The Mayor of Castro Street (31 page)

*   *   *

An explosion shattered the night.
Shards of glass sprayed across the sidewalks of Castro Street. Castro Camera's windows had been blown out by the M–80 mega-firecrackers; explosions shattered three more Castro Street stores within minutes. Supervisorial candidate Harvey Milk was on the front page of the next morning's
Chronicle
saying that, once again, Anita Bryant has goaded anti-gay violence. Years later friends hinted broadly that Harvey had more than a little foreknowledge that the explosions would happen. “You gotta realize the campaign was sort of going slow, and, well…” the confidante lets his voice taper off.

It's doubtful that Milk was responsible for the blasts, other friends say, if for no other reason than he could barely afford the cost it took to replace the window. The hints, however, indicate how badly friends knew Harvey wanted to win this election. Against such determination, Rick Stokes never had a chance. The early months did more to embitter than excite the soft-spoken attorney about the mechanics of electoral politics. Stokes was running because his years of drafting laws had intrigued him with the notion of sitting on a legislative board. He was never excited about campaigning. Harvey, meanwhile, was an inveterate campaigner who knew little of the nuts and bolts of legislation. The shy, affable Stokes found he had a hard time tooting his own horn as the campaign progressed. He enjoyed meeting people, but shied away from working crowds. Harvey, of course, proved as masterful as ever in 1977, jutting out his hand to every potential voter he saw and grabbing press at every turn. Rick just got more discouraged. Every day of campaigning you have to sell off bits and pieces of yourself, he thought. Before you know it, you're out the window with all the bits and pieces. At one point in the campaign, Stokes even toyed with the idea of dropping out. According to his early campaign manager, Ken Maley, David Goodstein and Art Agnos prodded him back into the race. “They're not interested in getting Rick elected,” he observed. “They just want to put the final nail in the coffin of Harvey's political career.” Stokes stayed in the race.

Harvey campaigned on maniacally, even as all the cards fell his way. He canvassed every precinct twice. His human billboards again lined Market Street. The big shocker came in the campaign's closing days when the
Chronicle
amazed everybody, especially Milk, and endorsed Harvey for supervisor. The endorsement editorial noted Milk's business experience as part of his qualifications, sending Harvey's friends into hysterics. For all the things Harvey had been charged with over the years, no one had ever accused him of being a good businessman.

On election day, Harvey dashed madly from precinct to precinct. His nightmare: that he would again lose by the razor-thin margin that had marked his assembly defeat. He relentlessly pushed on his well organized corps of get-out-the-vote workers to knock on every door. The fears, at last, proved unfounded.

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Television kleig lights bathed Castro Camera's Victorian storefront with their surreal glow.
The rowdy crowd overflowed into the streets and filled every available counter and tabletop in the store. The roar of motorcycles was heard as Anne Kronenberg pulled her Honda 550 to the front of the store with Sheriff Richard Hongisto behind her, while her latest lover pulled in on another motorcycle with a grinning Supervisor-elect Harvey Milk on the back, fresh from claiming his lopsided victory at City Hall.

The crowd cheered at the sight of the winner while television crews got ready to go live from the headquarters of the upset winner who had polled the highest tally of any nonincumbent supervisorial candidate in the city, making him the first openly gay elected official of any big city in the United States. Harvey had beaten both Terrance Hallinan and Rick Stokes by a better than two-to-one margin, garnering 30 percent of the vote against his sixteen challengers. Rick Stokes, Jim Foster, and Art Agnos came down the street to make their traditional concession handshakes, but Milk would not even let them inside the store. “It's too crowded,” he said curtly.

“This is not my victory, it's yours and yours and yours,” Harvey exhorted to the wildly cheering crowd. “If a gay can win, it means that there
is
hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight. We've given them hope.”

“Harvey for mayor,” someone shouted and the crowd cheered more.

