The Mayor of Castro Street (14 page)

The staid Democrats retorted that neither the gay hippie nor the Arab grocer deserved serious consideration. Harvey Milk couldn't even get the backing of other gays; ask anybody in the Toklas club. As he read the angry responses, Milk only chuckled. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but just spell my name right,” he told Scott. “And it's hard to misspell Milk.”

Seniora provided the copy for Harvey's next press release too. Seniora had been very impressed with Harvey's campaign flyer, which listed Milk's stands of twenty-five major city issues; in fact, he was so impressed that he reprinted the fliers, replacing Milk's name with his own. The trick would have infuriated most candidates, but Harvey didn't get mad; he just issued a press release. The fact that an Arab, Republican businessman could use the same campaign flier as a gay Jewish Democrat hippie showed that Harvey Milk had a unique ability to “bridge ideologies” with his campaign and that the “need for a new direction in our leadership is far more important than Milk's homosexuality.”

By the end of the campaign, Harvey and Scott Smith worked out an intricate map that they used on their frequent press release runs. The map sketched out precisely which obscure alleys and legal U-turns were needed to make an efficient circuit to every television station and newspaper in San Francisco. Various press releases announced the formation of Street Artists for Milk and the Performing Artists for Milk, chaired by Equity member Scott Smith. A dishonorably discharged sailor, Tom Randol, chaired the Veterans for Milk Committee, and the press release sorrowfully told a story about how Harvey Milk had been booted out of the navy for being gay. He had not suffered this disgrace, he told a later campaign manager, but he knew the story would make good copy.

If anyone said something to Harvey about his fondness for such stunts, he would gesture wildly as he launched into a lecture. “Symbols, symbols, symbols,” he insisted. Sure, he had not been kicked out of the military, but he had a dozen friends who had had their lives muddled by anti-gay purges in the services. The point of the story was to let people know that service personnel routinely
do
get kicked out. Besides, he once confided, “Maybe people will read it, feel sorry for me, and then vote for me.”

*   *   *

Politics as theater.

It became one of Harvey's favorite topics of conversation. A continent away, Harvey's friends from Broadway were reveling in Harvey's stories about his candidacy. Eve Merriam, author of
Inner City,
sent Harvey his first campaign contribution, her own “buck for luck.” Harvey had always been involved in political plays like
Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar,
and
Lenny,
she thought, but he never could find a niche in theater since he wasn't interested in acting or producing. “Politics seemed the next logical step,” she later observed. “If he couldn't do politics in theater, it made sense that he would try to do theater in politics.”

“Harvey, why on earth are you doing
that?
” asked his old friend Jim Bruton.

“Somebody has to do it,” Harvey snapped back. “It might as well be me.”

Jim came to San Francisco to pitch in with the campaign. He could tell Harvey was finally realizing that purpose he had talked about so many years ago on a beach in East Hampton.

*   *   *

Harvey knew better, but he hoped he might actually win one of the five seats up for grabs on election day. He assembled a dozen friends in a Chinese restaurant after the polls closed to await election results. Bigger names like Dianne Feinstein and John Barbagelata carried the day. Harvey came in tenth in a field of thirty-two candidates, polling seventeen thousand votes.

That was an impressive tally, pundits noted, especially for a candidate who had everything going against him—long hair, homosexuality, and gay moderates' antipathy—not to mention the fact he spent only $4,500 on the entire campaign, a pittance compared to most candidates. The political analysts had been looking toward the Milk campaign as a clinical study of whether a gay vote actually did exist. Harvey's seventeen thousand votes showed that it clearly did.

Harvey beat out all challengers in the heavily gay neighborhoods around Castro and Polk Streets. He was the top vote-getter in the precincts around San Francisco State University and swept the “brown rice belt” of hippie voters. Milk was hoping for broader appeal, but even he was surprised at the intensity of support he got from the constituencies that swung his way. On a precinct-by-precinct basis, Harvey either won big or lost big; that's how people responded to him.

