WHAT HARVEY KNEW for certain was that he wanted to be with Scott. What he did not know was what he would do with the rest of his life. He thought briefly of opening a Jewish delicatessen in San Francisco. Then he decided not to rush into anything. He had saved up a little money; and Scott had received a couple of income tax refund checks before he left New York. They would see California before they settled down.
Harvey bought a secondhand Dodge Charger with a beat-up black vinyl roof and tattered bucket seats. They named the car the Green Witch in memory of Greenwich Village. For three months they drove around the state. When funds got low, they camped in the Redwoods. They loafed under trees, spent days reading magazines and newspapers, and made love whenever they were sure no one was around. Harvey, the consummate urban Jew who had never been camping before, was enraptured by the novelty and romance of it. When they tired of a place, they packed up the Green Witch and moved on.1 It seemed they could happily live that way forever. Scott would gladly have done that. He cared only about being with Harvey now. But Harvey, who had his forty-second birthday in May, could not quiet the voice within that kept telling him he had done little of value with his life thus far.
In the early summer they headed back to San Francisco, where they found a cheap apartment on Grant Avenue in Chinatown; but it did not feel like home. In a month or two they moved to another place, on Fillmore and Jackson; but the rent was too high. Finally, in September they settled into an apartment at 577 Castro.2 The area, which was part of Eureka Valley, had once been a conservative district of working-class people who held jobs such as longshoremen, factory workers, clerks, and cab drivers. Many were Irish or Italian, and their Sundays were spent at the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, two blocks from Castro Street. But the Castro area had been changing. The maritime jobs in which many of the Castro’s straight working-class residents were employed had seriously dwindled; automation ate up a lot of their other blue-collar jobs; and local factories were moving across the Bay to Oakland, where it was cheaper to operate.3 On top of the job losses, it seemed to many of the straight residents that the chain migration of homosexuals, begun at the end of the 1960s, was unstoppable. The gays were taking over the streets, and the Castro was no longer a good place for working-class heterosexuals to live and raise families. They started selling out cheaply to the invading homosexuals, and they fled.
By the time Scott and Harvey arrived that summer of 1972, the Castro was already a gay mecca. Those who were settling the Castro were like pioneers: everything was possible in this fresh “Boystown” that suddenly seemed to be populated and run by gay men. There was a twenty-four-hour gay diner called Andy’s Donuts just down the block from 577 Castro. There were shops like Leather Forever and High Gear, which sold day-glo jockstraps. There were seven or eight gay bars in a two-block strip, including Toad Hall, Nothing Special, the Honey Bucket, the Men’s Room, and, Scott’s and (teetotaling) Harvey’s favorite, the Midnight Sun. And nearby was the gay-friendly Bud’s Ice Cream to satisfy Harvey’s sweet tooth.
In the window of his and Scott’s apartment, Harvey placed a plant that signified how he saw his life thus far: it was a lavender-leafed Wandering Jew—but now, it and Harvey had found a home.4
At the SPCA pound they got a puppy. The pets Harvey had had with Galen—Trick and Trade—were given names that connoted outlaw sex. But this dog Harvey and Scott called The Kid, a droll indicator that they saw themselves as a family, replete with a four-legged child. Still, they were an almost-broke family. They applied for unemployment compensation and learned that they were each eligible to receive ninety-one dollars a week; and that is what they lived on while they tried to figure out what to do next. Harvey briefly thought of getting a job in the finance industry: but to end up there again, after his glorious freedom . . . that would be the worst thing that could happen to him, he decided.5 Throughout the fall and into the winter, he and Scott were unemployed.
The following February Tom O’Horgan came through for Harvey again by offering him a minor role in a Hollywood film he would be directing based on Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, an absurdist play that decried the tyranny of mob mentality. It was just O’Horgan’s sort of thing, and Harvey’s too. Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, and Karen Black signed on for the major roles.
Harvey hurried back to Hollywood to be in the movies! He played a chef, a role in which he mostly stood around in an absurdly tall white hat and looked grumpy. When Rhinoceros was finally released, in 1974, it got reviews so devastating that he could only be relieved he had ended up as the face on the cutting-room floor. But by then he had concluded that his glory was not to be found in Tinseltown.
