by Randy Shilts
That’s what America is.
Love it or leave it.
The sight of the hundreds of thousands gathered in front of the stately City Hall, overflowing from the large Civic Center plaza, flashed on television sets across the nation that night. The press had a field day with human interest side stories to the event. One white-haired, seventy-four-year-old woman, for example, told reporters about her two gay sons who were both teachers. “My older son committed suicide when his local school board found out he was gay and made moves to fire him,” she said. “My other son is afraid to be here today because of that S.O.B. Briggs and what he wants to do to teachers. I lost one son to the likes of Mr. Briggs and I don’t intend to lose another one.”
Also granting interviews that day was Supervisor Dan White, who stood grimly on the sidelines of the parade as the thousands marched by. White was the only supervisor who had voted against closing Market Street for the annual parade. “This is our only opportunity to approve or disapprove of what goes on in our streets,” he said. “The vast majority of people in this city don’t want public displays of sexuality.”
Anita Bryant asked Christians to pray for San Francisco on that Sunday.
Harvey was ecstatic about the response to his speech. As usual, he never mentioned the assassination fears once the imminent threat had passed. Instead, he spoke enthusiastically about the crowd and carefully handed out copies of his speech to every reporter he could buttonhole. Already, he could imagine the tens of thousands walking by the White House next year, assembling under the shadow of the Washington Monument. Such good theater.
* * *
Bienvenidos Castro. Willkommen Castro. Bienvenue Castro, in seven languages, the large canvas banner festooned over the intersection of Eighteenth and Castro spoke to the new role the Castro neighborhood now fulfilled in the homosexual collective conscious. The corner had been dubbed the crossroads of the gay world, and by the summer of 1978, the neighborhood had become an international gay tourist mecca. Thousands more were moving to the neighborhood, prompting gay politicos to speculate not if gays would become a numerical majority of San Francisco adults, but when. A new gay chauvinism ran rampant, complete with a lexicon of pejoratives. Heterosexuals became known as breeders—“Today’s breeders, tomorrow’s cows,” went one slogan—and the game of spotting heterosexuals on Castro Street replaced the old heterophile game of picking out queers.
The neighborhood represented less a trend than a bona-fide sociological phenomenon. An entire Castro life-style evolved, fixed squarely on machismo. A gym membership became a prerequisite to the neighborhood’s social life. Solid pectorals and washboard stomachs were highly valued for their aesthetic benefits during the ritualistic tearing off of sheer tank tops during the sweaty nights on the disco dance floor. The milieu was more macho than anything in heterosexual life and early settlers were disquieted by a profound shift in the neighborhood. No longer was the area a social experiment in the throes of creation; the life-style had solidified. Gays no longer came to the Castro to create a new life-style, they came to fit into the existing Castro Street mold. The summer of ‘78 seemed the Castro gays’ equivalent of the Haight-Ashbury hippies’ summer of love eleven years earlier; like its predecessor, the hot sunny days marked the end of an epoch as well as the beginning.
The continuing influx of gays from across the country strained housing stock and once distinct neighborhoods adjacent to the Castro soon became “Castroized,” as Harvey called it. The renovating gay immigrants bought up tract after tract of century-old Victorians, often at extragavant prices. Housing prices skyrocketed further because of the high demand—and the real estate speculators, who were taking advantage of the boom to quickly buy and sell the homes. The rate of real estate transactions jumped 700 percent between 1968 and 1978, according to one federal study of the Duboce Triangle neighborhood a few blocks off Castro. The gay immigrants bought heavily into neighboring black and Latino areas, whose low-income minorities could not compete economically. Black leaders were especially vocal in asserting that gays were shoving minorities out of the city. By the end of 1978, gay neighborhoods dominated roughly 20 percent of the city’s residential expanses.
No single strip in San Francisco felt the pinch of the inflated real estate values like the two-block core of the Castro district. Leases rose dramatically, killing marginal businesses to make way for establishments oriented toward the high-profit services needed by tourists and the increasingly affluent residents. A few hundred feet from the Willkommen Castro banner was another sign that spoke as meaningfully of the changing Castro. In the window of Castro Camera: “We need a new home.”
