The Mayor of Castro Street Read Online Free

surprised, very surprised when I heard about his activities in San Francisco,” he says, adding pointedly, “nothing like that was ever suspected.”
    Harvey never did seem to have any friends there, not really close friends. He hung around a lot with Dick Brown, the black basketball player from Williams Street, where Bayshore’s four or five black families lived. Like a lot of the class of ‘47, Brown, now married and a father, has never lived more than five miles away from his hometown. “He kept his secret well—it makes you wonder how many other guys were funny too,” Brown muses. “The one thing that gets me mad is, here I’m supposed to be one of his good buddies, but he never trusted me enough to tell me. I can’t say how I would have reacted.” Brown pauses in recollection. “I guess I would have ostracized him. What a cross to carry. You never know.”
    Nobody ever heard from Harvey after he graduated. “It was like he dropped off the face of the earth,” Brown says. Nobody’s ever heard from Bob, the fat sissy, either. The newspaper stories from San Francisco surprised Brown and Harvey’s other Bayshore friends. They were especially surprised when they saw the pictures of Harvey in the dailies and he no longer had the nose everybody made cracks about.
    Harvey himself never talked much about his childhood in Woodmere and Bayshore, except for two stories. First, the August afternoon a few weeks after his graduation when he was briefly picked up by police for indecent exposure. And then, there was the day his parents sat him down in 1943 to tell him about the brave Jews of Warsaw who were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded by Nazi troops. But they fought on anyway, not because they thought they could win, but because when something that evil descends on the world, you have to fight. Even if it’s hopeless.
    By the time Harvey took his high school diploma, news of the Nazi Holocaust had shocked the world, especially the millions of American middle-class Jews who had grown to feel so secure. The Holocaust touched Milk doubly, in a way that he could not have imagined at that time.
    *   *   *
    Before Hitler’s rise, Germany had an active gay liberation movement that pressed for legal demands and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions asking for homosexual equality. But in 1936, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler issued the following decree:
    Just as we today have gone back to the ancient German view on the question of marriages mixing different races, so too in our judgment of homosexuality—a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race—we must return to the guiding Nordic principle, extermination of degenerates.
    About a year later, Himmler ordered that gays be rounded up and sent to Level 3 camps—the death camps. Gays wore pink triangles, so they would not be confused with Jews who wore yellow stars of David. Some estimates put the number of gays exterminated at over 220,000, the second largest category of Nazi genocide victims after Jews.
    This attempt at genocide efficiently squashed the only gay political movement in the Western world. Harvey Milk, meanwhile, was seven years old then, playing in the aisles of grandfather Morris’ dry goods store. It would be years before ideas of gay equality rumbled again, this time in the United States.

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    Gay Everyman
    The winter of 1947 struck with unexpected fury. The campus of the New York State College for Teachers at Albany lay buried in mounting drifts of snow. The onslaught of returning veterans that year swelled enrollment so much that men were housed in slapped-up barracks. The guys in the C barracks felt lucky that they had the class clown, Harvey Milk, to entertain them. Harvey was assigned the bunk next to the barracks’ bathroom, a site which competed only with his nose as a source for his cornucopia of jokes.
    A certain