The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  At twenty-three, Cleve Jones did not have the disposition to ponder these complex interrelationships between the media, politics, and long-term social change. He was just pissed. As the April date of the St. Paul vote neared, he talked more heatedly as he cruised the corners of Castro Street. They had to do something. At 3 A.M., just days before the balloting in Minnesota, Cleve and a handful of friends made their move. Armed with staplers and cheaply reproduced fliers, they blanketed all available walls and phone poles in the neighborhood with the announcement—come to Castro Street at 10 P.M. on the night of the St. Paul election. In evening sessions at Jones’s Castro Street apartment, the covert activists trained monitors to serve as a buffer between the expected crowds and police. There would be no notification of authorities, no police permits, nothing polite—just a raw, spontaneous expression of anger.

  Even the most pessimistic gay activists were stunned at the proportions of defeat in St. Paul, which was even worse than in Dade County. Hundreds of young men in fleece-lined bomber jackets milled around the corner of Castro and Market as the news of defeat swept the neighborhood. Jones took a bullhorn and held up a police whistle, which so many gay men carried to ward off attackers. “You have whistles,” he shouted. “You use them when you have been attacked. Tonight, we have been attacked.”

  With whistles shrieking, the crowd surged past Castro Street’s gay bars, attracting hundreds more. The size and intensity of the throng startled even Jones, not to mention the police, who gave up trying to restrict the crowd to a sidewalk. By the time the raucous demonstration passed City Hall, at least two thousand were shouting and blowing their whistles in unison. They cut the traditional five-mile swath through the city, the path they had followed on Orange Tuesday, and a lively rally at Union Square lasted past midnight. Afterward, Jones and his angry young friends decided they must further organize so that they could call a spontaneous demonstration with only a few hours’ notice. They also had to stake out Castro Street as the locale for gays to go to during times of crisis. “Castro Street has to be made into our territory. Strictly,” said Jones.

  * * *

  One week later, State Senator John Briggs appeared on the wide granite steps of City Hall to file the petitions that would assure that his initiative, now dubbed by gays the Briggs Initiative, would appear on the November ballot. Briggs’s gubernatorial campaign had fizzled by then. The initiative represented his last chance to get statewide recognition for whatever ambitions for higher office he might have held. The chants of gay demonstrators assured lead-story coverage: “John Briggs, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

  As usual, the state senator from Fullerton had his dollop of hyperbole. He was launching the drive in San Francisco again because, he explained, the city was “the moral garbage dump of homosexuality in this country.”

  Not about to be outdone, Supervisor Harvey Milk told reporters, “Nobody likes garbage cause it smells. Yet eight million tourists visited San Francisco last year. I wonder how many visited Fullerton.”

  Within a week, Wichita voters rejected their city’s gay rights ordinance by a whopping five-to-one margin. The posters had been put up secretly, only days before that march too; monitors were ready to keep the crowd in line so police would have no reason to attack. Over one thousand assembled at Castro and Market, angrily surging about like a herd of impatient cattle waiting to stampede. A true child of the Television Age, Cleve Jones had already arranged a march route that would assure the best pictures for the television cameras ready to get the tantalizing live shot of the demonstration for the late-night news. Cleve took his bullhorn to address the crowd, but before a dozen sentences came from his mouth, the throng spontaneously turned and pushed toward City Hall, leaving Cleve scrambling to catch up and take his ostensible post as leader. On the sides, walking inconspicuously in his cordoroy jacket, blue jeans, and sneakers, was Harvey Milk. The militance he had been urging gays to gain since 1973 had become a fait accompli. The shouts were no longer courteous slogans like “Gay Rights Now,” but chants like, “Civil Rights or Civil War.”

  As the crowd turned off Market Street on the final blocks toward the City Hall rotunda, a wave of anger swept over the throng, an invisible yet palpable tide that rose cathartically like a small waft of gasoline vapor rising toward a spark, and then ebbing, falling back slowly, only seconds before the moment of ignition. “It only came this far from being a riot,” Harvey confided to a reporter later that night. The reporter noted that Harvey didn’t seem particularly upset by the prospect.

  At the rally after the march, Jones took his bullhorn to note that the day marked the fortieth anniversary of the year Adolf Hitler issued his first anti-homosexual decrees banning gays from many jobs and making homosexual thoughts a punishable offense. “Forty years ago tonight, the gay citizens of Germany found out they no longer had civil rights,” Cleve exhorted. “Tomorrow morning, the gay citizens of Wichita will also awaken to find that they too have lost their civil rights.”

  * * *

  “Take the clown suit off Harvey and all you end up with is another clown,” Harvey’s friend Carl Carlson said later.

  Barnum and Bailey’s circus had come to town, and, as a publicity stunt, offered to make up a number of public figures as clowns. Harvey, City Hall’s most ardent circus lover, stepped to the front of the line; Harvey could finally be a clown—a real one—for a change. A California Living magazine writer, Ira Kamin, was on hand to record Harvey’s transformation. His description has eerie implications, given both the bizarre sequence of events that followed the story’s publication and the later historic significance of the date, May 21, just one day before Harvey’s forty-eighth birthday.

