The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  The liberals in City Hall were also out of touch with the emerging political reality. By 1977, gays had obtained only three commission appointments out of the nearly four hundred the mayor could make, and two of these were the women’s and human rights commissions, which had little real power. Gays were, at best, the unwanted stepchildren of city politics. Mayor Moscone refused to meet with leaders from groups like the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, insisting that anyone with a problem to take up with city government had to go through Jim Foster. Since Foster and the entrenched gay leadership would have little to do with the unkempt gay militants of Castro Street, the new mass of gays, many of whom had arrived after the 1975 mayoral race and the repressive days of the Alioto regime, were, in effect, frozen out of City Hall. Politicos like Foster saw the process as simply part of the old political game of kings and barons. Harvey Milk, a baron, had challenged Moscone, the king; Moscone had no choice but to hang Milk in the public square and cut himself off from Milk’s troops. That was how politics worked, reasoned the sophisticated political pro’s. Among the less seasoned, however, an anger simmered just the same. This was not a matter of kings-and-barons politics, they thought, but of a movement—and, most significantly, a new gay consciousness—coming into its own in a neighborhood of its own, Castro Street.

  * * *

  Harvey’s frequent bursts of enthusiasm had long ago stopped surprising Michael Wong, but even Wong was amazed when Harvey euphorically maintained he had finally found a campaign manager perfectly suited for his idiosyncracies.

  “A manager?” Wong asked. “Who the hell can manage you?”

  “This person, Anne Kronenberg!” Harvey exclaimed. “Wait till you meet her, Mike. She’s really good at managing things for me.”

  “You’re full of shit, Harvey,” Mike snapped. “John Ryckman couldn’t manage you and you want me to believe that someone is managing your campaign?”

  Harvey was undeterred. “If I win, I intend to bring her to City Hall, but don’t say anything, because I don’t want people to start tripping over that.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Sharp, young, and a good, good worker. You’re gonna love her.”

  Wong was surprised when he finally did meet Anne. She seemed everything Harvey wasn’t. Kronenberg was quiet by nature and spoke slowly and thoughtfully while Harvey yapped away in his characteristic breakneck pace; she was methodical, with a concern for details while the disorganized Milk carelessly forged ahead with little thought for specifics; she was relaxed and laid back while Harvey was his old hyperactive self. At twenty-three, Anne was half Harvey’s age, but they proved a perfect match and her appearance completed the creation of the cadre of key aides who would work with Harvey for the rest of his career.

  Anne knew from the first day she walked into a campaign headquarters as a junior high student in Everrett, Washington, that she liked politics. The headquarters always bristled with the excitement of people doing something that made a difference, even if it was just licking envelopes or sorting out precinct maps. Most of Anne’s friends were Republicans, but at thirteen, Kronenberg figured out she was no traditionalist, so she joined the Young Democrats, often busing to nearby Seattle to work on liberal campaigns there. She had always felt different, but her mom assured her it was normal to get jealous when her girl friends dated boys, so it didn’t cross her mind until after she graduated from the University of Washington and moved to San Francisco that her difference had anything to do with sex. After a long bout with hepatitis, Anne was having a hard time establishing a career, so she was looking more for purpose than a job when she showed up at Castro Camera one day and said she’d like to volunteer. Since she was unemployed, she could work full time and, with his usual casualness, Harvey made Anne campaign manager.

  Initially Kronenberg was not as taken with her candidate as he was with her. He was always running around and yelling; she was intimidated by his seemingly limitless energy. Harvey could not afford to pay her a salary, so she had to live off whatever extra $10 or $20 bill appeared in the Castro Camera register that day. The whole campaign had to be run on such a piecemeal basis. A $25 profit on developing a vacation’s worth of slides meant that $25 worth of brochures could be printed up that day. It didn’t bode well for long-term strategizing. On a more personal level, Anne worried that Harvey seemed hopelessly entangled in his complicated relationship with Scott Smith—using Scott as the scapegoat in his tantrums—while Harvey simultaneously maintained he was having a terrible time finding boyfriends. “You two act like you still are lovers,” Anne told Harvey in her first weeks of campaigning. “No, we don’t,” Harvey said stubbornly.

