The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  The crowd was still somber when the speeches ended. Many took their candles and set them on the statue of Abraham Lincoln near City Hall’s front portico. Most trudged silently back to the Castro where, on the corner of Eighteenth and Castro Street, spray-painted graffiti posed the larger social question so troubling to gays, so inexplicable to straights: “Who Killed Harvey Milk?”

  * * *

  In the Sunset District, a labor organizer who had met Milk in the district elections campaign spent much of the early evening pacing his living room in the district where he had lived nearly all his life. Sure he had once worried about the fruits and kooks, but by late 1978, he knew Harvey Milk was a friend of the union man, a voice for the regular guy like him. And as for George Moscone, he had held a neighborhood coffee for George right in his own living room back in the watershed 1975 campaign. Something had to be terribly wrong in the world when two men like that could just get offed in a matter of a few minutes, he thought. Something terribly wrong. He paced further. Finally, after darkness fell, he hopped in his car and went to City Hall where he listened to Joan Baez, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Britt. But he was still agitated as the mourners turned back to Castro Street; he knew where he had to go. On a hill overlooking the Castro, his daughter had moved in with another woman. Just a few weeks before, she had told her stolid father that she was gay. His wife had been more shaken than the machinist himself. After all, he had known Harvey for years. Still, he had not gone to her apartment without an express invitation before, but on this, of all nights, he felt that’s where he needed to go. She answered the door, her face still red from the day’s tears, and within moments the father and daughter had fallen into each others’ arms, sobbing. “Knowing Harvey Milk,” he said later, “was a blessing.”

  * * *

  With meticulous precision, the coroner worked on the bodies of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, collecting the necessary forensic data. Once washed down, it was amazing to see how small the bullet holes that riddled Harvey’s body actually were. Harvey would have survived the body wounds, the coroner concluded, but, as he shaved the back of Harvey’s head to reveal the wounds into which Dan White had pumped his coup de grace shots, he could see that the final bullet had brought instantaneous death. Once the autopsy was completed, the coroner fulfilled Harvey’s last request and removed his dead eyes to be transplanted into the living.

  * * *

  By Tuesday, the immediate jolt had passed and the newspapers had started speculating about the political ramifications of the shooting of the city’s two most dynamic liberal politicians. Few politicos wanted to be quoted by name, but their assessments were nearly unanimous. As one neighborhood activist put it, “This sets back the liberal cause fifteen, maybe twenty years.”

  * * *

  Jim Rivaldo and Scott Smith were punchy with exhaustion when they rummaged through Harvey’s closet that afternoon to pick out Harvey’s final attire. Talk was already spreading that Harvey would lie in state at City Hall, so Jim first suggested that only one outfit would suit Harvey for such august surroundings—his blue jeans, plaid shirt, and sneakers. After deciding that might be too much for the sober morticians to appreciate, they ferreted through Harvey’s more respectable outfits. Rivaldo was amazed to see that most of Harvey’s clothes, from his suits to his underwear, were tattered and threadbare. They had a hard time finding socks that didn’t have holes in them.

  * * *

  By Tuesday afternoon, most of Harvey’s inner circle agreed that Anne should succeed Harvey. Anne wasn’t enthusiastic at first, but she agreed to make the push. She and Doug Franks bused to Macy’s and bought what they called a Dianne Junior outfit, complete with a wool skirt, a purse, and a frilly bowed blouse. In twenty minutes, Kronenberg—who had not one dress to her name—looked like a serious young businesswoman.

  * * *

  John Wahl was standing in a phone booth when he recognized a troupe of men he had seen at the Hall of Justice. He couldn’t remember whether they were policemen or sheriff’s deputies. They apparently recognized him from his appearance on the local television stations when he had read the publicly released portion of Harvey’s will; when they walked by him, they started chanting, “Dan White is all right. Dan White is all right.”

  * * *

  Jack McKinley was in the second day of a drunken binge on Tuesday. “I want to fuck Dan White to death,” he kept telling friends in New York.

