The Mayor of Castro Street (16 page)

The fair earned CVA citywide attention and a growing membership. Harvey decided it needed the respectability of having established institutions as members. The street's two banks were ideal new members: one was a branch of the gigantic Bank of America, the other a branch of the Irish locally owned Hibernia Bank. Executives at both branches rejected Milk's suggestion that they join. Most of the CVA members avoided Bank of America because of its bad-guy image as the world's largest bank, so Hibernia held most of the area's gay money. Harvey carefully wrote a letter to the Hibernia branch explaining that the CVA annual dues were $20 a year and that his research showed that Hibernia's central offices budgeted money for that branch's neighborhood involvement. “We strongly urge you to send the $20 to join our group,” Harvey wrote. Instead of signing the letter with the CVA members' names, Milk had each business affix their bank deposit stamps to the bottom of the request.

Rarely have the words “for deposit only” produced such quick results. Hibernia's $20 dues came in the return mail. Harvey took his newly revised list of CVA members to the Bank of America branch manager, mentioning he would hate to have it get around that B of A was anti-gay. The branch signed on.

By the end of 1974, politicians began coming to CVA meetings. Membership swelled. The political possibilities titillated Harvey, who rarely looked further than the next election. He pushed his friends into being voter registrars. Customers in Castro Camera were rarely greeted with a pitch to buy film; instead, the first question was, “Are you registered to vote?” If the unwary patron said no, Harvey would issue a harsh and incredulous, “Why not?” Registering voters was no mere passion with Harvey, it became an obsession; Harvey considered his most important accomplishment of 1974 to be the registration of 2,350 new voters for the governor's race. Surrendering the right to vote was, to Milk, like surrendering the chance to make a difference in the world. Each person
can
make a difference, he stormed. That was the precept that fueled everything he did and formed the basis of his realpolitik philosophy. All of Milk's alderman activities, meanwhile, confirmed this and taught him more about the workings of the City Hall. The more he learned, the angrier he got at the distance that had grown between the downtown-oriented city government and the picturesque neighborhoods that were withering from neglect and, sometimes, abuse.

*   *   *

“I asked you where you got those bruises.”

The police badge shimmered in the darkness of the paddy wagon. Minutes before, the two young men had been standing inside Hamburger Mary's, a popular gay hippie restaurant. Two police officers had simply walked in, beat them to the floor with their billy clubs, and hauled them into a paddy wagon where they pummeled them more.

“I asked you where you got the bruises,” the officer repeated.

“I don't know.”

The officer delivered another blow to his prostrated victim's stomach. “I didn't hear that.”

“I said I don't know.”

At the police station, an officer ordered the pair to strip down and they were beaten further. “He got a funny look each time he hit me,” one of the victims said when he recounted his story to a gay paper. “It was like all his frustrations were coming out. He would call me ‘fag' or ‘queer' and get this weird look on his face and then hit me.”

The two were charged with drunk and disorderly conduct and, of course, resisting arrest. Their stories held up under polygraph tests and the charges were dismissed. As usual, no disciplinary actions were taken against the police officers.

*   *   *

The hard-working Irish families of Most Holy Redeemer parish had long supplied the San Francisco Police Department with a high proportion of its tough Irish cops, so there were few officers who did not have a parent, aunt, or cousin muttering about the gay invaders. Police had held little fondness for the Haight-Ashbury degenerates in the first place, but the idea that long-haired, dope-smoking, anti-war fags could get so uppity as to try to take over a neighborhood, their neighborhood, was galling. Allan Baird noticed a police cruiser or a hawkish motorcycle cop became a fixture on the corner a block from his home at Nineteenth and Castro. Police had never viewed the quiet residential intersection as a high-priority target before, but suddenly Baird started noticing that cars with pairs of white, long-haired males were routinely being pulled over. “Going down to the Midnight Sun?” the policeman would ask politely. If either man showed any glimmer of recognition for the name of the gay bar, the officer slapped the driver with a ticket and ran a warrant check to see if any outstanding tickets could land his prey in jail. On weekend nights, cadres of officers ran sorties into the district, sometimes rounding up groups of four or five gays, dragging them to a nearby park, handcuffing them and then beating them senseless with their nightsticks. According to an account in one gay newspaper, the police managed to hospitalize three men on one foray alone, one with his skull split open. The trio were charged with “trespassing in a park” and resisting arrest; the charges, of course, were later dismissed.

