The Mayor of Castro Street (3 page)

The new location proved Harvey's luckiest break since his first trip to the standing section. Just a few blocks away was the train station where the LIRR deposited passengers for the ferry to a new vacation resort on a sandbar called Fire Island. Come summer, Harvey could catch glimpses of this other world so far from his middle-class Jewish life in Bayshore. Sophisticated writers, famous actors, and glamorous socialites walked by Bayshore Furriers on their way from the LIRR depot to the ferry landing. Ethel Merman sent shivers of excitement through the town when she stopped at the nearby Cortney Hotel for a drink one afternoon. Many of the visitors came in grand automobiles, catching the eyes of all the local boys since most families in Bayshore, including the Milks, were not rich enough to afford a car.

Harvey worked boxing groceries that the weekenders took over to the island. On some weekends, he'd skip the opera and catch the last ferry to Fire Island's Ocean Beach, striking up friendships with some of the older men he'd met in the store. Often, it wasn't even for sex. He had always felt so different, and here he could rub shoulders with other different people, a world away from his life as a j.v. linebacker.

Minnie didn't worry much if Harvey spent Saturday night away from home. She'd had her own maverick streak during her younger years and she wasn't about to deny the same independence to her headstrong son. And Harvey was a model child, not because he excelled, really, but because he had such tenacity. Though he would never have the quickest coordination, he plodded through years in school sports, never the star but always dependable. For some reason, he got it in his head he had to go on to college—and out of Bayshore—a year early, so even though Harvey was only a B student, he was pushing through school faster than just about anybody in his class.

Harvey sometimes felt the urge to bring the two strands of his life—the open and the secret—together, but he liked being popular and having his share of attention in athletics. He didn't want to be like that fat sissy Bob, getting beat up in the locker room, or Willy, sashaying down the halls while everybody made jokes behind his back. So Harvey, the plodder, learned to play the game.

On June 23, 1947, five weeks after his seventeenth birthday, Milk graduated from Bayshore High School. The legend beneath his picture in the yearbook reads: “Glimpy Milk—And they say WOMEN are never at a loss for words.”

*   *   *

Eileen Mulcahy graduated a year after Harvey and now works in Bayshore High's audiovisual library. The imposing brick high school has a new wing now and the kids sneak a drag of marijuana instead of a Camel on lunch breaks, but Bayshore's maple-lined streets retain the small-town feel they had thirty-five years ago. John Cochran went on to become the district's state assemblyman. Jim Gowan sits on the state supreme court. The old-timers who work in the administrative offices, however, know that the school's most famous alumnus is Harvey Milk.

Eileen has methodically clipped all the newspaper stories about Harvey over the years and circulated them among her old classmates. “I've thought about this a lot,” she says carefully, straining to be precise. “When we were young people, we didn't know there was such a thing as gayness. The worst thing you could do was call somebody a faggot. If Harvey knew this, he had to face it all by himself. It really is terrible to think about. It must have been traumatic for him.”

Still, ordinary is the one word that best describes Milk—ordinary except for one point. “He was different, not in the sense that he was peculiar or out of it,” says Mulcahy. “But in the sense that he was an individual at a time when people all tried to be alike.”

Crusty Clifton LePlatney coached hundreds of teens through decades of football seasons at Bayshore High. Yes, he remembers Harvey Milk; he taught his physics class too. “Harvey was a nice ordinary fellow—not any different than any of the other kids. Just like the other kids in class, the other kids in sports, only more talkative,” says the retired coach. “I was surprised, very surprised when I heard about his activities in San Francisco,” he says, adding pointedly, “nothing like
that
was ever suspected.”

