The Mayor of Castro Street Read Online Free Page A

camaraderie prevailed among the thousand students at Albany State then. These were the students smart enough to qualify for prestigious private schools, but not rich enough to afford them. So they attended Albany State, the only state school that offered a liberal arts teaching curriculum. They were at the poor man’s Yale, they assured themselves; they were the intelligentsia of tomorrow. The young men of the new class of ‘51 spent their nights up late in their snowbound barracks, arguing Nietzsche, the Truman-Dewey race, and the escalating tensions in Korea.
    The subject of homosexuality might flit by in an allusion, but this was the late forties and nobody talked much about it then. Howard Rosman, whose bunk was across the barracks from Harvey’s, figured out that two of the other guys in the barracks were queers, but he never saw Milk have anything to do with them. Harvey certainly wasn’t what most of the middle-class kids at Albany State thought queers were like. Harvey was just another math major with a minor in his favorite subject, history.
    Milk’s performance on Bayshore’s j.v. team did not rate him a slot on any of the Albany State Great Danes teams, so he stuck to intramural basketball and football. He coached his fraternity basketball team to an intramural championship in his junior year. His major involvement with sports in college, however, was as sportswriter for the State College News.
    Like the other Jews on campus, Milk could not expect to be invited to the cushier life of the live-in fraternities, so he joined Kappa Beta, the fledgling Jewish fraternity. His social life centered on Jewish activities. Though he rarely dated, he sometimes could be found at the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house, entertaining five or six girls at a time with his antics. He occasionally turned up at meetings of Hillel or the Intercollegiate Zionist Federation of America. A gregarious guy, but when the classmates thought back, they recalled something odd. He was always somehow detached.
    I don’t think you’re going to find anybody who isn’t Harvey’s friend. Everybody likes him. He always has a joke, Doris Brody remembered thinking years later. She’d seen a lot of Harvey at the Alpha Epsilon Phi house and in her history classes. He seemed a paradox. Everybody’s friend, but I don’t think you’d find anybody who is a real close friend to him either, she thought.
    Funny, because Harvey stuck his nose into so many issues. When freshman hazing got Milk’s dander up, his writing jumped from the sports section to the editorial page as he railed against the practice. He sternly lectured the thirty-five members of his fraternity, Kappa Beta, that they should admit non-Jewish members. How could they deride the other frats for not admitting Jews when they discriminated themselves? he asked.
    Though thoroughly conventional, he sometimes took a maverick path, escorting a black woman friend to a school dance if he felt like it. One of his better friends was a black basketball player who, like Milk, took up the somewhat suspicious pastime of jotting verses of poetry.
    But that was about as suspicious as Milk ever got. Most of his grades were B’s or C’s as he plodded on. By his senior year, he was State College News sports editor. That gave him the chance to travel with the basketball team, which lost all but four or five games in Division IV that year. “We have the pleasure without the pressure,” quipped Milk about his team’s unwillingness to win. On the way home from the games, Harvey could always be found in the back of the bus, the life of the party.
    That was Harvey. Nobody knows what he did on those weekends away from campus. On a job application thirteen years later, Harvey told of a 1950 disorderly conduct arrest in Albany. No one got suspicious when he abruptly resigned his job as sports editor in the middle of his senior year. Everybody liked