The Mayor of Castro Street (6 page)

Rodwell became active in the Mattachine Society, New York City's only gay group of that time. Chapters had been popping up since 1950, named after the Italian
Matachinos,
the court jesters who, behind a mask, could speak truth to otherwise obdurate rulers. Rodwell decided he'd help bolster attendance at meetings, so he and his Arkansas roommate hand-wrote notices of upcoming Mattachine events and dropped them in at the Greenwich Village apartments that bore two male names on the mailbox. The unsolicited leafleting infuriated Milk.

“You shouldn't do that to people,” Milk shouted. “Getting those in mailboxes will make people paranoid that everyone knows about them being gay.”

“You're just thinking about how
you
would react if it showed up in your mailbox and you thought somebody might suspect you were gay,” Rodwell later remembered arguing back.

Harvey loved to argue and, like his father, he was pigheaded. This proved especially true in politics. A staunch conservative, Milk was then looking forward to Barry Goldwater's getting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. That could get the true conservative message out to the nation, he thought. His fiercest argument with Rodwell was not about gay equality, but President Kennedy's move against the steel companies. The raw use of federal power in the economy made Harvey's blood boil. Rodwell ended the argument by calling Harvey a fascist and stomping out of the apartment.

Craig should have seen the end coming. Harvey was too set in his ways. It came soon after Rodwell made a Labor Day trip to the gay cruising section of Riis Park. About twice a year, police swept down on the gay section, enforcing an archaic law that demanded male swimmers be clad in suits that extended from the navel to over the thigh.

“This is harassment of homosexuals,” Rodwell shouted. He was promptly arrested for both indecent exposure and inciting a riot. In court, the judge glanced down at the young man and dismissed the incitement charge. What about the other offense? Craig started to explain how the police routinely used the charge to harass homosexuals. Homosexuals? At the mention of the offensive word, the judge slammed down his gavel. Nothing more need be said. Rodwell went to jail for three days.

During Craig's disappearance Harvey kept nervously calling Collin to see when his young paramour would resurface. Rodwell still recalls the curious look that crept across Milk's face when he saw his head—the police had shaved it. Craig explained about jail and the angry judge.

“Harvey never wanted to talk about it much, but I could see he was terrified by what I had done,” Rodwell recalled. “Here he had this carefully constructed life. Everything was in its place. He was terrified that someone might find out he was gay because he was going with me, and I was branded.”

The early morning wake-up calls became less frequent: every other day, then twice and then once a week. Then no more. Harvey Milk shifted his attentions to other young men with less troublesome ideas; he had carefully compartmentalized his life for years and he wasn't about to change now. Craig Rodwell was alone and confused.

Dazed, being lured into a sweet, comfortable sleep.
So relaxed. But he had to get the note. The note. He had to put it where Collin would find it. For two weeks, Craig Rodwell had carefully planned that moment. He quit school, gave his two-week notice on the job, bought a bottle of turenol and then waited for Thursday night, when Collin went to Times Square to catch his usual diet of bargain 1930s movies.

Collin had left an hour ago. Everything went fine. But the note. Craig had taken half the bottle, fifteen pills, and then remembered he had left the note on a chair. The note instructed Collin to call Craig's aunt, so his mother would not have to hear the news from the police. God, Craig hated the police. Collin might not see the note on the chair, so Craig had to put it on the living room table. Jesus, he was tired. He'd finish the pills when he got back from the chair. He had to get the note over to the table.

*   *   *

A boring double bill, Collin thought, so he left the theater early. He found Craig stretched out between a chair and the living room couch. Craig remembered waking up hours later in Bellevue Hospital where a police officer stood over him, waiting to take a report. The sight of a cop infuriated him so much he bolted upright in bed, breaking the restraints. Months of sedatives and shock therapy followed. Rodwell groped for a purpose and it finally occurred to him. He would do something for the gay movement.

Harvey visited Craig once in the hospital. Rodwell next saw Milk where the pair had first met, cruising Central Park West. Ever the pragmatist, Harvey suggested an afternoon tryst. “I was still so madly in love with him,” says Rodwell. “I got such a thrill out of saying no.”

