The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  Harvey pulled back the curtain and saw Jack’s body, cold and discolored, hanging from the beam. Milk ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. As he cut the rope, he looked at the beam and saw that Jack had nailed to it a paperback novelization of the television series Holocaust. Distrusting police, Harvey ran to a firehouse a few doors down the street and then called two of his most trusted friends, Anne Kronenberg and Scott Smith. Anne motorcycled over in time to see the firemen attempt and fail at resuscitation. The coroner later estimated that Jack had been dead forty-five minutes before Milk got home, at about 6:15. Jack had timed it so his legs would still be kicking when he thought Harvey would walk in the door.

  The body was gone by the time Scott arrived. The trio got to work cleaning up the house before the police came. Jack had left notes all over the apartment. A long suicide message scrawled in both Spanish and English rambled about the anti-gay tide he saw sweeping the country. Other notes, which were never made public, ranted vindictively against Milk. “You’re a lousy lover, Harvey.” Jack had carefully hidden the taunting reminders throughout the house. Over the next few days, Scott found many notes tucked into odd drawers, out-of-the-way nooks, in the seams of Harvey’s underwear and between the pages of books and magazines that Jack knew Harvey would pick up some day. A six-pack of empty Coors beer cans sat in the refrigerator. Months later, Anne got a sinking feeling in her stomach when she remembered a note taped prominently on a kitchen wall: “Beware Of The Ides of November.”

  Both the police and press treated the death gingerly. Though the suicide made page one the next day, it quickly faded. An avalanche of sympathy notes poured into Harvey’s office. About half came from other lesbians and gay men who had lost a lover to suicide, often after they’d been arrested on a trumped-up charge, fired from a job or dishonorably discharged from the military. A sixty-four-year-old wrote of how his lover of fourteen years had committed suicide in 1953. With another man, the lover’s suicide was six years ago, another three and one was “just last month.” A grandmother wrote of how her grandson, a promising sixth grade teacher, had years ago been seen going into a suburban gay bar by a colleague, and how the school principal drove the young man to the pharmacist to get the dosage of pills that would save the teacher from an embarrassing hearing in front of the school board. Exactly fifty letters came from a small jungle outpost in South America, all sending regrets and extending an invitation. “I had the opportunity in San Francisco when we were there to get to know you and thought very highly of your commitment to social actions and to the betterment of your community,” wrote Sharon Amos, who had organized the Peoples Temple leafleting for Harvey’s Assembly campaign before moving with Jim Jones to Guyana. “I hope you will be able to visit us here sometime in Jonestown. Believe it or not, it is a tremendously sophisticated community, though it is in a jungle.”

  Even then, the packet of letters was chilling. It was as if it had never crossed the writers’ minds that the appearances of exactly fifty letters—many of them identical word for word, and none of them wavering from the condolence-invitation formula—written on identical pieces of paper with similar pencils would look like anything but a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy.

  “Everything I’ve ever done was to give hope to people like Jack,” Harvey repeated over and over to his friends after the initial shock wore off. “And here I failed.” Milk had suffered many political defeats, almost humorously, because he could always find some germ of victory in them—a little old lady converted from anti-gay prejudice, a new union supporter, or, if nothing else, higher name recognition. But the defeat had been final with Jack. There could be no hope for a victory the next time. Harvey had failed.

  * * *

  The guilt dissipated within hours of Milk’s arrival in Fresno for Lira’s funeral. He met and took an instant disliking to Jack’s father who, Jack claimed, had so consistently rejected him. Harvey learned of Jack’s previous suicide attempts; nobody in the family had bothered to inform him about them before. Jack’s sister later wrote Harvey, “I hadn’t told you about how bad the family was because I didn’t think you’d ever have to be exposed to them. Now you see. Don’t feel guilty about Jack. You were better to him than anyone else.”

  Harvey returned from the funeral relieved. “The guy never had a chance,” he told Anne. Within a week, Harvey had met a young bartender, Billy Wiegardt, who had just moved to the Castro from Long Beach, Washington. Harvey registered him to vote and then proceeded with the mushy love notes and bouquets of red roses. Billy moved into Harvey’s apartment a week later.

