The Mayor of Castro Street Read online

  Frank Robinson had spent the morning working on his new submarine disaster novel when he took his afternoon break and heard the news from a restaurant waitress. He went home, tuned into a news radio station, and started taking the dozens of calls from Harvey’s other friends. He remembered the early days he and Harvey had spent bullshitting about politics on the old maroon couch in the funky Victorian storefront on Castro Street. A sense of isolation gripped Robinson as he realized this all was over now. He had no anger or hatred for Dan White. For Frank, White did not even exist as a person; White was just a tool, he thought. It was the whole society that hated gays; the game had always been stacked. You could be the best man in the world, he thought, and still the society would crucify you.

  A few blocks away, Harvey’s political friends from the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club were conferring at Harry Britt’s house. They decided to respond to the assassinations just as they had responded to the crises of past years—a march from Castro Street to City Hall. The permits, details, and announcements fell into place as the afternoon wore on. They asked mourners to bring candles.

  President Carter’s statement that afternoon expressed “a sense of outrage and sadness at the senseless killing” of the two men. He praised Supervisor Milk as “a hard-working and dedicated supervisor, a leader of San Francisco’s gay community, who kept his promise to represent all constituents.”

  * * *

  The board met briefly for its regularly scheduled Monday meeting at 2 P.M. “This is an unparalleled time for San Francisco, and we need to keep together,” said Acting Mayor Feinstein. “I think we all have to share the same sense of outrage, the same sense of shame, the same sense of sorrow and the same sense of anger.” Feinstein urged the public to “go into a state of very deep and meaningful mourning and to express its sorrow with a dignity and an inner examination.…”

  * * *

  Medora Payne was on her lunch break at Lowell High School when a friend told her that Harvey and the mayor had been killed by Dan White. She had to be kidding, Medora thought, but her chemistry teacher confirmed the news. Medora could tell by the look in her teacher’s eyes that it was true. She broke into tears, apologized to her friend for not believing her, and asked if she would stay with her while she wept for the funny man she had met so many years before when she took her parents’ film to get developed at Castro Camera. She spent the next few hours walking around the high school’s cinder track, crying and remembering the nights she had spent licking envelopes and handing out brochures for Harvey Milk.

  * * *

  Tom O’Horgan heard the news in New York City only hours before he went to the mailbox to find the letter Harvey had posted after he went to the opera, the letter ending with the exclamation—“Life is worth living.” A few hours later, Jack McKinley, hysterical from grief, joined him. O’Horgan loaned him the money to make the trip to San Francisco.

  * * *

  Mrs. Gina Moscone and the mayor’s mother were attending a cousin’s funeral seventy miles north of San Francisco when the assassinations occurred. The mayor’s four children had converged on their home from their various schools by 1 P.M., when they finally arrived home. Gina took a few steps from her car and collapsed into a friend’s arms. She had heard of the news of her husband’s killing on the car radio.

  * * *

  “This is Harvey Milk, speaking on Friday, November 18, 1977. This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. I’ve given it considerable thought to this, not just since the election. I’ve been thinking about this for some time prior to the election and certainly over the years. I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed with themselves. Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment or any time, I feel it’s important that some people should understand my thoughts, so the following are my thoughts, my wishes, my desires, whatever, and I’d like to pass them on and played for the appropriate people.”

  Most of the people in the room had known Harvey had made this tape. Now, only three hours after the shootings, they were following Harvey’s wish that it be played. Harvey knew enough about the machinations of City Hall politics to understand that the outer trappings of sorrow would not keep politicos from immediately maneuvering to grab his seat. He had made the tape to ensure that his post would not fall into the hands of the gay moderates, whom he had so long opposed. Pabich, Rivaldo, Jones, Carlson, and Scott Smith, along with a handful of others, had originally walked into Harvey’s office to play the tape, but Scott had seen Harvey’s honorary clown certificate and the memorabilia cluttering Harvey’s walls and could not bear to stay in the room, so they now huddled in Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver’s cubicle, listening to Harvey’s political will.

  “I stood for more than just a candidate. I think there was a strong differential between somebody like Rick Stokes and myself. I have never considered myself a candidate. I have always considered myself part of a movement, part of a candidacy. I’ve considered the movement the candidate. I think there’s a distinction between those who use the movement and those who are part of the movement. I think I was always part of the movement. I wish that I had time to explain everything I did. Almost everything was done with an eye on the gay movement.”

