The Mayor of Castro Street Read online

  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 Sayāo 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.

  The new location proved Harvey’s luckiest break since his first trip to the standing section. Just a few blocks away was the train station where the LIRR deposited passengers for the ferry to a new vacation resort on a sandbar called Fire Island. Come summer, Harvey could catch glimpses of this other world so far from his middle-class Jewish life in Bayshore. Sophisticated writers, famous actors, and glamorous socialites walked by Bayshore Furriers on their way from the LIRR depot to the ferry landi
ng. Ethel Merman sent shivers of excitement through the town when she stopped at the nearby Cortney Hotel for a drink one afternoon. Many of the visitors came in grand automobiles, catching the eyes of all the local boys since most families in Bayshore, including the Milks, were not rich enough to afford a car.

  Harvey worked boxing groceries that the weekenders took over to the island. On some weekends, he’d skip the opera and catch the last ferry to Fire Island’s Ocean Beach, striking up friendships with some of the older men he’d met in the store. Often, it wasn’t even for sex. He had always felt so different, and here he could rub shoulders with other different people, a world away from his life as a j.v. linebacker.

  Minnie didn’t worry much if Harvey spent Saturday night away from home. She’d had her own maverick streak during her younger years and she wasn’t about to deny the same independence to her headstrong son. And Harvey was a model child, not because he excelled, really, but because he had such tenacity. Though he would never have the quickest coordination, he plodded through years in school sports, never the star but always dependable. For some reason, he got it in his head he had to go on to college—and out of Bayshore—a year early, so even though Harvey was only a B student, he was pushing through school faster than just about anybody in his class.

  Harvey sometimes felt the urge to bring the two strands of his life—the open and the secret—together, but he liked being popular and having his share of attention in athletics. He didn’t want to be like that fat sissy Bob, getting beat up in the locker room, or Willy, sashaying down the halls while everybody made jokes behind his back. So Harvey, the plodder, learned to play the game.

  On June 23, 1947, five weeks after his seventeenth birthday, Milk graduated from Bayshore High School. The legend beneath his picture in the yearbook reads: “Glimpy Milk—And they say WOMEN are never at a loss for words.”

  * * *

  Eileen Mulcahy graduated a year after Harvey and now works in Bayshore High’s audiovisual library. The imposing brick high school has a new wing now and the kids sneak a drag of marijuana instead of a Camel on lunch breaks, but Bayshore’s maple-lined streets retain the small-town feel they had thirty-five years ago. John Cochran went on to become the district’s state assemblyman. Jim Gowan sits on the state supreme court. The old-timers who work in the administrative offices, however, know that the school’s most famous alumnus is Harvey Milk.

  Eileen has methodically clipped all the newspaper stories about Harvey over the years and circulated them among her old classmates. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” she says carefully, straining to be precise. “When we were young people, we didn’t know there was such a thing as gayness. The worst thing you could do was call somebody a faggot. If Harvey knew this, he had to face it all by himself. It really is terrible to think about. It must have been traumatic for him.”

  Still, ordinary is the one word that best describes Milk—ordinary except for one point. “He was different, not in the sense that he was peculiar or out of it,” says Mulcahy. “But in the sense that he was an individual at a time when people all tried to be alike.”

  Crusty Clifton LePlatney coached hundreds of teens through decades of football seasons at Bayshore High. Yes, he remembers Harvey Milk; he taught his physics class too. “Harvey was a nice ordinary fellow—not any different than any of the other kids. Just like the other kids in class, the other kids in sports, only more talkative,” says the retired coach. “I was surprised, very surprised when I heard about his activities in San Francisco,” he says, adding pointedly, “nothing like that was ever suspected.”

  Harvey never did seem to have any friends there, not really close friends. He hung around a lot with Dick Brown, the black basketball player from Williams Street, where Bayshore’s four or five black families lived. Like a lot of the class of ‘47, Brown, now married and a father, has never lived more than five miles away from his hometown. “He kept his secret well—it makes you wonder how many other guys were funny too,” Brown muses. “The one thing that gets me mad is, here I’m supposed to be one of his good buddies, but he never trusted me enough to tell me. I can’t say how I would have reacted.” Brown pauses in recollection. “I guess I would have ostracized him. What a cross to carry. You never know.”

  Nobody ever heard from Harvey after he graduated. “It was like he dropped off the face of the earth,” Brown says. Nobody’s ever heard from Bob, the fat sissy, either. The newspaper stories from San Francisco surprised Brown and Harvey’s other Bayshore friends. They were especially surprised when they saw the pictures of Harvey in the dailies and he no longer had the nose everybody made cracks about.

