by Randy Shilts
The conspiracy of silence was definitely broken. That, gay activists long complained, was what they had always fought; the silence that had haunted them since they were children and realized they were somehow different; the silence that said they were different in a way so evil as to be unspeakable.
* * *
A secret to kill and die for.
It didn’t make sense, Al Asmussen’s friends agreed. Acquaintances in his Young Republican club theorized that he may have been silenced so he would never reveal some secret he may have learned in an important investigation. One neighbor became so convinced San Francisco police were covering up a murder that she called the San Francisco FBI office to ask for a separate investigation. The suicide didn’t make sense.
Asmussen’s mother let the stories spread, even though Sheriff Hongisto had told her the details of Al’s last night as delicately as he could. She would not open the screen door when a journalist came asking questions. “I don’t know about that part of my son’s life and I don’t want to know,” she shouted, angrily, as if the revelation of his homosexuality had added insult to the injury of her son’s suicide. “My son is gone, dead and buried. No matter what he was, he was a fine and decent boy.”
* * *
The district attorney’s investigators had already been there, as had the police and public defender. Still, the chunky, late-fortyish contractor was surprised to see two reporters pull into his construction site. The man uncomfortably adjusted his beer gut over his belt as the reporters confronted him with what they already knew—that he had had a sexual relationship with John Cordova, the nineteen-year-old just convicted of stabbing Robert Hillsborough fifteen times in the face and chest.
“I got this call from this friend of mine who knew what I liked, said I should meet this kid,” he explained. “He’d come over, drink a lot and say, ‘I’m tired, let’s go to sleep.’ Then before long, he’d be on top of me or his legs would be in the air, but he never wanted to act like he knew what he was doin’.”
The trysts occurred sporadically, he said. According to the contractor, Cordova would sometimes call and ask him to pick him up at an intersection four or five blocks from his home. The next morning, Cordova would always wake up as in a daze, insisting he had no idea what had happened the night before.
Then Cordova started degenerating. He’d show up at the man’s front door, drunk, with his pants pulled down around his legs. Once he appeared naked, except for a coat, and the older man took him in, and in the morning, Cordova couldn’t remember what had happened.
The judge at Cordova’s trial denied a motion to introduce the information into the record, saying the subject matter was “too remote” from the case. Cordova was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.
* * *
Two men dead in the late hours of June 21, 1977, one a victim in the year’s most celebrated murder, the other an obscure suicide that rated only three paragraphs deep inside the early edition of the next day’s Examiner. The real stories of John Cordova and Al Asmussen never made the newspapers, so the only thing the two deaths had in common was that, in the big black book where deaths are logged in the coroner’s office, the autopsies for Al Asmussen and Robert Hillsborough are just one page apart.
eleven
Showdown on Castro Street
“We could castrate you, but we’ll try shock treatment instead.”
That was the studied opinion of the first psychiatrist, a man highly regarded in Oklahoma mental health circles. The second, younger doctor was more empathetic as he prepared the frightened and confused young man for his first rendezvous with the electrodes. “Your wife and your mother are the two people who really need this treatment,” he assured him, “but you’re the one who has been selected, so let’s get on with it.”
He would never forget the terror, sitting in the waiting room with the others, praying, hoping against hope that the next name they called would be someone else’s. Please let someone else be next. The shot of Nembutal, slipping into a daze. The wooden machine is wheeled in. You’re strapped on an ironing board with an axle, spinning through space, but you never really know what you’re doing because you’re unconscious. There’s unspeakable pain but you’re out so you can’t scream or even open your eyes; you just feel your back arching and all you’re left with is the profound sense that you’ve been hurt, hurt bad, because, as the doctor said, you were the one who had been selected.
By the time Rick Stokes ran for the board of supervisors in 1977, this story of his electric shock treatment had been neatly packaged into a nationally televised documentary, sealed as part of the San Francisco gay community’s heritage, along with comparable stories of bar raids, suicide attempts, dishonorable discharges, and, of course, Jose singing “God Save the Nelly Queens.” There was already talk of heritage now, because it was obvious that a small part of history was being worked out in San Francisco and that a major turning point of that history would come in the November election, where District 5 voters were expected to elect the first openly gay big city official in American history. Rick Stokes and Harvey Milk were the two men most aware of that historic reality.
