The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts Page A

to stay behind until the play closed. Smith’s mailbox was soon crammed with daily letters from Harvey explaining in detail why Smith had to join him in San Francisco as soon as Inner City folded. On the back of a Dots candy box, Milk assured Scott that San Francisco had many movie theaters they could enjoy. Another handmade card insisted Scott should move because his shoulder-length blond hair would dry faster in the California sun.
    Once reunited, Milk and Smith picked up a mutt from the pound, named it The Kid, climbed into Milk’s 1967 green Dodge Charger and spent nearly a year driving through California. They lived meagerly off their unemployment checks, usually tossing their sleeping bags under the redwoods of the state park to which they were closest. When the unemployment checks stopped coming, they returned to San Francisco, lived on their income tax refunds, and frittered away their afternoons on massive jigsaw puzzles.
    Harvey’s old roommate Tom Eure had never seen anybody throw himself into jigsaw puzzles with such passion as Harvey. Day after day. Night after night. Harvey stood over the puzzles, trying to get the complex, confusing pieces to fit together. Somehow.
    â€œHarvey, what are you going to do for money?” Jim Bruton asked when he visited Harvey and Scott in San Francisco. “Aren’t you almost out?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow are you going to get more?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Harvey. He didn’t think the subject needed to be discussed any more.
    â€œWhat are you going to do for a living?” Bruton persisted.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter.”
    â€œAnd you know what?” Bruton observed years later when he recounted the conversation. “I think he was happier than at any time I had ever seen him in his entire life.”

four
    Sodom by the Sea
    If this little book should see the light after its 100 years of entombment, I would like its readers to know that the author was a lover of her own sex and devoted the best years of her life in striving for the political equal and social and moral elevation of women.
    â€”Laura De Force Gordon, May, 1879 (Found in time capsule at San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, April 22, 1979, on the flyleaf of Gordon’s book “Great Geysers of California. )
    Â 
    â€œUnited we stand. Divided they catch us one by one.”
    A warm breeze rustled through The Black Cat bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on a soft October night in 1951. Hazel the piano player had just announced last call and Jose, in his usual sequined gown, stepped forward to deliver his nightly oration.
    â€œRemember, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. The crime is getting caught,” he shouted. “Let’s all stand up and form a circle.” The crowd slowly went into a formation. “For one moment, I want you to stand and be proud of who you are.”
    With an evangelist’s fervor, Jose led the chorus:
    God save us nelly queens
    God save us nelly queens
    God save us queens.…
    Moments later, the sergeant at the old Hall of Justice across the street motioned to the prisoners of the gay tier. “There’s your leader,” he laughed, pointing out the window.
    Below, Jose had moved his sing-along to The Black Cat’s front door, where they could look up to their friends who had been unfortunate enough to be caught in that week’s sweep of gays. Small figures on a sidewalk, singing up to their friends behind the bars: “God save us queens.”
    Decades later, grown men would break into tears when they remembered those nights in the 1950s, singing to their friends in jail. No one else could possibly have cared about the queens, in those lonely days, they explain, except maybe God.
    *   *   *
    Generations before people like Harvey Milk went west to build a political movement that would one day capture the nation’s attention, a