The Mayor of Castro Street (24 page)

Both Tom and Tory were relieved when they sped back toward the Castro. Tory later confided her anxieties to Harvey, who dropped his normally jocular tone to give her some deadly serious advice.

“Make sure you're always nice to the Peoples Temple,” he admonished her. “If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They're weird and they're dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.”

Tory was involved in a number of Democratic Party causes and kept tabs on the party nationally through her friendship with San Mateo's Congressman Leo Ryan. She began mentioning her experience with Jones to a number of her other political friends. Hartmann was worried. Jones was, after all, a major political force on the scene now that Mayor Moscone had made him chairman of the Housing Authority, an incredibly powerful position for a man who oriented his work toward the same poor who used public housing. District Attorney Joe Freitas, meanwhile, had made Jones's top lieutenant, Tim Stoen, an assistant district attorney and even assigned him to investigate allegations of voter fraud—quite a choice assignment considering Peoples Temple itself was the brunt of many of these charges. Tory's political contacts, however, only reassured her of what a marvelous new fixture Jim Jones was on the political scene. He could turn out so many volunteers, just like that. It seemed they'd do anything for him. “Nobody wanted to listen to me,” Hartmann said later. “It was like I was telling a joke but there wasn't any punchline.”

*   *   *

“Harvey's a friend. You don't screw your friends.”

It was a rule labor leader George Evankovich stuck by, but it fell on deaf ears at the San Francisco Labor Council, which wanted nothing to do with the fruit candidate. A few union leaders kept their unions with Harvey—the Laborers, Fire Fighters, Teamsters, and the massive Building and Construction Trades Council—but most pulled into line for Agnos. Nobody knew much about Agnos, that was true, but they had to keep in good with Burton and McCarthy. They couldn't risk the wrath of the Democratic Party's cartel that was behind Agnos.

That's the way it worked with virtually every special interest group in the city. Milk stood by stunned, as group after group endorsed Agnos, even though many of the leaders privately conceded they hadn't heard his name until just months before.

*   *   *

“I'll tell you why I can't stand Harvey Milk.”

His face blushing, his arms waving about his roly-poly figure, David Goodstein was having one of his tantrums again. Even his reverence for Werner Erhard and his erhard seminars training (est) couldn't keep Goodstein from controlling his temper. Goodstein's employees at the
Advocate
offices in San Mateo didn't even have to casually stroll to the coffee machine to eavesdrop on this one. His voice resounded through the partitions of the nation's largest gay paper. Goodstein had purchased the biweekly only two years before and his penchant for mixing journalism with his idiosyncratic theories of gay activism had by now earned him the nickname “Citizen Goodstein.” That this nobody camera shop owner was tangling with “our liberal friends” infuriated him.

“Harvey Milk's goddamn crazy. He can't be trusted. He'll embarrass the shit out of us.” Goodstein's normally sociable terrier, Minnie, huddled in a corner while her master's tirade continued. “He's just an opportunist.”

When Goodstein learned that his old Pacific Heights friend Anne Eliaser had donated money to Milk, he quickly got on the phone. “Why are you doing this off-the-wall thing?” he fumed. “Harvey is a crazy man.”

Eliaser found herself in the curious position of being a heterosexual trying to explain to the nation's major gay publisher why it was time gays themselves, not just their liberal friends, hold public office.

Jim Foster was angry at the whole tenor of Harvey's anti-machine theme. Sure it's a machine, Foster thought, a machine that finally got that fascist Joe Alioto out of office; a machine that got a district attorney who stopped prosecuting gays like they were Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, a machine that made it legal for gays to have sex in California for the first time in 102 years; a machine that had made the first gay commission appointments in the nation's history; a machine that was carrying gay civil rights legislation in Congress. It's a machine all right, Foster thought, remembering back on the years of bar raids and police harassment he had experienced over a decade before Harvey Milk even moved here. But it's
our
machine for a change, a machine on
our
side.