The confrontations peaked at bar closing time in the early morning hours of Labor Day, 1974. Tensions had already run high with police that weekend. In two days alone, police sweeps of the local park had put nineteen gay men in jail. Still, the sidewalk outside the popular Toad Hall bar bustled with men out to make their last-minute choices when a police car pulled up next to a patron walking down Castro Street. “Off the street, faggot,” the officer shouted.

When the young man just glanced back and slowly walked away, two officers leaped from the car, threw him to the pavement, and started beating him with their billy clubs. Like clockwork, a paddy wagon rolled up to the curb and the cops hurled their unsuspecting victim in the back. Police reinforcements suddenly appeared from all directions, most keeping their badge numbers well hidden. Dozens of gay men were knocked down and beaten. Fourteen were herded into paddy wagons and taken to jail. The heinous charges that brought about the massive police action—obstructing a sidewalk.

Harvey Milk dubbed the victims the Castro 14 and headquartered their defense fund in his store. Rick Stokes filed a $1.375 million lawsuit against the police. Tensions boiled over at a neighborhood hearing of the police community relations board when Milk horrified staid gay moderates by calling the police “pigs.” Galvanized at last by a brazen issue, gay radicals joined the chorus as well and police officials got a crash course in future shock. Castro gays weren't a bunch of Judy Garland fans who would take a beating and sulk back to their lace-lined apartments just because Joe Alioto wanted to get a red hat for the city's Catholics.

Police brutality in the Castro area dropped markedly after the incident, but Milk used the fracas to underscore the need for building a tight neighborhood political base. “I pay my taxes for police to protect me, not persecute me,” he wrote in his column for the
Bay Area Reporter.
Milk's temper flared further when the Board of Supervisors frustrated his attempts to raise a defense fund by passing an ordinance requiring all such organizations to register and obtain permits—from the San Francisco Police Department. Milk typically ended his tirades with a pitch for gays to register to vote and “no longer hide, but join together and use Gay Power.” The Castro 14 furor sealed the neighborhood's reputation as
the
new homosexual hot spot. What in 1973 was a seedy, out-of-the-way hamlet was, by the beginning of 1975, coming alive with new business activity that was gaining the grudging appreciation from even the stodgiest of old neighborhood merchants. It was ironic that two of the men who shared the most similar view of what the Castro could become were as different as the beer-bellied teamster Allan Baird and the militant gay, Harvey Milk.

*   *   *

“This is for gays only.”

Allan Baird couldn't believe what he was hearing. He and Helen had taken Helen's mom out for a night on the town for her birthday. Since his mother-in-law had lived in the neighborhood fifty years, Allan thought it would be fun to take her for a drink at the central institution of the new Castro, the Toad Hall bar. The bouncer wouldn't let the trio in.

“Wait a minute,” Baird argued. “I worked in the Coors boycott. I'm a personal friend of Harvey Milk's.”

“Sorry,” the doorman repeated. “This is a gay bar.”

“This is discrimination,” Baird shot back. “
I'm
not part of the problem. You shouldn't be doing things like this.”

Allan and Helen ran into Harvey a few days after the incident. The three went to the Elephant Walk bar for a drink. The Elephant Walk had drawn awe from gays around California since it was one of the first gay bars to actually have large plate-glass windows looking out on the street. Harvey liked the symbolism of the bright open bar, after gays had spent so many years in dark, windowless toilets. Allan and Helen liked the bar since it was one of the few places on Castro Street that drew an even mix of gay and straight patrons.

“It's important that a place like this exists,” Allan said, after telling Harvey about the problem at Toad Hall.

“You're right,” said Harvey. “We need more of it. No gay person or straight person should feel self-conscious about going anywhere. That's what Castro Street should be all about.”