To most, the confrontation between these two leading gay candidates fell into easily definable components, as starkly contrasted as black and white. Rick Stokes was the gentleman politician, a moderate Democrat who had built a substantial reputation as a gay rights lawyer, working for the gay cause in some of the highest legal circles in the state, a reasonable, coolheaded, and respectable homosexual. Harvey Milk, by contrast, was still the enragé, given to shoot-from-the-hip hyperbole, the maverick forging a populist political niche, representing the scruffy studs on Castro Street, the shirtless ones. Respectable? Hardly. A reputable professional? Even to his detractors, Milk conceded that his business was little more than a front for his political activities. The contrasts could not be more distinct, but history has a way of playing tricks with scenarios that are so clearly etched; rarely has such a distinct dichotomy been, in fact, so clouded by subtle shades of ambiguity.
Born to an impoverished, west Texas family of cotton pickers, Rick Stokes spent his first years living in a dirt-floored shack. His parents pursued an upwardly mobile dream and moved to a ranch outside Shawnee, Oklahoma. It was on the ranch, about the time he turned six, that Ricky knew he was different. An only child, Rick spent most of his time playing with the kids on the ranch down the road, especially his best friend Joe. By the time the two were teenagers, they had started a passionate affair that lasted ten years, even after Joe got married. Rick was depressed and jealous when Joe took his vows and he confided to his parents the story of the love he and Joe had shared. So when Rick was seventeen, his parents knew all about his homosexuality; that was 1951, the year Harvey Milk joined the navy. While Harvey was leading a discreet but active gay life in the navy, Rick struggled to live up to the sexual norm, marrying and having a daughter. While Harvey contentedly lived his double life in New York City in the waning years of the 1950s, the family of Stokes’s wife, appalled at the revelation of their son-in-law’s homosexuality, sent Rick off to shock therapy and intensive psychiatric treatment.
The same year Harvey was passing out Barry Goldwater leaflets in Manhattan subways, Rick Stokes had found a political cause too—in Sacramento, where he had fled from his family and founded the area’s first gay organization. While Harvey was arguing vociferously that America should bullishly win the Vietnam war, Rick was organizing gay protests and driving to San Francisco to participate in the fledgling Society for Individual Rights.
By 1977, of course, their roles had reversed and Harvey Milk was the candidate who talked most convincingly of the terrors perpetrated by a heterosexual society, even though Rick Stokes surely was the candidate who had more intimately experienced them; Harvey was the candidate who talked of the importance of coming out to parents and friends, even though Rick had done it years before the concept even dawned on Milk; Harvey was t
he outsider candidate who had once enjoyed a comfortable life of operas, gourmet cuisine, and fine apartments while Rick Stokes was the insider from a dirt-floored shack, the victim of some of the sternest blows meted out to those who are deemed society’s pariahs. And all the compounded contradictions meant nothing in that election because politics reduces complexities to facile catch phrases and flossy symbols. So to most, the choice between Harvey Milk and Rick Stokes did not represent a conflict between two ambiguous men, but between two ways of life.
On Castro Street, that meant the rift between the teeming thousands of militant and angry street gays who had come during the 1970s and the older, more established professionals who had thrust deep roots into the city’s political structure. The discordance bred deep animosities that began before the official campaign announcements were spoken and lingered long after election day. Both camps were convinced that the victory of the other would be a profound defeat for the entire gay movement. To Stokes supporters, Harvey Milk was a loudmouthed, unpredictable opportunist who had done little but run for office since he moved to San Francisco just five years before. To Milk supporters, Rick Stokes was just another part of the wealthy elite, salving his wounds by kissing ass to liberal friends. On a personal level, the conflict had been building since the first day Harvey Milk was rebuffed by Jim Foster in 1973 and the first time Harvey talked publicly of the Alice B. Toklas club’s “Uncle Toms.” Heterosexuals, meanwhile, were amazed that gays, as embattled as they were by the summer of 1977, would spend so much time fighting each other.