Harvey never did seem to have any friends there, not really close friends. He hung around a lot with Dick Brown, the black basketball player from Williams Street, where Bayshore's four or five black families lived. Like a lot of the class of ‘47, Brown, now married and a father, has never lived more than five miles away from his hometown. “He kept his secret well—it makes you wonder how many other guys were funny too,” Brown muses. “The one thing that gets me mad is, here I'm supposed to be one of his good buddies, but he never trusted me enough to tell me. I can't say how I would have reacted.” Brown pauses in recollection. “I guess I would have ostracized him. What a cross to carry. You never know.”

Nobody ever heard from Harvey after he graduated. “It was like he dropped off the face of the earth,” Brown says. Nobody's ever heard from Bob, the fat sissy, either. The newspaper stories from San Francisco surprised Brown and Harvey's other Bayshore friends. They were especially surprised when they saw the pictures of Harvey in the dailies and he no longer had the nose everybody made cracks about.

Harvey himself never talked much about his childhood in Woodmere and Bayshore, except for two stories. First, the August afternoon a few weeks after his graduation when he was briefly picked up by police for indecent exposure. And then, there was the day his parents sat him down in 1943 to tell him about the brave Jews of Warsaw who were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded by Nazi troops. But they fought on anyway, not because they thought they could win, but because when something
that
evil descends on the world, you have to fight. Even if it's hopeless.

By the time Harvey took his high school diploma, news of the Nazi Holocaust had shocked the world, especially the millions of American middle-class Jews who had grown to feel so secure. The Holocaust touched Milk doubly, in a way that he could not have imagined at that time.

*   *   *

Before Hitler's rise, Germany had an active gay liberation movement that pressed for legal demands and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions asking for homosexual equality. But in 1936, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler issued the following decree:

Just as we today have gone back to the ancient German view on the question of marriages mixing different races, so too in our judgment of homosexuality—a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race—we must return to the guiding Nordic principle, extermination of degenerates.

About a year later, Himmler ordered that gays be rounded up and sent to Level 3 camps—the death camps. Gays wore pink triangles, so they would not be confused with Jews who wore yellow stars of David. Some estimates put the number of gays exterminated at over 220,000, the second largest category of Nazi genocide victims after Jews.

This attempt at genocide efficiently squashed the only gay political movement in the Western world. Harvey Milk, meanwhile, was seven years old then, playing in the aisles of grandfather Morris' dry goods store. It would be years before ideas of gay equality rumbled again, this time in the United States.

two

Gay Everyman

The winter of 1947 struck with unexpected fury.
The campus of the New York State College for Teachers at Albany lay buried in mounting drifts of snow. The onslaught of returning veterans that year swelled enrollment so much that men were housed in slapped-up barracks. The guys in the C barracks felt lucky that they had the class clown, Harvey Milk, to entertain them. Harvey was assigned the bunk next to the barracks' bathroom, a site which competed only with his nose as a source for his cornucopia of jokes.

A certain camaraderie prevailed among the thousand students at Albany State then. These were the students smart enough to qualify for prestigious private schools, but not rich enough to afford them. So they attended Albany State, the only state school that offered a liberal arts teaching curriculum. They were at the poor man's Yale, they assured themselves; they were the intelligentsia of tomorrow. The young men of the new class of ‘51 spent their nights up late in their snowbound barracks, arguing Nietzsche, the Truman-Dewey race, and the escalating tensions in Korea.

The subject of homosexuality might flit by in an allusion, but this was the late forties and nobody talked much about it then. Howard Rosman, whose bunk was across the barracks from Harvey's, figured out that two of the other guys in the barracks were queers, but he never saw Milk have anything to do with them. Harvey certainly wasn't what most of the middle-class kids at Albany State thought queers were like. Harvey was just another math major with a minor in his favorite subject, history.

Milk's performance on Bayshore's j.v. team did not rate him a slot on any of the Albany State Great Danes teams, so he stuck to intramural basketball and football. He coached his fraternity basketball team to an intramural championship in his junior year. His major involvement with sports in college, however, was as sportswriter for the
State College News.

