The Mayor of Castro Street (2 page)

Across the continent, a younger man watches pictures of the candlelight march on the late night news. Jack McKinley recalls the five years he spent loving Harvey Milk in New York City during the 1960s. That his stubbornly conventional former lover, a successful Wall Street financial analyst whose politics rarely strayed to the left of Barry Goldwater, would get shot to prove some political point seems unfathomable to him. But as McKinley looks at the mile-long procession of softly glimmering lights in San Francisco, he's sure of one thing. This is good theater and Harvey loved good theater.

Scott Smith barely feels alive as he walks down the marble steps of City Hall toward the sea of candles. He had met Harvey in New York when Harvey was a Broadway producer making the avant-garde scene as a forty-one-year-old hippy. They had moved to San Francisco together, established their camera shop, and lain in bed until the early morning hours arguing campaign strategy. “You're going to write about the life of Harvey Milk?” he asks some months later, almost sardonically. “It's all so strange. Nothing needs to be fictionalized. If somebody tried to write it as fiction, no one would believe it.”

“Swing low, sweet chariot.” The song drifts gently into the night, as forty thousand stand beneath the grand rotunda of City Hall where Harvey Milk had worked and died. At midnight, the crowd melts quietly away. Candles are left to shimmer on the bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting in front of City Hall, the lights casting a multitude of tiny shadows. The mourners turn to walk back toward Castro Street, where it seems right for this night to end. After years of searching and drifting, Castro Street had become Harvey's hometown, and he had worked to make it a hometown for tens of thousands of homosexuals from around the world. The mayor of Castro Street, that was Harvey's unofficial title. And now the mayor of San Francisco and the mayor of Castro Street lie dead. What is left is the dream and its lengthening shadow.

PART I

The Years without Hope

one

The Men without Their Shirts

First came the feeling of being different.
Somehow. It was like a radio. Before you hear it, even before you turn it on, a signal exists.

He was an ordinary sort, everybody agrees. Seemed to fit in well enough: an average student, a second-string high school athlete, and a wit that more than compensated for a plain, if not homely, face. Still, some noticed something different even then. Not peculiar or odd, just different.

Harvey Milk would strain, sweat, and wrestle to keep the difference a secret only a few could know. On the rare occasions when the cover did slip, he would realize the size of the stakes. They were high enough to keep him sweating and straining for many years, like so many others.

*   *   *

August 1947. A sweltering Sunday afternoon.
Election years routinely forced the politicians to fend off charges that New York City had become a haven for prostitutes and perverts. The cadre of police moving lazily uptown through Central Park on that sultry afternoon were of little concern to the families lolling about the meadows. The husbands eyed their children briefly before laying back down to sun their bare chests, their heads propped on rolled-up undershirts.

Minutes later, in the more isolated sections of the park, where men eyed each other instead of children, the police descended with methodical swiftness, as they had so many times before. By taking off their shirts, these men were technically guilty of indecent exposure—this
is
a public place.

Seventeen-year-old Harvey Milk trembled as police shunted him and the other homosexual men toward the paddy wagons. Across the meadow, Harvey saw the equally shirtless family men nodding grimly at the thought that their children had been romping so close to deviants. Young Milk was bewildered but not angry as he stepped into the dark paddy wagon. Anger had no place among homosexuals of those years, only fear. Not only fear of the police, but fear of himself and of his secret being revealed by an afternoon's routine police action. Harvey was lucky that day. Police often didn't bother to lock up their quarry. Just put a little fear of God in them.

*   *   *

Glimpy Milch, Harvey's other name.
Glimpy was for his unlikely appearance, the big schnoz, flappy ears, and oversized feet that early on made him look like some character from a Walt Disney cartoon. Milch was the surname he always considered his. It was the name his grandfather Morris had when he emigrated from Lithuania, Harvey told friends later. Milk was merely the English translation.

