The Mayor of Castro Street (20 page)

The young men from Port Arthur, Tulsa, and Davenport were crowding in on the early hip invaders, and men of the new gay subculture followed their predecessors more in style than substance. Their common ground, of course, was their male gender and their sexuality. The casual practicality that dictated the Castro's earlier fashions slipped into rigid macho conformity. The men didn't buy plaid shirts from J.C. Funky's for $1.50, but the expensive Pendleton variety from All-American Boy, tightly fit to show just the right tuft of chest hair. No more used jeans, but brand-new straight-legged models, pulled tight at the ass and suggestively stretched around the crotch. The fashion models were derived from the most virile male images of the society—cowboys, construction workers, and military men. Cowboy hats and Western Fryes became common. Engineer boots, keys dangling from the belt, and a shiny hard hat lent the contractor's look. Fatigues, army jackets, olive caps, and leather bomber jackets also became de rigueur.

The mating rituals became carefully honed as the hundreds of young men cruised the strip. Eye contact first, maybe a slight nod, and, if all goes well, the right strut over to the intended with an appropriately cool grunt of greeting. Getting that far was three-quarters of the battle and a few sentences more were all that was necessary to complete arrangements for a tryst. But if the first stare was too longing, if the nod came off at all prissy, if the salutation's tone was not aloof or masculine enough, then you could blow the whole thing
that
easy. Before long, the posturing became a caricature of the heterosexual ideal, as if this new generation of gays were out to deliver one big “fuck you” to society. Tell ‘em they're femmy queers who need wrist-splints and lisp lessons and they'll end up looking like a bunch of cowboys, loggers, and
M.P.S.
Whaddaya think of that?

*   *   *

“Harvey, they're coming here to be free and they all look alike.”

Haight Street camera shop owner Rick Nichols moved to the Castro in the early days. Nichols was irritated that the emerging macho conformity both amused and delighted his friend Milk. They were on the tattered maroon couch, going over the familiar argument.

“They have to find a family here,” Milk snapped back. “They need support—they've never had it before. This is the first chance they've ever had to be free.”

“Why are they going about it like
this?
” Nichols asked. “All they're doing is fitting into another mold, finding a new conformity.”

“They've been through hell, give these guys a break. This is just a necessary stage they're going through, once they've done their Castro bit, they'll go on to…” Harvey paused, not able to think of what exactly they would go
to,
but he dismissed the problem with a characteristically grand flourish of his hands. “They'll go on to something else.”

Nichols thought the new gay denizens were on the wrong track. The point of gay liberation was not to make it so gay men could be macho too, but to make macho passé altogether. “They're not being free,” he said, “they're just being lazy.”

Nichols was never sure whether Harvey was as interested in the sociological implications of the burgeoning gay counterculture as he was in the vast numbers of handsome young men. The romance with Scott was slowly fading. They remained business partners and confidants, but the couple also took ample advantage of the available material, especially the young waifs Harvey had always found so appealing. Though Harvey was in his mid-forties, his sexual appetite showed no signs of diminishing.

Scott and Harvey casually lived above the camera store. Between the campaigning, community organizing, and scores of commission hearings Milk addictively attended, he had never gotten the chance to unpack all the boxes of his New York possessions. As the years wore on, every available table and counter became buried in the reams of fliers, news clippings, and official reports, which Harvey could never bring himself to throw away. But the kitchen remained in working order and several times a month Harvey's friends would troop to Castro Street for a multicoursed feast. Other than the circus and an occasional ballet or opera performance, cooking remained the only luxury the peripatetic campaigner permitted himself.

For all the money made by Castro Street merchants—in no small part because Milk tirelessly promoted the neighborhood as America's gay Main Street—Harvey concerned himself little with the mundane matters of business. Milk's lack of interest in his commercial health exasperated bookstore owner Donn Tatum.

