We showed them that they can’t take us for granted, that we’re always going to have some say.” Harvey’s voice was cracking. “Maybe not this time, but remember that every election we get closer. And what’s important is that we keep on working, getting people to vote, getting out there in campaigns. Because if we do that, if we can keep on doing that, there’s no way they can stop us and what we stand for.”

  The final tally didn’t come in until 1:30 A.M. Harvey had lost by 3,600 of the 33,000 votes cast. “I guess you could call me a gay Harold Stassen,” he joked to a reporter.

  John Ryckman was back in the headquarters cleaning out his desk the next morning. He hadn’t broken down all night. This is what I do for my job, he kept telling himself, I’m not going to cry. The camera shop door slammed and a small, blond eleven-year-old figure trod slowly to his desk. Medora tried to say something, but it didn’t come out and she threw herself into his arms, sobbing. And John Ryckman had to cry too.

  * * *

  Hard bitter days followed for Harvey. He took his first vacation in three years to visit an old Dallas boyfriend who lived in Nevada City. Within weeks of his return, the bickering began again with Scott and by August, Scott had moved out. The couple began the difficult process of finding out where their sex ended and their love began, and how to continue to be both former lovers and business partners.

  The entrenched gay leaders were jubilant at Milk’s loss. “When votes start changing against a candidate, it usually signals the beginning of the end of that candidate’s political career,” wrote gay publisher Charles Morris, who planned a political career of his own. “Two defeats for the price of one,” another gay reporter called Milk’s loss of both the election and his commissioner’s seat.

  The Democratic establishment drew the gay moderates deeper into the fold after the defeat. Clearly, the gay reformers, not Harvey Milk or those newcomers on Castro Street, were the people to deal with. Since the politicos did not take homosexuals seriously enough to examine closely the precinct maps, they did not note that despite the united opposition of the entire gay leadership, Harvey Milk had carried the gay precincts by margins of 60 to 70 percent. The gay leaders had not delivered. Events about to unfold a continent away in Dade County would tremendously recast the shape and tenor of San Francisco gay politicking, but for the rest of 1976, the gay reformers were happily writing Harvey Milk’s political obituary.

  Some political observers were far less eager to write Milk off and were genuinely shocked that the unorthodox maverick had come so close to beating the quintessential insider. The winner had every conceivable advantage—certainly more than any other nonincumbent primary challenger in the state that year—and still he had only narrowly defeated a camera store owner. Some news stories focused less on Agnos’ victory than on the fact that Milk had come so close to winning. Before long, Milk’s spirits returned. He confided to Wong, “Mike, if losing like this means all the publicity I’m getting, I think Agnos wishes he had lost.”

  * * *

  The Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club would never support Harvey for anything, a number of Milk’s supporters agreed in a post mortem meeting shortly after the election. They even doubted that the club would ever support a gay candidate as along as there was an adequate supply of liberal friends willing to attend their cocktail parties, make annual appearances at Toklas dinners and assure members that there were heterosexuals who thought some gays were just fine after all. Harvey needed a Democratic club to support him. The younger, more militant gays from Castro Street also needed an apparatus to rigorously press demands for the gay community, even if it did make “our liberal friends” nervous. Harvey, Jim Rivaldo, Dick Pabich, and Harry Britt were among the early members; Chris Perry was elected presdient. The San Francisco Gay Democratic Club set forth a basic manifesto:

  No decisions which affect our lives should be made without the gay voice being heard. We want our fair share of city services. We want openly gay people appointed and elected to city offices—people who reflect the diversity of our community. We want the schools of San Francisco to provide full exposure to and positive appreciation of gay lifestyles. We are asking no more than we deserve: We will not settle for less.

  “What am I doin’ here with a bunch of fruits and kooks?”

  Jim Elliot looked at the unlikely group sitting around him in the cluttered back room of Castro Camera. There were solid union men like himself, good men like Stan Smith and George Evankovich. And then the kooks: the environmentalists and neighborhood activists who kept trying to put union men out of jobs with their rhetoric about limited growth and high-rise controls. If that weren’t enough to worry the be’jesus out of him, there’s all these fruits with Harvey Milk; at least he seemed like a regular guy. Still, he couldn’t help wondering aloud, “What am I doin’ here with a bunch of fruits and kooks?”

  Feelings were mutual on all sides and Harvey could proba
bly have never pulled off this meeting except all present had one interest in common—they hated, positively loathed, the current board of supervisors. Labor was still licking its wounds from the wave of anti-union ballot propositions that the board kept putting before voters and voters kept approving. The radical neighborhood activists still thought downtown interests and real estate developers owned the board. Under the current system, gays worried that they’d never be able to get their admission ticket to the democratic process—their own elected official.

  Harvey was the only neighborhood activist, however, who had built ties to labor and now he was pushing both sides to join and kick the bums out. Plans for district elections of supervisors, led by a motley assortment of leftover sixties radicals, had failed in both 1972 and 1973, largely because proponents considered fund raising a pass-the-coffee-can affair and never garnered the funds to assert a strong campaign. Labor, however, had money. Plenty of it. The massive gay immigration since 1973 had also vastly increased the pool of available votes.

  Both sides felt each other out cautiously at the meeting. Even Jim Elliot had to admit that without Harvey Milk they probably would never be in the same room. In a few weeks, larger meetings with more labor leaders and neighborhood organizers had struck a deal. As Evankovich put it bluntly, “We were out for revenge on the board.” Between labor money and the neighborhood organizations’ ability to get legions of volunteers and mount a grass-roots effort, they easily qualified the proposal for the November 1976 ballot.