* * *
One day in the Castro Harvey took a roll of film he had shot, mostly pictures of Scott, to a nearby pharmacy. It came back ruined. After getting over their anger, Harvey and Scott decided that what the Castro lacked was a neighborhood store that would serve the photographic needs of the community with care and respect—and that is what they could do for a living. They would open a store that would offer a reliable developing service, and the gay clientele would not have to worry that the developer might disapprove of the subject of their photos. They could also sell rolls of film at discount prices. Maybe they could sell photograph paper and darkroom chemicals too. They would call the place Castro Camera, though they would not stock many cameras because that would require more financial investment than they could manage.
Harvey turned to Tom O’Horgan yet again, and O’Horgan lent them a thousand dollars to get started. Half the money went for rent on a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot space at 575 Castro Street, right next door to their apartment. (Eventually they would move to an apartment upstairs from Castro Camera.) The other half of O’Horgan’s loan went for supplies and a flowery antique cash register. They signed a five-year lease, and on March 3, 1973, they opened the doors. In the window, they placed a placard that announced, “We are VERY open.” But stock was so meager that only the front third of the store was used for business. A friend who was moving lent them a battered art deco maroon sofa—only until he was settled in his new place, he said; but he never reclaimed it. Harvey and Scott tacked plywood to the bottom to keep the springs from falling out. The springs bulged through the top instead, but the sofa sat in Castro Camera for as long as the place was open for business.6 They also brought in an old barber’s chair and a 1950s-era easy chair. That was where The Kid slept or kept watch. Behind a gray curtain that separated the store from the “office” was a modest refrigerator, a coffeepot that was often perking, and a beat-up wooden desk. A stereo was always on, and the recorded voices of Maria Callas, Magda Olivero, Jon Vickers, and Franco Corelli were heard in every corner of the store.7
They settled into being merchants, and at first Harvey was fine with that role. He remembered that his grandfather had once opened a store and that he had made a great success of it. Then several things happened to make Harvey dream that something grander might yet be possible. A few days before his forty-third birthday the televised Watergate hearings, about the break-in and illegal wiretapping at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, began. In his senior year at college he had written a column for the school paper saying that political proceedings in America ought to be broadcast. Now they were, and they were about Republican crooks, and he was going to watch every minute of them.
He turned the stereo off and lugged the TV down from his apartment, placed it on a chair behind the counter, and let Scott tend to business while he sat glued to the screen. Every once in a while he hurled curses at President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell; at the White House counsel John Dean; and especially at Richard Nixon, whom he loathed. Customers who came into the store would see scantily filled racks, a small TV set balanced on a chair, and a middle-aged man with long hair and dark circles under his eyes screaming at the TV set, “You two-faced son-of-a-bitch!” “You lying, fucking son-of-a bitch!”8
Harvey later claimed it was Watergate that truly politicized him and sent him on his way to his next step in life. He was spurred along also by a couple of other incidents that happened around the same time as the hearings. The first was an altercation with a Board of Equalization official who came to the store to tell Harvey he had to pay a one-hundred-dollar deposit for his business license. Immediately. Harvey did not have the money to spare on hand. “You mean to tell me that if I don’t have one hundred dollars I can’t open a business in free-enterprise America?” he screamed at the official. The man screamed back, and two customers scurried out. “I’m paying your fucking salary and you’re running my customers away!” Harvey shrieked. He spent hours on the phone fighting with the Board of Equalization. Finally, he was able to negotiate the deposit amount down to thirty dollars. He regarded the episode as his “first political victory.”9
The next incident happened soon after. An elementary school teacher came into the store wanting to rent a slide projector that she could use in her class the next day. Her school did have a couple of projectors, she told Harvey, but you could not get one unless you reserved it months in advance. “So the city has enough money to send out bureaucrats to bug people, but not enough to get a teacher a slide projector she could use for her kids!” he complained to Scott.10
These incidents brought Harvey to a thrilling realization. The stage he had sought his whole life could be the political arena. He could do something momentous after all, something worthy of his dreams. He could change the system. Municipal elections were coming up in November. He would start by getting himself elected to the Board of Supervisors, which had jurisdiction over all legislation for the city and county of San Francisco.
