The Mayor of Castro Street (19 page)

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The city's Italian community shuddered at the thought that two Italians should be competing for mayor. “You should've gotten together and worked it out among yourselves,” one elderly Italian lectured Moscone. But the days of the old ethnic voting lines were over. The contest between Moscone and Barbagelata represented an even more profound dichotomy than liberal or conservative, since it concerned questions of the traditional versus alternative life-styles, the franchised against the disenfranchised. No politician in the city had succeeded in tying together the have-not votes of blacks, Latins, liberals, and gays. There just weren't enough of them to swing an election. The massive gay migration to San Francisco in the early 1970s, however, was shifting the balance, and Moscone courted the émigrés with an enthusiasm local politicians once reserved for the Chamber of Commerce.

It didn't hurt Moscone when Barbagelata polarized the race further by insisting he was “unaware” that discrimination against gays existed and that he would continue to oppose the law banning anti-gay bias among city contractors because the city might be forced to accept higher bids from nondiscriminating companies over the low bids of biased employers. At a breakfast meeting with twenty-five gay leaders, Barbagelata added that he had nothing against gays personally, but worried about “public displays” such as the annual Gay Freedom Day Parade. When asked if he similarly opposed public displays of other minorities such as the flamboyant activities surrounding the Chinese New Year's Parade, he sharply retorted that at least Chinese were “traditional.” Some of the more conservative gay leaders would have forgiven much of this, except for one point—Barbagelata could not bring himself to utter the word gay. Instead he referred to his guests as “you people.” Moscone got nearly unanimous gay support.

In the runoff, Moscone squeaked to a narrow victory, edging out Barbagelata by a bare 4,400 votes. A jubilant Moscone publicly thanked Harvey Milk in his victory speech that night, adding that the unofficial mayor of Castro Street would soon have an official role in his administration. Moscone dropped another bombshell days later when asked by reporters whom he would appoint to the board if any vacancies arose. Moscone judiciously weighed the question and said he would feel obliged to appoint the man who had the next highest number of votes in the 1975 race. He didn't need to add that the candidate was Harvey Milk.

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The euphoric aftermath of the 1975 elections had liberal neighborhood activists counting blessings they could barely have imagined a few years before. Liberals occupied the city's top three posts: the mayor, district attorney, and sheriff. The direction of San Francisco was finally turned away from moneyed corporate interests to the neighborhoods. Harvey Milk would soon be the first acknowledged gay commissioner in the United States. But the euphoria belied the election's more troubling implications. Moscone had won, but by one of the slimmest margins in San Francisco history, in this the most liberal city in the country. Feinstein's humiliating defeat showed that the city's new political spectrum had little room for moderates, as the city had become polarized between the more extreme left and right—and the sides were almost evenly matched. The election, therefore, was not the decisive battle, between the old and new San Francisco, but merely an early skirmish.

For Harvey, the future path was clear. He had staked out his turf as the most influential gay politician. He was an insider at last. He could count on the support of the liberal establishment in the next supervisorial elections in 1977. All he had to do was settle down and play ball with the big boys. The trouble was, Harvey never could learn how to play ball.

eight

Gay Main Street

“Something's happening here.”

The realization had been germinating for months. The politics and vote tallies were the least of it. Every time he reviewed the monthly balance sheets to see his soaring receipts, every time another realtor made an astronomical offer on his building, every time he ran into another friend from Fresno, awestricken at the rows of handsome men lining the street, Steve Lowell couldn't escape the obvious conclusion: Something's happening here.

Lowell certainly hadn't expected it turn to out this way when he and Donn Tatum opened Paperback Traffic on Castro Street back in 1972. They were just out to do something for the people. The store fit in well with what the idealistic young couple wanted to do with their lives. They could recycle old paperbacks, frustrate high-profit corporations with their dirt-cheap prices, and even live in the back of the store, like the mellowed-out proprietors of some mom and pop grocery.