The urbane, goateed Morris Milk earned Harvey's early admiration. Through peddling up and down Long Island, Morris acquired enough to open Milk's Dry Goods in Woodmere in 1882, a business that rapidly grew into the largest department store on the island. The Milk patriarch clearly knew how to get things done. Barely enough Jews lived in Woodmere for a minyan, the quorum of Jewish males necessary to hold a service, but Milk helped organize the area's first synagogue, Beth Israel. Years later, his widow even traveled to Palestine to choose the cornerstone and escort it back to Beth Israel's groundbreaking. When the local Rockaway Hunt Club did not let Jews join, Morris Milk and his fellow Jewish burghers simply started their own. But the second of Morris' six children, William, was not destined to be a pillar of the community. Bill worked some time at the store, then drifted out west to work as a cowboy, later enlisting in the navy to serve on a sub crew during World War I.

The spirited Minerva Karns did not know exactly what she would do with her life when the Great War broke out, but she knew it wouldn't be traditional. The lively Brooklyn girl wasn't about to sit around knitting while the guys saw all the excitement, so she trotted down to the navy enlistment office on October 10, 1918, and signed up as one of the first yeomanettes, the pioneers of the women's navy.

After the war, both Bill and Minerva returned to their disparate New York lives, not entirely settled. Minnie kept striking an independent course. She nearly lost her stenographer's job when she saw a Clara Bow movie and raced to the stylist to get one of the first bobbed hairstyles in Manhattan. Fortunately, half the steno pool bobbed their hair within two weeks. Bill was back working at his dad's store in Woodmere. By now he was distinctively forthright with an irritating penchant for a loud laugh at best; at worst, he was temperamental and tactless.

Measuring in at five foot two and 106 pounds, the brown-eyed Minnie was no match in size for her future gangly husband, but her sharp wit let her hold her own against Bill's tantrums during their courtship. From their marriage came two sons, Robert Milk and, four years later, Harvey Bernard Milk, born May 22, 1930, at Woodmere General Hospital.

*   *   *

Harvey was in an elegant tuxedo now, the orchestra assembled before him.
He glanced up at the stage, tapped his wand, and from the handsome radio on the mantelpiece burst forth the live Saturday afternoon opera from the old Met. Standing on the hearth, closing his eyes, waving his hands with affected precision, eleven-year-old Harvey conducted the unseen orchestra.

The flair for theatricality was evident early. Harvey loved attention, and he got it. As a child, he and brother Bob would go to the Lone Ranger matinees in the Rockaways. The highlight of Harvey's day was not the serials, but the raffles, and the rare moments when he had the winning ticket and could mount the stage for his prize. The greater reward, of course, was the chance to bask briefly in the public eye.

Minnie was proud when Harvey came to her during the war years to ask for money. Not for soda pop or saddle shoes, Minnie boasted to the neighbors, but so he could go to the opera. Harvey already had his favorite composers by then—Mahler, Strauss, Wagner—and declared one day, with considerable pomposity, that he considered himself too sophisticated for Verdi.

Bidú Say
ā
o sang that first Saturday matinee as Harvey peeked toward the stage from among the standees at the old Met. It was all he had imagined—and then some. Harvey had never heard the jokes about the old Met's standing section; about standees being the only New Yorkers who wore zippers on both the front and back of their pants, or the one about never being able to tell which sound was louder at the end of an opera, the bravos of the operaphiles or the sound of flies going up in the standing sections. But Harvey got the gist of what the jokes were driving at right off. Every week, Harvey took to asking Minnie for change to augment his allowance so he could go to the opera.

Harvey had always felt different. Now he was learning why. He also was learning that he had to keep that difference a secret. He knew it from the day Minnie sat him down for some serious counseling. If he was going to be trekking into New York City every week, there were some unpleasant facts of life he needed to learn. Minnie's eyes lost their usual twinkle when she told Harvey about people called homosexuals. He had heard the jokes about guys who put on dresses, but there was a second kind of homosexual, too. They hung around the train depot and did things to little boys, Minnie explained. She never said exactly what they did, but the way she talked about it made Harvey realize that what they did was so bad it wasn't even supposed to be talked about.

