The Mayor of Castro Street Read Online Free Page B

Harvey and when he was handed his diploma on a warm June day in 1951, he just left and nobody ever heard from him again.
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    The camaraderie of the class of ’51 stuck, especially with the alumni of the Kappa Beta fraternity and Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority. Many kept in touch, sporadically updating addresses and gossip about other grads. Instead of ending up as the intelligentsia of tomorrow, they went on to teach in grade schools and junior colleges around the country.
    Paul Buchman spent a lot of Tuesday and Thursday nights working with Harvey on the State College News sports section. He’s fond of telling the story of how Life magazine surveyed the college graduating classes of his era, rating their subsequent contributions to American life on a scale of zero to four. The class of ‘51 was the only zero, Buchman says. “We weren’t the lost generation, we were the blank generation. The class of ‘51 didn’t have any unusual characteristics. We didn’t have anything that stood out. We fell into a rut that had no character at all. Harvey and I were just like that—we were ordinary.”
    Doris Brody from Hillel ended up marrying Harvey’s barracks-mate Howard Rosman and they settled back in Valley Stream, two LIRR stops south of Woodmere. “He was never thought of as a possible queer—that’s what you called them then—he was a man’s man,” recalls Mrs. Doris Rosman. “In our day, of course, people were thought to be gay if they were effeminate—or if they announced it. Of course, nobody announced it in those days.”
    Another alumnus who kept in contact moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and supplied classmates with newspaper clippings about Harvey’s budding political career. Christian Lievestro didn’t have a hard time imagining what Harvey’s life had been like at Albany State. “Harvey was discreet—and sensible,” says Lievestro, class of ‘50. “We didn’t know about each other being gay. Of course nobody did in those days. You certainly never talked about it or let on because you were there to be a teacher, and it could destroy your chances at that.” Gay life was a melange of “chance encounters” and “incidental things,” he says. The braver gays joined the glee club where drunken parties might lead to that one desparate moment of gratification, followed by the days of regret, and, more saliently, fear that the secret would get out.
    But Lievestro found that by the late 1970s, most of his Albany State contemporaries seemed downright proud of Harvey Milk. He was one of the few remarkable people from the class of ‘51. Some of Harvey’s fraternity brothers even seem somewhat hurt that Milk never reached back. Sure they didn’t end up Nobel laureates as they had once hoped, but they were from the liberal middle-class Jewish mold. They didn’t call gays queers anymore. They wanted to pat Harvey on the back. He’d always been a winner.
    Harvey had something special even back then; politicians later called it charisma. “Like I’m talking to you now. His face and his laugh come perfectly to mind, even though I haven’t seen him in thirty years,” says Doris Rosman. “In fact, I haven’t seen anyone who has seen him since we graduated.”
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    Harvey makes such a handsome sailor. Who to match him up with?
    The question buzzed through the wedding reception as Harvey grabbed girl after girl to dance them through the celebration of Robert Milk’s marriage. Robert and Audrey were a handsome couple, but Bob suffered in comparison to his tall, athletic younger brother, who looked positively dashing in his navy dress whites. The women marveled at his grace and humor. Everybody talked excitedly of how he actually put on those windowed helmets and thick wet suits like you see in the movies, to be