The Mayor of Castro Street (35 page)

“Who said it's speculation?” Harvey asked.

Wong told him he was crazy: a gay supervisor yes, a gay mayor, no. “Not even San Francisco is ready for that,” he insisted.

“I'm not so sure, my little fortune cookie,” Harvey said. “Besides, it doesn't hurt to let people think I'm interested in the job.”

*   *   *

Harvey proudly showed Allan Baird the pen-and-pencil set Allan had given him during the first supervisorial campaign in 1973, when Baird made his first trip to City Hall. The Teamster friends who had once worried that Baird might be queer for hanging out with Harvey were now complimenting Allan on his foresight, and occasionally trying to nudge a favor from the supervisorial friend.

“Are you going to be the next mayor of San Francisco?” Allan bluntly asked Harvey.

“Allan, you can be the next mayor of San Francisco, anybody can be,” Harvey said. “All you have to do is work hard and you can get it.”

Harvey figured he had already pretty much proved that point with his election as supervisor.

*   *   *

With the specter of a statewide fight on the Briggs Initiative looming ahead, Harvey took to building a statewide political machine geared to his nuts-and-bolts approach to politics. He met the Los Angeles end of the planned machine before his election when he ran into Don Amador, a gay studies professor at a local college. With characteristic tact, Milk told him the best way to educate people about gays was through politics, not colleges.

“How many students do you have?” Harvey demanded.

“Thirty,” said Amador.

“How long do you have them for?”

“Sixteen weeks.”

Harvey made his instant calculations. Only thirty people every sixteen weeks. “No,” he said tersely. “That's too slow.”

The two struck up a friendship. Once in office, Harvey lobbied Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to appoint Amador as his official liaison to the gay community. Amador got the job and Milk started persuading the teacher that he should run for office if he really wanted to educate people about gays. On a spare afternoon, Harvey jotted out his ten rules of how to win an election:

1. Interviews with all major papers. [All was underlined three times.]

2. Knock on all doors.

3. Ride buses.

4. Visit non-gay bars during the daytime and any singles bars at nite.

5. Coffee shops and restaurants. Stop off early in morning and late at night.

6. Shake hands.

7. Shake hands.

8. As few meetings as possible—just meet the people.

9. Door to door of registered Demo's is very best thing you can do outside of media coverage.

10. Don't stop.

Harvey's new friendship with Amador gave him rare chances to escape the tensions of home and office to stay in what became his own room in Don's comfortable home. One day, Amador and his lover returned to find the house covered with orange juice promotional signs. “Orange Juice Just Isn't for Breakfast Anymore” posters hung from the chandeliers while o.j. cardboard table tents covered all counters and promotional bumper stickers graced the windows. Harvey had a new boyfriend, an employee of Anita Bryant's boss, the Florida Citrus Commission. Bob Tuttle had seen Harvey standing alone after speaking at a Los Angeles gay rally. It seemed funny to see somebody that important standing all by himself, Tuttle thought, like a lost little boy. “I just want to tell you that I appreciate what you're doing because if this ever turns against us, you'll be the first one they go after,” Tuttle impulsively told him. Milk beamed back, “Yeah, I know.”

Tuttle was twenty-eight, but looked all of twenty-one, an appearance that put him in Harvey's favored age bracket, so the pair started a long-distance romance. During a four-day stay at Tuttle's Venice Beach apartment, Harvey confided he was then having his longest vacation in six years.

*   *   *

During another visit to Amador's, the phone rang. A young voice said he had read about Don in a
People
magazine story about Amador's gay courses. He was seventeen years old, in Richmond, Minnesota, he explained—and about to kill himself because his parents were going to institutionalize him for being gay. Harvey took the call, confident he could do some crash counseling; the young man was, after all, the lonely teenage constituent for whom Harvey had tailored all his candidacies. “Run away from home,” Harvey urged. “Get on the bus, go to the next biggest city—New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, even Minneapolis, it doesn't matter. Just leave.”

