The Mayor of Castro Street (39 page)

*   *   *

A dynamite day at City Hall,
Harvey thought as he started walking home. His dogshit ordinance had finally passed its third and final reading. Everybody at work had ribbed him about the clown story, which had appeared in the previous day's newspaper magazine supplement. Had he really been running up to cable cars telling people he was an elected official? they asked.

The only small blot on the day was Jack Lira. He'd called during the board meeting, insisting that Anne had to pull Harvey out of the board chambers so he could talk to him. In the background, Harvey could hear that Jack had turned his radio to a live broadcast of the board meeting. Jack had known he was pulling Harvey out of the meeting, but he did it anyway, Harvey thought. Harvey had already confided to friends that Jack had to go. The moods, the drinking, it was all too much. Jack had even run away to Los Angeles briefly a week before, staying with Don Amador, making drunken scenes and public embarrassments for his host throughout his stay. Harvey always felt a fatherly impulse to protect his friends. The fact that Jack had held Amador up for potential ridicule rankled Harvey more than the humiliating scenes with which Lira had long harassed Harvey. Jack had to go.

Harvey kept a cheerful spring in his pace as he walked the eleven blocks from City Hall to his new flat on Henry Street. He should have been home at 6:15, but he'd stayed an extra forty-five minutes to stick his head into a committee meeting. No obligation to be there, but he enjoyed making his presence known. Harvey fumbled for his keys as he arrived at his flat; the first thing he saw as he opened the door mystified him.

A trail of voter registration forms. It led from the front door down the hall into the living room. Harvey quizzically followed the trail from living to dining room. Now, wadded-up anti-Briggs fliers also littered the floor and dropped sporadically on the voter forms were empty cans of Coors beer. The path grew messier as it wound from the dining room into the kitchen, through the bathroom, back into the hallway, through Jack's room and finally onto the enclosed back porch. A huge black velvet curtain was draped from the beam. Jack had pinned a note to it: “You've always loved the circus, Harvey. What do you think of my last act?”

Harvey pulled back the curtain and saw Jack's body, cold and discolored, hanging from the beam. Milk ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. As he cut the rope, he looked at the beam and saw that Jack had nailed to it a paperback novelization of the television series
Holocaust.
Distrusting police, Harvey ran to a firehouse a few doors down the street and then called two of his most trusted friends, Anne Kronenberg and Scott Smith. Anne motorcycled over in time to see the firemen attempt and fail at resuscitation. The coroner later estimated that Jack had been dead forty-five minutes before Milk got home, at about 6:15. Jack had timed it so his legs would still be kicking when he thought Harvey would walk in the door.

The body was gone by the time Scott arrived. The trio got to work cleaning up the house before the police came. Jack had left notes all over the apartment. A long suicide message scrawled in both Spanish and English rambled about the anti-gay tide he saw sweeping the country. Other notes, which were never made public, ranted vindictively against Milk. “You're a lousy lover, Harvey.” Jack had carefully hidden the taunting reminders throughout the house. Over the next few days, Scott found many notes tucked into odd drawers, out-of-the-way nooks, in the seams of Harvey's underwear and between the pages of books and magazines that Jack knew Harvey would pick up some day. A six-pack of empty Coors beer cans sat in the refrigerator. Months later, Anne got a sinking feeling in her stomach when she remembered a note taped prominently on a kitchen wall: “Beware Of The Ides of November.”

Both the police and press treated the death gingerly. Though the suicide made page one the next day, it quickly faded. An avalanche of sympathy notes poured into Harvey's office. About half came from other lesbians and gay men who had lost a lover to suicide, often after they'd been arrested on a trumped-up charge, fired from a job or dishonorably discharged from the military. A sixty-four-year-old wrote of how his lover of fourteen years had committed suicide in 1953. With another man, the lover's suicide was six years ago, another three and one was “just last month.” A grandmother wrote of how her grandson, a promising sixth grade teacher, had years ago been seen going into a suburban gay bar by a colleague, and how the school principal drove the young man to the pharmacist to get the dosage of pills that would save the teacher from an embarrassing hearing in front of the school board. Exactly fifty letters came from a small jungle outpost in South America, all sending regrets and extending an invitation. “I had the opportunity in San Francisco when we were there to get to know you and thought very highly of your commitment to social actions and to the betterment of your community,” wrote Sharon Amos, who had organized the Peoples Temple leafleting for Harvey's Assembly campaign before moving with Jim Jones to Guyana. “I hope you will be able to visit us here sometime in Jonestown. Believe it or not, it is a tremendously sophisticated community, though it is in a jungle.”