  “You’ve got to remember, Bill, you’re in the direct line of fire,” Harvey warned as the young man unpacked.

  “What do you mean?” This was, after all, pretty heavy stuff for a twenty-two-year-old who had just left Long Beach, Washington.

  “If I get killed, you can be killed too,” Harvey said matter-of-factly. “Somebody could walk through the door and blow both our brains out.”

  Harvey had grown to dislike mixing politics with romance, so most of the courtship employed the sentimental tactics he’d used successfully since nabbing Joe Campbell in 1956. Unaware of the details of Jack’s suicide, which Harvey rarely discussed, Billy was delighted to come home one day and find paper footprints leading down the hallway, into the dining room, through the kitchen, down the hall and into Billy’s new room. At the end, a vase of flowers. Billy noticed that the flowers Harvey frequently left never looked like they came from a florist shop. In fact, they looked like they might have just been plucked from somebody’s front yard. Billy had the good sense never to ask Harvey about their origins.

  The passion soon fled their affair. Like a sailor on his first leave, Billy was having his first taste of gay life, and in San Francisco no less. Neither the time nor the environment encouraged him to settle into the type of marriage in which Harvey had been involved for well over twenty years. Instead of being lovers, they became roommates who sometimes slept together. Harvey started complaining to friends that he wasn’t getting enough sex. “Get it while you can,” he counseled Harry Britt. “Nobody likes an old queen.” The comment was based more on self-pity than fact; Harvey had few problems rustling himself up new boyfriends.

  Within weeks of meeting Wiegardt, Harvey was courting twenty-four-year-old Doug Franks, a graduate student at San Francisco State University. Harvey registered him to vote and talked woefully of the loneliness of the campaign trail. Once he had earned Franks’ sympathies, Harvey brightened up and asked him for a date. The event was a Nationalist Chinese dinner Milk was attending as a favor to John Molinari, Chinatown’s district supervisor. Doug expected to be picked up for the date in a swanky big car, the kind he figured all supervisors drove. Instead, Harvey picked a rendezvous point on the city’s bus system. On the way up the stairs to the dinner, Franks started seeing a panoply of political notables, as well as scores of sedate Chinese couples.

  “Harvey, this is like I’m going as your date.”

  Harvey pulled Doug aside and gave him careful instructions.

  “Now remember, if anyone says one thing to you that is snotty or condescending, you have my permission to say this.” Harvey changed his voice tone into a sprightly conversational cadence. “You say, ‘No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. Harvey doesn’t fuck me. I fuck Harvey.’”

  The statement’s accuracy did not convince Doug it was appropriate. “Harvey!” he answered incredulously. “I can’t say that.”

  “No, say it,” said Harvey grinning.

  Milk could barely restrain his laughter while speakers droned on about how the Taiwanese would inevitably reclaim the mainland. Doug found himself sitting with the city’s public health director on one side and a representative from Governor Brown’s office on the other. Harvey nudged Doug as the lazy susan loaded with Chinese delicacies was brought to the table.

  “Go for it, Doug,” Harvey prodded. “Don’t worry about anybody else. It’s their dinner,” Harvey said, pointin
g to the would-be conquerors of Beijing. “If we run out of food, they’ll just have to put out more.”

  On the way home, Doug mentioned he’d never been to City Hall. “You’ve never been to City Hall?” Harvey asked in amazement. He wanted to give Doug a private tour right then, but he’d left his keys at home, so he instead launched into a long lecture about the intricate friezes adorning the inside of the stately rotunda. He told of how sometimes, in the beautifully carved board chambers, he simply sat back and stared up at the crystal chandeliers and the carefully crafted scrolls carved into every corner. And of course, there was the grand marble staircase that flowed elegantly into the spacious colonnaded lobby. Like the steps of a grandiose Roman palace in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. “Never take an elevator when you’re in City Hall,” Harvey explained. “Always take that stairway. You can make such an entrance with it.” Harvey paused, pondering the building on which so many of his aspirations had been centered. “You can make such an entrance—take it slowly.”