Harvey assumed that if he ran as an openly gay man he would easily get votes in the Castro. But San Francisco did not have district elections; supervisors had to run citywide. He would have to get votes in Pacific Heights and Visitacion Valley and everywhere else in San Francisco. A calmer mind would have found the prospect daunting, but in his zeal Harvey could not contemplate failure.
He must surely have known that in the whole history of America only three self-declared homosexuals had ever run for public office. More than a decade earlier, in 1961, José Sarria, a celebrity drag queen who entertained at San Francisco’s notorious Black Cat Café, made a bid for the Board of Supervisors against thirty-three other candidates.11 Five seats were open, and Sarria came in ninth. In 1971 Frank Kameny ran for a seat in the U.S. Congress. He came in fourth in a field of six. In 1972 Rick Stokes, an openly gay lawyer, was urged by San Francisco’s gay establishment to run for a very modest office—trustee on the Community College Board. He too lost his bid. But once Harvey made up his mind, he would not be discouraged. He would run as an out homosexual.
Scott was perplexed. He had no particular interest in politics, but Harvey was throwing himself headlong into this new enthusiasm. He wrote Scott an excited “love note” in which he begged the younger man to help him realize his aspiration: “I hope to make many things out of my love for you—I hope to use it so that everyone can enjoy our love—We can bring joy not only to each other but to others as well—There is enough strength between us to help others.”12
Scott would have preferred to go on with their old life, but when it was clear that Harvey’s new passion was not going away, he pledged his help. They would run a campaign together, though neither he nor Harvey knew the first thing about how to do it. Harvey gave Scott, who was not Jewish, a gift of a little gold chai, two attached Hebrew letters, chet and yod, whose numerological significance symbolizes “life.” Scott wore it for a while on a chain around his neck. It seemed to say that now they were truly one.13
With the help of Tom Randol, an artist friend of Scott’s who had recently migrated to the Castro from New York, Harvey and Scott hung up clotheslines in the back of Castro Camera and dried silk-screened campaign posters on them. They wrote press releases. They plastered the windows of Castro Camera with handwritten signs that declared, “Put Milk on Your Shopping [sic] List!” and “Milk Needs HELP COLD CASH WARM BODIES WILLING HANDS COME IN AND TALK!” They hung a large placard that announced, “YOUR CANDIDATE FOR SUPERVISOR HARVEY MILK” over a photograph of Harvey sporting a big, black mustache, his hair tied back in a messy ponytail.14
Harvey sported the mustache and ponytail when he went out campaigning too; and he wore his usual laid-back uniform: sneakers, jeans, denim or Pendleton shirts with open collars exposing his abundant chest hair. His was the style of Tom O’Horgan and most New York theater people he knew; it was the style too of the antiwar protestors and practically every male on the Left. But even Harvey’s friends thought he looked less like a bohemian or even a radical than a “freak,” “like Rasputin, with eyes like drills,” “like a wandering Jew looking for his tribe.”15 Yet to cut his hair, shave his mustache, don a suit and tie and leather shoes—it smacked too much of the bourgeois conformity to which he had put himself in opposition since his La MaMa days. He refused to look like a Wall Street cutout ever again.