The pair had their political consciousness up too. Steve got his schooling in the turbulent days after the Stonewall riots when Gay Liberation Fronts swept into the nation's campuses. Within six months of Stonewall, Steve had joined the Boston GLF, helped seize a Harvard building, and learned to talk convincingly of the new order about to be established. Both were charter members of the Castro Village Association and had voted for Harvey Milk for its president. Donn even succeeded Milk as CVA president when Harvey resigned to run for supervisor in 1975.

Neither hoped or planned to end up as a successful businessman, but by early 1976 it was clear they didn't have a choice. Between 1973 and 1975, their business gross tripled and the early months of 1976 saw this rate of business growth increase further. The heavy demand forced the couple to open a second shop across the street. In 1974, they bought a deserted six-unit Victorian a few doors down from Castro Camera. Only one unit was occupied; the other five had been vacant for years and were filled with refuse. Now five shops, a restaurant and their bookstore did a bustling business there. Within a year, they found they could sell the building for many times what they had paid for it; the edifice was less a good investment than a gold mine. Similar stories came from all corners of Castro Street.

Allan Baird watched the gay onslaught transform the old neighborhood bars. Mart's Place, where Allan had once served beers to crusty Scandanavians, was now the Pendulum, catering to white gays who liked black men. The old German merchant marine hangout became the place for the over-forty Castro crowd. Candy counters, smoke shops, and even an old bank branch became gay bars too. Dee's Dress Shop used to sell maternity smocks for expectant mothers. Now it was the All-American Boy, specializing in tight straight-legged Levis and specially logoed jock straps. The family florist store became Leather Forever. The cigar store-bookie operation now housed a fashionable hair stylist. The old pool hall sold Mandarin food. Many more boarded-up storefronts and residential units became bars, boutiques, and restaurants in the business explosion.

The texture of the new Castro immigrants was changing as well. The counterculture had faded. Many former flower children had tired of street life and geared their ambitions toward careers. At Paperback Traffic, this meant that sales of once-popular titles like
Be Here Now
and
Siddhartha
fell off, and patrons started demanding the latest hardbound best-sellers. The low demand for second-hand paperbacks barely justified continuing that line of business. By then publishers were churning out gay books, so it was not unusual for the store to be ordering fifty or one hundred books a throw, an unheard-of volume a few years back. The astounding success of the store, and many others like it, forced the laid-back former hippies to pick up business acumen. Merchants like Lowell and Tatum cut off their shoulder-length hair, started worrying about once-obscure issues like cash flow and overhead, and took to finding their inner peace through formal meditation instead of the hopes for the imminent New Age.

This did not mean that business merchants and immigrants alike did not sense that something vital was indeed growing in the Castro. Something clearly
was
happening. In 1975 and 1976, however, it was just hard to tell what that something was. All that was clear was that wave after wave of gay men were descending on Castro Street. They were not counterculturals who had moved to San Francisco to be hippies and then found the Castro. They were people from all backgrounds who had come to Castro Street to be gay , and they had a lot to sort out.

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Hit the cue ball just so and it's gonna be number six in the corner pocket.
Smartest thing Toad Hall ever did was put in the pool table. What would the National Merit Scholarship people think if they saw me now? Or the other guys at the Port Arthur Methodist Youth Fellowship? Or the Methodist minister from Clover, South Carolina, and his daughter Fran? My wife.

Harry Britt leaned over the table, peering at the intransigent six ball that stood between himself and the next guy up, a stud in cowboy boots, plaid shirt, and button-fly Levis, with the bottom button provocatively unhitched. That guy's hot. No doubt about it. Not that Harry tricked around a lot. But there he was at Toad Hall, almost every day for the three years between 1975 and 1977, even on Chistmas Eve when nobody went to gay bars. What would they all think now?