  * * *

  The very suggestion enraged Harvey’s friends. During the preparations for the planned lying in state, the mayor’s staff decided that George Moscone alone would lie beneath the City Hall rotunda. Harvey’s casket would be left in the front lobby for mourners to file by on their way to see the main attraction. Harvey’s aides argued bitterly against the plan, sensing that even in death, the political establishment was trying to shove Harvey’s casket to the back of the bus. The mayor’s staff finally relented.

  * * *

  That night, the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club voted unanimously to change its name to the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.

  The thick layer of clouds that had so relentlessly shrouded the city since the assassinations still hung over City Hall on Wednesday morning when the hearses arrived to deliver the bodies of George Moscone and Harvey Milk to their final appearance in City Hall. Hundreds crowded around the side entrance just a few feet away from the window Dan White had crawled through forty-eight hours before to see the two coffins carried into the building.

  An hour later, the memorial service began and Acting Mayor Feinstein spoke from a black-bunted stage erected on City Hall’s front stairs. “The murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk shake and pain us all. In the wake of the tragedies in Guyana, this additional senseless monstrosity seems simply unreal. Yet our anguish and grief permeate everything we do. We silently rail at the manifest injustice of these untimely deaths. We cry out to reverse the irrevocable. In our sorrow, this lovely jewel of a city seems a dark and saddened place.”

  Doug Franks sat with Anne Kronenberg during the service. At the end, an elderly woman came to pat Anne on the shoulder and assure her, “Don’t worry. At least now he’s with Jack.” It was the first time that Doug realized that Jack Lira was dead. He vaguely remembered reading something about a roommate of Harvey’s committing suicide before they had met, but Milk himself had never alluded to the incident, much less indicated that the suicide represented the demise of Harvey’s relationship with Jack.

  Once the service was over, lines formed on the steps of City Hall to view the closed caskets that lay under the great rotunda. Flowers crowded each step of the grand staircase. Mourners followed a long crimson carpet to where the two coffins lay. Over ten thousand filed by the coffins that afternoon. A militant lesbian in jeans and leather jacket strained against the velvet cord to drop a single rose on the casket of the Italian family man who was the thirty-seventh mayor of San Francisco. An old Irish crone genuflected by the coffin of Harvey Milk, a gay Jew. One woman left a pair of black gloves on George’s casket, a dapper man left a silk black top hat on Harvey’s. For hours, the stream of people walked by silently, touching the coffins to gain some physical connection to the tragedy.

  Scott Smith looked down at the scene from the second floor promenade. He kept staring at Harvey’s plain wooden coffin, trying to convince himself that Harvey’s body was really inside it, that it was all over. Really. For good. Trying to imagine what Harvey’s body looked like under the layers of red roses and white chrysanthemums. An old friend of Harvey’s from Dallas stood next to Scott and remembered that he had stood with Harvey at that very spot earlier that year when Harvey had waved his hand across the marble lobby where his coffin now laid and asked, “What do you think of my new theater?” At the mention of such a moment, which Scott recognized as quintessentially Harvey, Smith broke into tears and collapsed in the friend’s arms.

  Later that afternoon, a special memorial service was held for Harvey at
Temple Emmanue-El, the city’s most prestigious synagogue. The service marked the first time an openly gay rabbi was permitted to officiate at that temple.

  That night, a portly man and his wife stepped off a jet at San Francisco International Airport. Reporters immediately noted how much Robert Milk resembled his brother, except that he looked many years older, carried many more pounds and had a much bigger nose. Robert told reporters he had always thought his brother was a minor office holder, and only realized his broader significance when he turned on his television Tuesday morning to see the vast crowd carrying candles in the darkness for his younger brother. Heterosexuals had so long viewed gays as people without pasts or families that Robert Milk was immediately accorded a dignitary’s status as reporters probed to find something more in the background of the politician who had entertained them for so many years. Robert told of how he and Harvey had once doubledated and how Harvey had kept his homosexuality a secret for many years, probably to protect his parents, he figured. He spoke convincingly of the meaning of Harvey’s career. “Harvey was a pioneer of the twentieth century,” Robert said. “His struggle and his deeds will prove to history that there’s no such thing as a gay way, that there is only one way.… The citizens of San Francisco can make Harvey live forever by continuing to do things his way, in the deeds and in the accomplishments of their daily efforts to make their great city live.” As for any concerns Robert might have had about his brother’s homosexuality, the elder Milk simply said, “I didn’t feel it was important.”