The trouble started when Harvey learned his landlord, a Castro Street gay realtor, had kicked an elderly woman out of a nearby apartment where she had lived for decades to make way for a title insurance company. Harvey repeatedly used the eviction as an example of why the city needed an anti-speculation tax. Harvey’s landlord was understandably miffed at being paraded about as the city’s number one “bloodsucker,” as Harvey was fond of calling realtors. He even mentioned Harvey’s indiscretion in a letter informing the supervisor that his store’s rent was increasing from $350 to $1200 a month. Rent on Milk’s apartment above the store was also boosted.
With characteristic delicacy, Harvey posted the old and new rent figures on his store window, alongside the name of the offending realtor. Harvey didn’t need the extra hundreds of square feet any more, since most of his obligations as the mayor of Castro Street had shifted months before to the real City Hall, so he found a small cubbyhole on Market Street right off Castro and moved the still skimpy inventory. Harvey’s friends looked at the move as something of an end to an era on Castro Street, and sneered when the space was soon taken up by a bourgeois boutique that sold such utilitarian items as $350 crystal vases.
Virtually all of Milk’s aides and friends saw the move from his Castro Street apartment as an opportunity to unload Jack Lira. As the months of Harvey’s supervisorial term wore on, it became obvious to them that Jack was Harvey’s major liability. His drunken tantrums often embarrassed Milk publicly and certainly provided no role model for the nation’s first gay city official. His depression from watching Holocaust on TV never lifted. Moreover, Jack was always hassling Harvey’s City Hall aides, insisting that they record his lengthy messages word for word while they were in the midst of heated political activity. Jack, however, usually refused to take any messages for Harvey and simply hung up the phone on many political callers, including a state senator and a number of other supervisors.
Anne Kronenberg pushed Harvey to move into his new apartment without Jack. But Harvey had prepared a dozen reasons to keep him. Jack was improving; he might take a job next week; he might go back to school; he seemed to be getting better the last few days; and, of course, the old standby, “He needs me.” Sometimes Harvey pointed to Lira’s occasional voter registration work as proof Jack was straightening out; he registered 123 voters in one week alone, Milk boasted. But the only money-making project Anne ever saw him get behind was a scheme to write all the major cash prize quiz shows in Los Angeles, suggesting they bring on this hilarious San Francisco politician as a contestant. Anne figured that Jack liked the project because it was a way to make money without him having to get a job. In the end, Jack made the move with Harvey.
It would be another year before Anne understood Harvey’s ill-fated attraction to Jack and other men with dependent and often troubled personalities. She was studying alcoholism and ran across research about a pandemic, though little-known, problem known as co-alcoholism. Alcoholics, by definition, usually need someone to take care of them, since they are ill-suited to take care of themselves; their caretaker is the co-alcoholic, a person who, like Harvey, is often a nondrinkier. The co-alcoholics are the people who drive the drunk home from the bar, pay the rent and offer hope to otherwise dismal lives. By doing this, the co-alcoholic fulfills an addiction as dangerous as alcohol—the need to be n
eeded. Harvey had all the classic symptoms of the co-alcoholic, Kronenberg thought later. But then it was too late.
fourteen
Deadline Pressure
“This is not a civil rights question. This is not a human rights question. It is simply a question of morality.”
The senator perspired lightly under the glare of the television lights and the derisive sighs of the overwhelmingly hostile audience. Briggs cited the apocryphal statistics he brought up in every debate: a third of San Francisco’s teachers were gays, as were 20 percent of Los Angeles.’ “Most of them are in the closet,” he concluded, “and frankly, that’s where I think they should remain.”
“If Senator Briggs thinks he’s better than Christ, that he can decide what’s moral,” the supervisor snapped back, “then maybe we should have elected him Pope.”
