The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  * * *

  Scott Smith drove with Jack McKinley and Tom Randol to the mortuary Friday afternoon to pick up Harvey’s ashes. The undertaker offhandedly greeted Scott and made Smith follow him through the lab where morticians embalmed bodies. The room seemed grisly to Smith. Had he been a bereaved widow, the undertaker would have respectfully turned over the remains with appropriate sympathy, Scott thought. But he had long ago come to expect that as far as most heterosexuals were concerned, gays were people with no family or loved ones, so ordinary concerns of courtesy were not necessary. The mortician unceremoniously handed Smith a brown plastic box with the label, “Cremated Remains of Harvey B. Milk.”

  Repercussions came in all hues, not just those of regret and compassion. Harvey’s Los Angeles boyfriend, Bob Tuttle, asked for the week off from his job with the Florida Citrus Commission, explaining that Harvey was a close friend. When he returned to work, his supervisor called him into a special conference. “I’ve got something I want you to do for me,” he said. “We think it would be in both of our interests if you submit your resignation.” Tuttle complied, though he would always wonder what Harvey would have told him to do.

  The day after the candlelight march, Steve Hollonzine, a nineteen-year-old graduate student who had carried the California flag in the solemn procession, received an unexpected phone call from his parents. They had flown from their home in Toronto to San Francisco immediately after seeing a telecast of the march on Canadian television. Both parents were Auschwitz survivors who had lost their entire families in Nazi death camps. Hollonzine’s father was an orthodox rabbi who had proudly watched his son graduate from high school at sixteen and then go off to the University of San Francisco to start work on a master’s degree in philosophy as preparation for his own rabbinical career. The elder Hollonzine was not pleased to see that his son had appeared on television carrying a flag in a march mourning a dead homosexual.

  “Are you a sodomite?” he demanded when he got to his son’s apartment. Steve allowed that he was. “Either you get on the next plane home with us or we no longer have a son,” the rabbi ordered. The parents left without their only surviving child. Two years later, Steve’s friends would call from Toronto to see why he had not attended his own mother’s funeral; that’s how Steve learned his mom had died. Gays have long been disowned by irate parents, but the story of Steve Hollonzine’s estrangement carried an extra twist since both his parents knew that he was suffering from a malignant brain tumor that was slowly spreading cancer throughout his body. They had left their nineteen-year-old son to face his early death alone.

  * * *

  Press speculation settled on three leading candidates to succeed Harvey Milk: Rick Stokes, Jo Daly, and Frank Fitch, all past presidents of the Alice Toklas club. Milk’s cohorts wanted to ensure that their favorite, Anne Kronenberg, proved the most viable candidate, even though she did not live in District 5. A Milk aide called the city attorney’s office to check the legal technicalities. The office said it had prepared an opinion on the subject just a few weeks before, when George Moscone was pondering who to appoint to Dan White’s seat. No, the office stated decisively, an appointee did not need to be a district resident. Milk’s allies decided to make an all-out push for Anne and quickly leaked to the press the news that Harvey’s list of unacceptable successors included just the names newsmen were discussing. Kronenberg, meanwhile, was touted as Harvey’s favorite choice. Kronenberg’s supporters decided to move Anne into the district, so on Friday night, Billy Wiegardt heard the door of his flat open and came into the living room to see a half dozen of Harvey’s friends moving Anne’s furniture into Harvey’s old apartment.

  The release of Harvey’s enemies list to the media incensed Harvey’s lawyer, John Wahl, who felt that the four activists were being unfairly tried in the press without the chance to hear the still-secret tape themselves. He arranged a meeting for the four Milk opponents to hear the message. Jim Foster turned red with rage when he heard Harvey insist that “the Jim Fosters never understood the movement.” This was only further proof that Harvey was a megalomaniac, Foster said. Harvey’s exhortation that gay lawyers, doctors, and architects should come out raised cackles from the veteran activists who had only days before read Robert Milk’s newspaper statements that Harvey had never come out earlier because he didn’t want to hurt his parents. “Come out, come out, but please don’t tell my mother,” mocked one of the four unacceptables. Rick Stokes angrily told reporters that the tapes should have been destroyed and that the refusal of Milk’s friends to publicly release the full contents of the tapes represented “Nixonian Watergate” tactics to obscure Harvey’s vindictive character. “We had a hero,” Stokes said. “We all could have used a hero. This is not in the best interests of Harvey at all.”