The effort to establish district election of supervisors also failed. But two facts were not lost on Milk. First, the highest vote totals for district elections came not from traditionally liberal areas but from the city's gay neighborhoods. A look at the voter returns from the district that would have been carved around Castro Street showed why. Had the district elections plan been in effect for the 1973 race, Harvey Milk would have been elected a member of the board of supervisors from the Castro district.

Milk's concession speech lashed out at gay moderates who had supported liberal friends over a gay person. Liberals' toleration, he said, was “a crumb thrown to keep us happy, to let us feel that we are getting something when in reality we should be getting our freedom.

“I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted. I have a lot more to drink. For that reason, the political numbers game will be played. I know the rules of their game now and how to play it. All human beings have power,” he concluded. “You are just one person, but you have power. That makes power so significant.”

Two weeks after the election, Milk cut his hair. Milk also swore two oaths to himself: he would never smoke marijuana or go to a San Francisco bathhouse again. “I decided this was all too important to have it get wrecked because of smoking a joint or being in a raid at some bathhouse,” he told a reporter years later.

Michael Wong barely recognized Harvey when he ran into Milk at a political event. Michael was relieved that Harvey did not appear to know how he had subverted the political endorsements. Harvey was as affable as ever. “I cut it all off to get more votes,” Harvey said. “You have to play the game, you know.”

six

The Early Invaders

Everybody's worried the neighborhood isn't like the old days.
Hell, Allan Baird thought, it's more like the old days now than it's been for a good fifteen years.

The son of two Scottish immigrants, Baird was born just seven blocks from the central Castro shopping strip in 1932. That's the farthest from Castro Street he ever lived. The gentle slopes surrounding the street seemed to cut the neighborhood off from the rest of San Francisco, lending the cozy, working-class area all the trappings of a small, insular town. As Baird started the two-block walk from his house—where his wife Helen had lived forty years—to Castro Camera, he looked at the neighborhood that was changing so much. There on the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, he hawked newspapers as a kid during World War II. Across the street, the Walking Book, in his wide-shouldered double-breasted suits and white fedora hat, used to take the morning bets, cutting seriously into Jack MacCormack's booking operation in the back of the nearby cigar store. The Little Man's Store used to be down the street; it had done a booming business in bootleg gin during Prohibition.

The city maps had always called the area Eureka Valley, but to most of the people who lived there, it was just Most Holy Redeemer Parish. The Catholic Church dominated every facet of the neighborhood's life from the schooling of children to the family picnics and weekly bingo games. Wives stayed at home to take care of their large broods; families stayed here generation after generation; God was in His heaven, and, most Castro residents would agree, He was probably Irish. And now it was all changing.

The coming of the downtown skyscrapers heralded the end. This had always been a working-class neighborhood of longshoremen, stevedores, factory workers, and cops. But the blue-collar workers had to move to where the new factories were. By the 1950s, the kids no longer wanted to live in a big city anyway. Some of the old people stayed, but the later generations moved to subdivisions near San Jose, buying into the ranchhouses of the new American dream. The small-town ambience faded fast. Stores went out of business. Houses stood vacant. Then, came the whispers.

Maybe it was Mrs. O'Malley talking to Mrs. O'Shea over the cod at the open-air fish market. It could have been Mrs. Maloney fretting to Mrs. Asmussen, who was a good friend even though she
was
a Lutheran. The word went out. A former police officer, not a good Castro boy, but—the housewife flicked her wrist, raised her eyebrows, and, after a meaningful pause—a funny one, bought The Gem bar. And he's probably going to make it over for
his
crowd. Real estate agents were already writing obituaries for the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood over the hill. The hippies came in and wham, there went the neighborhood. Now the gays were going to do that too, right here in Most Holy Redeemer Parish.

