The Mayor of Castro Street (32 page)

Even the crustiest reporters, however, did not fail to note the symbolism Milk underscored in this, the first district-elected board in the city's modern history. Taking oaths were the city's first elected Chinese supervisor, the first black woman, the only Latino supervisor, the first gay city official in the nation, and, from another alternative life-styles category, even the first unwed mother supervisor, Harvey's friend and ally, Carol Ruth Silver. The inauguration also signaled what looked like the beginning of a new stability in city government after the turbulence caused first by Moscone's election, then the passage of district elections, later the whirlwind efforts to not only repeal district elections but recall the city's top officials, and finally the ouster of the citywide board in November. Feinstein called it “a new day in San Francisco politics”; the transition in power from downtown to the neighborhoods looked like a juggernaut now, a palace coup that could not be undone.

The best media event of inauguration day came not from Milk, but from his old nemesis David Goodstein, who sponsored a series of inaugural night parties at the city's three most popular gay discos. Publicly, Goodstein culled jargon from his est courses to insist he wanted to provide a supportive context for Milk and, publicly, Harvey said, “If Begin and Sadat can get together to talk, so can we.” Privately, Goodstein quoted Machiavelli's
Prince,
not Werner Erhard, as the reason for the parties. “I want to coopt Harvey,” he bluntly told an employee. For his part Harvey privately savored seeing Goodstein “kiss my ass,” disdaining to do so much as even ride to the parties in the same car that Goodstein rode in.

Reporter Francis Moriarty later recalled the chilling irony at the end of that evening when Goodstein kissed Milk's hand as they parted company, saying “Goodnight, sweet Prince”—Horatio's famous farewell to the slain Hamlet. Goodstein later denied making the statement, but Moriarty insisted the moment stuck in his mind, since the quote came just after Hamlet, in his dying breath, endorsed Fortinbras in the coming struggle for power. Goodstein would not know for nearly a year that his parting line followed Milk's own secret taped nominations for his successor—nominations intended to squeeze out Goodstein's closest allies, Jim Foster and Rick Stokes.

The round of inaugural partying did not end until the next night when Milk threw a formal dinner to help pay off his campaign debt. The new supervisor used the occasion to wax eloquent again about his dreams for new cities and for hope:

The American Dream starts with neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. To sit on the front steps—whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city—is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.…

Yesterday, my esteemed colleague on the board said we cannot live on hope alone. I know that.… The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it. If the story of Don Quixote means anything, it means that the spirit of life is just as important as its substance.

When Harvey met Jack Lira, he confided to his friend Tory Hartmann, “I've found the love of my life.” Tory liked her gay friends because, as a Catholic, she thought they were God's lost people, but she could never get used to their easy romancing. “Just how many lovers for life are you going to have?” she asked Harvey; like most of Harvey's friends, she thought the politician could do much better than Lira. The night of the inaugural dinner she heard a whisper from the coat check. Jack was offended that he did not get to sit on the dais with Harvey and the important public officials, he told Tory, so he had thrown a tantrum and was hiding in the coatroom, refusing even to eat. Again, Tory had to wonder about Harvey's choice of boyfriends.

*   *   *

A huge American flag hung sternly from the balcony.
The stirring fanfare of the “Theme from Rocky” blared. A handsome young man strode purposefully onto a balcony high above the crowd. It all gave Doris Silvistri the creeps. As a good friend of Building and Construction Trades secretary-treasurer Stan Smith, Silvistri got to attend more than her share of post-campaign fund raisers in the early months of the supervisors' terms. Nothing on the circuit bothered her more than the fund raiser for Dan White in the same spacious design center Harvey had used for his dinner. When White's turn to speak came, the balcony cleared, leaving only an oversized American flag draped in the rear, the “Rocky” fanfare and a disembodied voice introducing White. He walked stiffly across the balcony—like a robot, Doris thought.