“Harvey, you should get more stock. Look at all this space,” Tatum waved his hand around the cavernous store, most of which was filled with campaign paraphernalia. “You could start selling used cameras. You should see all the business stores in downtown do in used cameras.”

Harvey dismissed the pleas with a wave of his hand.

“If I did that, I'd have to put bars on the windows and worry about burglars,” he said.

Milk sometimes mentioned that his lease expired in 1978 and that if neighborhood patterns held steady, his rent would probably double or triple. “At that point, I may have to rethink our policy of being a specialty shop,” he'd say—and then he'd be off campaigning more.

Milk's laissez-faire attitude about his own success did not prevent him from needling old-time merchants who had originally been so fearful about the gay influx. “How much is that building worth now?” Harvey asked a neighboring realtor, knowing full well the value had gone up 250 percent between 1972 and 1975. When the old realtor mumbled that it was probably worth more, not sure just how much though, Harvey did his best not to say “I told you so,” and put on his backslapping politico's manner. “That's good to hear, real good.”

Another store owner had complained that the early gays were destroying the “family character” of the Castro. Harvey tried to affect genuine concern when he asked, “By the way, you're not having any problems—your business
is
all right?” The merchant would be damned if he was going to concede that business had tripled since a gay bar had replaced the competition across the street, but he would grumble, “No, we're doing just fine.” Harvey would nod his head with relief, as if a great burden was lifted from his shoulders. “Just checking.”

The Italian delicatessen owner once talked of how gays were disrupting the “neighborhood balance.” By 1976, he had hired homosexual clerks and was courting the new gay business. The old man who owned the windowshade shop—and was originally horrified at the gay invasion—discovered new-found appreciation for decor-minded gays when his business soared. The young manager of Cliff's Variety Store, Ernie Astin—the fourth generation of his family to run the emporium—had no problems with gays, and he became the only straight charter member of the revitalized CVA. In constant contact with gay merchants, Astin realized that gays were renovating hundreds of the area's old Victorians, so he bolstered his store's stock of building supplies. The area's two established hardware store owners snubbed both the CVA and gay clientele and were out of touch with the new buying trends. They both went out of business when Cliff gobbled up the lion's share of business in renovation hardware.

The CVA's membership jumped to nearly sixty members in one year, about half of whom were straight. Membership rolls increased another 50 percent in 1976, dwarfing the old EVMA. The 1975 Castro Street Fair drew twenty-five thousand, making it the best attended neighborhood fair in the city. About 100,000 came to bask in the August sunshine for the 1976 fair. Still, the downtown-based Council of District Merchants adamantly refused to let the CVA—by now, the best-known merchants group in the city—join and be enfranchised as an official district merchants organization.

*   *   *

The trend that most caught the eye of San Francisco was the massive facelift gays gave to a neighborhood that had been degenerating into an eyesore. The endless rows of Victorians had been little more than tract housing when they were built in the 1880s; to the Irish who stayed in the neighborhoods until the 1970s, they were just “old houses.” Unburdened by a homebody wife and 2.2 children, the gay immigrants started an unprecedented wave of private urban renewal. Block after block of high Italianate Edwardian homes burst forth in polychromatic splendor. News that a pair of men had bought the home next door would once have set shudders up Mrs. Gallagher's housecoat, but by 1976 the same revelation sent her to the phone to euphorically report, “Guess what—gays have moved in next door!”

The Irish who had sold out in the panic of the late sixties now kicked themselves as they saw housing prices as much as double in six months, and increase another 50 percent six months later. Between 1973 and 1976, prices of many of the solid old homes quintupled. The phenomenon engendered a new kind of blockbusting. Many of the old ethnic pensioners found they couldn't afford
not
to sell their homes at the astronomical sums they were being offered, so they moved out and the neighborhood became even more gay. Real estate speculation created similar conditions in all parts of San Francisco, but in no area was the explosion as marked as in the Castro where thousands were willing to pay any price to live at last in a neighborhood where they would not be different.