Rick Stokes had more pragmatic concerns. He had specific gay civil rights legislation he wanted passed in Sacramento. Even if Milk did win—a very doubtful possibility, he thought—Milk would have the instant emnity of the all-powerful Speaker McCarthy. An assemblyman sitting on the sanitation committee could do little good for changing the laws for lesbian custody cases, or anti-gay job bias, Stokes thought, while Assemblyman Agnos would immediately sit at the right hand of McCarthy from which he could judge the quick and the dead among legislative proposals.

Virtually every major gay leader endorsed Agnos, usually with a vitriolic denunciation of Milk. They even imported State Representative Elaine Noble, the openly gay legislator from Massachusetts, to come all the way from Boston to tell San Francisco gays why they did not need an openly gay legislator from California. Milk shouted carpetbagger, and the corps of Castro Street workers for Milk were generally speechless at the sight of the nation's foremost lesbian leader opposing Milk, a man with whom she had neither talked nor met. “It's easy to explain,” an
Advocate
editor said at a Noble fund raiser for Agnos. “She wants to run for U.S. Senate in 1978 and she'll need all these gay leaders to raise money for her out here.” Milk's Castro volunteers may have been committed, but they certainly had little to offer Noble's campaign chest, so the gays with the Agnos campaign, with the prospect of money for Noble in the future, got the advantage of running full-page ads in gay papers heralding Noble's endorsement.

With characteristic hyperbole, Milk compared the gay establishment to Nazi collaborators, insisting that gays' priority should be electing the first gay candidate in California, not a liberal friend. “Since these self-appointed ‘leaders' lack the courage to run for public office themselves, they then MUST try to destroy anyone who does run for office unless that person is blessed by them,” he wrote. “You don't dictate to us by going to four or five ‘gay leaders' and making a deal,” he told one reporter. “These leaders can't deliver. They are not going to deliver the votes of the people on the streets.”

Art Agnos, meanwhile, learned the hazards of campaigning in the San Francisco of the 1970s. At a Sunday afternoon campaign stop at a spaghetti feed in a Folsom Street bar, Agnos was stumping for votes when a leather-clad patron shook Agnos' hand with his right paw and grabbed the candidate's crotch with his left. The affable Agnos smiled at the masher. “Do I measure up to Harvey?” he asked. The crowd hooted. “Ya sure do, buddy,” the leather man answered. Agnos got an ovation; he figured he walked out with every vote in the bar.

Even as the campaign grew more bitter, Art Agnos had to concede, Harvey Milk was a quick study. Though unschooled in the niceties of diplomacy, Harvey was an effective speaker who kept his sense of humor while the pair stumped together through endless candidates' nights. It wasn't unusual for even the most bitter opponents to review each others' performances; after all, they heard their campaign speeches more than anybody else. Agnos later remembered putting his arm around Harvey's shoulder as the two emerged from a particularly fierce debate and walked toward the parking lot.

“How do you feel having the machine around you?” he joked.

“Best machine I've ever had handle me,” Harvey quipped.

Agnos wondered how seriously Harvey took all this machine business.

“Y'know Harv', your speech is too much of a downer,” Agnos suggested. “You talk about how you're gonna throw the bums out, but how are you gonna fix things—other than beat me? You shouldn't leave your audience on a down.”

Shortly after that, Agnos noted that Harvey started ending his speeches on an up note, a tone that became especially eloquent when Milk talked to gay audiences. He talked about the time when the only homosexuals he heard of were drag queens and child molesters; it was time to change that. “A gay official is needed not only for our protection, but to set an example for younger gays that says the system works,” Harvey implored. “We've got to give them hope.”

At meetings with fewer gays, Milk would change the words to black, Chicano, or whatever group he was wooing, but as the campaign progressed, he increasingly ended every speech with this call for hope. Frank Robinson soon refined it into a polished appeal that sounded as if it came straight from the orations of Hubert Humphrey. Harvey's friends began calling the pitch Harvey's “hope speech.”

