Castro Street
Since the end of World
War II, the major port city of San
Francisco had been home to a sizable number of gay men who had been
expelled from the military and decided to stay rather than return to their hometowns
and face ostracism. By 1969 the Kinsey Institute believed San Francisco had more gay people per
capita than any other American city;
when the National Institute of Mental
Health asked the Institute to survey homosexuals, the Institute chose San Francisco as its focus. Milk and McKinley were among the thousands of
gay men attracted to San Francisco.
McKinley was a stage manager for Tom
O'Horgan, a director who started his career in experimental theater, but
soon graduated to much larger Broadway
productions. They arrived in 1969 with the Broadway
touring company of Hair. McKinley was
offered a job in the New York City
production of Jesus Christ Superstar,
and their tempestuous relationship came to an end. The city appealed to Milk so
much that he decided to stay, working at an investment firm. In 1970,
increasingly frustrated with the political climate after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Milk let his hair grow long. When told to cut it, he
refused and was fired.
Milk drifted from California
to Texas to New York, without a steady job or plan. In New York City he became involved with O'Horgan's theater company as
a "general aide", signing
on as associate producer for Lenny and for Eve
Merriam's Inner City. The time he
had spent with the cast of flower children wore away much of Milk's
conservatism. A contemporary New York
Times story about O'Horgan described Milk as "a sad-eyed man—another aging hippie with long, long hair, wearing
faded jeans and pretty beads". Craig Rodwell read the description of
the formerly uptight man and wondered if it could be the same person. One of Milk's
Wall Street friends worried that he
seemed to have no plan or future, but remembered Milk's attitude: "I think he was happier than at any
time I had ever seen him in his entire life."
Milk met Scott Smith,
18 years his junior, and began another relationship. Milk and Smith returned to
San Francisco, where they lived on
money they had saved. In March 1973,
after a roll of film Milk left at a local shop was ruined, he and Smith opened
a camera store on Castro Street with
their last $1,000.
Changing politics
In the late 1960s, the Society
for Individual Rights (SIR) and the Daughters
of Bilitis (DOB) began to work against police persecution of gay bars and
entrapment in San Francisco. Oral
sex was still a felony, and in 1970, nearly 90 people in the city were arrested
for having sex in public parks at night. Mayor Alioto asked the police to
target the parks, hoping the decision would appeal to the Archdiocese and his Catholic
supporters. In 1971, 2,800 gay men were arrested for public sex in San Francisco. By comparison, New York City recorded only 63 arrests
for the same offense that year. Any
arrest for a morals charge required registration as a sex offender.
Congressman Phillip
Burton, Assemblyman Willie Brown,
and other California politicians
recognized the growing clout and organization of homosexuals in the city, and
courted their votes by attending meetings of gay and lesbian organizations.
Brown pushed for the legalization of sex between consenting adults in 1969 but
failed. SIR was also pursued by popular moderate Supervisor Dianne Feinstein in her bid to become mayor, opposing
Alioto. Ex-policeman Richard Hongisto
worked for 10 years to change the conservative views of the San Francisco Police Department, and
also actively appealed to the gay community, which responded by raising
significant funds for his campaign for sheriff. Though Feinstein was
unsuccessful, Hongisto's win in 1971 showed the political clout of the gay
community.
SIR had become
powerful enough for political maneuvering. In 1971 SIR members Jim Foster, Rick
Stokes and Advocate publisher David Goodstein formed the Alice
B. Toklas Memorial Democratic
Club, known as simply "Alice".
Alice befriended liberal politicians to persuade them to sponsor bills, proving
successful in 1972 when Del Martin
and Phyllis Lyon obtained
Feinstein's support for an ordinance outlawing employment discrimination on the
basis of sexual orientation. Alice chose Stokes to run for a relatively
unimportant seat on the community college board. Though Stokes received 45,000
votes, he was quiet and unassuming and did not win. Foster, however, shot to
national prominence by being the first openly gay man to address a political
convention. His speech at the 1972
Democratic National Convention ensured that his voice, according to San Francisco politicians, was the one
to be heard when they wanted the opinions, and especially the votes, of the gay
community.
Milk became more interested in political and civic matters
when he was faced with civic problems and policies he disliked. One day in
1973, a state bureaucrat entered Milk's shop Castro Camera and informed him that he owed $100 as a deposit
against state sales tax. Milk was incredulous and traded shouts with the man
about the rights of business owners; after he complained for weeks at state
offices, the deposit was reduced to $30. Milk fumed about government priorities
when a teacher came into his store to borrow a projector because the equipment
in the schools did not function. Friends also remember around the same time
having to restrain him from kicking the television while Attorney General John N. Mitchell gave consistent "I don't recall" replies during
the Watergate hearings. Milk
decided that the time had come to run for city supervisor. He said later, "I finally reached the point where I
knew I had to become involved or shut up".