Even then, the packet of letters was chilling. It was as if it had never crossed the writers' minds that the appearances of exactly fifty letters—many of them identical word for word, and none of them wavering from the condolence-invitation formula—written on identical pieces of paper with similar pencils would look like anything but a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy.

“Everything I've ever done was to give hope to people like Jack,” Harvey repeated over and over to his friends after the initial shock wore off. “And here I failed.” Milk had suffered many political defeats, almost humorously, because he could always find some germ of victory in them—a little old lady converted from anti-gay prejudice, a new union supporter, or, if nothing else, higher name recognition. But the defeat had been final with Jack. There could be no hope for a victory the next time. Harvey had failed.

*   *   *

The guilt dissipated within hours of Milk's arrival in Fresno for Lira's funeral. He met and took an instant disliking to Jack's father who, Jack claimed, had so consistently rejected him. Harvey learned of Jack's previous suicide attempts; nobody in the family had bothered to inform him about them before. Jack's sister later wrote Harvey, “I hadn't told you about how bad the family was because I didn't think you'd ever have to be exposed to them. Now you see. Don't feel guilty about Jack. You were better to him than anyone else.”

Harvey returned from the funeral relieved. “The guy never had a chance,” he told Anne. Within a week, Harvey had met a young bartender, Billy Wiegardt, who had just moved to the Castro from Long Beach, Washington. Harvey registered him to vote and then proceeded with the mushy love notes and bouquets of red roses. Billy moved into Harvey's apartment a week later.

“You've got to remember, Bill, you're in the direct line of fire,” Harvey warned as the young man unpacked.

“What do you mean?” This was, after all, pretty heavy stuff for a twenty-two-year-old who had just left Long Beach, Washington.

“If I get killed, you can be killed too,” Harvey said matter-of-factly. “Somebody could walk through the door and blow both our brains out.”

Harvey had grown to dislike mixing politics with romance, so most of the courtship employed the sentimental tactics he'd used successfully since nabbing Joe Campbell in 1956. Unaware of the details of Jack's suicide, which Harvey rarely discussed, Billy was delighted to come home one day and find paper footprints leading down the hallway, into the dining room, through the kitchen, down the hall and into Billy's new room. At the end, a vase of flowers. Billy noticed that the flowers Harvey frequently left never looked like they came from a florist shop. In fact, they looked like they might have just been plucked from somebody's front yard. Billy had the good sense never to ask Harvey about their origins.

The passion soon fled their affair. Like a sailor on his first leave, Billy was having his first taste of gay life, and in San Francisco no less. Neither the time nor the environment encouraged him to settle into the type of marriage in which Harvey had been involved for well over twenty years. Instead of being lovers, they became roommates who sometimes slept together. Harvey started complaining to friends that he wasn't getting enough sex. “Get it while you can,” he counseled Harry Britt. “Nobody likes an old queen.” The comment was based more on self-pity than fact; Harvey had few problems rustling himself up new boyfriends.

Within weeks of meeting Wiegardt, Harvey was courting twenty-four-year-old Doug Franks, a graduate student at San Francisco State University. Harvey registered him to vote and talked woefully of the loneliness of the campaign trail. Once he had earned Franks' sympathies, Harvey brightened up and asked him for a date. The event was a Nationalist Chinese dinner Milk was attending as a favor to John Molinari, Chinatown's district supervisor. Doug expected to be picked up for the date in a swanky big car, the kind he figured all supervisors drove. Instead, Harvey picked a rendezvous point on the city's bus system. On the way up the stairs to the dinner, Franks started seeing a panoply of political notables, as well as scores of sedate Chinese couples.

“Harvey, this is like I'm going as your date.”

Harvey pulled Doug aside and gave him careful instructions.

