The Mayor of Castro Street (15 page)

The massive gay influx clearly was driving people to extremes. Baird saw gays as the new generation of residents and small businessmen who would revitalize a neighborhood that had been going to pot since the white flight of the 1950s. Most of his neighbors, however, were convinced the gays would come in, wreck the district, and then just go away, the way the flower children had destroyed the Haight.

Where were all these gays coming from, any way? they asked.

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Fortunately, older men found him cute.

That would be good for free drinks and a few dinners in those first difficult months.

Cleve Jones knew he was different long before the guys at Tempe High School in suburban Phoenix realized it. Once they did, Cleve had to learn how to bend over at just the right moment, affecting the right posture of pain, while still avoiding the full force of the punch that ground him into the locker room's tiled walls. When simple brutality grew tedious, Jones's classmates took to dunking his head in the toilet. Cleve became insecure. The slight Jones faked a lung ailment to escape from two years of gym classes. Even a five-minute oral report for English class would have him dry heaving in the bathroom for an hour. Cleve, everyone knew, was the class sissy.

Vaguely aware that his effeminacy stemmed from an infirmity he did not understand, Cleve slipped into the library of his father, a psychology professor at Arizona State University. Jones reached carefully into the shelves and looked under “H” in his dad's compendium of psychological disorders. He found homosexuality cross-referenced to a chapter discussing genital deformities and hormonal imbalances. The experts told him why he got beat up in gym class. Homosexuals, they said, were “injustice collectors,” as if injustices fell randomly from the sky and were magnetized toward a genetically predetermined human subspecies. In another generation, Jones might have then resigned himself to be another hapless miscreant doomed to liaisons in the Phoenix Greyhound depot.

During his sophomore year at Tempe High, however, Cleve read a small item in the back pages of the
Arizona Republic.
In New York City, homosexuals had rioted a few weeks before. Now they were actually forming organizations. Just think. Organizations for homosexuals. Cleve started reading the back pages more carefully and picked up more snippets. In San Francisco, homosexuals were influencing elections, coalescing into gay neighborhoods and even holding parades. From the age of fifteen on, Cleve Jones decided he had only one goal—to move to San Francisco and march in a Gay Freedom Day Parade. The beatings continued, of course, but Jones was courageous enough to scrawl the metaphor of his adolescent defiance on his notebook: “Jesus Christ had limp wrists. Nails do that to you.”

Jones hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1973, just weeks after his eighteenth birthday. That first night he ended up wandering the streets of the seedy Tenderloin district and was lucky enough to trick with Joey, a seventeen-year-old hustler from Mexico. As they climbed the stairs to Joey's room in the Grand Hotel, they walked through a hallway where a transvestite had killed himself that morning; his blood still stained the wall. A half dozen other seventeen- and eighteen-year-old hustlers shared the room; they let Cleve sleep on the floor in his sleeping bag until he got settled. Jones found a job as a bicycle delivery boy downtown and learned how to get free drinks and dinners from older men who liked his boyish looks. Every night, Cleve, Joey, and the rest of the gang rendezvoused at Bob's Burgers on Polk Street. Those hustlers who had had a generous trick that day treated the less fortunate to a cheeseburger and fries.

Cleve next got a job as a houseboy in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The once-legendary neighborhood had fallen into decay by 1973. The hard-core flower children had left for communes in Oregon and not very many people talked about creating the New Age any more. Jones and his young Haight friends started drifting over the hill to the run-down street where there were bars full of young gay and hippie men like himself. Those were exhilarating times to be gay on Castro Street. It was like being in a club without paying dues. The fellow émigrés tended to come from the counterculture, so Cleve shared not only a common sexuality, but the same general tastes in music, politics, and social values. Being gay in the Castro of 1973 meant being opposed to the Vietnam War, smoking marijuana, and having a more than casual interest in Hermann Hesse, Mick Jagger, Walt Whitman, and John Lennon.