  “How do you feel,” asked the make-up artist.

  “I’m getting into sadness,” said Milk.…

  You don’t realize someone’s sad, really, till you see them in clown make-up. The eyes will always give you away. And Harvey Milk in white face had these terribly sad eyes.… Harvey Milk jutted out his lower lip, and drooped his shoulders. It was as if, getting into sadness, he was picking up the horror, the real horror of the world and there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about the real horror of the world, but jut out your lower lip and drop your shoulders and apply white cream to your face and feel it.

  Once outside, Kamin wrote, “something snapped” and Harvey gleefully started running up to cable cars, shaking tourists’ hands. “Hey, I’m a supervisor,” he explained, in full clown regalia. “I pass laws. I run this city. I’m an elected official.” The fact that the bozo claimed his name was Harvey Milk didn’t do much to convince the skeptical visitors.

  The circus’ major problem was that once in a clown outfit, Harvey didn’t want to give it up. After terrorizing tourists and charming children with his antics, Harvey went on to make his appointed rounds of political events that day—in his clown drag.

  The day after the clowning, while supervisors deliberated their serious municipal measures, Board President Feinstein was startled to see a man in a huge gorrilla costume come traipsing into the board chambers, lean over the railing separating supervisors from the gallery, hand Milk a red rose, and plant a big kiss on the legislator’s lips. It was Harvey’s last birthday.

  * * *

  Caught up in the tide of events that seemed so unrelenting in those early days of 1978, voters in Eugene repealed their gay rights ordinance the day after Harvey’s birthday. Once again, thousands took to the streets of San Francisco to chant, blow whistles, and then rally. After the successive losses in Dade County, St. Paul, and Wichita, a gay cartoonist depicted the new vote with one scoreboard: Lions—4, Gays—0. Few had any doubts that the Christian lions would chalk up another win when the Briggs Initiative—just qualified as Proposition 6 for the November ballot—came up for a vote. David Goodstein wrote that any fight was hopeless but that gays should slip into the background and let experienced campaign managers handle the effort. Less moderate gays condemned this as
elitist Uncle Tomism, but they were not much more optimistic. “We’re going to be creamed and it’s important that we not deceive people into thinking we can win,” warned Chris Perry, former President of the S.F. Gay club.

  Gay politicos responded to the Prop 6 threat by doing what they usually did when faced with a tough fight—splintering into factions. Moderates aligned with the Goodstein-Foster axis formed the statewide Concerned Voters of California (CVC), which would serve as the top-level professional side of the statewide campaign. The group hired Don Bradley, a veteran campaign warhorse whose experience included managing the statewide campaigns of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, former Governor Pat Brown, and many local politicians, most notably George Moscone. Bradley was well connected with political machines, which would ensure endorsements from virtually every major public figure and union in the state. Radicals, meanwhile, jelled into a statewide network of groups highlighted by San Francisco’s Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative (BACABI). These groups stuck to the tactics they knew best, organizing demonstrations and rallies. BACABI moved quickly to shore up support among all gays activists to the left of Goodstein.

  Neither group satisified Harvey. At a meeting of local gay leaders with CVC strategists, Representative Phil Burton proudly held up a brochure that talked in nebulous terms of human rights and the U.S. Constitution. “This is masturbation—shit and masturbation,” Harvey shouted, convinced the brochure was merely a tepid response to what he considered a dangerous threat. All he’d get from CVC, he decided, was liberal bullshit. Milk also doubted that the rowdy demonstrations and leftist rhetoric of groups like BACABI would do much to convince California voters either. Harvey and his corps of close followers formed their own group, San Franciscans Against Prop 6. Since winning the election seemed out of the question, the group had only one primary goal: to make sure Prop 6 was defeated in San Francisco. A statewide loss might be tolerable, but losing in San Francisco would have national significance and prove a devastating blow to the image of gay power Harvey had promoted for so many years. Harry Britt was now president of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club; he and activists like Cleve Jones, Dick Pabich, and Jim Rivaldo put together the framework of S.F. Against, deciding to avoid the high-budget media strategy of CVC and to leave picketing to the hard-core radicals. Instead, they would use the political tactics Harvey had lectured on through his four campaigns—registering voters, walking precincts, and gaining support through old-fashioned door-to-door canvasing. Harvey spurned suggestions that big names be brought in to direct and staff the group. “Always take people from the streets,” he urged. So the two directors, Bill Kraus, a UC-Berkeley graduate student fresh from the anti-Jarvis–Gann campaign, and Gwenn Craig, a black lesbian from Atlanta, were activists with little organizational experience.