A quick study, Agnos thought—maybe too quick. Agnos couldn't help but be impressed, and two or three weeks before election day he was also getting worried. He called Leo McCarthy. He was sure he was trailing Milk, he told the speaker. He didn't know how much, but he was scared. Leo laughed off the fears. Just campaign jitters, he told Agnos. But Art remembered the color-coded map Harvey was so proud of and took a poll. The results showed 25 percent for Milk, 16 percent for Agnos and the rest undecided. Leo didn't laugh at Art's fears any more; he was about to lose an assembly seat. McCarthy started pulling every string he could to get money for Agnos' campaign. Just about every politician and industry in the state had to deal with the California Assembly in some way, so astonishing sums poured in from special interest committees all across California. The Friends of Leo McCarthy, the speaker's own reserve fund, donated $11,000. A nebulous “Association for Better Citizenship” gave $4,000. Campaign committees from two neighboring assemblymen chipped in another $4,500. In the last two weeks of the campaign alone, Agnos collected an amazing $22,580—about the same amount Milk spent on his entire campaign.

Agnos focused on the weak points in Milk's campaign. The district was one of the most liberal in the state, but to belie fears that his homosexuality might brand him a crazy radical, Harvey had made his business experience a major campaign theme. He would cast a cold businessman's eye on the state budget, cut fat and red tape. The only two public officials to openly endorse Harvey, meanwhile, were moderate State Senator Milton Marks, the only Republican legislator from the city, and Supervisor Quentin Kopp, the board's most conservative member who endorsed Harvey because he was planning to take on Moscone for mayor in the 1979 elections. Putting it all together, Milk was running as the more conservative candidate. Agnos was also surprised to find Harvey had downplayed campaigning in the district's heavily black and Latino areas, assuming they would be too homophobic to support him. That left Agnos virgin territory.

Agnos dug into Milk's weaknesses, using the expertise he had learned in the speaker's office: direct mail campaigning. Every other day for the rest of the campaign, a new district-wide mailer hit the post office accenting Agnos' work in liberal social programs, especially to the city's minorities. One brochure juxtaposed a year-by-year rundown of Agnos and Milk's past activities. Art's side was graced with the many bills he had drafted as a legislative aide. On Milk's side there were few accomplishments of any note; those that did merit attention were often pointedly preceded with the blunt phrase “first up-front gay.” The barrage of mailers was unprecedented in city politicking.

*   *   *

As Harvey felt the momentum slip from his campaign, his fights with Scott grew more frequent and bitter. “You fucked it up,” he would shout at Scott when his lover made the slightest error. “You've ruined everything.” From there, Milk would launch into one of his tantrums, while Smith, whose Mississippi background bred a less abrasive demeanor, sat quietly absorbing the abuse, knowing he was the only person Harvey could shout at so vehemently and still count on loving the next morning.

That, however, was when Scott became sure the passion had ebbed from their relationship. Maybe it had been happening for years and they hadn't noticed it between the campaigns and the extracurricular flings, but it was gone now. Outside the Castro Camera window, scores of handsome young men strode by casually every day, all day, and twenty-eight-year-old Scott was always trapped inside, constantly stuck in a store that barely showed a profit, constantly campaigning for a forty-six-year-old lover who grew more harried with each race, and the races never ended. Scott had fallen in love with a man who excelled in gourmet dinners, slept under Redwoods, rarely missed a Broadway opening, fell into trances during Mahler operas, and never let a circus go by. Now it was all politics. Scott agreed with the politics, and had devoted three years of his life to helping Harvey, but Harvey still wasn't the carefree, footloose hippie he had fallen in love with at a subway stop in Greenwich Village in 1971. Somewhere during the campaign, Scott stopped sleeping with Harvey and moved into his own bedroom.

One night, Michael Wong went upstairs to Harvey and Scott's apartment to fix a can of soup, the only dinner he could fit in between his nine-to-five job and the six hours he spent every night at the headquarters. He found Scott slumped in a chair, exhausted from the long hours of campaigning and simultaneously running the business. Wong saw pictures of Harvey in what looked like theatrical costumes. It surprised Mike. Like most of Milk's friends, Wong had no idea Harvey had had anything to do with Broadway. Harvey always seemed too tied up in the present to discuss the past.