Baird never saw anything like the panic that followed the establishment of the first gay bar on Castro Street in the late 1960s. The stolid Irish families sold their Victorians at dirt-cheap prices, fearing greater loss if they waited. By 1973, the numbers of gays moving into the neighborhood amounted to an invasion. That's what the old-timers called the new men of Castro Street—invaders. Now it was 1973 and Baird figured at least half the people moving in were gay, while more and more of the old-timers sold out.

A hard-working German family used to live where Harvey Milk's Castro Camera was now. Baird remembered playing in the back lot as he stepped inside the shop's door. He'd heard that Harvey Milk was the man to talk to if you wanted to work with the gays. The other guys at the Teamsters hall might think I'm crazy, Baird thought, but it's worth a try.

“I'm Allan Baird, a representative of the Teamsters and director of the Coors beer boycott in California.” Allan began formally.

“I know who you are,” Harvey smiled. Allan realized he didn't need to be formal.

“I know you're the spokesperson for the gay community here and I think I can use your help.”

The beer drivers' local was striking the six major beer distributors who adamantly refused to sign the proposed union contract. “These guys are like me,” explained Baird, who had trucked newspapers before working his way into the Teamsters hierarchy. “They can't be out of work long.” So far Baird had enlisted a group representing over four hundred Arab grocers and the federation of Chinese grocers who would boycott scab drivers. If gay bars chipped in, they could win it.

“I'll do what I can,” said Harvey, pausing to add one condition. “You've got to promise me one thing. You've got to help bring gays into the Teamsters union. We buy a lot of the beer that your union delivers. It's only fair that we get a share of the jobs.”

Baird liked Milk's straightforwardness. After years in the give-and-take of union politics, the beefy teamster thought he could spot a bullshitter. Harvey Milk was no bullshitter. Baird grew more impressed when he later learned Milk was in the middle of his campaign for supervisor. Any other politician would have asked for an endorsement, he thought. Milk just asked for jobs.

The project gave Milk a chance to test out his new theories about achieving gay power through economic clout. He enlisted his friend, gay publisher Bob Ross, to help connect him to bar owners and started buttonholing support for the boycott. Baird was amazed at Milk's ability to get press attention for the effort; Milk enjoyed the symbolism of tying gays to the conservative Teamsters union.

The boycott worked. Gays provided the coup de grace shot to the already strained distributors. Five of the six beer firms signed the pact. Only Coors refused to settle. Harvey used the refusal as a basis to launch a more highly publicized boycott of Coors beer in gay bars. Baird was surprised not only at Milk's success, but by the fact that Harvey was as outraged at Coors discrimination against Chicanos as by the fabled Coors antipathy to gays. This guy's got a national philosophy, Baird thought.

At a Colorado meeting with arch-conservative William Coors, Baird warned the executive about the success of the gay boycott and about the persuasive gay leader who had just made an impressive showing in the local supervisorial race. These guys are getting more powerful, Baird warned, and they'll be on the unions' side. Coors acted astonished by the talk. He didn't come out and say it, but Baird felt he could tell what Coors was thinking by the sneer on his face: Community. What the hell is a
gay
community?

Baird kept his end of the bargain. Gays started driving for Falstalf, Lucky Lager, Budweiser, and soon all the distributors, except, of course, Coors. The biggest recruiting problem came not from biased employers, but from gays who found it hard to believe that there would be companies who were openly
not
discriminating against them.

“Those guys in the gay community are real powerful. I don't think you understand their power yet,” Baird told Teamsters officials. “They can turn something on and off just like that.”

The officials liked Baird's work, but some worried that Allan might be turning queer himself. “He
does
live just a few blocks off Eighteenth and Castro,” one speculated. “Just how close
are
he and this Harvey Milk anyway?”

Back in the neighborhood, the growing friendship between Allan Baird and Harvey Milk caused no small consternation. The wizened old housewives had known Allan for years, as well as his wife Helen, since her parents had run the Greek restaurant next to the Castro Theater in the 1920s. “Is your husband a fag?” one neighbor bluntly asked her.