“What is it you and Harvey had against each other anyway?” one local Democratic leader asked Jim Foster years later. Foster launched into an elaborate explanation about their different styles and political strategies. The wizened old politician listened carefully to Foster and then snapped that the whole explanation was bullshit. “I think the problem between you and Harvey was one of turf,” he said. Foster had to concede the old-timer was probably right.
* * *
From the start, the District 5 race came off like the three-ring circus of the eleven district supervisorial contests. Seventeen candidates filed for the seat, more than in any other district in the city, and about half were gay. Straight challengers included such big names as former 49er football player Bob St. Claire and Terrance Hallinan, the son of the onetime Progressive Party presidential candidate who had championed radical causes in the Bay Area for a half century. The two great axes of liberal power in San Francisco divided between Milk’s two most serious opponents, Stokes and Hallinan. Jim Foster made sure that the McCarthy clan would fall behind Rick when he had a casual conversation with Art Agnos. “Rick Stokes has a great political future,” he mentioned to Art. “But I’m not sure what he should run for—supervisor or assembly.” Assemblyman Agnos, of course, immediately chirped that he thought Rick would make a terrific supervisor and both he and Speaker McCarthy fell into his corner. Mayor Moscone, who also had little affection for Harvey Milk, did his part for Stokes by overlooking the no-candidate-no-commissioner rule and permitting Rick to keep his seat on the Board of Permit Appeals until the last possible day—long after Stokes had blanketed the district with his posters.
Many political gays thought Moscone’s ulterior motive for tacitly supporting Stokes was to help the candidate who would most benefit from a divided gay vote: Terrance “Kayo” Hallinan. Moscone’s ally, Representative Phil Burton, strongly backed Hallinan, who based his campaign on the hope that Milk and Stokes would split the gay vote to the extent that he could squeak to victory. The Burtons pulled out all stops for Hallinan. When Harvey led all hopefuls in balloting for the endorsement of the San Francisco Labor Council, for example, the congressmen’s cronies pressured a major union into changing its votes from Milk to Hallinan. The council leadership, controlled by Burton allies, then refused to let a furious Stan Smith take the floor in support of Harvey. Once again, however, Milk deftly used the machinations to his advantage, and stories about the complex endorsement deals did less to promote Hallinan than to underscore Milk’s perennial claim to the status of outsider and underdog.
Such PR left the other candidates shouting foul since Milk was, for once, anything but the underdog in the race. His basic strategy focused on running an incumbent’s campaign, challenging his opponents to meet his record of involvement in neighborhood issues. Three campaigns had built a corps of experienced volunteers and by 1977, Harvey was able to assemble an impressive array of endorsements ranging from the Mexican-American Political Association to the gay Republican club and the usual assortment of unions. Members of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club had infiltrated the Alice Toklas club to the point that they were able to deny Rick Stokes, a former Alice president, his own club’s endorsement. All this had Milk’s detractors muttering about the Milk Machine, to which Harvey snorted, “Well, at least a Milk Machine is healthy.”
For all these advantages, Harvey ran hard, almost desperately in this, his fourth attempt for office in as many years. He raced through gruelling seventeen-hour days of bus stop handshaking, afternoon door-to-door canvassing and evening bingo games and candidates’ nights. On one level, the immense funds pouring into the Stokes treasury and the political heavyweights behind Hallinan intimidated Milk; the panoply of minor candidates came as an unexpected challenge. Friends could also detect personal reasons for his uncharacteristic anxiety. His fabled stamina was beginning to fade; the years of nonstop campaigning had taken their toll. The massive publicity Milk had garnered as the primary gay spokesperson during the 1977 wave of militance had engendered an onslaught of macabre death threats. And just four weeks before Harvey made the formal announcement of his candidacy he turned forty-seven years old.