  Harvey launched into vociferous attacks on the four people who he said should not succeed him: Jim Foster, Rick Stokes, Jo Daly, and Frank Fitch, all past presidents of the Alice Toklas Democratic Club Harvey had battled so long. He then listed the four people who he said should be considered as replacements, strongly praising Frank Robinson and Bob Ross, his first choices, suggesting Harry Britt as a third choice, and offhandedly mentioning Anne Kronenberg as well. Scott sat through the tapes silently, still numbed by the killing. Cleve broke into sobs as Harvey’s voice talked on. Jim Rivaldo, meanwhile, began to marvel at the perfection of the destiny Harvey had created for himself. There Harvey was, carefully instructing his friends on what to do next, weighing the political situation and prodding his allies to keep up the fight. Rivaldo felt torn between the tragedy of the day and this sense of marvel that Harvey was living out an extraordinary final act. He had known that his death would be another step in a historical process, and was even now counseling his associates in how to use it. Rivaldo began to think less of Harvey, a man who had been killed, than Harvey the actor, still performing exquisite political theater.

  Even as they listened to the tape, reporters were clamoring for a statement from Harvey’s friends. In the next paragraphs, they found it.

  “The other aspect of the tapes is the business of what would happen should there be an assassination. I cannot prevent some people from feeling angry and frustrated and mad, but I hope they will take that frustration and that madness and instead of demonstrating or anything of that type, I would hope they would take the power and I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay doctor come out, every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let that world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody would imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”

  Harvey closed his tape with the lecture most in the room had heard many times before; maybe that’s why it wasn’t included in the press release that Harvey’s lawyer, John Wahl, read to reporters soon afterward. The last words that most of them would ever hear Harvey Milk speak concerned the one commodity he believed he had brought to gays—hope: “I ask for the movement to continue, for the movement to grow because last week I got the phone call from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope. And after all, that’s what this is all about. It’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power—it’s about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias hope. You gotta give them hope.”

  At H
arry Britt’s house, the leaders of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club were beginning to arrive at the same consensus developing in Harvey’s office about who should follow Milk as supervisor. Frank Robinson, Harvey’s first choice, had neither the experience nor the desire to be a supervisor. The second choice, Bob Ross, had never been close to Harvey’s younger political coterie. They worried his instincts were more conservative than their own liberalism, so they decided to try to engineer the selection away from him. Few of Harvey’s intimates took Harry Britt seriously as a potential successor. His political experience was largely limited to Milk’s campaigns and their own fledging Democratic club. His long sideburns and west Texas drawl convinced most that he was an unrefined yahoo, ill-suited for the role as the city’s chief gay spokesperson. That left Anne Kronenberg. As Harvey’s aide and former campaign manager, Anne knew many of the political connections who would be necessary to persuade the next mayor. Though the group making the decision was almost exclusively male, most liked the idea of advancing a lesbian for the job, since lesbian-feminists frequently carped that the gay movement seemed dominated by men. Slowly, with many phone calls between Britt’s house and City Hall, the consensus began to build for Kronenberg who was then on a plane, flying home from a visit with her parents.

  * * *

  Joe Campbell saw a bold headline mentioning something about a mayor, but since stories about mayors usually meant talk about politics, Joe didn’t bother to give the paper an extra glance. He wasn’t interested in politics. Later that same Monday afternoon, he was driving toward his isolated Marin County home when he picked up a hunky young hitchhiker.

  “Too bad about the mayor and that other guy,” the rider casually said.

  “What about?”

  “You haven’t heard? They got shot. The mayor and some other guy. He was a supervisor.”

  “Milk?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Harvey Milk.”

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Yeah. Shot in the head.”

  Campbell careened his station wagon to the shoulder of the gravel road and collapsed into tears.

  “That’s my lover,” he sobbed.

  The hitchhiker held Campbell for five minutes as Joe wept for the man he had lived with for six years in what seemed like another lifetime. As the late afternoon sun began to set over the Pacific, Campbell began his frantic drive into San Francisco.

  * * *

  Though most of his friends at City Hall spent much of the day saying how shocked they were that Dan White would kill the mayor and supervisor, Undersheriff Jim Denman had no trouble believing that Dan White was capable of the crime. Denman had spent years working with the police subculture and his brief meetings with Dan White had indicated the former supervisor fit the police mold well—rigid, conservative, and anti-gay. But White was also a prisoner who needed protection. With the image of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald haunting him, Denman personally supervised Dan White’s first day in jail. Denman was not particularly surprised that police treated White with deference, though he was taken aback when one policeman gave White a pat on the behind, as if the killer had just scored the winning touchdown for the high school football team. What did amaze Denman was the cool calm with which White handled himself. He was controlled, businesslike, and exceedingly polite. If he was in shock, Denman thought, it was at best a very mild shock. The only time White showed any sign of emotion was when he called his mother. “Hi, mom, how you doing?” he said. “I guess you heard.” A few minutes into the conversation, White’s voice turned soft and caring, like it might crack—and then White caught himself and his voice turned hard again.

  When the cell door slammed behind him, White betrayed no hint of emotion. He simply laid back on his cot, folded his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling. For three days Denman watched White for any sign that he understood what he had done. Never did a tear, a questioning glance, or any sign of remorse crossed the former policeman’s face.

