The Mayor of Castro Street (5 page)

They quickly settled into a safe middle-class marriage. Harvey accepted nothing short of complete monogamy. Their outings were to the opera, ballet, and museums—not gay bars. Harvey was accepted into Joe's family. “We had a Jewish man here in this house once, standing right where you're standing,” explained Joe's grandmother hospitably when the lovers took a trip to the Campbell family hometown of Veto, Alabama. “Of course,” she added, “he was invited in by my father. That must have been, well, fifty years ago.”

The topic of homosexuality of course never arose during visits to either Joe's or Harvey's families. Joe Campbell still thought that Bill Milk seemed uncomfortable around him. But Minnie was concerned that the young man looked skinny, so she cheerfully made sure Joe kept eating when the new couple visited the elder Milks' household.

For all the stability Milk gained in his domestic life, he remained unsure about what to do professionally. He quickly tired of teaching. Besides, that was a risky career that could easily be destroyed by even a rumor of homosexuality. He had never liked New York's cold weather, so, by June 1957, Harvey told Joe they would be moving to Dallas. Joe spent that summer working as a Good Humor man. Harvey hawked fruits and vegetables for a cousin's business. They saved up enough money to buy a push-button Plymouth Savoy in September and they were on their way.

*   *   *

“Y'know here in Dallas, you won't find a Baptist firm hiring even a Methodist,” businessmen counseled Harvey as he started applying for jobs. “Either change your name to something like Miller or go to work for a Jewish firm.”

The advice startled Harvey, but he did wrangle a job as an assistant credit manager—at a Jewish-owned department store. He lost the post when his boss's son graduated from college and needed a job. The best employment Harvey found after that was selling used sewing machines to families who couldn't afford them. That way, the buyer made a couple payments, defaulted, and the machine was repossessed to sell again.

The scam disgusted Milk. He complained that it was the only job they'd let a Jew have in Dallas. Joe told him he had a persecution complex. After Minnie's first heart attack, Harvey talked more about going back to New York. Finally, at a performance of
Swan Lake,
Harvey announced his decision: They were going back east.

Harvey got a job as an actuarial statistician at the Great American Insurance Company. Joe went back to gilding furniture. Between Harvey's $140 weekly salary and Joe's $90, they could rent a comfortable apartment at Ninety-sixth Street and Central Park West. Joe decorated the apartment in late-fifties splendor. Harvey bought a pet toucan he named Bill and got on with adoring Joe, who seemed to get more handsome every year.

One morning Joe woke up to find a cup of hot chocolate, a glass of orange juice, and a sweet pastry sitting on the apartment windowsill, with a note: “Someone is waiting for you outside.” Across the street in Central Park stood a snowman. “Hello” was spelled out in the snow at his feet. Joe finally had his fantasy kingdom. Both knew it was going to last forever.

On their second anniversary in 1958, Harvey wrote one of his typical love notes:

To my Joesan,

To me you are my warrior—

You are my knight—

You are my day—

May the many many days and years pass pleasantly, happy and rewarding, for we have many years to spend together—the first two have swept by and with each I have found I love you 365 days more and 365 times harderuminiumuns.

Your dollbabysan,

Harveysan.

If there was oppression of homosexuals, it wasn't of any concern to Joe or Harvey. They had a beautiful apartment, a box at the opera, season tickets for the ballet, and regular trips to the beaches of Puerto Rico. Who was oppressed?

Joe's mother died suddenly after that second anniversary. Soon after, doctors told Minnie Milk she had only a few years to live. Not one to waste a minute of it, Minnie insisted that she and Bill move to Manhattan so she'd at least have something interesting to look at out her window. She started taking up all the interests she'd been putting off, began guitar and singing lessons and got active in senior citizens' groups.

For Christmas, Minnie knitted Joe and Harvey matching afghans and crocheted booties. The pair did everything as a couple; they were treated as a couple; but Harvey insisted it would kill his mother if he ever brought up the fact he was gay.