The materialism of the early homosexual gentry was
passé.
These new gays were not going to devote their lives to acquiring tasteful end tables and spot-lighted impressionist paintings. Orange crates and Jimi Hendrix posters did just fine. No expensive colognes, just petulia oil. The carefully tailored suits of the gay upper crust or the flamboyant silk scarves and sheer shirts of the glitterati were nowhere to be seen. Instead came a new homosexual fashion born out of the J.C. Funky secondhand clothing shore. This august institution sold army fatigues and used blue jeans for $2 a pair, flannel shirts for $1.50, and hooded sweatshirts for $1.75. The prices were ideally suited for the customers' rejection of the work ethic. The fashions proved functional for the city's Mediterranean climate. Fashion designers later called it the layered look; the Castro men just called it cheap.

The new gay fashion matched a new gay attitude. The clothing spoke of strength and working-class machismo, not the gentle bourgeoise effetism of generations past. The politically conscious men of the Castro did not mince or step delicately down the street; they strutted defiantly. A sour look from a crusty Irish widow was the most valuable form of flattery.

The smart gay money had been buying up the neighborhood's Victorians for several years, renting long-vacant flats to groups of guys who could each afford to chip in $40 or $50 for their share of the monthly rent. The cheap leases and inexpensive wardrobes kept working time to a minimum and street life blossomed. Men with mustaches, miniskirts, and high-heeled pumps could be occasionally seen picking through the vegetable bins at the produce market. Campy street entertainment from artists like the Cockettes—featuring a black drag queen named Sylvester—flourished regularly on the streetcorners where the guys assembled to cruise and smoke joints.

The excitement sparked the imaginations of young men like Cleve Jones, who could tell the Castro neighborhood was going to go somewhere, even if he didn't know just where. Hanging out on the street one day, Jones stumbled into a camera store where he met a long-haired merchant who had a fondness for helping the young gay refugees who were pouring into the neighborhood. Maybe it was because the aging hippie foresaw that the lively young men might later be useful in campaigns; maybe it was just because he liked lively young men. It didn't matter, because in 1973, Harvey Milk was just a small camera shop owner and Cleve Jones was just another eighteen-year-old drifter far more interested in manning the dance floors than the barricades. But things were changing and all because boys like Cleve Jones got beat up and called sissy in high schools around the country and because a man like Harvey Milk was gaining a sense of how an unusual permutation of power, politics, and personality might rewrite the script by which gays had acted out their lives for so long.

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“Some people call me the unofficial mayor of Castro Street.”

Harvey first tried the title out during his unsuccessful run for supervisor. Once he threw himself into the Coors beer boycott and a host of other local issues, he always brought the title up to any reporter who happened by Castro Camera. Nobody was ever sure who the “some people” who allegedly made up the nickname were, but the appellation made good copy, so nobody groused.

Business was slow the first months, so Milk left Scott Smith to tend the store alone on many days and went off to meet his neighbors. He methodically walked door to door on the two-block central business strip of Castro Street, introducing himself to gay and straight merchants alike. At forty-three, Harvey was one of the older gay merchants and he sometimes was the first gay businessman who tried to make contact with the neighborhood's old-timers. He soon became an ex-officio liaison between the established Castro businessmen and the new gay merchants who were moving into the once boarded-up storefronts. What surprised many of the businessmen was that Milk never tried to drum up business with his visits; he just stopped by to chat.

When Harvey was in, Castro Camera became less a business establishment than a vest-pocket City Hall from which Harvey held court. The barest minimum of space was devoted to the skimpy camera supplies. An old overstuffed maroon couch was stretched in front of the store's large bay window, next to the old barber chair where The Kid sat much of the day, lapping at the hand of any customer who had a penchant for mutts. Harvey could often be found on his frumpy couch when new Castro residents came to find where to look for apartments, what to do with a lover who had an alcohol problem, or how to find that first job. Local merchants discovered that Harvey was the man to go to if police took too long to answer a suspected burglary or if the sewer overflowed; Harvey always knew whom to call at City Hall, or the reporter to buzz with the proper story of moral indignation if nothing was done. The store's large picture windows displayed announcements of upcoming demonstrations, environmental protests, commission hearings on Castro issues, or neighborhood meetings. Petitions for a host of causes, from whale-saving to gay rights, cluttered the beat-up counter. At night, Harvey took the addresses from every check cashed at the store that day and put it on his political mailing list.