  * * *

  Scott Smith was ecstatic to see Harvey alive again, sitting in a Paris café sipping wine. “Things were getting too heavy,” Harvey grinned. “I had to get out.” Scott could barely contain his joy and then he woke up and realized that he had been dreaming and that Harvey was still dead, and he started to cry.

  * * *

  Like all the shrouded mornings of that week, Saturday promised to be another overcast day, but brilliant sunshine broke through the clouds late in the morning while two dozen of Harvey’s closest friends gathered at a San Francisco pier where an antique 102-foot schooner, the Lady Frie, was berthed. The captain remarked that San Francisco Bay sat remarkably calm that day; only four or five days a year saw that kind of glassy peace on the normally turbulant Bay. Harvey’s old lovers, friends, and political cronies arrived: Tom O’Horgan and Jack McKinley from New York, lovers like Joe Campbell, Billy Wiegardt, Doug Franks, and Scott, and friends like Tory Hartmann, Danny Nicoletta, Tom Randol, Bob Ross, Jim Rivaldo, and Dick Pabich. Dick passed around cigar-sized joints while Jack freely shared whiskey from his hip flask. After a dreary week of death and eulogies, they were ready for a party. A curious shrine greeted the revelers when they went below into the ship’s cabin. Neatly arranged on the top of a color television set was a dictionary-sized box wrapped in Doonesbury comics and topped by a single long-stemmed crimson rose. Spelled out in rhinestones on the cartoons were the initials R.I.P. Arranged neatly around the package was a box of bubble bath and an array of grape Kool-Aid packs, the drink with which, according to early news reports, the Reverend Jim Jones had mixed cyanide during the Guyana suicide rituals. Jack explained that he had decided to wrap the box in comics since Harvey would never want to be seen publicly in plastic.

  The ship glided gently across the Bay, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and into the open sea. Once out to sea, Tom Randol tore the funny papers off the plastic box while Jack ripped open the Kool-Aid packs and the bubble bath. Under the clear California skies, the ashes, Kool-Aid, and bubble bath fell gently from the schooner and Harvey was gone, a bubbly patch of lavender on the cold, glittering Pacific Ocean.

  * * *

  That night, the “Saturday Night Live” comedy show ran a news flash about the assassinations on its Weekend Update segment. To mourn the deaths of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, 350,000 Chinese homosexuals had marched in San Francisco, the newscaster deadpanned. The mourners wearing red collars were dominant while the marchers with keys on their belts were passive.

  San Francisco officialdom erupted with moral outrage at the spoof and demanded an apology from the NBC network. Most of Harvey’s friends, however, agreed that the comic take-off on the candlelight march probably would have been the tribute that amused Harvey most.

  * * *

  By Sunday, the political chips were rapidly falling in favor of Dianne Feinstein’s election as mayor. Even her most bitter detractors had to admit that Feinstein handled her role as acting mayor during the tragic week with incredible poise and grace. Both the Saturday and Sunday Examiner editions editorialized for her. Politicking remained frenzied. Supervisor Molinari was the first to openly commit himself for Feinstein, reportedly after he got Fe
instein’s promise that she would back his election as board president. Supervisor Silver also endorsed Feinstein on two key conditions—that she would get the powerful chairmanship of the Finance Committee and, as a concession for Silver’s gay following, that Feinstein would promise not to fire Police Chief Charles Gain for the duration of what would have been George Moscone’s term.

  Exactly one week after the assassinations, the board voted 6–2 to elect forty-five-year-old Dianne Feinstein the thirty-eighth mayor of San Francisco, the first woman to hold that office. In the same meeting, the board appropriated $375,000 to finance a gay community center to be named after Harvey Milk. The long-planned Yerba Buena Convention Center was renamed after George Moscone. “Though we are crippled with our grief and our sadness, we must and we will resume the important tasks of governing this city,” said Feinstein after assuming the office she had said she would never seek again. “Despite our grief, I know these two leaders would have insisted that we get on with the business of putting this city back together again—that we see how our spiritual health depends on tomorrow’s visions not yesterday’s sorrows.”