Like the other Jews on campus, Milk could not expect to be invited to the cushier life of the live-in fraternities, so he joined Kappa Beta, the fledgling Jewish fraternity. His social life centered on Jewish activities. Though he rarely dated, he sometimes could be found at the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house, entertaining five or six girls at a time with his antics. He occasionally turned up at meetings of Hillel or the Intercollegiate Zionist Federation of America. A gregarious guy, but when the classmates thought back, they recalled something odd. He was always somehow detached.

I don't think you're going to find anybody who isn't Harvey's friend. Everybody likes him. He always has a joke, Doris Brody remembered thinking years later. She'd seen a lot of Harvey at the Alpha Epsilon Phi house and in her history classes. He seemed a paradox. Everybody's friend, but I don't think you'd find anybody who is a real close friend to him either, she thought.

Funny, because Harvey stuck his nose into so many issues. When freshman hazing got Milk's dander up, his writing jumped from the sports section to the editorial page as he railed against the practice. He sternly lectured the thirty-five members of his fraternity, Kappa Beta, that they should admit non-Jewish members. How could they deride the other frats for not admitting Jews when they discriminated themselves? he asked.

Though thoroughly conventional, he sometimes took a maverick path, escorting a black woman friend to a school dance if he felt like it. One of his better friends was a black basketball player who, like Milk, took up the somewhat suspicious pastime of jotting verses of poetry.

But that was about as suspicious as Milk ever got. Most of his grades were B's or C's as he plodded on. By his senior year, he was
State College News
sports editor. That gave him the chance to travel with the basketball team, which lost all but four or five games in Division IV that year. “We have the pleasure without the pressure,” quipped Milk about his team's unwillingness to win. On the way home from the games, Harvey could always be found in the back of the bus, the life of the party.

That was Harvey. Nobody knows what he did on those weekends away from campus. On a job application thirteen years later, Harvey told of a 1950 disorderly conduct arrest in Albany. No one got suspicious when he abruptly resigned his job as sports editor in the middle of his senior year. Everybody liked Harvey and when he was handed his diploma on a warm June day in 1951, he just left and nobody ever heard from him again.

*   *   *

The camaraderie of the class of '51 stuck, especially with the alumni of the Kappa Beta fraternity and Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority. Many kept in touch, sporadically updating addresses and gossip about other grads. Instead of ending up as the intelligentsia of tomorrow, they went on to teach in grade schools and junior colleges around the country.

Paul Buchman spent a lot of Tuesday and Thursday nights working with Harvey on the
State College News
sports section. He's fond of telling the story of how
Life
magazine surveyed the college graduating classes of his era, rating their subsequent contributions to American life on a scale of zero to four. The class of ‘51 was the only zero, Buchman says. “We weren't the lost generation, we were the blank generation. The class of ‘51 didn't have any unusual characteristics. We didn't have anything that stood out. We fell into a rut that had no character at all. Harvey and I were just like that—we were ordinary.”

Doris Brody from Hillel ended up marrying Harvey's barracks-mate Howard Rosman and they settled back in Valley Stream, two LIRR stops south of Woodmere. “He was never thought of as a possible queer—that's what you called them then—he was a man's man,” recalls Mrs. Doris Rosman. “In our day, of course, people were thought to be gay if they were effeminate—or if they announced it. Of course, nobody announced it in those days.”

Another alumnus who kept in contact moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and supplied classmates with newspaper clippings about Harvey's budding political career. Christian Lievestro didn't have a hard time imagining what Harvey's life had been like at Albany State. “Harvey was discreet—and sensible,” says Lievestro, class of ‘50. “We didn't know about each other being gay. Of course nobody did in those days. You certainly never talked about it or let on because you were there to be a teacher, and it could destroy your chances at that.” Gay life was a melange of “chance encounters” and “incidental things,” he says. The braver gays joined the glee club where drunken parties might lead to that one desparate moment of gratification, followed by the days of regret, and, more saliently, fear that the secret would get out.