The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts

counterculture. When it came to romance, however, he was set in his ways and he quickly found a new lover to fit his new life-style. Harvey met Joseph Scott Smith at the Christopher Street Subway stop on his forty-first birthday, the same week Lenny opened on Broadway. Smith’s Equity pseudonym was Joe Scott, but Harvey would never call him Joe. Probably, friends thought, because of the reminder of his first lover, Joe Campbell. With long blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a firm build, the twenty-two-year-old Smith proved the perfect lover for the transformed Milk.
    Smith had only recently moved from Jackson, Mississippi. Like many men his age, Smith skipped a stint in Vietnam by checking the little box on the final page of his draft medical form—the box next to the word homosexual. The deferment put Scott in league with Jackson’s small countercultural scene, since hippies were the only locals who were unshaken by Smith and his handful of openly gay friends.
    Hip life in Jackson, however, was less than scintillating. There are only so many times you can take LSD, listen to the same Moody Blues songs, and stare at the three-dimensional cover of the Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties Request album before a lusty young man yearns for greater things. When two gay friends announced they were quitting the magnolias for Greenwich Village, Smith cast his lot with them.
    Harvey was twenty years older than Smith, but his appearance and entourage were very au courant. The onslaught of invitations to opening nights and backstage parties was enough to charm any boy fresh from Mississippi. Harvey wasted no time mapping out their future. Once he finished work on O’Horgan’s new play, Inner City, they would move to San Francisco.
    Tom made Harvey associate producer of Inner City in the hope that Milk’s background in finance could make him a serious Broadway producer. Like any good boss, Milk promptly got his boyfriend Scott on the payroll, where he worked under the stage manager, Galen McKinley. The play was based on the controversial Inner City Mother Goose by Eve Merriam. The book was then the second most banned work in America. An Orange County teacher was fired for simply loaning his copy to a student. The play enumerated the injustices of urban life and seemed well-suited for Harvey’s new left-leaning politics.
    The critics had little use for the iconoclastic O’Horgan, however, and panned the play. Audiences were wildly enthusiastic but small. Keeping the play afloat required hyperactive fund raising by Milk. He hit up his old friends at Bache, many of whom did not even recognize their former colleague when he turned up at 51 Wall Street.
    The play’s two other co-producers, meanwhile, were horrified that O’Horgan was using some aging hippie as his representative to the project. Fights between Milk and the play manager escalated rapidly. The management was horrified at the blatant marijuana smoking of the cast. The play was probably one of the only Broadway productions to have to issue a policy statement that pot could be smoked only in the second- and third-floor dressing rooms since the gallery had begun to stink of weed. Every week, the stage manager would plead that the play was broke and issue a notice giving Equity actors warning that they would soon be fired. Every week, Milk would delight the cast by tearing down the notice, swearing he would raise the money to keep the play open.
    The play’s three-month run lasted into 1972, but events conspired to drive it to an early end. Richard Nixon was about to be reelected president. The country was tiring of incessant gripes about injustice. The counterculture was losing steam. Social conscience became passé. Broadway audiences didn’t want to see plays about blacks in ghettos. They wanted musicals with lots of nice dancing.
    Feeling he could do no more, Harvey left the production and moved to San Francisco. Scott Smith had