I was at the end of my rope with corporate public relations and two years into a passionate pursuit of photography. I had just moved across town from the tony eastern slopes of Pacific Heights into San Francisco's funky, friendlier Noe Valley neighborhood, sandwiched sedately between the teeming, largely Latino Mission District to the east and the pulsating, largely gay Eureka Valley to the west and north, whose main "drag," Castro Street, was recovering and upscaling from years of Irish-Catholic suburban flight. The year was 1974.
I was well aware of an upstart, ponytailed, gay Jewish hippie transplant from Manhattan named Harvey Milk and his bushy red-haired and freckled partner in life and business, Scott Smith �" they had burst on the Castro scene two years before, with much flamboyance and fanfare, opening a camera shop as conspicuous as an activist hangout as an emporium for film, flashcubes, and darkroom supplies. They had adopted a large, black mutt they christened "The Kid" and were the poster boys for a burgeoning brand of family model in a transmuting enclave. In the fall of 1973, Milk had had the audacity to run for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Six seats needed to be filled; Milk finished 10th among the field of candidates.
By 1974, the Haight-Ashbury was shuttered and on lockdown �" the flower children and their disenfranchised hangers-on had either turned hard-core druggies and cultists or fled a mile-and-a-half southeast to the loosey-goosey, live-and-let-live, love-and-let-love Castro. Milk, the once properly establishment insurance salesman from Woodmere, New York, now with big hair and tight, torn Levi's, was poised to become leader of this rag-tag pack.
In the fall of 1974, I was a three-piece-suited associate editor, speechwriter, and publicist for Standard Oil Company of California (now Chevron USA). Up-to-here with shilling for big petroleum I dropped out and resurfaced as Rick Jarrett, free-lance photographer, writer, model, bartender, caterer's assistant �" and, eventually, assistant shopkeeper. For in the course of human events, I bounded into Castro Camera one day to stock a darkroom in my flat I had converted from a walk-in closet, and, not so coincidentally, to check out the shop's free-spirited and fame-grabbing proprietors.
In the vernacular of the day, there was an easy karma among the three of us, though I was clearly drawn more to Smith's lilting Mississippi drawl and southern gallantry and charm than to Milk's New York nasality and more assertive, acerbic, and abrasive affect. Despite my own reticence, some say standoffishness, with new people, I was greeted with more than rote courtesies whenever I came in.
Less than a year later, I found myself behind the counter of Castro Camera alongside Scott and/or an elfish, wide-eyed shutterbug named Danny Nicoletta, cha-chinging on a relic cash register from the 1930s. I had been recruited �" the candidate Milk was fond of opening stump speeches with "I'm Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you" �" so that he could strategize with his noisy cadre of operatives in the shop's back room and later hit the campaign trail in his second quest for a supervisor seat.
Milk cleaned up his act for that second run �" he lost the ponytail and beard, sprung for a second-hand suit, and accepted my offer of a half-dozen or so neckties left over from my years in the PR trenches. Despite his more mainstream appearance and a strategic effort to reach out to a more broadly-based constituency, he finished one place out of the winner's circle.
A year later �" 1976 �" despite Smith's wearying patience and support, Milk was at it again, this time bidding upward for California state assemblyman, facing off against liberal, but more widely known San Francisco attorney, Art Agnos, who, in the next decade, would become mayor. Smith was back on the phone �" "Rick, we need you."
I've tried my hand at acting, with varying success, but I've never aspired to a place on the activist stage. At Castro Camera, I was surrounded by young guns embrazened by the glories of Stonewall and their sheer critical mass in a city known for its enlightenment and permissiveness. I admired their grit and their ability to learn and adapt on the run, though I was put off somewhat by a zeal that was often intemperate and all consuming. Activism was their primary identity. For better or worse, I was content to remain a political observer and occasional enabler. Aside from helping Smith hold the family business together, I took pictures of Milk the candidate for campaign handouts �" my personal contributions to the cause.
Milk acquitted himself well in his run for the Assembly �" even received powerful endorsements from the most unlikely of organizations �" the Teamsters Union, for one �" but, alas, he lost again, and vowed this was his last hurrah. But fate intervened when the citizens of San Francisco voted to elect its Board of Supervisors by district instead of citywide. His advisers prevailed, and he ran a fourth time �" and, glory be, he won �" one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country.