  Anne’s lesbian friends, meanwhile, warned her that she should never get mixed up with a politician of the male gender. “He’s a man,” they counseled knowingly. “He’s just going to use you and throw you out.” Lesbian leaders had long ago spread the word that Harvey was anti-woman, partially for his close alliances with drag queens, and few ever backed Harvey. But the more Anne saw of Harvey, the more impressed she was. She was amazed that one man could have so much influence without ever having held public office; it never occurred to her that mere citizens could garner such power. And there was the endless stream of little old ladies and troubled young gay men who came to Harvey with their problems, big and small, and Harvey always had time for them. Anne soon found that Harvey was much more manageable than he would admit. The major problem was to learn how to put up with his constant ribbing—”We’ll have to install a revolving door to handle all your girlfriends,” he remarked at the sight of Kronenberg’s frequent suitors—but that, she realized, came with the territory.

  The sudden appearance of such a perfect campaign manager seemed suspicious to Harvey’s old friend, Wayne Friday. Friday was convinced that she had been planted by the Stokes campaign to sabotage Harvey’s effort. He even spent an hour grilling her before he would give his approval. The campaign, however, quickly evolved into a family affair. Kronenberg managed volunteers while Harry Britt worked for Harvey through the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. Jim Rivaldo and Dick Pabich teamed up to design Harvey’s campaign literature and took to consulting a number of political campaigns throughout the city. The Milk Machine was in full gear.

  * * *

  The guards at Peoples Temple eyed Anne suspiciously when she rode up to the locked gate on her Honda 550 with a boxload of Milk fliers strapped on the seat. The guard admitted her to the gate, but made her wait in a locked vestibule until he was authorized to admit her to a second locked vestibule, where she had to wait until she got still another authorization to walk inside the church, the guards standing stiffly at every door. She was then instructed to call before she came again, so she could get her name put on a special list that would enable her to enter. She left the Temple feeling queasy about the entire experience.

  “They’re weird, but they’re good volunteers,” Harvey told her. “You take help where it comes from, but don’t trust them.”

  Bad press had plagued Peoples Temple that summer. An investigation by the Chronicle’s City Hall reporter Marshall Kilduff had uncovered evidence that Jim Jones routinely faked his faith healings and that he kept Temple members sternly in line by regular beatings for the slightest infractions of the rules. The information startled Kilduff since Jones headed a powerful city commission, wielded considerable political influence, and had a top lieutenant serving in the district attorney’s office, an appointment that effectively kept Temple dissidents from taking their complaints to the D.A. The Chronicle would not print Kilduff’s revelations, so he had the story published in New West magazine. The city editor who squelched the People’s Temple story, it turned out, had been well cultivated by the Reverend Jones. By fall, a besieged Reverend Jones headed for the Utopia he claimed he was building in the jungles of Guyana—named Jonestown, after himself. The city editor who stopped the Chronicle investigation of Jim Jones, meanwhile, would be gone by the time Peoples Temple made t
he news again.

  Hallinan clearly stood as the most formidable challenger in District 5, but most of the talk at Milk’s headquarters centered on Rick Stokes and his supporters, whom Harvey dubbed “Stokettes,” as if the election were for control of the gay movement instead of District 5. When Harvey quelled the riots on Orange Tuesday, he pointedly kept asking, “Where was Rick Stokes? He’s the highest gay official in the city, not me. And he wants to be a leader?” When real estate campaign contributions swelled Stokes’s campaign chest to the largest of any nonincumbent in San Francisco, Milk talked of “blood-sucker real estate speculators” and piously maintained, “You can spend a fortune to buy ‘name recognition’ or you can earn it by helping people.” All the money just proved he was once again the underdog, fighting the machine. The charge infuriated Rick, who knew well he was the underdog in the race. “Harvey was born to be a martyr,” he fumed to one interviewer.