*   *   *

“Yes, I used to sell insurance with Harvey Milk, back almost twenty-five years ago.”
The septuagenarian's voice is tired and worn now, but the crankiness subsides for a moment as he falls back on his old memories. He was one of the few people with whom Milk had both a professional and personal friendship from the 1950s through the 1960s, the kind of gay father figure that many young homosexual professionals seek out early in their careers.

“I was sick once, in the hospital for two weeks. Harvey came in every single day with all the paperwork I needed. Kept me up to date at work in the hospital and then nursed me when I got home. He was a kind man, so gentle.”

But he doesn't have anything to say about the Harvey Milk people read about in the newspapers. That was a different person. What does politics have to do with homosexuality? The old man is afraid that by talking he might be exposed. It's not that he has any family left. No friends to shock either. As far as exposing his lover, well, they were together for twenty-three years and he passed on a few months back. He's retired, so there's no job to lose. It's just that their
condition
wasn't anything he ever talked about his whole life, so why start now? All homosexuals his age wanted to do was live undetected, be grateful if they passed, and then die, he explains. That should be easy to understand.

“Excuse me,” the old man says. “I'm just from a different generation.” But it's also the generation Harvey Milk came from, he stresses. Once, a long time ago.

*   *   *

Harvey was one of the lucky ones of his generation. At least he had lovers, knew other gay men, and could pursue sex and romance. These alternatives were available only to gays who lived in a handful of major American cities. Most homosexuals simply lived without. But even the lucky ones like Harvey paid the price of vigilance for their liberty. The constant fear of the loose phrase, the wrong pronoun, the chance moment, the misspoken word that might give it all away.

three

Judy Garland's Dead

“I came to New York so I could suck cock.”

John Galen McKinley delighted in telling Harvey that this was the sole explanation of why at sixteen he decided to quit high school, jump a Greyhound bus, and leave rural Hagerstown, Maryland, for the gay scene in Greenwich Village he'd heard rumors of.

Milk's friends immediately noted the physical resemblance McKinley bore to Joe Campbell. The mix of Scottish, Cherokee, and French-Canadian blood in Jack's background yielded deep sultry eyes, thick dark hair, and a compact build. Lodging came easy in New York, first with Tom O'Horgan, an entertainer who had made a small mark in the lounge circuit by telling jokes as he strummed a harp. By 1963, O'Horgan had gone bohemian and was trying his hand at experimental theater. McKinley had lived with O'Horgan for only a few weeks when he came in one day to announce that a handsome businessman twice his age was vying for his affection.

O'Horgan dismissed the news, thinking Jack was trying to make him jealous. He was relieved when the suitor materialized, since he was already worried that the sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. If Jack was indeed dangling the new boyfriend merely to tempt O'Horgan's devotion, Jack had vastly underestimated his new pursuer's tenacity.

Within a few weeks, McKinley moved into Harvey Milk's Upper West Side apartment. They bought a dog they named Trick, a cat they called Trade, and settled into a middle-class domestic marriage. At thirty-three, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.

Only months before, the insurance job had become so unbearable that one payday Milk collected his check, walked out at lunch, cashed it and never went back. Harvey never bothered with niceties like two weeks' notice once he made up his mind to do something. He finagled a job as a researcher in the information center of Bache & Company, a Wall Street investment firm. The job allowed him to use his sharp memory, his knack for math, and, most significantly, his uncanny intuitions about social and business trends that could influence investment futures. He rose rapidly. Within a year he was the information center supervisor. Soon he was issuing a daily report that provided updated tips for Bache's offices throughout the country.

Milk's success intrigued Monty Gordon, the man who had hired him. Gordon had spent years watching the men who took the entry-level jobs in the information center. He could instinctively pick out who would make it on Wall Street and who wouldn't. Harvey had covered up the years of drifting on his job application, concealing his jumps from teaching to Dallas by saying he had worked years at his dad's store. Nevertheless, from the first day Monty Gordon met Milk, he had one assessment—Harvey was a drifter, not cut from the Wall Street mold. He might wear three-piece suits, but Milk seemed somehow unsettled, as if he still didn't know what he actually wanted to do with his life. You could always depend on Harvey, Gordon thought; he'd always get the job done with flair and a personal touch, and his advice was literally making millions—for other people. But as for Harvey himself, Gordon sensed that he was uncertain, still not committed to any course. It was a race between talent and wanderlust, and Monty Gordon was betting against talent.