The next morning, Harvey and his cohorts were back on Market Street, smiling and waving, with their last human billboard, freshly crayoned signs that simply said, “Thank You.” The drivers, fresh from seeing the morning
Chronicle
with the picture of the motorcycled Milk and Hongisto on the front page, waved back and honked their horns wildly. During red lights, Harvey jogged between cars to accept congratulations and shake hands. Trolley drivers rang their congratulations. Just like a Rice-a-Roni commercial.

When the traffic rush subsided, Harvey pulled Harry Britt over to the side. He was writing a note to Mayor Moscone, Harvey explained, just in case, well, anything happened. The letter would list the people Harvey wanted to replace him, and Harry should know that his name would be among them. Britt was surprised because he and Harvey had not been particularly close personal friends. They did seem to agree instinstinctively on political matters, but their relationship hadn't gone much beyond politics. Harry thought Harvey's disclosure was somewhat depressing and quickly dismissed the conversation, convinced that the rush of victory had kept Milk awake all night and left him emotionally drained. When Harvey told his friend Frank Robinson about the planned letter, Frank told him he was being downright morbid, attributing the political “will” to the black streak he had long ago noticed running on the underside of Milk's otherwise humorous demeanor.

It was well past midnight a week later when, after an exhausting day at the camera shop, Harvey slumped over a cassette recorder to tape the three messages he simply entitled “In case.” Harvey listed who was and who was not acceptable as a successor. There was a chilling anatomical specificity to it all when Harvey's recorded voice was later heard saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

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Congratulations poured in from around the country in the days after the election. “Thanks to you that kid in Des Moines just bought a ticket for San Francisco,” teased one friend. “Supe at last, supe at last, thank God Almighty, supe at last,” wrote another. A sixty-eight-year-old lesbian who had been a San Francisco schoolteacher since 1932 wrote poignantly, “I thank God I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.” Her one regret was that she didn't live in District 5 to savor the victory as a constituent. Days later, Harvey added the finishing touches to his hope speech when he emerged with a vaguely apocryaphal tale of a sixteen-year-old boy from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who called to thank Harvey for giving him hope that he could make something of his life. No more talk of Dayton or Des Moines. For the rest of his career, Milk's hope speech talked of a sixteen-year-old boy from Altoona, Pennsylvania. There were other letters too, dozens of them, like the one addressed simply to “Milk the Faggot.” It concluded with the cheery sign-off: “Maybe, just maybe, some of the more hostile in the district may firebomb your store or may even take some pot shots at you—we hope!!!”

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The Irish Catholic cop-turned-politician and the gay Jewish neighborhood politico.
The media like quick, easy juxtapositions that can be translated into the brief ninety seconds generally alloted to each television news story. The elections of Harvey Bernard Milk and Daniel James White to the board of supervisors were the natural peg to the election follow-ups. On one level, both typified the ultimate goal of district elections—to reflect the diverse citzenry of the city. Dan White reflected his working class, traditional native San Francisco district, just as Harvey Milk reflected his hip, heavily gay, non-native district. The contrast was too tantalizing for the television producers to pass up. In the weeks following the election, White and Milk made a number of joint appearances on local talk shows. Both warmly praised the other. White even publicly assured Harvey that his brochure's comments about “social deviates” referred to junkies, not gays. Milk began privately telling friends that he might be able to work with the conservative White.

Dennis Seely had been in the habit of arguing with Harvey ever since the two were neighbors on Castro Street, and Milk came to pound on Dennis' door complaining he couldn't hear his Mahler over the din of Seely's Jefferson Airplane records. The sight of Harvey buddying up with White on television was no more conducive to a smooth conversation between Dennis and Harvey than had been the sound of Grace Slick's piercing voice.

“Harvey, that guy's a pig,” Dennis told him bluntly after he had seen a Dan-and-Harvey talk show. “I hate him.”

“Dan White is just stupid,” Harvey insisted. “He's working class, a Catholic, been brought up with all those prejudices. I'm gonna sit next to him every day and let him know we're not all those bad things he thinks we are.”