The young man started crying. He was confined to a wheelchair and couldn't get on any bus he said. That moment marked one of the only times Amador would ever see tears come to Harvey's eyes. Everything was so much more goddamn complex than he could say in his hope speech.

thirteen

Willkommen Castro

“On this spot, four days ago, a young citizen was murdered because he was a homosexual”

Ribbons in the colors of the Catalonian province, yellow and orange, laid silently on the street next to the cardboard flowers by the hand-scrawled epitaph. It had been years since Cleve Jones fulfilled his adolescent dream and come to San Francisco for his first San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Like most of his friends, he too had been swept up in the tide of militance after the Anita Bryant controversy. Weeks after Orange Tuesday, he had left his Castro Street apartment to take a hitchihiking tour of Europe. In Barcelona, he had heard there would be a rally, here, where the blood of a gay man had spilled just four days before. The fledgling Spanish gay activists were cautious as they first approached the spot. This was the first gay demonstration since the death of Francisco Franco, they explained to Cleve; that meant the first gay demonstration in Spanish history. Ever.

Slowly, the momentum grew as Jones and a cadre of the braver gays marched down Los Ramblos from the waterfront to the Catalonian provincial capitol. From nowhere, La Guardia Civil appeared, firing rubber bullets into the crowd. Jones turned to see bullets tear off the scalp of the woman marching at his side. Blood, broken glass, and tear gas filled the streets. Rather than surrender, the gay protestors launched into an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the police through the winding alleys and lanes of Barcelona. They took the chairs and tables from sidewalk cafés and built barricades, taunting the police to fire on. Cleve threw his first rock. The street fighting in Barcelona excited his long latent anger even more than the frenzied chanting of the San Francisco demonstrations after Orange Tuesday. When the days' fighting waned, he wrote a long letter enthusiastically recounting the day to a friend; the letter was widely reprinted in gay papers across the country. When Jones returned to Castro Street that fall to work in Harvey Milk's supervisorial campaign, he still talked ecstatically of that day in Barcelona. He had suddenly realized that the gay movement meant more than an annual parade and that it would soon be bigger than anyone imagined; too much anger simmered beneath the surface, all over the world.

Jones couldn't have come to a time and place that could better nourish that conviction. A sense of gay manifest destiny gripped San Francisco by 1978, as if it were ordained that homosexuals should people the city from sea to shining bay. Harvey's bold public role as Castro Street's neighborhood supervisor—and the national publicity he garnered as the city's gay spokesperson—certainly fueled that attitude. But the import of the San Francisco gay phenomenon had implications far beyond the pillared walls of City Hall, and the gays of San Francisco saw themselves as the avant-garde of a burgeoning national movement.

Dade County marked the beginning, not the end, of organized opposition to the gay civil rights cause; the issue moved to the forefront of the nation's social agenda. Fundamentalists filed petitions in rapid-fire succession in St. Paul, Wichita, Seattle, and Eugene to repeal local gay-rights ordinances. Even more significantly, State Senator John Briggs was targeting his initiative for the November general election ballot, when one in ten American voters went to the polls to vote for, among other offices, California governor.

Gays seemed on the defensive around the country. The Oklahoma legislature enacted their own version of Briggs's proposal to ban gays from teaching in public schools. From Oklahoma City soon afterward came the news that one hundred teenage boys had formed their own Klu Klux Klan chapter and had picked gay bars as their primary targets, slashing tires and beating patrons with baseball bats. In nearby Arkansas, the legislature took up a bill that not only banned gays from teaching, but denied credentials to gays in the fields of pediatrics, psychiatry, child psychology and youth counseling. Moreover, the bill empowered the state to strip existing licenses from anybody discovered to be gay and penalized gays caught lying about their sexuality by five years in prison. Adolf Hitler had started his final solution for Jews by just such methodical, restrictive legislation, and the analogy was not lost on the startled gays of San Francisco. The pink triangle, which Hitler forced gays to wear in his death camps, soon became the most prominent symbol of the San Francisco gay rights movement.