  Harvey himself never talked much about his childhood in Woodmere and Bayshore, except for two stories. First, the August afternoon a few weeks after his graduation when he was briefly picked up by police for indecent exposure. And then, there was the day his parents sat him down in 1943 to tell him about the brave Jews of Warsaw who were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded by Nazi troops. But they fought on anyway, not because they thought they could win, but because when something that evil descends on the world, you have to fight. Even if it’s hopeless.

  By the time Harvey took his high school diploma, news of the Nazi Holocaust had shocked the world, especially the millions of American middle-class Jews who had grown to feel so secure. The Holocaust touched Milk doubly, in a way that he could not have imagined at that time.

  * * *

  Before Hitler’s rise, Germany had an active gay liberation movement that pressed for legal demands and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions asking for homosexual equality. But in 1936, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler issued the following decree:

  Just as we today have gone back to the ancient German view on the question of marriages mixing different races, so too in our judgment of homosexuality—a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race—we must return to the guiding Nordic principle, extermination of degenerates.

  About a year later, Himmler ordered that gays be rounded up and sent to Level 3 camps—the death camps. Gays wore pink triangles, so they would not be confused with Jews who wore yellow stars of David. Some estimates put the number of gays exterminated at over 220,000, the second largest category of Nazi genocide victims after Jews.

  This attempt at genocide efficiently squashed the only gay political movement in the Western world. Harvey Milk, meanwhile, was seven years old then, playing in the aisles of grandfather Morris’ dry goods store. It would be years before ideas of gay equality rumbled again, this time in the United States.

  two

  Gay Everyman

  The winter of 1947 struck with unexpected fury. The campus of the New York State College for Teachers at Albany lay buried in mounting drifts of snow. The onslaught of returning veterans that year swelled enrollment so much that men were housed in slapped-up barracks. The guys in the C barracks felt lucky that they had the class clown, Harvey Milk, to entertain them. Harvey was assigned the bunk next to the barracks’ bathroom, a site which competed only with his nose as a source for his cornucopia of jokes.

  A certain camaraderie prevailed among the thousand students at Albany State then. These were the students smart enough to qualify for prestigious private schools, but not rich enough to afford them. So they attended Albany State, the only state school that offered a liberal arts teaching curriculum. They were at the poor man’s Yale, they assured themselves; they were the intelligentsia of tomorrow. The young men of the new class of ‘51 spent their nights up late in their snowbound barracks, arguing Nietzsche, the Truman-Dewey race, and the escalating tensions in Korea.

  The subject of homosexuality might flit by in an allusion, but this was the late forties and nobody talked much about it then. Howard Rosman, whose bunk was across the barracks from Harvey’s, figured out that two of the other guys in the barracks were queers, but he never saw Milk have anything to do with them. Harvey certainly wasn’t what most of the middle-class kids at Alba
ny State thought queers were like. Harvey was just another math major with a minor in his favorite subject, history.

  Milk’s performance on Bayshore’s j.v. team did not rate him a slot on any of the Albany State Great Danes teams, so he stuck to intramural basketball and football. He coached his fraternity basketball team to an intramural championship in his junior year. His major involvement with sports in college, however, was as sportswriter for the State College News.

  Like the other Jews on campus, Milk could not expect to be invited to the cushier life of the live-in fraternities, so he joined Kappa Beta, the fledgling Jewish fraternity. His social life centered on Jewish activities. Though he rarely dated, he sometimes could be found at the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house, entertaining five or six girls at a time with his antics. He occasionally turned up at meetings of Hillel or the Intercollegiate Zionist Federation of America. A gregarious guy, but when the classmates thought back, they recalled something odd. He was always somehow detached.

  I don’t think you’re going to find anybody who isn’t Harvey’s friend. Everybody likes him. He always has a joke, Doris Brody remembered thinking years later. She’d seen a lot of Harvey at the Alpha Epsilon Phi house and in her history classes. He seemed a paradox. Everybody’s friend, but I don’t think you’d find anybody who is a real close friend to him either, she thought.

  Funny, because Harvey stuck his nose into so many issues. When freshman hazing got Milk’s dander up, his writing jumped from the sports section to the editorial page as he railed against the practice. He sternly lectured the thirty-five members of his fraternity, Kappa Beta, that they should admit non-Jewish members. How could they deride the other frats for not admitting Jews when they discriminated themselves? he asked.