  That afternoon, the newly elected legislature was sworn in at the state capital in Sacramento. The California Senate session was largely spent eulogizing George Moscone, its former majority leader. Hardened conservatives broke down and cried as they recounted the good-natured jostling with the jovial mayor. The body unanimously passed a resolution honoring their onetime colleague. When a San Francisco state senator offered a similar resolution for Harvey Milk, State Senator John Briggs led a cadre of nine conservative senators who would have nothing to do with honoring a homosexual. “I don’t think anybody is sadder over the death of Harvey Milk than I am,” said Briggs. “But this wasn’t a resolution memorializing him. I think it memorialized what he did and stood for—and that’s the issue.” The resolution ultimately passed with thirty ayes and nine abstentions. The state assembly adjourned its session in honor of Representative Leo Ryan, Moscone, and Milk. Because of the conservative objections voiced by Briggs, however, the senate adjourned only in the memory of Ryan and Moscone as well as “the others slain in a senseless way.”

  Shortly after the board meeting, Anne Kronenberg held a press conference on the steps of City Hall, flanked by a panoply of District 5 leaders. Members of the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club handed out fliers bearing the picture of Harvey joking with Anne, headlined: “Continue the work Harvey Milk started—Make sure we get the supervisor that Harvey Milk wanted: Anne Kronenberg.” Dick Pabich and Jim Rivaldo proved key strategists in the campaign to get Mayor Feinstein to appoint Anne. They soon found that their most powerful ally remained Harvey Milk. After a week of tributes that endlessly repeated the phrase George-and-Harvey, Milk had attained a higher status than he would ever have received had he been killed alone, largely because the simultaneous deaths of both the mayor and supervisor had equalized the two officials in the eyes of the mainstream political establishment, symbolically elevating Milk to the rank of the slain mayor. Leaders in the Chinese, black, Latino, environmental, labor, neighborhood, and Democratic Party groups now rallied behind Milk’s powerful memory. Since virtually all Harvey’s old aides said supporting Milk meant supporting Kronenberg, an argument based on the tapes they kept secret, Anne achieved an immense base of broad support.

  Anne’s fans seemed everywhere—except in the mayor’s office. Feinstein worried that the twenty-four-year-old Kronenberg was too young to hold the job. On the afternoon of Dianne Feinstein’s first day of office, the city attorney’s office told Rivaldo that it had reversed its residency ruling of a few days before, insisting that new research indicated that any appointee had to live in the district for at least thirty days. Fine, Kronenberg’s supporters responded, she had moved into the district; in a matter of a few weeks, she would be a resident. Feinstein remained unenthusiastic. Stories began to spread that the mayor was particularly upset about the comment Kronenberg had made at the opera house about showing up in a dress or in leathers. The idea that homosexuals donned leather in the dark of night had long disturbed the mayor’s sensibilities. “Would Anne dress in leather when she attended board meetings?” Feinstein reportedly asked gay politicos. Harvey’s aides dug in their heels for a long fight.

  * * *

  Running, panting, the footsteps chasing him down, tapping loudly on the marble hallways of City Hall. Cleve Jones would have this dream many times in the months following the City Hall assassinations, but it first came in the week after the killings. He was being chased around a dark, empty City Hall. He didn’t know who was chasing him, but he knew he was in danger and he had to escape. Up the grand staircase and through the colonnaded halls Jones ran until finally he reached the door to the complex of supervisors’ offices. Cleve had a key to this door. Once inside, he slammed the door resolutely behind him. He started running down the hallway, knowing he was safe now, but looking for a place to hide. Then he heard the sound of another key slipping into the lock and the door opening, the door that Dan White had used on his way to see Harvey that last time. Cleve started running hard again, running down the narrow hallway that seemed miles long in his dream, the hallway that Dan White’s office was on, where Harvey had died. Running and panting and then in front of him, floating in the air, Cleve saw the pale blue dead face of Harvey Milk, rolling above him, as it had when Cleve had seen the police turning over the corpse on that dark Monday morning. The pale blue face was rolling and then Cleve woke up.

