The Mayor of Castro Street (7 page)

Joe Campbell also found himself at the center of a network of avant-garde friends who clustered at Joe's hangout, Kelly's Bar. As New York's best-known hustler bar, Kelly's had become the watering hole of Manhattan's new trashy chic set. Campbell traveled on the fringes of the Andy Warhol crowd, where he was dubbed the “Sugar Plum Fairy,” the name rock ‘n' roller Lou Reed later called Campbell in Reed's paeon to the New York hustling scene, “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Harvey could never completely abandon his protector role with any of his former lovers, and he occasionally dropped by Kelly's to see Campbell. Campbell's trendy friends were amazed that Joe had spent nearly seven years with Milk. The staid businessman didn't seem enough—attractive enough, rich enough, and certainly not chic enough—to warrant the attentions of the dazzling Sugar Plum Fairy.

Campbell was amused at Milk's attempt to juggle his stolid bourgeois values with the new peer group Harvey was finding among the least traditional folk in New York. “Here Harvey is trying to lead the perfect middle-class life with the perfect monogamous marriage and the upwardly mobile Wall Street career,” Campbell thought, “But he can't get away from the fact that he's a faggot and a Jew. He'll always be Minnie's boy.”

Harvey worried incessantly that Campbell might seduce Jack. At one point, he even presented Joe with a statement that solemnly swore that Joe would never go to bed with Harvey's newest ingenue. He refused to sign, but Joe's new romantic interest allayed Harvey's fear. Joe fell head over heels for a younger man he met at Kelly's, Oliver “Bill” Sipple. The pair soon left New York to set up housekeeping in Fort Lauderdale.

Then Joe crashed his motorcycle. Billy couldn't get a job. Within months, they were broke and Harvey had to fly down to loan them enough money to pull through the next few difficult months.

*   *   *

The final heart attack struck when Minnie was preparing a Thanksgiving turkey for a Lower East Side mission. Harvey ordered a traditional white Jewish shroud for Minnie's funeral—and then had her body cremated, spreading her ashes on the Atlantic Ocean. The cremation infuriated the more orthodox Robert Milk. Harvey later told friends that upon learning of the cremation, Bob had accusingly shouted, “You burned my mother.”

Harvey had never been particularly close to either his brother or father, so the fracas at Minnie's death did little more than finalize a split between Harvey and the male members of his family. Harvey never had much to do with his family after that.

*   *   *

A sunny July afternoon in 1964,
just the kind of day that made Jim Bruton glad he'd invested in his East Hampton house. Jim and Harvey spent the afternoon in an exhausting volleyball game. Despite Milk's athletic prowess, his team had lost, largely because of the vigor of a strong, handsome opponent in his mid-fifties.

“You'll end up just like him if you keep exercising,” Bruton told Milk. “You've kept your body in shape so far. You've got a quick mind. Keep it all in shape and you'll be as attractive as he is twenty years from now.”

“No, he's over fifty,” Harvey said matter-of-factly. “I'll never make it that far.”

Jim thought Harvey was gearing up for one of his sick jokes. “The only way you'll go before you're fifty is if you finally get somebody at the office so mad that they'll push you out a window on Wall Street,” he joked.

“No, really,” Harvey insisted. “Something will happen before then.”

Jim knew Harvey had a tendency to be melodramatic, but this talk was taking it a little far, he thought.

“Harvey, we all have that kind of feeling now and then. It's nothing to take that seriously.”

“I've known it since I was a kid,” Milk persisted. “I'll never make it to fifty. There's just something sinister down the road. I don't know what it is, but it's there.”

That's how Bruton recalled the conversation years later. Harvey was almost nonchalant about a conviction Bruton considered morbid. Milk never dwelled on the point, but it occasionally came up during the years of their friendship. After a whirlwind week of going to opera, ballet, and theater performances, the pair retired to the Russian Tea Room next to Carnegie Hall one night where a somewhat dazed Bruton mentioned they had partied four of the last seven nights.

“Harvey, while you're doing this, you're not putting any money away,” Jim warned. “You're blowing your future. You should invest your money in a house or something.”

“What for?” Milk asked. “I'll never live to enjoy it.”

Bruton looked at his friend incredulously.