Milk kept his sexuality a closely guarded secret at work. Only one person managed to break the barriers between Harvey's personal and professional life and it wasn't by Milk's own choice. Jim Bruton, a Bache vice-president, met Milk when Harvey approached him for authorization to open an investment account as a guardian for a younger man who was his ward. Bruton, a perceptive and urbane man, could barely contain his smile as he looked Milk sternly in the eye.

“What's this guardian crap?” he asked. “What you're really talking about is opening an account for the boy you've got living with you. Right?”

Milk broke out laughing, and tore up the forms he had carefully filled out. “Okay, I guess we'll start this over.”

Bruton and Milk struck a warm friendship. Bruton was surprised to learn that his gregarious colleague had few close friends, lavishing virtually all his affection on his lover, Jack McKinley. Through the office grapevine, he also learned that however bright Milk was on business trends, he was downright callow when it came to cultivating professional relationships. In conferences, Milk would stubbornly stick to his own idiosyncratic ideas about economic trends, arguing bitterly with older executives who took their bearings from more orthodox business wisdom. Milk frequently ended up being right and didn't refrain from saying I told you so.

Bruton privately agreed that his friend was often smarter than his superiors, but he spent hours blasting Milk for his lack of tact. “That's not how you play the game if you want to get ahead,” Bruton insisted. Milk, however, heeded only his own advice.

Milk and Gordon became the Laurel and Hardy act of the Bache offices at 51 Wall Street and Milk's humor came to compensate for his poor marks in office politics. Harvey's ability to deliver Henny Youngman one-liners was the perfect foil to Gordon's drier wit. The company promoted Harvey rapidly over the years, frequently breaking its own salary policies to reward him with large annual raises.

Harvey used his income to share the good life with Jack. Like a patient father, Harvey intoduced Jack to opera, ballet, museums, and, of course, the reams of love notes and romantic poems he churned out. To Jack, it was love out of a Leslie Gore song. For all the flippancy that marked his sassy character, Jack fundamentally needed someone to take care of him and he had found the perfect protector in Harvey Milk.

Harvey took a new apartment in Greenwich Village. The flat had the bonus of overlooking the townhouse where opera star Leontyne Price lived. Milk spent hours at the window trying to catch a glimpse of the diva. He would occasionally play her records at high volume and after every aria applaud loudly, shouting “Bravo” out his open window.

Tom O'Horgan, meanwhile, had started producing experimental plays in his Lower East Side loft and at Ellen Steuart's fledgling Café La Mama. Harvey jumped at the chance to take a firsthand role in theater after so many years of watching ballets and operas. The bright McKinley showed a talent for tending to the technical aspects of theater and learned the basics of stage managing in O'Horgan's plays. The three became an indivisible trio: the teenaged high school dropout, the avant-garde director, and the Wall Street businessman. Harvey occasionally slipped O'Horgan a loan as he encouraged him to be more ambitious and take on a major production. While McKinley was learning his career and O'Horgan was setting his sights for his future, Harvey Milk, the only established professional in the bunch, was rubbing shoulders with an artistic community whose bohemian lives were thoroughly different from his own rigid conventionality.

Nothing brought out the incongruities of Harvey's new peer group more than political discussions. A hard-boiled conservative in the laissez-faire capitalist mold, Harvey and Jack spent much of the fall of 1964 rising early so they could distribute Barry Goldwater leaflets in New York City subways. Harvey even managed to talk Joe Campbell, his first lover, into campaigning for the Arizona Republican. Jack began to doggedly mimic Milk's stubborn arguments for Goldwater, much to the dismay of their theater friends, who considered such views only slightly more contemporary than the pterodactyl.