  Cleve was still sobbing as he shook the sleep from his head. He grabbed a paperweight near his bed and threw it at a framed painting across the room, sending the portrait crashing to the floor. He stumbled over to his crowded desk, swept his hand across the surface, kicking and flailing at the papers that filled the air. He knocked over his bookshelf, threw the heavy volumes against the wall and hurled his bedside water glass against his door. He began to cry and pick up the room, so his roommate would not see what he had done; crying, trying to pull order out of the chaos while the grief started turning to rage.

  PART IV

  The Legend Begins

  seventeen

  Justice and Thieves

  A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is justice, which is the thief?

  —King Lear, IV, vi.

  “… It’s about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias hope. You gotta give them hope.”

  John Wahl reached over and turned his Panasonic cassette recorder off. Dianne Feinstein hadn’t expected Milk’s tape-recorded voice to leave such an impact on her, but the sound of a man talking about himself in the past tense shook her. She thought it was like Harvey was talking from the dead. Carl Carlson was surprised to see Feinstein lose the patina of control she seemed to maintain in every situation. Feinstein confided none of her personal anxieties to the two men who had come to play Harvey’s tape and instead delved straight to the issue at hand. “Who do you think I should appoint?” she asked.

  Both Carlson and Wahl insisted their duty as Harvey’s friends was solely to relay what Harvey wanted. The responses left Feinstein facing the most bizarre political twist she had confronted in a decade of city government—a dead man was essentially dictating one of her most important decisions from the grave.

  Anne had virtually eliminated herself from serious consideration in her first meeting with the mayor. Supervisor Silver had carefully coached Kronenberg that Feinstein’s primary consideration in making the appointment was loyalty. Do what you want once you get on the board, Anne’s supporters urged, but at least tell her now you’ll be loyal. Once Feinstein raised the loyalty question, Kronenberg would only say, “I promise to give you every bit of consideration Harvey did.” Anne later defended the statement by saying Feinstein never would have believed a blanket pledge of loyalty; politicians familiar with Feinstein, however, saw Kron
enberg’s answer as a kamikazi flight for honesty. Harvey Milk, after all, rarely gave Feinstein’s views anything resembling serious consideration; Anne’s promise, therefore, did scarcely anything to assuage the fears of a politician who would be seeking reelection in a matter of months.

  Feinstein easily filled Dan White’s vacant seat, appointing the man Moscone had selected because, she said, the bullets from Dan White’s gun should not alter planned city policy. For the seat left vacant by her elevation to the mayor’s office, Feinstein had appointed a blue ribbon panel of district leaders who sifted through applications and found a replacement closely aligned with the new mayor’s moderate policies. Feinstein refused to appoint such a committee for Harvey’s district. Virtually every district leader had already endorsed Anne by then anyway. Feinstein still had few options, since she had publicly said she would follow Milk’s wishes and appoint a gay successor. Author Frank Robinson had pulled himself out of consideration; Harry Britt had endorsed Kronenberg; Bob Ross was nixed because he had recently been elected the emperor of San Francisco, the male counterpart to the city’s drag queen empress. Feinstein didn’t like drag queens any more than leather. Feinstein stalled on making the decision for weeks.

  Pabich and Rivaldo first hoped that the mayor was postponing the appointment to let Anne creep in under the thirty-day residency requirement. When word leaked that the mayor opposed Anne, they decided to try to intimidate Feinstein. “Kronenberg For Supervisor” posters appeared throughout District 5, pointedly employing the same colors and typeface of Harvey’s campaign posters. Over two thousand district residents signed petitions endorsing her. But Feinstein would not be bullied and as other hopefuls began submitting their names for the seat, the contest to succeed Harvey Milk became the city’s major political circus. Former Air Force Sergeant Lenny Matlovich announced his availability for the seat, even though he had lived in San Francisco only six months. One heterosexual woman aspirant said she “would don leathers or chains or do whatever is necessary to meet the qualifications” Feinstein had set for the gay seat.