Campaigns
Milk received an icy reception from the gay political
establishment in San Francisco. Jim Foster, who had by then been active
in gay politics for ten years, resented that the newcomer had asked for his
endorsement for a position as prestigious as a city supervisor. Foster told Milk,
"There's an old saying in the Democratic Party. You don't get to
dance unless you put up the chairs. I've never seen you put up the
chairs." Milk was furious that
Foster had snubbed him for the position, and the conversation marked the
beginning of an antagonistic relationship between the "Alice" Club and Harvey
Milk. Some gay bar owners, still battling police harassment and unhappy
with what they saw as a timid approach by Alice to established authority in the
city, decided to endorse him.
Milk had drifted through life up to this point, but he found
his vocation, according to journalist Frances
FitzGerald, who called him a "born
politician". At first, his
inexperience showed. He tried to do without money, support, or staff, and
instead relied on his message of sound financial management, promoting
individuals over large corporations and government. After one debate, an opponent told him, "you really gotta change your rap; it's
a downer." He supported the reorganization of supervisor
elections from a citywide ballot to district ballots, which was intended to
reduce the influence of money and give neighborhoods more control over their
representatives in city government. He also ran on a culturally liberal
platform, opposing government interference in private sexual matters and
favoring the legalization of marijuana. Milk's fiery, flamboyant speeches and
savvy media skills earned him a significant amount of press during the 1973
election. He earned 16,900 votes—sweeping the Castro District and other liberal neighborhoods and coming in 10th place
out of 32 candidates. Had the elections
been reorganized to allow districts to elect their own supervisors, he would
have won.
Mayor of Castro
Street
From early in his political career, Milk displayed an
affinity for building coalitions. The Teamsters
wanted to strike against beer distributors—Coors
in particular—who refused to sign the union contract. An organizer asked Milk
for assistance with gay bars; in return, Milk asked the union to hire more gay
drivers. A few days later, Milk canvassed the gay bars in and surrounding the Castro District, urging them to refuse
to sell the beer. With the help of a coalition of Arab and Chinese grocers,
the Teamsters had also recruited, the
boycott was successful. Milk found a
strong political ally in organized labor, and it was around this time that he
began to style himself "The Mayor of
Castro Street". As Castro Street's presence grew, so did
Milk's reputation. Tom O'Horgan
remarked, "Harvey spent most of his
life looking for a stage. On Castro
Street he finally found it."
Tensions were growing between the older citizens of the Most Holy Redeemer Parish and the gays
who were entering the Castro District.
In 1973, two gay men tried to open an antique shop, but the Eureka Valley Merchants Association (EVMA) attempted
to prevent them from receiving a business license. Milk and a few other gay
business owners founded the Castro
Village Association, with Milk as the president. He often repeated his
philosophy that gays should buy from gay businesses. Milk organized the Castro Street Fair in 1974 to attract
more customers to the area. More than
5,000 attended, and some of the EVMA
members were stunned; they did more business at the Castro Street Fair than on any previous day.
Serious candidate
Although he was a newcomer to the Castro District, Milk had shown leadership in the small community.
He was starting to be taken seriously as a candidate and decided to run again
for supervisor in 1975. He reconsidered his approach and cut his long hair,
swore off marijuana, and vowed never to visit another gay bathhouse again. Milk's campaigning earned the support of the
teamsters, firefighters, and construction unions. His store, Castro Camera became the center of
activity in the neighborhood. Milk would often pull people off the street to
work his campaigns—many discovered later that they just happened to be the type
of men Milk found attractive.
Milk favored support for small businesses and the growth of neighborhoods. Since 1968, Mayor Alioto had been luring
large corporations to the city despite what critics labeled "the Manhattanization of San
Francisco". As blue-collar jobs were replaced by the
service industry, Alioto's weakened political base allowed for new leadership
to be voted into office in the city. In 1975, state senator George Moscone was
elected mayor. Moscone had been instrumental in repealing the sodomy law
earlier that year in the California
State Legislature. He acknowledged Milk's influence in his election by
visiting Milk's election night headquarters, thanking Milk personally, and
offering him a position as a city commissioner. Milk came in seventh place in
the election, only one position away from earning a supervisor seat. Liberal politicians held the offices of the
mayor, district attorney, and sheriff.
Despite the new leadership in the city, there were still
conservative strongholds. In one of Moscone's first acts as mayor, he appointed
a police chief to the embattled San
Francisco Police Department (SFPD). He chose Charles Gain, against the wishes of the SFPD. Most of the force disliked Gain for criticizing the police
in the press for racial insensitivity and alcohol abuse on the job, instead of
working within the command structure to change attitudes. By the request of the mayor, Gain made it clear
that gay police officers would be welcomed in the department; this became
national news. Police under Gain expressed their hatred of him, and of the
mayor for betraying them.
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