Harvey was reading the line off one of the dozens of five-by-nine inch pieces of paper on which he had methodically typed each pat answer to all the equally pat charges which arose in his debates with the Fullerton senator. The debate in a high school auditorium in suburban Walnut Creek—televised live to the Bay Area—looked like as heated an exchange as could be found in American politics. But by late September, each combatant had honed his argument into prepackaged, easily digestible quotes for media consumption. Fast food politics. The John and Harvey show.
Since the governor’s race was nothing more than a dull cakewalk to victory for Jerry Brown, Proposition 6 became the most talked about contest in California’s 1978 general elections. Reporters from around the world trekked to America’s most populous state to cover the first time an entire state had voted on gay rights. Each side had a champion, one of two forty-eight-year-old public officials, both Korean war veterans and both scrappers who had struck maverick political careers. Prop 6 had yanked both men from regional notoriety and into a national spotlight as they slugged it out over this new and ambiguous social issue of homosexuality. Both were given to buzzwords, bugaboos and apocalyptic visions. For John Briggs, the battle was his one last chance to build a statewide following to expand on his backwater Orange County roots. For Harvey Milk, the fight was the latest act of a political drama that started with his hippie board candidacy five years earlier; finally he had the platform to say everything that had needed to be said, and heard, for so many years, since that traumatic day in Central Park when he took off his shirt.
“Homosexuality is the hottest issue in this country since Reconstruction,” said John Briggs. On that, at least, nobody at the debate disagreed. A handful of suburban Briggs supporters watched aghast as buses deposited hundreds of San Francisco gays at the auditorium doors. Sitting with his San Francisco friends was Harvey Milk’s new boyfriend, Doug Franks. Everybody liked Doug much more than Jack Lira and they nodded knowingly as they purveyed Doug’s short, muscular body. Just Harvey’s type. The television technicians focused their instant eyes and adjusted their blaring lights—and the debate continued. Briggs quoted the statistics about one-quarter of gay men having over five hundred sexual contacts. “I wish,” Harvey jabbed back.
Briggs insisted he was only out to defend the family. “There are no organizations to defend children. There are all kinds of organizations to abuse your children. Pornographers want your children. Dope addicts want your children. Homosexuals want your children.” And the issue is, he maintained, again and again, children. “They don’t have any children of their own. If they don’t recruit children or very young people, they’d all die away. They have no means of replenishing. That’s why they want to be teachers and be equal status and have those people serve as role models and encourage people to join them.”
“Children,” Harvey shot back, “do need protection—protection from the incest and child beatings pandemic in the heterosexual family.” Milk glanced down to point number four in his notes. The heading: Teaching Homosexuality. “How do you teach homosexuality—like French?” As far as role models, “If it were true that children mimicked their teachers,” Harvey joked, “you’d sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around.”
In the end, both posed their visions of two imminent dark futures. “We cannot exist without the family, without the church and without the nation,” Briggs concluded. “And if the initiative is defeated, I think it portends for a period of moral decay in this country that is going to lead to the carrying out or the bearing out of the prediction of General MacArthur, who stated that no civilization has ever been recorded having survived when it falls into a period of general economic decline and moral decay.… As of late with this free love, this zero population and gay liberation, we are in effect weakening the moral fiber, not only of the family and the child and the parents, but the country. And this is a greater danger than communism.”
A greater danger than communism, Harvey thought to himself. Did he first hear that on the public television debate, read it in the Los Angeles Times interview, or see it at one of Briggs’ City Hall appearances? All the charges had become so interchangeable, and Harvey’s eyes darted down at his notes for his now-familiar windup. “John Briggs knows that every one of his statements has been repudiated by facts,” Harvey began. “Yet he never stops making wild inflammatory remarks that, to anyone who knows the facts, sounds as if it were the KKK talking about blacks or Hitler about Jews. There is absolutely no difference between those types of morality.” Harvey picked up the pace for the ending, so rote he needed no notes, just the right dramatic intonations. “In your own drive for personal power, how many careers are you willing to see destroyed? How many lives will you destroy in your lust for power? And when will you stop?”