Milk still had his unpredictable moments. At a Manhattan restaurant in the late fifties, a patron muttered “faggot” one night when Joe and Harvey walked by. Milk reached over a divider, grabbed the offender's collar, started shouting epithets of his own, and shook the man until his chair trembled. Joe was embarrassed. And surprised.

Harvey was far more militant on any matter relating to Jews. Joe invited a German friend to dinner one night and Milk quickly turned the conversation to the Holocaust. What did the guest think about Buchenwald? When Joe's friend said he didn't know about the death camps until after the war, Harvey flew into a rampage: “How could you have lived in Germany and
not
known what was going on?” he shouted. “How could you
not
have been aware of the carnage? Huh? Were you deaf? Dumb? Blind? Huh?” Joe was now convinced Harvey had a persecution complex. Harvey told Joe he was anti-Semitic.

Harvey reserved virtually all his affection for Joe, however, having few friends beyond an older man he worked with at Great American, Harvey's surrogate father figure. Harvey had Joe's teeth capped, took endless rolls of photos of Joe's finely tuned body, and showered him with small gifts. Harvey confided that a plastic surgeon had developed a certain fondness for him shortly after Milk's release from the navy. He'd fixed Harvey's nose, but Milk turned down the suggestion that his oversized ears be tucked in, thereby saving the feature that political cartoonists would later find so useful.

Life for Harvey and Joe fell into predictable patterns. Every Saturday, the pair took laundry to the Chinese cleaners and ran errands. Every Sunday, they slept late, ate Harvey's matzoh meal pancakes, and lay in bed, reading the
Times.

It would always be that way. Joe thought so even after he withdrew from Harvey sexually, not understanding Harvey's voracious sexual appetite. Joe had always considered sex little more than an easy way to get attention. Harvey, meanwhile, threw himself into the act like he was some marathon runner in the last days of training for the big race. He could never get enough. Joe felt he was a device for Harvey's pleasure and pulled back. Harvey pleaded and begged, shouted and threw tantrums.

Dissatisfaction faced Milk on all fronts by late 1962. His job was boring and there was nothing Harvey hated more than being bored. He had to make a break. He decided to quit and get a new job. Joe was ironing shirts one afternoon when Harvey walked in the room.

“Have you thought about moving out?” he asked with characteristic tact.

“Yeah,” Joe said, “but I don't want to.”

“Maybe you better think about it some more.”

Joe moved out a few weeks later. That was how Harvey's longest relationship ended. Harvey regretted the decision immediately. He sent long notes imploring Joe to come back: “Now that I can no longer see or hear you, I have no desire to fight for a job, no desire to make it good, no desire for anything.”

Joe knew Harvey would make it; he'd just select somebody else.

“What did Helen Keller's parents do to punish her?”

“Rearrange the furniture. You told me that one yesterday.” Craig Rodwell looked at the alarm clock next to his phone. Sure enough, it was 9:30 exactly.

“No,” giggled Harvey, pausing dramatically.

“Okay, okay. What did they do?”

“They made her read the waffle iron.”

With boyfriends like Harvey, who needs an alarm clock? thought Craig as he pulled himself from bed. The relationship certainly had its advantages, especially for a boy who had run away from the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago at seventeen to savor big-city homosexual life in Manhattan. Besides the frequent love notes, there were Harvey's personally guided Sunday tours of the museums, Saturday nights at Milk's box at the opera and cozy evenings in his Upper West Side apartment where Harvey struggled for just the right texture in the sauce for the chicken and broccoli. Every morning at precisely 9:30
A.M.
, Rodwell got his wake-up call so he wouldn't be late for his ballet classes. The calls always opened with one of Harvey's sick jokes.

Harvey's good humor faded only once in those early romantic days of his relationship with Craig. Harvey mentioned watching Joe Campbell move out of the apartment a few months before, pulling his possessions out the building's front door while Harvey watched from their apartment window several stories above. “I wanted to jump out the window to follow him,” Harvey told Craig. But Harvey didn't dwell on the past and Craig spent most of his time being utterly enchanted by his new boyfriend.