The courts provided few hopes for judicial remedies. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to even hear the case of a Tacoma teacher with a flawless record who was fired from his job not for any misdeed, but solely because his principal learned of his homosexuality. In a more extreme case, the Supreme Court refused to review the conviction of a North Carolina man guilty solely of having sex with another man, a proverbial consenting adult. The Jacksonville police admitted they had recruited the man to entice their prey, a local massage parlor owner, and that the eventual seduction was “deliberate and planned.” The man was sentenced to nine months in prison for committing a crime that according to Dr. Kinsey's statistics, one in 10 Americans routinely indulge—and the Supreme Court would not even listen to arguments that the man's privacy and equal protection rights might have been violated.

Given the courts' timidity on homosexual issues, gays didn't feel any more reassured when Anita Bryant gave a long magazine interview in which she said gays should be locked up for at least twenty years if convicted of commiting just one homosexual act. “Any time you water down the law, it just makes it easier for immorality to be tolerated,” she explained. “Why make it easier for them? I think it only helps condone it and this makes it easier for kids who wouldn't be so concerned. If it were a felony, [it] might make them think twice, especially the younger ones.” Of course, Bryant held out hope for salvation. “They'll have plenty of time to think in prison,” she said.

Though a few dozen congressmen bravely introduced federal gay rights legislation, hopes of any congressional action withered; few major national politicians wanted to take the risk of being tied to gays. In an effort to recruit a big-name speaker for his San Francisco Gay Democratic Club and to get a major public figure to stand with gays against their increasingly virulent opposition, Harvey Milk sent letters to President Carter, Senator Edward Kennedy, Governor Jerry Brown, and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, imploring them to make some kind of pro-gay statement, hopefully at an S.F. Gay dinner. Each letter ended with a plea roughly like the one Harvey sent to Carter:

Sooner or later, the massive gay population will indeed win their rights, as other groups have already done. Sooner or later, the strife and anger and hatred and violence against gay people will be put aside. What we seek now is to leap over the many years and great turmoil that will take place by having the person who represents these people speak out now.

A Carter aide sent back a two-sentence reply a week later explaining the President had prior commitments, but that he “appreciates your thoughtfulness and sends his best wishes.” Julian Bond wrote to say he had forwarded the request to his booking agent.

*   *   *

Fear and anger dominated many street-corner conversations among the young women and men who had moved to Castro Street. Though representing the entire spectrum of American life, most of the migrants—like most Americans—came from typical middle-class, mid-American backgrounds, so they were not prepared to have their backs shoved up against the wall for any reason. They may have grown up being called queers and getting beat up in locker rooms, but the attacks were so pervasive in the broad psychological and physical scope that the enemy barely seemed tangible. Now the threats could be defined as flesh and blood religious activists mounting concrete political efforts for specific election days. It was all so … so real. Cleve Jones started spreading word among his many street friends in the neighborhood as the day of the first post-Miami referendum vote neared in St. Paul. “Now is the time for us to get our army together,” he said.

*   *   *

A preternatural smile spreads slowly,
tremulously across Pat's lips while she speaks, as if the forty-six-year-old southern California housewife can almost see the Sunday School picture of Jesus Christ drifting into sight. “And the Bible says that just before Jesus comes to take all Christians to heaven, there will be times when men will have unnatural affections toward other men,” she says calmly, her smile never losing its benevolence. “Then, God says He will visit great wrath upon the earth.”

A few hours earlier, Pat had sat in the front pew of the Central Baptist Church of Pomona and filled out the three-by-five index cards on which newly saved Pomonans recorded their vital statistics before wading toward the promise of ever-lasting life in Central Baptist's plastic-walled baptismal font. Last Tuesday, Pat had had her first day of work in a different kind of heavenly project, though she saw it as no less essential to her salvation than her daily prayer studies. That's when Pat had folded fliers for the California Defend Our Children Committee, the political arm of State Senator John Briggs's efforts to ban gay teachers from public schools. Like Cleve, Pat saw herself as part of an army, one of the “foot soldiers of God” that Anita Bryant talked so glowingly about. Pat had never taken part in politics before, but this was clearly different. “This isn't politics,” she insisted, “it's the Lord's work.”