  When not deriding Stokes, Harvey picked on his favorite nemesis, downtown business and tourist interests. “I don’t know whether they’re following some big plan of the Chamber of Commerce,” Harvey speculated, but he made it clear that he thought the days were over when executives in skyscrapers could dictate the direction of the city. “Better watch out,” one friend warned. “You keep talking like that and you’re gonna get shot.”

  Harvey, however, had his own plans for the city. He wanted to reorient the tax structure to bring light industry back to the deserted factories and warehouses near downtown. The city could also use the structures for day-care centers where senior citizens, who frittered away their last years in lonely Tenderloin apartments, could tend the children of low-income mothers trying to work their way off welfare. The vision fit perfectly with the essentially capitalistic core of Harvey’s own version of urban Jeffersonian democracy, focused on small businesses and industries working around decentralized neighborhoods which, like the Castro, could return the small-town flavor to big-city life. Harvey was fond of telling the story about the newspaper publisher who heard all these plans at Milk’s endorsement interview and ended the meeting quizically saying, “You really are a dreamer, aren’t you?” Harvey’s favorite Broadway show had always been Man of LaMancha, so the question struck him as the highest compliment he received during the entire campaign.

  The central element of Harvey’s campaign appearances, however, were always the last paragraphs of his hope speech. By now, it had several permutations. Sometimes it was a boy in Des Moines, sometimes he was from Dayton, but always there was a young person out there who would hear of Milk’s victory and know that even though he was gay and somehow different, he had a chance too. “It was funny,” Frank Robinson later reflected. “Harvey had so much hope for the generic you and so much personal fatalism about his own life.”

  * * *

  “Who’s that drunk?”

  Dick Pabich had little use for heavy drinkers and here he was, having the most successful fund raiser in Harvey’s career, and there was this drunken Mexican, slobbering around, muttering epithets in a mixture of Spanish and English. “I’ll show you the door,” said Pabich, guiding the inebriated young man outside. A few minutes later, one of Milk’s friends giggled, “He was Harvey’s new boyfriend.”

  That was how Dick Pabich met Jack Lira; that was how most people met Jack Lira. Drunk. Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems, so Jack’s appearance surprised few who had known Harvey in the days of Jack McKinley. Most of Harvey’s San Francisco associates, however, had known only Scott Smith, who had for years served as the quintessential political wife, working on campaigns and managing the business while Harvey played politics. According to most accounts, Harvey had discovered Jack Lira one night on Castro Street, staring absently into the window of Castro Camera. His compact body made the twenty-five-year-old Latino irresistible to Milk and the pair made time for sexual trysts whenever they could be fit into Harvey’s hectic campaign schedule. The older wealthy man with whom Lira lived at that time took a dim view of Jack’s extracurricular activities. One day, Lira turned up tearfully at Castro Camera with a long letter explaining why he was being evicted from the comfortable Pacific Heights mansion. That night, Jack Lira moved into Harvey’s slovenly apartment above the camera store.

  Harvey quickly nicknamed Lira “Taco Bell”; Harvey’s friends called him “the mistake.” While campaign volunteers worked late into the night leafleting and stuffing envelopes, Lira spent afternoons watching soap operas and evenings drinking with a set of queeny buddies who also gained the disdain of Harvey’s friends. He spent other hours sitting at the apartment window, staring silently out at Castro Street. Lira struck up a feud with Scott Smith, who was usually jealous of Harvey’s new boyfriends anyway. Smith complained that Jack lashed out at his predecessor by mistreating the dog. When friends confronted Harvey about his questionable choice of lovers, Milk would sketchily outline Lira’s troubled past. The youngest child of a poor Mexican-American family, Jack had little education and no useful skills. The way Harvey told it, Jack’s dad had declared he no longer had a son when he learned of Jack’s homosexuality, so, like the many others, Jack trekked from Fresno to gay Mecca. Harvey insisted he was just trying to help out a troubled kid. Besides, he’d add with a wink, Jack was dynamite sex.