“Now remember, if anyone says one thing to you that is snotty or condescending, you have my permission to say this.” Harvey changed his voice tone into a sprightly conversational cadence. “You say, ‘No, no, no. You've got it all wrong. Harvey doesn't fuck me. I fuck Harvey.'”

The statement's accuracy did not convince Doug it was appropriate. “Harvey!” he answered incredulously. “I can't say that.”

“No, say it,” said Harvey grinning.

Milk could barely restrain his laughter while speakers droned on about how the Taiwanese would inevitably reclaim the mainland. Doug found himself sitting with the city's public health director on one side and a representative from Governor Brown's office on the other. Harvey nudged Doug as the lazy susan loaded with Chinese delicacies was brought to the table.

“Go for it, Doug,” Harvey prodded. “Don't worry about anybody else. It's
their
dinner,” Harvey said, pointing to the would-be conquerors of Beijing. “If we run out of food, they'll just have to put out more.”

On the way home, Doug mentioned he'd never been to City Hall. “You've never been to City Hall?” Harvey asked in amazement. He wanted to give Doug a private tour right then, but he'd left his keys at home, so he instead launched into a long lecture about the intricate friezes adorning the inside of the stately rotunda. He told of how sometimes, in the beautifully carved board chambers, he simply sat back and stared up at the crystal chandeliers and the carefully crafted scrolls carved into every corner. And of course, there was the grand marble staircase that flowed elegantly into the spacious colonnaded lobby. Like the steps of a grandiose Roman palace in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. “Never take an elevator when you're in City Hall,” Harvey explained. “Always take that stairway. You can make such an entrance with it.” Harvey paused, pondering the building on which so many of his aspirations had been centered. “You can make such an entrance—take it slowly.”

When the pair finally trollied to Harvey's door, Doug was initially intimidated by the old blow-ups Harvey still had out of Jack McKinley's derriere. Doug wondered if he would measure up. The next morning, Harvey assured him he did and, as usual, Harvey jumped headfirst into a passionate love again. The relationship bloomed rapidly. Both were rebounding from collapsed affairs. Doug had broken up with a man he had lived with since he divorced his wife four years ago; he had only moved to San Francisco in August. Harvey talked little of Jack or how the relationship had ended. Given the anger that Harvey seemed to harbor against his former lover, Doug wasn't surprised that Jack never called or that Harvey never ran into him, even though Harvey stumbled into no small number of former flings at the numerous gay fund raisers the pair attended. Doug didn't worry about it; Jack Lira didn't sound like anybody Doug wanted to meet anyway. Harvey confided one night that at twenty-four, Doug was the oldest man Harvey had ever started an affair with; Doug thought he was kidding.

Explaining the waning affair with Billy and the ongoing romance with Bob Tuttle in Los Angeles required a full exposition on Harvey's theories of neo-homosexual romance. “As homosexuals, we can't depend on the heterosexual model,” Harvey explained to Doug one night. “We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don't have to follow it. We should be developing our own life-style. There's no reason why you can't love more than one person at a time. You don't have to love them all the same. You love some less, love some more—and always be honest with everybody about where you're at. They in turn can do the same thing and it can open up a bigger sphere.”

A sphere of love, always growing. That ultimately was what his politics were all about, Harvey decided. Lovers were not meant to be chattel, locked into only one finite relationship. Harvey never had any use for organized religion, but he was convinced that his notion of love was what Jesus was probably talking about years ago, not the hate that John Briggs and the fundamentalist Christians kept bringing out. Such lectures on the nature of love and the corny romantic courtship poems and flower bouquets came only in brief moments, the few which Harvey could spare from his hectic schedule. Every other waking minute was the campaign. Harvey had always enjoyed feverish activity, but now, friends worried, he acted like a driven man. He rose at 6
A.M.
every day and rarely got to bed before midnight. Billy frequently came home from his bartending job at 3
A.M.
to find the supervisor passed out on the couch. But there were sleepless nights too. Billy would awaken in the early morning hours before dawn started filtering into the sky and he'd see Harvey awake, staring at the ceiling. “The whole world is watching this,” Harvey said once. Billy would doze off again, because he'd already heard so much about the Briggs Initiative, but Harvey would still be staring up blankly. The whole world was watching.