“I'm not sure whether he thinks he's George Patton or Adolph Hitler, but he sure makes me nervous,” Doris whispered to Stan.

Smith countered that everybody seemed to like the clean-cut young man.

“I don't care,” Doris argued. “There's something wrong with that man. He's wound up too tight. Something's wrong.” Talking personally to White did little to reassure her. “He responded like he was programmed,” she said later. “He was like a spring ready to go off.”

*   *   *

“
I'm number one queen now.
You can work with me or fight me. But if you fight me, be ready for me to do my best to make sure you don't get reelected.”

Harvey Milk repeated this challenge to anyone who would listen. Mayor Moscone tried to start their first post-election conversation with small talk about how he could help Harvey erase his campaign debt when Harvey cut him off, pounded his fists on the mayor's desk, and laid out the ground rules for their relationship. Harvey wanted final say over any gay appointments. He also wanted the mayor to start producing substantive results for gays. Or else.

“You're never given power,” he had railed for five years, “you have to take it.” Milk knew his Machiavelli as well as any politico in town and he intended to use his clout as the first gay official to prove it. Moscone, for one, saw the new order shaping up in the gay community; he had bet on the wrong horse. At an open meeting with the gay community shortly after Milk's election, Moscone told gays to funnel complaints through Milk and that he would no longer pay heed to any “kingmakers” in the community, a direct slap at Jim Foster, who had long been called the gay kingmaker. Moreover, Moscone promised that he would appoint a gay member to the Police Commission, satisfying a demand gays had been making since the days of Jose's Black Cat. “Whatta difference a gay makes,” touted one gay newspaper's headline at the breakthroughs. Milk returned the favor to Moscone. By the end of Harvey's first month in office, one political columnist observed that “Milk has become Moscone's strongest political ally on the board.” Though the couple shared a similar liberal political philosophy, the newfound rapport between the two old foes surprised pundits both in and out of City Hall.

*   *   *

The new supervisor from District 5 was out to be more than the gay legislator and he used his first months on the board to build his populist image, inveighing against the interests he considered the bane of a healthy San Francisco—downtown corporations and real estate developers. He pushed for a commuter tax, so the 300,000-plus corporate employees who came downtown each day from suburbia would pay their share for the city services they used. When the Jarvis-Gann tax revolt started drying up local revenue sources, he joined Moscone in a push for higher business taxes, legislation that business-oriented Board President Feinstein managed to kill. The news that a parking garage for a new performing arts center near City Hall would replace housing units sent Harvey on a rampage. “It's a scandal of human nature to rip down sixty-seven housing units in this day so that the wealthy can have a place to park their cars,” he lectured. “A place for an auto to rest is not as important as the need for a place for people to rest. There is a shifting of tides taking place toward the needs of people versus the needs of the auto.” Real estate developers tried to persuade Milk to support a massive downtown development project with the argument that once built, it would provide thousands of jobs for minorities. “Jobs as what?” Harvey sneered. “Janitors, waitresses, and busboys. Big fucking deal. What kinds of opportunities are those?”

The centerpiece of Milk's legislative agenda remained his ordinance to discourage the real estate speculation that was running rampant throughout San Francisco, especially in the Castro. Harvey worried that the spiraling housing prices would force the poor and minorities out of the city. Milk went right to the belly of the beast and delivered the announcement of his anti-speculation tax to the San Francisco Board of Realtors. The group wasted no time in singling Milk out as their most formidable political foe. Still, conceded one Milk critic, “With Harvey, you never had to worry about a knife in the back. He gave you a frontal assault.”

The Pentagon's announcement that it planned to close the city's Presidio military base had Board President Feinstein racing to shore up unanimous support for a resolution pleading for the complex's continued operation. Harvey stood as the lone dissenter, insisting the base's spacious grounds would be a dandy park and that the housing could better be used for his favorite special interest group, senior citizens. Besides, he confided to one friend, he'd seen too many lives wrecked by the military and its anti-gay pogroms; the less San Francisco had to do with the services, the better. The base ultimately remained open, but the freshman supervisor's anti-military posture only confirmed the editorial writers' view that Supervisor Milk was indeed a disappointment.