His appearance and everything else about him was abhorrent to San Francisco’s gay establishment. The leading power broker of that establishment was Jim Foster, a buttoned-down man in his late thirties who had been working in the homophile movement since he was witch-hunted and booted out of the army in 1961. In 1971 he helped found the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, a gay and lesbian group that supported liberal mainstream politicians who promised to oppose discrimination against homosexuals. The next year, 1972, Foster ran a successful campaign to get the presidential candidate George McGovern, who had made some gay-friendly remarks, listed at the top—the most advantageous spot—of the California ballot in the Democratic primaries. Foster’s feat gave him prominence among gays and led to his being chosen to speak in a plenary session of the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Granted, he was not allowed to speak until five o’clock in the morning, and the gay rights plank he was promoting went down to resounding defeat—nevertheless, he was the first openly gay person in the history of American politics to have a few minutes at the microphone of a Democratic National Convention.16 Foster’s celebrity among gays gave him virtual carte blanche in spending the money the Alice Club raised in its Dollars for Democrats drives. The worthy recipients of that money, in Foster’s estimation, were politicians like George Moscone, Willie Brown, and Dianne Feinstein, who were friendly to the kinds of gays who wouldn’t embarrass them (and Alice Club members) by being swishy or shrill or otherwise outrageous.17
So when Harvey came to Jim Foster to say he was running for supervisor and he hoped the Alice Club would endorse him, Foster’s first thought was, “Who is this Mr. Yoyo?”18 Harvey’s long hair and sloppy dress were a wild contrast to the conservative style of San Francisco’s gay leaders. But it was not just his appearance that turned Foster off.19 It was also the fact that here was this guy who had arrived in San Francisco a few months earlier, had no history of working for the gay community, and had the temerity to think that an uncloseted homosexual could get elected to the Board of Supervisors. If it were possible for someone who was openly gay to win an election, Jim Foster surely would have run himself. Now he relished being brutally blunt to the weirdo with the heavy New York accent who stood before him. “Well, there’s an old saying in the Democratic Party,” he told Harvey. “You don’t get to dance unless you put up the chairs. I’ve never seen you putting up the chairs.”20 Harvey reiterated his intention to fight fiercely for gay rights once he got elected; but Foster was unimpressed. “We’re like the Catholic Church,” he sneered. “We take converts, but we don’t make them pope the same day.”21
* * *
Since Foster was not going to let him through the gate, Harvey had to figure out how to attract a constituency that was broader than the gay community. He would court the elderly, the poor, the young, the worker, all the racial minorities. They were outsiders too, and as a double outsider—a homosexual and a Jew—his deepest sentiments were always with outsiders. Asked to fill out a questionnaire for a group that was preparing a voter’s pamphlet, Harvey wrote zealously about how government threw away taxpayers’ money by hiring police to arrest people for victimless crimes instead of spending it where it ought to go—on expanding health care, especially for the elderly, “particularly dental care”; on expanding “Operation Bootstrap for black, Spanish, welfare [recipients], young” and helping them “go into business for themselves.” Marijuana should be legalized, and “hard-drug addicts” should be helped, he declared. To a question about whether halfway houses and board and care homes should be placed in residential areas he replied, “If people who call themselves Christians are Christians then the only answer is ‘of course.’ ” In answer to a question about civil rights he wrote,
For all—esp. gay
esp. black
esp. Mexican
esp. Oriental
The questionnaire also asked what the candidate’s source of campaign financing would be. “Passing the hat for dollars and coins” was Harvey’s plan.22
With little money to spend he had a hard time getting noticed by the media, though once in a while he got lucky. A writer for the gay biweekly Kalendar Magazine interviewed Harvey at home and gushed with enthusiasm, writing that Harvey’s “ideas came racing out at me as I sipped my coffee. I could feel the excitement in him, the intensity, the idealism he had to build a better world.”23 It was exactly how Harvey wished to be perceived; it was exactly how he felt. But a glowing article like this was scarce.
For the most part the gay press was dubious about his candidacy, even hostile. In August, at the beginning of his campaign, Harvey wrote a long and very serious letter to the editor of the Advocate, America’s largest national gay newspaper, whose circulation of tens of thousands was boosted by hookup ads and spreads of beautiful beefcakes. Harvey explained in the letter that he was running because he thought it was time for gay people to elect uncloseted gays to political office instead of relying on gay-friendly politicians who did no more than throw the community “a few crumbs.” If a gay person got elected to the Board of Supervisors, Harvey wrote, there would be a gay voice that the other board members would have to listen to. An uncloseted gay on the board would even force the issue of decriminalizing homosexual acts, he argued, because the government would be embarrassed to call a political leader criminal. If a gay was elected, he declared optimistically, that person would fight for human rights, and the image of gays “would change overnight and bring respect to all of us.”24 The letter was an ingenuous and impassioned statement of his aspirations.