Am I going to grow up to be one of those men in dresses or end up hanging out at the Woodmere LIRR stop? Harvey worried about this during those first times at the old Met. Sometimes he pushed back the wandering hands. But the dark tinglings were too powerful to be long denied. Random groping led to brief trysts after the performances. The encounters taught him more valuable information: where he could meet other men who liked junior high athletes, how to walk down the streets just so, how to take a casual stroll through the gay sections of Central Park without getting busted.

Harvey dove headfirst into the newly discovered subculture. Rarely were there better years and a more fortuitous locale for a teenager discovering sexuality. The war had pressed sixteen million men together in the military. Pulled from traditional social constraints of families and hometowns, then thrust together in all-male environments, tens of thousands of men who may have once lived out their sex lives in fantasy discovered that many other men were secretly tuned to the same clandestine station. They soon learned how to find each other as they milled amid the thousands of soldiers in the major debarkation points of New York and San Francisco.

Since there weren't enough cots to bed on properly, many of these soldiers were forced to sleep in parks. If you happened to stumble out of the bushes and run into a cop, you were just another G.I. out to catch some shut-eye. Harvey soon heard all the stories, peering from the branches where he hid until the cop walked away. He learned all the tricks and, by his own account, was leading an active homosexual life by the age of fourteen.

Harvey still adored Minnie, but he realized increasingly that her expertise of making matzoh meal pancakes did not give her credentials as an authority on homosexuality. Though he had grave fears about the life he might end up leading—fears that sometimes troubled his sleep and tormented his days—his adolescent randiness drove him on. He'd protect Minnie, he decided, by keeping it a secret. Besides, he had only recently heard the words that described his condition. They weren't words that ever came up in conversation. As Harvey grew older, he learned how important it would be to keep his difference a secret not only from Minnie, but from everybody. Nobody knew in Woodmere or in Bayshore, where the family moved after V-E Day, 1945.

*   *   *

Harvey Milk, the linebacker in jersey number 60 for Bayshore High
was no sissy. Bob, the son of the pharmacist—now there was a sissy. The guys hassled him in the locker room, so much he even broke down once and cried. There was another sissy too, Willy, the nelly black guy. He was swishy, but people got along with him. He had a great voice and could dance up a storm. Besides, his big brother was a prominent athlete who could stomp the shit out of anybody who gave Willy a hard time.

Bayshore High had its swishes, but they stuck to the glee club and drama club. They weren't on the football and basketball teams like Glimpy Milk. Nothing ever seemed funny about Harv, his high school friends all agree. Nothing except that big nose. “Better bring an extra high sled so your nose don't plow away the snow when you go down the hill,” they joked one weekend when they went sledding at Beth Paige State Park. But Harvey could always snap back with an even funnier schnoz joke and keep everybody in stitches all afternoon. A real funny guy.

The only time anybody saw him mad was when Dick Brown, John Cochran, and Jim Gowan dumped horse manure on the homecoming parade and smeared more dung all over the principal's office. Harvey was furious when he heard of the prank. He kept shouting, “Why didn't you tell me? I wouldda been there.”

Harvey's tall build made him an asset to the basketball team. He dabbled in track and wrestling, and made linebacker for the junior varsity football team. After the Friday night game, he'd be up in Attic's soda fountain with the other jocks, pressing jukebox buttons, hoofing the lindy, and making wisecracks when somebody played a serious song like the Mills Brothers' “Always.” After Friday night, social life in tiny Bayshore pretty much dried up. Especially for Harvey who was, after all, a Jew and hung around pretty much with black guys who tended not to get all the party invitations. Covertly, however, Harvey kept up his own busy schedule.

The move from Woodmere to Bayshore was so damned inconvenient, Harvey thought at first. The trip to Manhattan took an hour longer on the Long Island Railroad. Harvey knew that admitting he liked opera would make him suspect with the other guys, so he never mentioned his weekly visits to the old Met. There was no doubt that, by now, Harvey had years on his buddies in street smarts. The only reason Harvey was stuck in Bayshore was because Morris Milk balked at turning his dry goods store over to Bill, selling out instead to the New York City conglomerate that owned Macy's. Bill packed up Minnie and Harvey—Bob was still in the service—and moved thirty miles up Long Island to set up Bayshore Furriers at Fourth and Main Streets.