  The formation of Harvey’s own anti-6 group outraged both radicals and moderates. The CVC forces had long distrusted Milk’s type of volunteer-intensive campaigns, fearing that all those unkempt Castro Street gays wandering the neighborhoods might scare voters away from the gay side. Radicals, meanwhile, saw the new organization as a naked power play by Harvey, another step toward building the political machine he had started to put together with San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. To a large extent, the radicals were right. Harvey had every intention of building a machine trained in his pragmatic theories of realpolitik; it was no accident that the people he assembled in his City Hall office and anti-Briggs campaign—people like Kraus, Craig, Anne Kronenberg, Pabich, Rivaldo, Cleve Jones, and Harry Britt—would indeed prove to be the people who, in a few months, would be leading the gay community, their hands on more power than Harvey could have imagined.

  With State Senator Briggs appearing regularly on nightly news broadcasts with anti-gay tirades that made Anita Bryant sound like Gertrude Stein, gays did not have much time to bicker. The three major groups learned to take up a policy of peaceful coexistence and coordinated their various efforts. It had been nearly a year since Briggs first announced his campaign, so the hysteria with which gays first viewed the Briggs Initiative had given way to calmer determination as the hard work of the campaign neared.

  * * *

  “You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone.” The neatly typed postcard bore only that simple message, underscoring all the fears Harvey had about his appearance in the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade. A number of threats had promised Milk death on that day. Milk talked freely of the potential of assassination; maybe it would happen while he was riding in the open car, maybe on the stage, but he refused police protection. The Briggs Initiative had cast the eyes of the nation on California and especially on the San Francisco gay community. Harvey had to be there.

  The 1977 parade had been marked by strident militance in reaction to both the unexpected Bryant victory and the Robert Hillsborough murder; the 1978 parade, on a warm, sunny Sunday at the end of June, turned into a confident show of strength. A musician had organized a ninety-piece marching band to lead the parade. Near the head of the crowd stretched a long banner touting Jimmy Carter’s classic quote: “Human Rights Are Absolute.” Contingents from over one hundred gay groups—everything from gay doctors, teachers, and plumbers to the roaring Dykes on Bikes—filled the streets. Pink triangles dominated many of their posters. The Los Angeles Times estimated the crowd at 375,000—the largest assemblage of people that would meet in one place in San Francisco during the entire 1970s. Only the helicopters hovering overhead with their network cameramen could see the broad expanses of people eking their way slowly toward the beautiful Civic Center plaza. Parade organizers had asked marchers to carry a sign saying where they were from, so the television cameras could record that San Francisco’s homosexuals were indeed refugees from all over the United States. With a flowered lei thrown casually over his white T-shirt, Harvey Milk, sitting in the back of a convertible, carried his hand-lettered sign, “I’m from Woodmere, N.Y.” He waved to the crowd that swelled around his car, cheering wildly as he passed. “This is such a great crowd,” Harvey enthused. “They’d even elect me mayor.”

  Wayne Friday carefully held Milk’s legs in case the car had to make a sudden lurch forward. As she drove slowly toward the City Hall rally site, Anne Kronenberg kept retracing the routes to the nearest hospital in case it happened. Less than a year ago, Anne had walked into Castro Camera to volunteer for some campaign work because she didn’t have anything better to do; now, she was driving one of the nation’s most famous gay leaders, bracing herself for the sound of gunfire. So much had happened so fast. And it had only begun.

  Harvey and Frank Robinson had prepared one of the dramatic pieces of oration Harvey loved so much for that day. Maybe the assassination threats had made him think of Martin Luther King, because he quoted King freely during the speech, even calling for a march on Washington for the next July 4. Few politicians in American history got the chance to directly address a crowd the size of the one stretched out before him and Harvey wanted to make the best of it.

  My name is Harvey Milk—and I want to recruit you. I want to recruit you for the fight to preserve democracy from the John Briggs and Anita Bryants who are trying to constitutionalize bigotry.

  We are not going to allow that to happen. We are not going to sit back in silence as 300,000 of our gay sisters and brothers did in Nazi Germany. We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads into the gas chambers.

  On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country.… Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.… We are coming out. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives. I know that it is hard and that it will hurt them, but thi
nk of how they will hurt you in the voting booths.…

  Jimmy Carter, you talk about human rights. You want to be the world’s leader for human rights. There are 15 to 20 million gay people in this nation. When are you going to talk about their rights?

  If you do not speak out, if you remain silent … then I call upon lesbians and gay men from all over the nation, your nation, to gather in Washington one year from now … on that very same spot where over a decade ago, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to a nation of his dreams, dreams that are fast fading, dreams that to many in this nation have become nightmares rather than dreams. I call upon all minorities and especially the millions of lesbians and gay men to wake up from their dreams, to gather in Washington and tell Jimmy Carter and their nation: “Wake up. Wake up, America. No more racism. No more sexism. No more ageism. No more hatred. No more … And to the bigots. To the John Briggs, to the Anita Bryants … and all their ilk: Let me remind you what America is.

  Listen carefully:

  On the statue of Liberty, it says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free…”

  In the Declaration of Independence, it is written: “All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights…”

  And in our national anthem, it says: “Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free.”

  For Mr. Briggs and Ms. Bryant … and all the bigots out there: That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence. No matter how hard you try, you cannot chip those words off the base of the Statue of Liberty. And no matter how hard you try, you cannot sing the “Star Spangled Banner” without those words.