  Some of Harvey’s closer friends grimaced at the sight of Harvey’s estranged brother belatedly embracing the slain supervisor’s cause. But they politely let Robert speak his piece and never made public the provision of Harvey’s will, which explicitly excluded Robert from receiving any benefit from his estate.

  The clouds lifted briefly on Thursday morning when several hundred San Francisco firemen, policemen, and sheriff’s deputies stood in rigid formation on the broad brick terrazo of St. Mary’s Cathedral where George Moscone’s casket was slowly carried for his Mass of Christian Burial. Over six thousand crowded outside to watch this final procession. Inside, a host of mayors, state legislators, and lesser officials took their seats with the governor and presidential representative, and the archbishop conducted the final service for the mayor. George Moscone was buried later that afternoon.

  Many of the thousands who converged on the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House late that Thursday joked that Harvey’s last memorial should be at an opera house, since few knew Harvey well enough to imagine that the fast-talking, maverick populist could have had anything to do with something so refined as opera. The service’s program simply bore the handful of speakers’ names and a handwritten motto Harvey had recently copied from a book and pinned to his office wall: “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.—Victor Hugo.”

  His face and body bloated by years of drinking, Jack McKinley had lost much of the good looks that had attracted Harvey to him back in 1963, but his flamboyance remained intact as he appeared at the service in a silk puffy-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to the navel, his chest covered by garlands of gold chains. Joe Campbell spent his first minutes of the service looking for familiar faces. He glanced up the center aisle and saw Billy Sipple heading for the section roped off for Milk’s friends. Something embarrassed Joe about seeing Billy, and he turned his head away, ignoring the man he had once loved so passionately. Only Audrey Milk recognized Joe. Knowing of the Milk family disagreements, Joe leaned over to Robert Milk. “Harvey left a lot of fractures in his life,” he said haltingly. “He was rash and left a lot of things behind. We’re just some of the fractures.”

  Over five thousand crowded into the seats and aisles of the opera house. Another thousand listened over a special loudspeaker set up in the lobby. Robert Milk sat in the front row, flanked by Governor Jerry Brown, the lieutenant governor, and the California Chief Justice on one side, with the acting mayor and the White House representative on the other.

  “These past few days have been the saddest days of my life and the saddest in the history of the city,” said Dick Pabich, starting the service. “This is not a night for tears and sadness—Harvey would not have liked that. Harvey reached out and touched us all and made us all his friends. Maybe here tonight, though we are tired and discouraged, we can gain strength from each other.… We never got to tell Harvey how much we loved him. We must never forget his smile, his courage and his sense of justice. That is why he spent so much of his time with us and why he gave us everything he had.”

  Harvey’s aides and friends decided that Milk would have preferred a political rally to a wake, so much of the evening was spent rousing the gay spirits—much to the discomfort of many of the esteemed dignitaries who had come expecting eulogies. “Tradition would expect me to tell you Harvey’s gone to heaven,” quipped the Reverend Bill Barcus, who had so dramatically come out during the Briggs campaign. “Harvey,” he said, “was much more interested in going to Washington.”

  A gay doctor spoke of a conversation he had had with Milk a few months before. “What can we do for gay people in the area?” the doctor had asked Milk. “Write more prescriptions for quaaludes,” Harvey had answered. While the crowd roared and cheered, Dianne Feinstein leaned over to her fiancé to ask, “What’s a quaalude?”

  “Harvey told me that if I ever had to speak at something like this that I should either, one, show up in full leather, or second, that I would show up in a dress,” began Anne Kronenberg. “I think he would have been more shocked to see me in a dress.”