It was never published, and when the image-conscious Advocate finally printed an interview a month before the election, it was deflating. The Advocate virtually mocked him. He was “not exactly a glamour boy,” the writer of the article observed. “Born in 1930, he looks a bit like a slightly overage hippie, with largish hair and mustache, and a bit like a neighborhood shopkeeper—which he is.”25
On the rare occasions that he got mainstream papers to pay attention to him, the results were no more flattering. An article in the San Francisco Examiner featured a picture of him that made him look like a weird cross between a hippie and a Hasid, with long sideburns that could be mistaken for peyas. The reporter portrayed him as a curiosity, almost a crackpot, who bellyached about “lack of respect by ‘our so-called leaders’ because [I] represent no large voting block or monied group.” Harvey did try hard to convey to the reporter who he was and whom he would champion, and he is quoted as saying, “I will strive to bring the government to the people, be they intellectuals or fellow homosexuals, be they blacks or fellow Jews, be they the tax-starved elderly or fellow small-shop owners.” But in the context of the article it was hard to see him as anything but a flake.26
He fared no better in the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran a photo of him over the caption “A Gay Jewish Democrat” and exposed his failure to raise support from those who should have been his base. The president of the San Francisco Council of Democratic Clubs scoffed in the article, “This guy Milk couldn’t even get the endorsement of his own people, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, so how could he expect to get the Council’s endorsement?”27 The Chronicle columnist Herb Caen quipped that Harvey Milk was “running for Supervisor on the homo ticket, and I don’t mean homogenized.”28
Harvey pretended to be impervious to all the insults. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” he told Scott, “but spell my name right. And there’s not too many ways to spell Milk.”29 He could not admit defeat. He had finally discovered—after a lifetime of searching—what he was meant to do; and now he would put everything into winning the right to do it.
Scott missed their old, laid-back life, but there was no going back. When he was not making campaign flyers or posters or writing press releases he faithfully minded the store while Harvey threw himself into campaigning. When Harvey had volunteered for Barry Goldwater, a lifetime ago, he would get up early and hurry to the subway with a fistful of Goldwater flyers to hand out to people on their way to work. Now he took fistfuls of Milk flyers to hand out to the early morning crowd at the San Francisco bus stops. With a humorous allusion to Delancey Street orators he printed the word SOAP on a wooden box, and at a little plaza on Castro Street he mounted his soapbox, shouted out that he was running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and schmoozed everyone who passed by until they took a Milk flyer. The election was citywide, so he covered the entire city. He handed out flyers in shopping centers and gay bars and even at his old place of employment, the financial district. His energy had no limit.
Hungry for an audience who would listen to his platform, he was eager to go anywhere he could squeeze out an invitation. But all the big gay organizations that held Candidates’ Nights, such as the Society for Individual Rights, followed the lead of the Alice Club. They snubbed him, making no distinction between Harvey and another candidate for the Board of Supervisors, Jesus Christ Satan, who described himself as being androgynous and wore flowing robes and a gaudy flowered hat.30 Both were considered kook candidates and “bad for the gays.”