The dream that Harvey and Allan Baird shared of an integrated neighborhood was taking a drubbing by 1976. The traditionalists who remembered the days when the district was called a parish had been far too stubborn to live side by side with people whom the church, the law, and the city government had always said were to be disdained and disparaged. Maybe a more educated, genteel neighborhood could have absorbed the influx and become a mix of gay and straight like Greenwich Village, but that would not be the fate of the Castro. Exacerbating the rapid change were the massive numbers of gays moving in. The high schools of America had been filled with class sissies like Cleve Jones who had suffered too much to stay in their hometowns. There had been too many wrongs; the lure of their own neighborhood was too great; their numbers would elbow out the old-timers who did not understand.

The Alioto administration had roundly ignored the homosexual immigration, but the political potential was not lost on a wily politician like George Moscone. George became a regular at the cocktail parties of the Alice Toklas Club. Gays who, months before, could not even get an appointment with Mayor Alioto, were being charmed by Mayor Moscone at every major gay event.

“Hey, Michelle,” Moscone shouted to a prominent drag entertainer at his first major post-election gay speech. “How come you didn't wear a gown at the swearing-in ceremony like you promised?”

“When you escort me down the marble stairway, I'll wear a gown to City Hall,” Michelle shot back.

“I'll do that when you dress and look like Jeanette MacDonald,” Moscone quipped, adding, “And I know you're going to answer me, ‘And when I look like Nelson Eddy, right?'”

The changes ran deeper than jokes and personal appearances. The most meaningful gesture for gays, and the move that remained the most controversial of his administration, came with the appointment of Charles Gain as chief of police. Calling himself a “sociological cop,” the soft-spoken, pensive Gain had worked his way up through the Oakland Police Department, serving as its chief during the tense years of racial strife there. Gain's conciliatory posture with blacks earned him applause as one of the most liberal law-enforcement officials in the country, and an early vote of no confidence from the city's heavily white police force.

Gain acted swiftly to shake up the old-boy Irish network that had made San Francisco's nepotic department the laughing stock of California police agencies. Police veterans gasped when Gain took the oversized American flag out of the Hall of Justice lobby, saying such super-patriotism alienated many of San Francisco's cosmopolitan citizens. Even worse, Gain issued an edict that had most cops muttering invectives: From now on, Gain ordered, police officers were not allowed to drink on duty. Police rank and file were also stung when Gain ordered that the traditional black and white SFPD cars be repainted a powder blue and labelled “Police Services,” reflecting a softer, more humanistic posture. Police old-timers thought the new color scheme was sissified.

The biggest shocker concerned the policies Gain demanded of his officers in dealing with gays. He had come to Oakland as a child from Texas, he explained to gay reporters, and he could never forget how the other neighborhood kids made fun of his Southwestern drawl. He knew what it was like to be different and he wasn't going to let his officers treat gays with any less respect than other San Franciscans just because they happened to be different. A reporter from a gay paper asked what Gain would do if a gay police officer came out. “I certainly think that a gay policeman could be up front about it under me,” Gain replied. “If I had a gay policeman who came out, I would support him one hundred percent.” After the quote broke in gay papers, the two dailies called Gain to see if such an unlikely statement could possibly be true. Gain repeated his stance, stressing that not only would he support gay cops, but that he hoped they stepped forward since it only made sense that a police force should reflect the city it served and gays certainly deserved to be represented. The story made headlines locally and nationally.

Within days, the graffiti appeared in bathrooms throughout the Hall of Justice: “Gain Is a Fruit.” Veterans joked that you didn't get ahead by the reports you issued over Gain's desk but the service you could perform under it. The great mass of the SFPD, from the captains and assistant chiefs to the lowest beat cop, never forgave Charles Gain for the remark he made about gay cops in the first weeks of his tenure.

*   *   *

“President Ford should be coming out through that door.”