The crowd cheered Milk on. The lights blinked off and Harvey collected his neatly typed notes for the next debate. That’s the way all the debates went, Harvey had explained to Doug on the way to the auditorium. But Doug saw Milk was exhilarated at the unique chance for televised rebuffs to the old stereotypes of child molesters and recruiters that had haunted gays since his own childhood in Woodmere more than forty years ago. After the debate, Doug easily slipped into the background as scores of fans came to congratulate Harvey. Doug enjoyed watching the idolatry younger gays heaped on the supervisor. Harvey, meanwhile, liked finally having a boyfriend who could fulfill the role of political wife. Jack had never done that, he told Doug. Jack couldn’t handle it when they’d go somewhere together and Harvey would get all the attention, leaving Lira in the background. Other than that brief assessment, however, Doug knew little of Jack, except that anger crept into Harvey’s voice every time the name came up.
Harvey had little time to dwell on the past. An election had to be won, and Harvey threw himself into his role as the chief campaigner for the gay side with a desparate pace that worried his friends. When not poring over his speech notes or flying all over California for debates and fund raisers, Milk had his heavy workload as San Francisco supervisor and his less official responsibilities as Castro Street ward healer to tend to. But there was a pathos to all the activity and it was rapidly taking a toll on the supervisor. For the first time, Harvey actually looked his age. The air of immortality that had always made him look years younger had faded into wrinkles and furrows. Harvey would come home from one of his seventeen-hour days, plop himself on the couch, strike up a conversation with a friend, and then, in mid-sentence, drop off to sleep in dead exhaustion.
“Harvey, you’re killing yourself,” pleaded Don Amador in Los Angeles. “You’ve got to slow down.” Amador later remembered, “He was acting like there wasn’t enough time to do everything that had to be done. He never complained that there was too much work—it was always that there wasn’t enough time.”
At City Hall, Anne Kronenberg grew more concerned as she saw the grueling campaign wearing out her boss. But he insisted that he had to keep going. No invitations could be turned down; it was all too important. A few friends guessed what caused those frantic weeks of activity that fall, tracing Harvey’s full-throttle campaigning back to that tragic Monday evening in
late August.
* * *
A dynamite day at City Hall, Harvey thought as he started walking home. His dogshit ordinance had finally passed its third and final reading. Everybody at work had ribbed him about the clown story, which had appeared in the previous day’s newspaper magazine supplement. Had he really been running up to cable cars telling people he was an elected official? they asked.
The only small blot on the day was Jack Lira. He’d called during the board meeting, insisting that Anne had to pull Harvey out of the board chambers so he could talk to him. In the background, Harvey could hear that Jack had turned his radio to a live broadcast of the board meeting. Jack had known he was pulling Harvey out of the meeting, but he did it anyway, Harvey thought. Harvey had already confided to friends that Jack had to go. The moods, the drinking, it was all too much. Jack had even run away to Los Angeles briefly a week before, staying with Don Amador, making drunken scenes and public embarrassments for his host throughout his stay. Harvey always felt a fatherly impulse to protect his friends. The fact that Jack had held Amador up for potential ridicule rankled Harvey more than the humiliating scenes with which Lira had long harassed Harvey. Jack had to go.
Harvey kept a cheerful spring in his pace as he walked the eleven blocks from City Hall to his new flat on Henry Street. He should have been home at 6:15, but he’d stayed an extra forty-five minutes to stick his head into a committee meeting. No obligation to be there, but he enjoyed making his presence known. Harvey fumbled for his keys as he arrived at his flat; the first thing he saw as he opened the door mystified him.
A trail of voter registration forms. It led from the front door down the hall into the living room. Harvey quizzically followed the trail from living to dining room. Now, wadded-up anti-Briggs fliers also littered the floor and dropped sporadically on the voter forms were empty cans of Coors beer. The path grew messier as it wound from the dining room into the kitchen, through the bathroom, back into the hallway, through Jack’s room and finally onto the enclosed back porch. A huge black velvet curtain was draped from the beam. Jack had pinned a note to it: “You’ve always loved the circus, Harvey. What do you think of my last act?”