“Look at him,” Dennis said incredulously. “He's never gonna be different. He's a cop. All the analysts in the world aren't gonna reach that guy and your yakkin' ain't gonna make any difference either.”

“As the years pass, the guy can be educated,” Milk argued, adding huffily, “that's where
we
disagree. Everyone can be reached. Everyone can be educated and helped.
You
think some people are hopeless—not me.”

PART III

Supervisor Harvey Milk

twelve

Media Star

“What do you think of my new theater?”

Supervisor Harvey Milk enjoyed posing that question to his friends as he would guide them up the grand marble staircase of San Francisco City Hall, and he pointed out the dramatic proportions the building seemed to lend to whatever history passed beneath its dome. “My stage,” he would say, looking down at the expansive lobby from the balcony. From his first day in office, Harvey left little doubt that his term would be marked more by his unique brand of political theater than by the substantive tasks of the board. He managed to turn his ceremonial swearing-in into a major media event when he and Jack Lira led a procession of 150 supporters from Castro Camera down the fifteen blocks to the wide front steps of City Hall. “This is a walk of reconciliation with a nation of people,” he lectured reporters. “This is a walk that will give to many people hope.”

Mayor Moscone and a gaggle of other politicians greeted the cadre of outsiders who were about to take their seat of power at last. Milk insisted on an outdoor inauguration, saying all his supporters could not fit indoors. Besides, the pictures of Milk in front of the proud rotunda made much better television. As Harvey began to repeat the words of his oath, a gentle rain began falling. “Anita Bryant said gay people brought the drought to California,” he joked, looking up at the sky. “Looks to me like it's finally started raining.”

“This is not my swearing-in, this is your swearing-in,” he told the crowd. “You can stand around and throw bricks at Silly Hall or you can take it over. Well, here we are.”

Milk used his first board meeting that afternoon to strike an independent path. His first legislative proposal called for the enactment of a comprehensive ban on all forms of discrimination against gays in the city. During the board's first order of business—the election of its president—Milk tenaciously held out against the certain election of Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, maintaining the board should have its first minority president, the new Chinese-American supervisor Gordon Lau. After Feinstein won her 6–5 vote—the first of many 6–5 wins in the coming year—Milk refused to go along with Lau's courtesy motion to make Feinstein's election unanimous. The lack of tact horrified the newspapers. The
Examiner
ran an editorial saying Milk was off to a “disappointing start.” But the anti-Feinstein swipe delighted both liberals, who viewed Feinstein as an ally of downtown business interests, and gays, who had grown uneasy with Feinstein's prudery. “I'm not concerned about the Emily Post attitude to life,” Harvey snapped at critics. He privately noted that the
Examiner
editorial had served its most important purpose, spelling his name right. And no matter what the editorial page said, the afternoon paper's front page was dominated by one picture—Harvey with his arm around Jack, leading the march up Castro Street.

The formal inauguration in the elaborately carved oak-paneled board chambers was marred only when Harvey turned to introduce Jack Lira. Dan White had used his introduction time to pay tribute to his grandmother, an Irish immigrant; Harvey relished the juxtaposition of introducing his male lover, but Lira had slipped out of the room even before the meeting started, afraid of the cameras and bright lights being trained on him. “It's well known that I'm a gay person. I have a loved one but he was too nervous to stay here and he left,” said Harvey. Milk had waited so many years for the day of his inauguration when he could stand as a homosexual to introduce the man he loved and the moment had fled him. Harvey instead used most of his introductory remarks to speak on his favorite theme. “A true function of politics is not just to pass laws, but to give hope,” he said. “There have been too many disappointments lately. The real abyss that lies not too far ahead is that day when a disappointed people lose their hope forever. When that happens, everything we cherish will be lost.”

“Hope is fine,” Feinstein said tartly in her opening remarks, “but you can't live on hope. The name of the game is six votes.”