Harvey loved circuses and holidays, especially Christmas, and the store's picture window sprang to life every December with ornate holiday displays. On Christmas Eve, the window would be packed with unopened presents under a fully decorated tree; the next morning, bows, ribbons, torn wrapping paper, and empty boxes lay haphazardly about the window, to be joined by bottles of Alka-Seltzer and Anacin a week later on New Year's Day.

More than one young boyish-looking patron would also be surprised when they came to pick up their photos and Harvey would giggle, “I see you have a new boyfriend.” Scott had worked out a system of marking the envelopes of incoming film from men who were particularly noteworthy, while Harvey thumbed through the daily delivery of processed photos to check for names of men he'd always wanted to see in less formal surroundings. If a customer seemed indignant at the prying, both Scott and Harvey would plead they were only spot-checking photos as part of their quality control. Neither Harvey nor Scott any longer put much faith in Harvey's once-dear devotion to fidelity. Promiscuity was practically an article of faith among the new gays of Castro Street, stemming both from the free-love hippie days and the adoption of aggressive male images. This proved particularly fortuitous for Harvey, whose sexual appetite never waned.

By now, of course, Harvey had found a political rationale for his accentuated horniness. As a representative of the SIR publicity committee, Harvey talked to a human sexuality class at Napa State University shortly after his forty-fourth birthday in 1974. He surprised the students by saying that intensified sexuality was one of the benefits of not being able to hold hands or express affection publicly. “What happens is,” he explained, “You get inside that room and the door closes. The intensity of the relationship increases to make up for it. The sexuality of many homosexuals is one of a very intense moment. In essence, sometimes I say thank you because the repression of my outside activities has heightened my inside activities.”

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The old Irish businesses resisted the rapid shift in the Castro area. The first skirmish came when two gay men tried to open up an antique store. The established burghers associated with the Eureka Valley Merchants Association (EVMA) were taken aback; an antique store just doors down from The Family Store where the kids go to buy their Most Holy Redeemer uniforms? The EVMA pushed the police to deny the store a resale license. The antique store won the fight, but the fracas soured relations between the old and new merchants. The EVMA would have nothing to do with the gay invaders.

Milk took a page from his grandfather's problems with the Rockaway Hunt Club. He assembled the younger gay merchants in the back room of a pizza parlor and resurrected a short-lived merchants group that had been organized by hippies a few years before. Harvey was dutifully elected president of the Castro Village Association (CVA), if for no other reason than nobody else wanted the job.

Harvey quickly picked up a new slogan. While he had spent 1973 preaching that gays should vote gay, 1974 was the year he insisted gays should buy gay. At various appearances at SIR meetings and any public forum he could muster, Milk enthusiastically talked about when blacks refused to be shunted to the back of municipal buses and the policy had changed not because whites came to understand the moral problems of discrimination, but because a year-long boycott was driving the bus company into the red. “Blacks won the right to ride buses for the wrong reason,” he argued, “but they won. When you want to win, it doesn't make a difference whether you win for the wrong reason. It's better than not winning at all.”

Milk took to promoting his new theories through the CVA with all the flair he had once demonstrated in pushing Broadway shows. He read in the newspaper one morning that Polk Street, a heavily gay area, was planning a street fair. Castro Street was not going to be outdone, he decided, so Milk cajoled the other CVA members to organize a Castro Street Fair. Over five thousand came to the first fair in August 1974. The street hadn't seen a crowd like that since the festival celebrating California's centennial fifteen years earlier. An Italian liquor store owner who had decried the gay onslaught rushed to Castro Camera the next day to tell Milk breathlessly he had sold three times the booze on that one Sunday than on any other single day in his decades of business. It was as if he just figured out that homosexuals liked ice-cold cans of Bud like anybody else. He signed up as a CVA member.