  When the pair finally trollied to Harvey’s door, Doug was initially intimidated by the old blow-ups Harvey still had out of Jack McKinley’s derriere. Doug wondered if he would measure up. The next morning, Harvey assured him he did and, as usual, Harvey jumped headfirst into a passionate love again. The relationship bloomed rapidly. Both were rebounding from collapsed affairs. Doug had broken up with a man he had lived with since he divorced his wife four years ago; he had only moved to San Francisco in August. Harvey talked little of Jack or how the relationship had ended. Given the anger that Harvey seemed to harbor against his former lover, Doug wasn’t surprised that Jack never called or that Harvey never ran into him, even though Harvey stumbled into no small number of former flings at the numerous gay fund raisers the pair attended. Doug didn’t worry about it; Jack Lira didn’t sound like anybody Doug wanted to meet anyway. Harvey confided one night that at twenty-four, Doug was the oldest man Harvey had ever started an affair with; Doug thought he was kidding.

  Explaining the waning affair with Billy and the ongoing romance with Bob Tuttle in Los Angeles required a full exposition on Harvey’s theories of neo-homosexual romance. “As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model,” Harvey explained to Doug one night. “We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it. We should be developing our own life-style. There’s no reason why you can’t love more than one person at a time. You don’t have to love them all the same. You love some less, love some more—and always be honest with everybody about where you’re at. They in turn can do the same thing and it can open up a bigger sphere.”

  A sphere of love, always growing. That ultimately was what his politics were all about, Harvey decided. Lovers were not meant to be chattel, locked into only one finite relationship. Harvey never had any use for organized religion, but he was convinced that his notion of love was what Jesus was probably talking about years ago, not the hate that John Briggs and the fundamentalist Christians kept bringing out. Such lectures on the nature of love and the corny romantic courtship poems and flower bouquets came only in brief moments, the few which Harvey could spare from his hectic schedule. Every other waking minute was the campaign. Harvey had always enjoyed feverish activity, but now, friends worried, he acted like a driven man. He rose at 6 A.M. every day and rarely got to bed before midnight. Billy frequently came home from his bartending job at 3 A.M. to find the supervisor passed out on the couch. But there were sleepless nights too. Billy would awaken in the early morning hours before dawn started filtering into the sky and he’d see Harvey awake, staring at the ceiling. “The whole world is watching this,” Harvey said once. Billy would doze off again, because he’d already heard so much about the Briggs Initiative, but Harvey would still be staring up blankly. The whole world was watching.

  * * *

  “You can act right now to help protect your family from vicious killers and defend your children from homosexual teachers.”

  With a picture of a bludgeoned teenage youth lying in a pool of his own blood, the brochure read like a grisly clearance sale, advertised with a political motif. Though it was Proposition 6 that gained the nickname the Briggs Initiative, the ambitious Fullerton senator had sponsored two ballot initiatives for the election—Prop 6 and Proposition 7, enacting a tougher death penalty statute. Briggs earnestly insisted that the two issues were inexorably tied together. The fund raising letter for both Propositions 6 and 7 drew the parallels, over the picture of a victim of the odious trashbag murderer. “The ruthless killer who shot this poor young man in the face can be SET FREE TO KILL AGAIN because California does not have an effective death penalty law.” A few paragraphs later, Briggs explained that homosexual teachers represented an equally horrendous threat, what with the proliferation of gay teacher-recruiters in the classrooms. The brochure lacked subtlety, but the skillful use of direct mail techniques initially brought hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of Briggs’s campaign.