* * *
When Harvey did manage to get an invitation to speak to a group, he delivered his on-target message passionately, and he knew how to connect with his audience. His years in the theater had not been wasted. In a speech to the newly established San Francisco branch of the National Women’s Political Caucus he emphasized that the city had to stop spending funds on ugly freeways and convention halls and start putting money into childcare centers and “poverty areas.”31 In a speech to the Joint International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union he blamed the present Board of Supervisors for caring only about “bigness and wealth” and not about the welfare of the San Francisco workingman.32 At a Candidates’ Night for an environmentalist group, San Francisco Tomorrow, he berated developers who were destroying neighborhoods and the whole city with their ugly high-rises. His presentation stole the show.33
But Harvey had not mastered the politic art of self-censorship—he never would. For instance, when a San Francisco Tomorrow member asked how he hoped to win the election without significant financial backing, Harvey joked that since he was openly gay some kid’s father who was upset about the recently discovered Houston serial killer Dean Corll, who had raped, tortured, and murdered twenty-eight boys, would shoot Harvey—and then “I’ll be lucky and survive and get lots of sympathy as well as the liberal and gay votes.” His bizarre sense of humor totally canceled out his fine speech. Not surprisingly, San Francisco Tomorrow decided it would not endorse Harvey Milk.34
* * *
Harvey was sure that if only he had more money to put into the campaign, he could win, but donations barely trickled in. Desperation led him to call his brother, Robert, back east, to ask for help. Harvey’s relationship with his brother had been cool since 1962, when their mother died. Jewish law forbids cremation, and Harvey knew that Robert was observant. Despite that, Harvey had Minnie cremated, as he wished to be himself someday. Robert was furious. And now, eleven years later, Harvey dared to call and ask Robert for money to run for some sort of office in San Francisco. As Harvey told friends, his brother bellowed, “Are you crazy? No way!” and hung up.35
Harvey did manage to raise about twenty-five hundred dollars from supporters. And he put another two thousand dollars of his own money into the campaign.36 But the spending cap per Board of Supervisors candidate that year was almost a dozen times that, fifty-one thousand dollars.37 Many of his competitors spent the limit. Realistically, Harvey did not have a chance.
In spite of the slim odds, his enemies in the gay establishment were not taking the chance that he might squeak through. There were five open spots on the Board of Supervisors; and they did everything to make sure Harvey would not win enough votes to get one of them. They took out a huge ad in Kalendar, San Francisco’s biggest gay paper, reminding its readers that over the past few years the gay community “has developed a political strength unmatched by any other community in the city”; and in order to maintain that strength, the ad said, it was necessary to “insure Responsible [sic] representation”—this was patently aimed at Harvey, who was not, in the power brokers’ eyes, “Responsible.” They then presented their choices for the supervisor slots—politicians who had proven themselves to be gay friendly. Dianne Feinstein led the list.38
But Harvey had struck a chord with some San Franciscans. The young in particular loved his idealism and iconoclasm. With his long hair and jeans, he looked more like them than any politician they had ever seen. Three weeks before the election the University of San Francisco conducted a poll among its students asking who they intended to vote for in the Board of Supervisors race. Harvey came in first. Feinstein came in second.39 Nevertheless, such enthusiasm was not widespread enough to get him one of the five seats. When the citywide election was held, Harvey came in tenth in a field of thirty-two candidates. Four incumbents who ran had been reelected. The only newly elected supervisor was the San Francisco–born Al Nelder, a longtime police officer who in 1970 had been appointed chief of police by Mayor Joseph Alioto.
Yet, despite Harvey’s political enemies, despite his lack of money, despite the heavy odds against him, seventeen thousand people had been impressed enough by Harvey Milk to turn out and vote for him.
* * *
Across the San Francisco Bay, on the same day of the Board of Supervisors election, November 6, 1973, Marcus Foster, the black superintendent of the Oakland School District, was shot to death. He had been killed by eight hollow-point bullets filled with cyanide. His assassins were members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical group that was angry with Foster for supporting a plan to force students to carry photo ID cards on campus to distinguish them from the drug dealers who were roaming the school halls. The head of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a black man called Cinque, had told his followers, “We are gonna off that nigger. We want to show the oppressed peoples there are black pigs just as there are white pigs.”40 Evidently it could be dangerous to be a public official in the Bay Area in the 1970s.
* * *
Harvey was disheartened by the election results. All that effort, and he had lost. Scott, ever solicitous of Harvey, suggested they needed a little vacation to regroup. He remembered the lovely time they had had when they first came to California, driving around in the Green Witch. Harvey agreed it would be good to get away. They locked up the store, packed the car, and again they drove. In a coastal city in Monterey County—Pacific Grove—they found a tacky motel they could afford and paid for three nights. They walked on the beach, ate picnic suppers while watching the sunset, and lolled about in bed. All the while Harvey kept telling himself and Scott too that he really had nothing to be down about. After all, he did not start campaigning until August. And all through the campaign he had gone around looking like a hippie. He realized that that was a big mistake. Still, seventeen thousand people had voted for him. Next time, he would do better.41