Harry had spent all his life being good. He was president of the Port Arthur Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) and then regional MYF president. He liked the MYF because it was the one environment where men did not expect him to live up to the macho ideal that so intimidated him. Harry was on the debating squad, served in student government, and won the only National Merit Scholarship in his part of West Texas, the first year they were given out. He went off to Duke University because it looked like all the colleges he had seen in the movies. He was fraternity president. Still his life had no focus, no direction. He sped through college in a little over three years, and he couldn't decide on a major. His life didn't seem to fit together. Somehow.

Then came Fran, the daughter of his Methodist minister. He married Fran; that's what he knew he was supposed to do. He even became a Methodist minister, holding parishes in Port Arthur, then Chicago. He compounded his acts of goodness there by living down the street from Martin Luther King, working in the civil rights movement, pleading for integration of his Community United Methodist Church on West Fiftieth Street. Harry Britt had spent his entire life being good, like many others; the secret still burned deep within him. He had worked so hard to justify his existence; he had known all that time that he was vile in the eyes of God, of himself, always lusting after the handsome young guy across the aisle. By the time he was a thirty-year-old preacher in Chicago, he had bloated out to 270 pounds and was smoking four packs of Old Gold Straights a day.

But then an assassin pumped a bullet into King's neck and the parishioners at Community United Methodist were horrified, not so much at the murder, but over the fear that rampaging black rioters would cross over Ashland Avenue and burn their houses. Fear overcame moral indignation. Harry spent hours riding the elevated trains in Chicago's South Side just to be around blacks. He knew he had to pull out of all of it, his marriage, his church, his entire past life.

He kept telling himself he didn't come to San Francisco to be gay. He came because of Esalen and the human potential groups who could provide him with a guru. His life had never had direction, maybe a guru could provide it. He watched Jim Foster address the Democratic convention on TV in 1972. That marked the first time Harry Britt ever saw a human being stand up and say he was gay. Harry knew he was too, but still he wrestled hard against the truth for another two years, until in 1974 he answered an ad in the
Berkeley Barb.
“I'm coming out and scared,” Bob's classified read. Harry answered the ad and the pair cautiously sidled into their first gay bars. Harry needed only a few months before he shifted into the intense gay life of the Castro. Finally, he got to do something he never thought would happen in his lifetime—he made love to a man.

He'd been on Castro Street ever since. For Harry Britt, being gay in the Castro in 1975 meant buying a sun lamp, losing one hundred pounds, joining a gym to pump up his sagging pectorals, and changing from glasses to contact lenses. His Texas twang and lean Castro look made him a hit at the pool tables. Since he'd taken a night auditor's job at the Hilton, he had all day to shoot pool at Toad Hall, walk through the Twin Peaks bar for a draft and then saunter past the stores, window-shopping both the wares and the salesmen. Harry was less concerned with whoring around to make up for lost time than with trying to fully integrate himself for the first time. After living over thirty years under the assumption he'd never experience a moment of passion, much less love, just seeing such a panoply of available partners was enough to set a guy's head spinning.

Harry had done his political number too, walking precincts for Harvey Milk's 1975 campaign, even standing in a human billboard one chilly morning. But that was mainly because Harry thought Scott Smith was a gorgeous hunk whom he'd like to land in the sack some time. Harry did not come to Castro Street for politics, he just wanted to cruise, like the other guys he kept running into on the street who came from the same west Texas MYF camps.

Thousands of them. The police chief estimated that in 1976, about 140,000 gays lived in San Francisco, over one in five citizens. About eighty gay men a week arrived to put down roots in the city, according to the conservative police estimate. They fueled the expanding gay business base in the Castro, but that was the most superficial gauge of their significance; they were creating a new counterculture. San Francisco had for decades been the birthing ground for America's new social tides: the beatniks came from North Beach in the 1950s; hippies created the flower generation in Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s; the new social phenomenon of the 1970s was the gay counterculture and it was being born on the streets of the Castro neighborhood where, on every sunny Saturday afternoon, hundreds of guys like Harry Britt, Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk, and Scott Smith cruised the strip.