“I've got to live fast,” Harvey said. “I know I'm not going to live long.”

Maybe it was these forbodings that kept Milk's own compass set strictly on the present with little regard for either the past or future. Harvey sometimes told the story of how he had bought Minnie a handsome set of porcelain dinnerware on one of his many leaves in Japan. He returned home to find that Minnie had given the new dishes a place of honor in her china cabinet while she kept on using the plain dinner sets that had withstood decades of use in the Milk family. Harvey shouted that he had bought his porcelain for Minnie to use, and not to save in some cabinet. Milk promptly ran through the kitchen collecting every old dish in the house and then proceeded to smash them. “Now,” he humphed, “You
have
to use them.”

*   *   *

Jack McKinley was a paradox, Harvey complained. At times, he was the bright, vivacious charmer Harvey had fallen in love with. But from the start, he had also been given to moody fits of depression. The psychiatrist had a word for the contradictions: manic-depressive.

Friends first attributed the problems to his background. Jack had, after all, been the youngest of a large, impoverished brood, raised on the strict backwater fundamentalism common among the poor families of rural Appalachia. The way Jack told it, the sin of Sodom was, to his family, only slightly less heinous than matricide. It was hardly a prescription for good mental health. But Jack's problems did not fade as the years separated him from his unhappy youth. They got worse.

He started using the drugs that were coming in to vogue in the mid-sixties—marijuana, speed, and LSD. He took to drinking. He returned from binges to tell Harvey tales of sexual promiscuity. Harvey soon stopped getting jealous. That would get Jack even further depressed and he'd drink more. Early on, Jack discovered he had one trump card that was guaranteed to light the short fuse of Harvey's temper—the suicide threat.

One night at the couple's Greenwich Village flat, Harvey heard a clatter in the garage. He arrived just in time to cut McKinley down from the rafter. After a particularly bitter fight, McKinley and Milk were walking through the narrow Village streets and the youth simply threw himself in front of a taxi. He missed death by inches.

Harvey tried sending him to a psychiatrist. After a month of visits, however, Jack bored of the mental gymnastics and increased his drinking. Harvey thought Jack might improve his self-image if he resumed his aborted education. Jack, however, was glad to have bypassed high school and would have nothing to do with such tedium.

A tragic turn in Joe Campbell's life gave Milk the chance to try to shock McKinley out of his suicide threats. Campbell's love for Billy Sipple had a passion Joe had never felt for Harvey. One afternoon, he returned to their Fort Lauderdale apartment to find that Billy had summarily left him. Campbell moved back to New York and promptly tried to kill himself.

Doctors had to perform a tracheotomy to save his life. Tubes coursed in and out of various parts of his body when Harvey took Jack to see the slumbering twenty-nine-year-old. “That's what happens when you don't succeed,” Harvey explained tersely.

Harvey kept a long vigil over Campbell, insisting someone should be there when he awoke. As Campbell slept, Harvey ruminated about suicide, a phenomenon that would haunt his life and loves for decades. He wrote Campbell a letter, concluding with his basic assessment of existence:

Life is rotten—hard—bitter and so forth—but life is life and the best that we have—no one should take another's—no one should let another take his—

people in worse situations than you have come back strong—have been against worse odds and won—only because they felt that somewhere there was some reason for living—they are not sure, but they had hope.

Love As Always,

H.

When Joe awoke, Harvey had blunter advice. “If you're going to commit suicide, you should go deep in a forest, cover yourself up with leaves and needles, then take all the pills you want.” Leaving a messy aftermath was simply bad theater. Harvey also mentioned his amazement that Joe would try to kill himself over the young unschooled Billy Sipple, and not for Harvey who had always done so much for him. The sight of Joe Campbell lying in that hospital bed breathing through a tube in his throat would return to Harvey's mind a decade later in San Francisco when Billy Sipple made his rendezvous with history.

*   *   *

Harvey thought Jack might improve if he left Manhattan's fast lane for a slower paced life, so in 1967 Milk accepted a transfer to work for Bache in Dallas. Jack lasted all of a few weeks in Texas. He quickly packed and moved back to Greenwich Village where his friend, Tom O'Horgan, had attracted enough acclaim to be asked to take over a faltering production about the budding counterculture.