* * *
Broader historical forces were fueling the juggernaut of Milk’s campaign. For proof, Harvey needed only to step outside his ex officio city hall and look down Castro Street. By the thousands, these men had flocked to the golden gates of the Castro, where even the store mannequins had washboard stomachs. The Castro had become the nation’s chief liberated zone, as if the neighborhood’s massive Castro theater marquee had asked, “Give me your weak, your huddled, your oppressed, and your horny looking for a little action.”
Machismo was no longer fashionable, it was ubiquitous. Few hippies walked the streets any more; the hair was kept closely cropped a la Korean War era. Those who dared grow more than a few inches kept it tightly combed back circa Rick Nelson. The dress was decidedly butch, as if God had dropped these men naked and commanded them to wear only straight-legged levis, plaid Pendleton shirts, and leather coats over hooded sweatshirts. Everywhere, drugstore cowboys eyed laundromat loggers winking at barfly jocks. It was a 1957 beach party movie all over again, except the air bristled with the sexual tension of the seventies and there were few women. Most estimates put the gay population of San Francisco at around 125,000, but the guesswork left the estimators looking like medieval monks trying to figure how many gays could disco on the head of a peninsula. Milk privately estimated that at least 25,000 to 30,000 had settled into the Castro. His friend Tory Hartmann called them the Jeep People, since they were refugees who came not in tiny boats, but in their macho four-wheel-drive jeeps. The uniformity in dress and style had the Castro denizens jokingly branding each other Castroids.
The Castro Village Association had grown to include ninety merchants as the Castro business district sprawled from the two-block Castro Street strip itself to include virtually all the adjacent side streets. Milk estimated that businesses on the Castro strip alone grossed $30 million in 1976, up 30 percent from the year before. The local Hibernia Bank branch jumped from being the smallest branch in the Hibernia system to one of the largest, forcing the bank to add a new wing. The burgeoning business community consummated much of Harvey’s early dream about gay economic clout. The mere rumor that beer magnate Joseph Coors had donated to Anita Bryant’s campaign resurrected the old Coors boycott and every gay bar in the city dropped the popular b
eer; that alone ended Coors’ long-held status as California’s top-selling beer, and the company scrambled to take out ads in gay papers to deny Bryant connections. Florida orange juice also became a prime no-no and every gay bar prominently displayed signs explaining that any o.j. came strictly from California groves.
Television news crews and writers from publications around the world stalked the Castro to chart the story of the unprecedented powerhouse of gay political and economic clout. Most ended up at the doorstep of the unofficial mayor of Castro Street, who talked on about the neighborhood the way a proud father brags about a firstborn son, albeit Milk’s enthusiasm for the street was often more lusty. With the growth of the Castro and the corollary development of economic and political strength, San Francisco replaced New York as the focus of the gay movement. Some called it Mecca, but to most gays it was nothing short of Oz, a place they had never hoped to see in their lifetimes. The area, however, maintained a small-town ambience. The neighborhood mailman was Harry Britt, the former Methodist minister, who could often be found chewing the fat with the neighborhood author, Frank Robinson, or the local pot dealer, Dennis Peron, in Castro Camera. The whole scenario brought back nostalgic memories for men like Allan Baird who knew of times when other villagers ambled casually along the friendly sidewalks.
Attacks came with the neighborhood’s national prominence. The upsurge in violent assaults on gays forced the formation of local street patrols, which nonviolently corralled attackers until police responded, often tardily. The fact that a virile gay community was taking care of its own problems startled the city’s establishment, which could barely deal with homosexuals of the Judy Garland vintage. The afternoon Examiner editorialized that the patrol was a “semi-vigilante” group and warned that “tolerant San Francisco has no quarrel with the gays as long as they don’t get hysterical and create problems that call for a police crackdown.” The comment indicated the extent to which city institutions were out of touch with the new realities being created by the gay influx to the city. At least 25,000 gays lived in the Castro, a quarter million showed up for the year’s Gay Freedom Day Parade—and the Examiner still believed it could even suggest a police crackdown, as if they were still in the good old days.