  Moreover, the gruesome brochure for the two initiatives was not particularly wild rhetoric compared to other fliers Briggs circulated for Prop 6. The major leaflet of his campaign featured fifteen different newspaper clippings with headlines like: “Teacher Accused of Sex Acts with Boy Students,” “Senate Shown Movie of Child Porn,” “Police Find Sexually Abused Children,” “Former Scoutmaster Convicted of Homosexual Acts with Boys,” “Why a 13-year-old Is Selling His Body,” “Ex-Teachers Indicted for Lewd Acts with Boys,” “R.I. Sex Club Lured Juveniles with Gifts.” One full-color newspaper advertising supplement featured pictures from the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on its cover with the words “Moral Decay” emblazoned across them. “Politicians Do Nothing—Decent Citizens Must Act. You Can Help! Start by Signing Up to Save Our Children from Homosexual Teachers.” Pictures of Briggs with Anita Bryant adorned the inside pages.

  In September, Briggs further startled gay activists when he said he was about to publish a book entitled Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Homosexuality But Were Afraid to Ask. The planned 150-page opus would include pictures of victims of the trash bag murders and the Houston sex-torture ring, he said. San Francisco would dominate the booklet with lengthy discussions of the seedier sides of gay life, including fist-loving sadomasochistic cults and sexual activity in parks, beaches, bathhouses, back rooms, and private male clubs.

  Briggs’ speeches were similarly peppered. “If you let one homosexual teacher stay, soon there’ll be two, then four, then 8, then 25—and before long, the entire school will be taught by homosexuals,” the senator said in a speech in Healdsburg, a tiny Sonoma County hamlet that gained national attention during the Prop 6 campaign when a local second grade teacher publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. In the course of that one forty-five-minute speech Briggs managed to equate homosexuals with adulterers, burglars, communists, murderers, rapists, Richard Nixon, child pornographers, and effeminate courtiers who had undermined the Greek and Roman civilizations.

  The rhetoric was less startling than the fact that Briggs’s law just might have passed if it were not for the brief definition of one three-word phrase in its language: Public Homosexual Conduct. The phrase may sound like a description of a round of fellatio on Main Street, but the initiative sweepingly defined “public homosexual conduct” as “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting of private or public homosexual activity directed at, or likely to come to the attention of, school children and/or other [school] employees.” Walking in a gay pride parade “encourages” homosexual activity, so any teacher, gay or straight, could have been fired for walking in a gay march. Having a drink in a gay bar, assigning books written by a gay author, attending a meeting where gay rights was discussed, all constituted activity that might advocate or promote homosexuality, and all were therefore punishable by termination, be the teacher gay or straight. The reason that Briggs picked Healdsburg as a showcase city was because the second grade teacher had said he was gay in a statement opposing the Briggs initiative.
Opposing the Briggs Initiative might be grounds for termination.

  In front of a crowded Healdsburg audience, Briggs defended the clause to teachers who worried that their stance against Prop 6 would later cost them their jobs, since a defeat for the initiative would encourage the gay movement. One teacher rose to ask if her defense of the embattled gay teacher might endanger her job in a school district twenty miles away.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Briggs assured her. “The law is not retroactive.”

  Another Healdsburg teacher, an admitted heterosexual, wanted to know if she could lose her job if she continued to support the gay teacher after the election.

  “It would depend on the limits of your support,” said Briggs.

  Where did Proposition 6 end and the First Amendment begin? “That,” Briggs said, “is up to the courts to decide.” He did note, however, that the Supreme Court had recently turned down the appeal of the Tacoma schoolteacher fired solely for his homosexuality, so he had no doubts about the constitutionality of his law.

  The sheer breadth of the law, as well as Briggs’s own heavy-handed hyperbole, made it easy for gays to dismiss the Orange County legislator as a contemporary incarnation of Hitler. This characterization genuinely mystified Briggs, who, on his home turf in southern California, was the epitome of the backslapping, gladhanding down-home politician. Privately, he was somewhat bemused by many of his fundamentalist followers—“They really know how to whoop it up,” he said once—and he often told the Anita Bryant jokes he heard from his gay adversaries. He made it clear that he thought Bryant’s propensity to burst into verses of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” put her somewhere out in “left field.” Asked if it were any more fair to compare all gay teachers to the Houston or trash bag murderers than it would be to compare all heterosexuals to Richard Speck or the Boston Strangler, Briggs would nod thoughtfully, “I believe the Good Lord is watching us, but this is a political battle—and in politics, anything is fair.”