  * * *

  From radio reports, Joe Campbell learned of a memorial service for Harvey at a makeshift gay community center near City Hall. He sat near the back of the hall, still in shock, and overheard someone whisper that Harvey’s lover was in the front row. Campbell glanced to Doug Franks but couldn’t think of anything to say. As the service began, Campbell realized that the speakers were talking about a man he didn’t know, certainly not about the Harvey Milk he had met at Riis Park Beach in 1956. Joe never understood what Harvey had meant with all his politics business, but he had no doubt that it wasn’t anything worth getting shot about. He was still dazed when he left the service. Since Joe knew little of Castro Street or the marches, he didn’t know that as he left the memorial service, thousands were converging on Castro Street. Instead, Joe drifted to a friend’s apartment, where he spent the night.

  * * *

  The crowd started gathering at 7:30 P.M. on the corner of Castro and Market Streets, the place that would one day be called Harvey Milk Plaza. Hundreds, then 5000 and soon 10,000 came with their candles. From a nearby balcony came the mournful wail of a conch shell as the crowd silently grew. The businesses had all closed now, their commercial displays replaced with tributes to Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Cleve Jones and his street radical friends had been training monitors all afternoon at Jones’s apartment a block up Castro. The police were worried about violence, but the throng, which had been so rambunctious during protests over gay rights referenda, needed little quelling as it stood dumbly, waiting for direction. A bank of television lights flicked on across Market Street and the crowd started moving toward it. The monitors, however, were not yet in place. As titular leader of street marches, Jones scrambled to a promontory where he could soothe the crowd. From a bullhorn, he shouted words from a folk song by lesbian singer Meg Christian:

  Can we be like drops of water

  Falling on the stone

  Splashing, breaking, dispersing in air

  Weaker than the stone by far

  But be aware that as time goes by

  The rock will wear away.

  The crowd stopped and stared mutely at Jones while the monitors raced into position.

  Three men, carrying the American, California, and San Francisco flags, took their places at the beginning of the procession, flanked by a lone drummer, slowly thrumping a muffled beat while in the night, the sound of a distant trumpet murmured the old Bob Dylan song “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Slowly, the march pushed down the boulevard, stretching for five and then ten blocks while thousands more were still arriving on Castro Street. The tens of thousands of candles glimmered in the night, their flickers merging with the lights on the hills around Castro Street so that from a distance it appeared that a thousand stars had fallen onto the avenue and were moving slowly toward City Hall, flowing from the hills of San Francisco and the dark night above.

  Medora Payne walked with her parents and John Ryckman, Harvey’s campaign manager from 1976, and gazed at the crowd around her. Young and old, men and women, gays and straights, walked slowly to the drum’s dirge. Medora thought how much Harvey had wanted gays and heterosexuals to come together and experience themselves beyond the superficial delineations of sexuality and now she saw Harvey’s dream finally dawning on these tens of thousands and Harvey wasn’t there to see it and this too made Medora want to cry. Harry Britt marched with Harvey’s many other friends—Pabich, Rivaldo, Robinson, Tom Randol, and Michael Wong—and while he was moved by the immensity of the demonstration around him, he was worried. Harvey had always been there before; now he was gone; was this the end or the beginning? Suddenly, Harry felt like the little boy in Altoona. All he had was hope. Behind him he heard a woman talking in muffled tones about who should succeed Harvey. “There’s a mailman we want to get Dianne to appoint,” she said. This came as disquieting news to Britt, the mailman.

  The massive crowd stretched the entire distance from City Hall to Castro Street, some 40,000 strong utterly silent. A reporter
standing on the sidewalk heard a cough from the center of the throng a half-block away. A carload of punks sped by and shouted “Goddamn queers”—and nobody bothered to shout anything back as the procession moved toward the grand rotunda. The Civic Center plaza was awash with the still-flickering tapers, stretching out around the wide granite stairs of City Hall while the strong and resonant voice of Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The march ostensibly memorialized both George and Harvey, but few speakers quarreled that the crowd had amassed chiefly to remember the gangly ward politician who had once called himself the mayor of Castro Street.

  “He was a leader who represented your voices,” Dianne Feinstein told the crowd. “Those of us on the board will remember him for his commitment, for his sense of humor, and for his ability to develop a sense of destiny. I ask you to take up that legacy and I give you my assurance that as long as I have any say in city government, we will remain a city that strives for human understanding and rights.”

  Milk had taught gays, Harry Britt said, that “no matter what the world has taught us about ourselves, we can be beautiful and we can get our thing together.… He was to us what Dr. King was to his people. Harvey was a prophet. Like Dr. King, he lived by a vision. As I look out over this crowd, I think the city has bought this vision. Something very special is going to happen in this city and it will have Harvey Milk’s name on it.… How many times have we made that walk down Market Street and known that when we got there to City Hall, Harvey Milk would be there? Harvey will be in the middle of us, always, always, always.”