  Kronenberg read from a poem Harvey had written during the height of the Briggs battle a month earlier:

  I can be killed with ease

  I can be cut right down

  But I cannot fall back into my closet

  I have grown

  I am not by myself

  I am too many

  I am all of us

  “Harvey understood the necessity of us all working together,” Kronenberg said. “Harvey would prefer often to build new bridges stone by stone. He knew that it was not something that was done overnight. But he knew our time would come,” she concluded, raising her fist. “And our time is now.”

  The crowd rose to its feet, stamping, applauding, and yelling its approval for Kronenberg’s strident message. Harvey’s cronies were amused to see the black lieutenant governor nudging a shocked Governor Brown who remained seated, as in a daze, while all the dignitaries around him rose, however reluctantly, to join the standing ovation. The sight of the politically powerful rising to cheer some of the most militant homosexual rhetoric that could be doled out left many of Harvey’s old cohorts laughing.

  When the service ended, a speaker implored the women and men to take the blossoms from the thousands of floral arrangements that crowded the opera house stage, saying, “Nothing should be allowed to die here.” On the buses and streetcars of San Francisco that afternoon, the lesbians and gay men passed the flowers out to strangers. Already, people had started talking of a Harvey Milk legend.

  * * *

  Dianne Feinstein left the opera house for an appearance on San Francisco’s public television’s nightly news show. While technicians miked her blouse, she privately complained that she felt the service’s strident tone was entirely inappropriate; it bothered her sense of decorum. Once on the air, the reporters’ questions turned to politics, a subject that had been politely avoided until the final services for George and Harvey. Feinstein acknowledged she would be among the candidates for mayor when the board met the following Monday to select Moscone’s successor. With speculation about Milk’s successor already running rampant, a reporter asked if Feinstein felt obliged to appoint a gay to Milk’s seat and whether she would follow Milk’s tape-recorded wishes about who should—and should not—succeed him. Feinstein clearly was not expecting the question, especially since knowledge of Harvey’s “no” list had not yet surfaced in news acc
ounts. Yes, she would appoint a gay supervisor, she said, and she would try to follow Harvey’s wishes.

  * * *

  Depression still hung heavily over the city at the week’s end. Crisis centers reported that suicide threats had doubled in the days after the assassinations. Business in restaurants and bars tapered off dramatically; few seemed interested in going out to party. Department stores noted that Christmas buying had fallen to a fraction of the previous year’s sales. Many of Harvey’s friends thought the lack of holiday cheer probably would have disturbed Harvey more than any other aspect of the post-assassination gloom. Harvey had always loved Christmases.

  Coming at the heels of Jonestown, the assassinations raised the usual talk of San Francisco as “Kook Capital” in both the national and local media. “Will we ever learn that there is no such thing as ‘just a harmless kook?’” asked Herb Caen in a Chronicle column quoted widely around the country. “This is every misfit’s favorite city,” complained Examiner editor Reg Murphy, a Southerner who had never had much use for San Francisco’s idiosyncracies to start with. Time magazine ran the definitive kook capital story by somehow tying together Patty Hearst, the SLA, Zebra killings, hippies, and Golden Gate Bridge jumpers to prove that San Francisco was indeed a magnet for wackos. The thesis raised no small irony, since much of San Francisco’s kook image in the late 1970s was borne of its reputation as a place where tolerant political leaders like George Moscone encouraged a massive gay immigration of people like Harvey Milk. The stories, of course, never mentioned that Dan White, the killer who had caused the city’s major tragedy, was spawned not in a hippie commune but from such all-American institutions as the Catholic Church, the U.S. Army, and the police and fire departments. In the curiously twisted logic of the media, the victims became the victimizers, while the criminal represented the morality from which an errant San Francisco had tragically wandered in its path toward kookiness. Local anger at the kook capital stories grew so severe that Herb Caen retracted his “harmless kook” comment. After all, he noted, nobody had ever called Dan White a kook.