Though Milk and his closest board ally, Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, ended up on the losing side of many a 9–2 vote, Harvey proved an effective ward healer once in office, practicing his own alderman brand of realpolitik to perfection. He saw to it that the once-weekly sweeping of Castro Street stepped up to a daily cleaning. He successfully thwarted the closing of the neighborhood's library branch, saying that cutting back on library services in a time of tight budgets was to cut “the bone, not the fat” in government. When the school district wanted to shut down the neighborhood grade school, Harvey fought to keep the school open and won; he still held true to his dream that the Castro could be the neighborhood where gays and straights could live together. Not one to get caught in abstruse political theory, Milk proudly counted fifty new neighborhood stop signs as one of his major accomplishments. He instructed his new City Hall aide, Anne Kronenberg, to give complaints about fixing potholes a top-priority status. “They might not remember how you voted on appropriations,” he told her, “but every time they vote, they'll always remember that pothole in front of their house.” Such matters represented the heart of politics to Harvey Milk. Even Harvey's most bitter opponents soon had to admit that Harvey was not the disaster they had predicted he would be.

As his early months in office wore on, Harvey gained greater confidence and poise. He reined his once galloping pace of speech to a reasonable canter. The formerly frenzied waving of arms gave way to a calmer, more confident gesture of one arm, index finger extended, which photographed better. He did his board homework meticulously. When a friend went to rouse him for a 2
A.M.
emergency one morning, he found Harvey wide awake in his pajamas, reading the complicated city charter. Veteran Supervisor John Molinari thought Milk was acting driven at times in his effort to keep up on all the issues before the board, as if he had to prove that he was more than just a gay supervisor.

Harvey's good humor started outshining his natural abrasiveness, so that even while he was often in the minority of board votes, few colleagues disliked the politician with a penchant for puns and one-liners. Michael Wong found a thoroughly ecstatic Milk when he visited City Hall in March. Harvey recounted his excitement at a recent fund raising dinner.

“Mike, you should have been at the dinner,” he enthused. “I told the audience, and a lot of Chamber of Commerce types were there, that the candidate I supported for President in 1976 was a populist named Fred Harris. When the polls showed he was within striking distance of winning [his senate seat], the oil companies sent him a check for two thousand dollars. His manager said, ‘Fred what should we do with the money?' Fred told him, ‘Screw them and send it back.' The manager pleaded, ‘But we need the money.' Fred said, ‘Okay, deposit the money and then screw them.' And that's what I'm doing tonight.”

“You're kidding?”

“Mike, they were stunned,” Milk giggled. “No one knew what to say and finally they started to clap.”

“Same old Harvey.”

“And you know what else?” Harvey pulled out a jar of jelly beans which, because of his sweet tooth, was never far from his mouth. “I'm getting the board addicted to jelly beans. Every time they come in here, I feed them one, then another, then another. They're all hooked. And Dianne and Quentin [Kopp], let me tell you they're both assholes. They think they're so high and mighty. What I do is leave my door open when I'm on the phone and when I know that Dianne or Quentin is outside, I yell real loud, ‘Shit, goddamn it, fuck' and all that street talk. It bugs the shit out of them.”

The conversation shifted to Harvey's assessment of his colleagues, including the man who had emerged as the most conservative board member, Dan White. “White, I like Dan,” Harvey insisted. “He's learning and he and I talk a lot. Give him some time.”

Moments later, White was walking to his office across the hall and saw Wong in Harvey's room. He stepped in to greet Mike. Harvey took to clowning around.

“Dan, look at this toy,” Harvey said, picking up a little statue of Mickey Mouse on a box. Harvey pushed a button and Mickey started running in place.