  * * *

  Former Toklas President Jo Daly and her lover Nancy Achilles had long planned some kind of marriage ceremony to solemnize their long relationship. Jo was taken aback, however, when she mentioned to her longtime friend Dianne Feinstein that she and Nancy were going to have a ceremony on a yacht cruising San Francisco Bay. Dianne was adamant; she wanted to go, but her husband was dying of cancer. They should have the ceremony in her backyard, Dianne suggested, so she could attend. Feinstein worked out the details and then poured over appropriate passages of Kahlil Gibran to read at the solemnization. The wedding was held on schedule in Feinstein’s back garden and that, as much as the Orange Tuesday demonstrations, said a lot about where gays stood in San Francisco of 1977. Only several weeks before Feinstein faced the voters in one of the city’s more conservative supervisorial districts, she held a lesbian wedding ceremony in her backyard. It barely caused a stir, and Dianne Feinstein was not generally considered to be among the more liberal politicians in city government.

  * * *

  An explosion shattered the night. Shards of glass sprayed across the sidewalks of Castro Street. Castro Camera’s windows had been blown out by the M–80 mega-firecrackers; explosions shattered three more Castro Street stores within minutes. Supervisorial candidate Harvey Milk was on the front page of the next morning’s Chronicle saying that, once again, Anita Bryant has goaded anti-gay violence. Years later friends hinted broadly that Harvey had more than a little foreknowledge that the explosions would happen. “You gotta realize the campaign was sort of going slow, and, well…” the confidante lets his voice taper off.

  It’s doubtful that Milk was responsible for the blasts, other friends say, if for no other reason than he could barely afford the cost it took to replace the window. The hints, however, indicate how badly friends knew Harvey wanted to win this election. Against such determination, Rick Stokes never had a chance. The early months did more to embitter than excite the soft-spoken attorney about the mechanics of electoral politics. Stokes was running because his years of drafting laws had intrigued him with the notion of sitting on a legislative board. He was never excited about campaigning. Harvey, meanwhile, was an inveterate campaigner who knew little of the nuts and bolts of legislation. The shy, affable Stokes found he had a hard time tooting his own horn as the campaign progressed. He enjoyed meeting people, but shied away from working crowds. Harvey, of course, proved as masterful as ever in 1977, jutting out his hand to every potential voter he saw and grabbing press at every turn. Rick just got more discouraged. Every day of campaigning you have to sell off bits and pieces of yourself, he thought. Before you know it, you’re out the window with all the bits and pieces. At one po
int in the campaign, Stokes even toyed with the idea of dropping out. According to his early campaign manager, Ken Maley, David Goodstein and Art Agnos prodded him back into the race. “They’re not interested in getting Rick elected,” he observed. “They just want to put the final nail in the coffin of Harvey’s political career.” Stokes stayed in the race.

  Harvey campaigned on maniacally, even as all the cards fell his way. He canvassed every precinct twice. His human billboards again lined Market Street. The big shocker came in the campaign’s closing days when the Chronicle amazed everybody, especially Milk, and endorsed Harvey for supervisor. The endorsement editorial noted Milk’s business experience as part of his qualifications, sending Harvey’s friends into hysterics. For all the things Harvey had been charged with over the years, no one had ever accused him of being a good businessman.

  On election day, Harvey dashed madly from precinct to precinct. His nightmare: that he would again lose by the razor-thin margin that had marked his assembly defeat. He relentlessly pushed on his well organized corps of get-out-the-vote workers to knock on every door. The fears, at last, proved unfounded.

  * * *

  Television kleig lights bathed Castro Camera’s Victorian storefront with their surreal glow. The rowdy crowd overflowed into the streets and filled every available counter and tabletop in the store. The roar of motorcycles was heard as Anne Kronenberg pulled her Honda 550 to the front of the store with Sheriff Richard Hongisto behind her, while her latest lover pulled in on another motorcycle with a grinning Supervisor-elect Harvey Milk on the back, fresh from claiming his lopsided victory at City Hall.