For twenty-two-year-old Rodwell, meat loaf had previously been the most exotic item of his cuisine and Chicago Cubs games were the closest he ever got to cultural events. The affair with Harvey came straight from a Hollywood romance, with Milk cast as the ardent, cultured, witty, and, by Rodwell's standards, rich suitor. In all, Harvey seemed a Prince Charming.

Though Milk was only ten years Rodwell's senior, he genuinely enjoyed the role of teacher and charmer. It would be to such boyish-looking men in their late teens and early twenties that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life. But this relationship would be different, haunted—and ultimately doomed—by strange new ideas that tied homosexuality to politics, ideas that both repelled and attracted the thirty-two-year-old Milk.

*   *   *

A soft September breeze blew in from Lake Michigan.
The cherry tops of Chicago police cars converged on the corner of Clark and Schiller, dazing fourteen-year-old Craig Rodwell. He spent two or three nights a week on this strip. Always the same. He'd walk aimlessly around the block until he caught the eye of a passerby or a man slowly driving his car down the street. Tonight he had picked up a forty-year-old Italian dishwasher who had taken him to a nearby fleabag hotel. Afterward, they had washed—the first time Craig had ever seen scented soap—and the older man was politely walking Craig to the elevated train stop.

Then the police cars swept upon them. The older man insisted he was Craig's uncle, but a fatherly patrolman took the frightened fourteen-year-old aside and sternly ordered, “Tell me the truth right now.” Craig did. The older man got a four-year sentence for his “crime against nature.” Craig got two years' probation.

Craig had spent most of his childhood in a private boys' school playing doctor and, later, necking among boys. It seemed natural, even romantic. Only when thrust into the Chicago public schools did he learn that the nature of his sexual longing was taboo. The contradictions tore at his conscience. Here he and the many Jewish kids at the liberal high school were cheering on the blacks who demanded to go to white public schools in Little Rock. Even if you were different, you were equal, his civics teacher told the class. Craig was different too, but instead of being equal, he was called a faggot. He saw a gentle Italian man go to prison for four years, his life destroyed. It made him angry. Anger bred defiance.

He kept cruising the streets and struggled to graduate from high school a year early. By August 1958 Rodwell, seventeen, was on his way to the one place where he heard other queers lived, Greenwich Village. He set up housekeeping with a buddy he had met in his first weeks at the YMCA, Collin, a teenager taking refuge from Helena, Arkansas. He soon learned that gay life in New York was no less risky than Chicago.

One night of cruising at the popular Washington Square park in the Village brought Rodwell face-to-face with a police officer. “Keep moving, faggot,” the officer tersely ordered.

“This is harassment of homosexuals,” objected Rodwell, with less discretion than valor. That night in jail police filed by Rodwell's cell to examine this defiant homosexual like some exotic curiosity. “Whats'a matter, lose your purse?” one asked. “Whats'a matter, lose your dress?”

“Whats'a matter,” Rodwell shot back, “never seen a faggot before?”

Charges, of course, were dismissed. They generally were in such cases, since the purpose of arrests was not the enforcement of any particular law but the broader social goal of keeping homosexuals in their place. The ongoing scrapes with the police did, however, give Rodwell some radical notions that kept him sparring with the tall, urbane man he met months later cruising Central Park West.

“Yes, Harvey, you've got a great job, a nice apartment, all the kitchenware a queen could ever dream of,” Craig argued. “Everything but the chance to be openly who you are, like a normal human being.”

“I can't let it out—it would kill my parents,” Milk insisted adamantly.

“Excuses, they're all excuses,” retorted Rodwell, pointing out that the United States would be in far shorter supply of living mothers if that were the case.

“When you get older, you'll understand,” snapped Harvey, using the line with which he usually concluded such arguments.

The mushy romantic moments dominated many more days of the relationship than the arguments, but the debates kept arising. Harvey seemed intrigued with Rodwell's ideas, though he frequently shuddered when Craig suggested such things as holding hands in public. In more abstract conversations, Craig argued that if only homosexuals banded together and pushed for equal treatment, as blacks were doing with their march on Washington, things could change.