In McKinley's absence, Harvey took to courting a handsome, blond twenty-one-year-old named Joe Turner. There was the usual fare of love notes, candlelight dinners, and evenings at the ballet. Harvey talked excitedly about the incredible success O'Horgan was having with his first Broadway play,
Hair.

McKinley, now the
Hair
stage manager, returned to visit Harvey in Dallas. He was no longer the cute young boy Harvey had known. His thick dark hair tumbled around his shoulders. He was wearing an unlikely outfit of beads, bells, fringed boots, and a transparent shirt with puffy medieval sleeves. Hippies were taking over New York, but Dallas had never seen the likes of it. Joe Turner, for one, thought Jack looked like an erotic dream of Genghis Khan.

The old problems persisted, despite the new image. Turner visited Harvey one night during Jack's stay to find Milk uncharacteristically subdued. Jack had taken a knife and locked himself in the bathroom, swearing he would kill himself, Milk explained. As Turner left, Harvey assured him, “Don't worry. He's done this before.”

Harvey asked for a transfer back to New York in 1968, growing dissatisfied with his life in Texas. He soon resigned from Bache. His boss, Monty Gordon, was not surprised. After five years with the firm, Milk was still a drifter, Gordon thought, still unsure of what he wanted to do when he grew up.

The times clearly were eroding Milk's conservatism. With both McKinley and O'Horgan preoccupied with
Hair,
Milk found himself surrounded by some of the most outrageous flower children on the continent. Harvey started assimilating the new countercultural values, which spurned materialism, eschewed conformity, and mocked orthodoxy. With each month, Milk's hair became a little longer. With each political argument, his views became more flexible. With each new apartment, he discarded more of the tasteful furniture, stylish decor, and middle-class comforts he had cherished since first settling down with Joe Campbell in 1956.

McKinley got the job as stage director for the San Francisco production of
Hair.
Harvey followed and took a job as a financial analyst on Montgomery Street, the heart of the city's financial district. When friends asked how Harvey could continue to put up with Jack's drinking and periodic suicide threats, Harvey would make a bawdy comment about Jack's finely curved buns. Indeed, the sexual bond was one of the few connections the pair had. Their house was adorned with large blowups of this unclad aspect of Jack's anatomy.

Though Harvey quickly came to love the more laid-back pace of San Francisco, his relationship with McKinley deteriorated steadily. One night, McKinley stormed out of a performance of the campy Cockettes when he saw Harvey flirting with another young man. Milk ended up taking that man home, only to be awakened by a soggy, mud-covered McKinley who claimed he had thrown himself off a pier near Fisherman's Wharf. Rather than falling to a lover's death, Jack landed in four feet of water and the oozy floor of San Francisco Bay. Frustrated, Jack started wildly throwing punches at Milk and could only be restrained when Harvey literally tied him up and threw him in a closet.

The next morning, Harvey unbound Jack. McKinley marched to the kitchen table where his competition was munching on a piece of toast. “You've been fucked and fed,” McKinley shouted. “Now leave.”

By then, Harvey had had enough. Though Jack had little formal education, his quick wit and easy charm had earned him success as a Broadway stage manager. He was no longer a helpless sixteen-year-old who needed a protector. Tom O'Horgan offered Jack the job as stage manager of his new play, a rock opera based on the life of Jesus Christ. Jack moved back to New York. Harvey moved in with a group of “Hair” cast members and stayed in San Francisco; that, he said, was where his future lay.

*   *   *

“I would love to be mayor of San Francisco.”

Harvey's new roommate, Tom Eure, knew Milk had a weird sense of humor, but he had a queasy feeling that Harvey wasn't joking when he made that observation over breakfast one morning. The newspapers were full of talk about the 1969 municipal elections. “Yes,” Harvey stated conclusively. “I want to be mayor.”

Harvey's new found liberalism was rankled by San Francisco politics. Downtown business interests controlled City Hall, he complained. Gays had no voice in city government at all. No matter how liberal that new candidate Dianne Feinstein sounded, Milk wasn't convinced she would do much to substantively change the problems. Eighteen years earlier, Harvey had decided
he
could help stop the communist tide in Korea; now, he could save San Francisco too.