Allan liked the way Harvey talked about Castro Street. For all the complaints his neighbors came up with, Allan thought Castro Street was getting more like it used to be when he was a kid; for the first time in years, it seemed like a small town again where everybody knew each other and said hi on the street. Now Castro Street could also show that gays and straights could live together and get along just fine. He'd learned it could be done from Harvey; he was convinced his neighbors could learn too. That's why the incident at Toad Hall bothered him so much. It boded poorly for his vision.

*   *   *

During the 1973 campaign, Allan gave Harvey a pen-and-pencil set. “You'll need it once you get to City Hall to sign bills,” he told Milk. Harvey now confided he was going to run for supervisor again. The problems with the police and the unresponsiveness of City Hall to the predicaments of the neighborhoods hadn't changed any in two years, he said. Allan was excited about Harvey's second try for office, because Harvey seemed to care not only about Castro Street but about all San Francisco. The guy even had a national perspective on things. Allan pledged to introduce Milk to more union leaders. “Don't worry,” he said. “You'll get to use that pen yet.”

seven

The First Skirmish

“Whaddaya mean you're thinkin' of endorsin' this Harvey Milk guy?
For Chrissakes, I'm supposed to go back to work and tell the guys we endorsed some goddamn fruit for a supervisor. Ya gotta be kiddin'.”

Jim Elliot had been a union man since 1949. His talk was thick with the hard, gutteral brogue that marked the native San Franciscan's Chicago-like accent. His fingernails were rarely without the black residue from his years of fixing lawn mowers and tractors at Golden Gate Park. The idea that he might have to go back to the 2,300 mechanics in his machinist local and try to foist some fruit as their candidate for supervisor seemed downright mortifying. But here he was at the San Francisco Labor Council's endorsement meeting, hearing serious talk from good union men like himself about why they should endorse Harvey Milk for supervisor.

“Who the fuck is this fruit that we should even think about endorsin' him?” Elliot asked.

“Hey. Harvey Milk's the guy who's been gettin' Coors beer out of gay bars,” a Teamster quickly retorted.

The very words “Coors beer” was enough to make any good union member shut up and listen. Here's this fruit who got Coors beer out of gay bars, Elliot thought. How many bars have the big macho labor guys gotten Coors out of? Still, Elliot was among the union stalwarts who successfully thwarted Milk's endorsement by the Labor Council that day, but the support Milk was gaining from union regulars made him follow the candidate's career more closely. “It kinda makes you think,” he told his wife when he got home.

*   *   *

Campaigning in a staunchly middle-class neighborhood, Milk makes the rounds of coffee shops, dutifully tagged by a
Chronicle
reporter assigned to make sense of this unlikely politician who calls himself the mayor of Castro Street.

In a coffee shop, a middle class man and woman recognize Milk. “What are you doing here? Why aren't you over in…” She seems embarrassed to mention Milk's neighborhood. But she says, “I hope you make it.” Her companion shakes Milk's hands and observes that “we need to see some new faces at City Hall.”

Another surprised coffee shop customer has never heard Milk's name before and jokingly asks if Harvey is running for dairy queen. Harvey laughs the question off, didactically telling the reporter, “If I turned around every time somebody called me a faggot, I'd be walking backwards and I don't want to walk backwards.”

*   *   *

Harvey Milk, at last, was a serious candidate. He was taking on six incumbent supervisors who were all seeking reelection. His real opponents, however, were downtown business interests. “As a small businessman, I intend to fight for the needs of small businesses rather than solely for the interests of downtown,” he said when he announced his campaign in March 1975. He accused the incumbents of having “distorted priorities” and promised that his “priorities would be reoriented to the people and not to the downtown interests.”

Milk outlined a four-point program to revitalize city neighborhoods. He wanted the 300,000 commuters who daily came from suburbia to work in corporate high-rises—and used expensive city services—to start paying a “fair share” tax to finance the fire and safety services that so drained city coffers. He sharply criticized City Hall's assessment policies, which drastically underassessed the hotels and skyscrapers of powerful campaign contributors, leaving small homeowners to pick up the tax bill.