After my two-and-a-half year bid to be my own boss, I got tired of self-promotion and chasing debtors and returned to corporate life in the spring of 1977, just when Milk's last campaign was gearing up. I wasn't around much for either the run or the victory hoopla. But shortly after Milk and his fellow newbies on the board, including the adversarial Dan White, were sworn in by Mayor George Moscone, Milk and Smith, whose personal lives were now separate, got word that the camera shop's lease would only be renewed if they coughed up double the original rent. Castro Street had become an avenue of boutiques, bars, and eateries, and property values had soared in the intervening five years. They opted out and moved the business to a hole-in-the-wall down the block and around the corner on upper Market Street. Their relationship was strained, and the emotional headiness of those first years in the city had evaporated in the heat of politics and a new relationship for Milk with an unstable fellow named Jack Lira.
"Rick, is there any chance you can help us out again...on Saturdays?" Smith asked. They both needed time away from the shop �" Milk to attend to supervisor business he couldn't wrap up during the week. I welcomed the extra cash and said yes. I went back behind the register at Castro Camera sometime in the late summer or early autumn of 1978. Much of the time I was alone in the shop, but Milk would drop in, and we would chat about issues confronting the board. He was candid about his growing dislike for and distrust of former cop and fireman White and openly contemptuous of White's family values approach to city politics. Milk could be snide and spiteful, and White was the prime object of his scorn and ridicule. He could also be gracious and caring �" that dichotomy being the mark of a true Gemini.
In the midst of the Milk-White clashes on the board, to a large extent centered on a gay rights ordinance Milk had sponsored and White opposed, Milk's boyfriend Jack Lira, self-absorbed and distraught about his exclusion from Milk's political life and feeling alienated by Milk's friends (most of whom were Smith loyalists), hung himself in their apartment one evening when Milk was attending a meeting. Lira's suicide set in motion a cataclysmic period in which Milk and Smith decided to shut down the camera shop for good and Milk and Moscone were assassinated by an equally self-absorbed, distraught, and agitated White, who had resigned as supervisor, then had a change of heart and wanted his job back. White, the lone conservative voice on the board, believed that Milk was instrumental in blocking his rehire, and he was right.
There's a scene in Gus Van Sant's compelling new docudrama, Milk , in which Milk (Sean Penn) confronts Moscone (Victor Garber) on the issue of honoring White's request for reinstatement. In a political power play, Milk warns Moscone that rehiring White will alienate the gay community and cripple the mayor's upcoming bid for re-election. It was Milk relishing and basking in his new role as powerbroker, but, in hindsight, was he carrying things too far in his denunciation of everything that his fellow board member stood for? When the board had acted on Milk's citywide gay rights ordinance, the vote tally was 10-1 in favor, White being the lone dissenter. So was the Irish-Catholic ex-cop's ideology really a viable threat to Milk's legislative agenda? Or was the vendetta, at its core, mischievous and mean-spirited? Had White been reinstated, three lives would have been saved �" White committed suicide two years after being released from prison. On the other hand, out of the carnage stepped Dianne Feinstein to take the oath of mayor denied her previously by the electorate, a post from which she launched a long, influential career in the U.S. Senate.
The last time I saw Milk was two weeks before he was gunned down in his San Francisco City Hall office the morning of November 27, 1978. I had just returned from a long weekend in Monterey and Carmel and was in my office at Pacific Telephone when my friend Mike Polansky called with the devastating news.
The last time I saw Smith was on a visit to San Francisco in 1989. I had left that city eight years before �" after the deaths of two other people even closer to me �" seeking less tumult, more solace, and a fresh perspective on the opposite coast in Boston. But much about what used to be known as Baghdad by the Bay still courses through my arteries. The insularity of the Hub of the Universe was anathema to my sensibilities, my penchant for the off-center, the inclusive, the irreverent, the ridiculous �" embodied in that camera shop in that compressed period of the giddy, gaudy, but ultimately galvanizing 1970s.
Smith was as welcoming as ever during our short reunion. He even indulged my new foray into videography and gave me a few awkward moments on tape. One of these days, when the bittersweet aftertaste of watching Milk has worn off, I'll dig out the cassette and re-watch the clip for the first time in 20 years. Smith had a new career that suited his easiness with strangers, as consultant for Cook International Travel. A wave of sadness washed over me when I learned in 1995 that he had passed away from AIDS-related pneumonia within weeks after returning, as honored guest, from the world premiere of the opera Milk in Houston.
Some, like Allen Baird, who had helped secure Milk that Teamsters endorsement, have suggested that by accepting the Houston's Opera special invitation to the premiere, Smith was finally able to step out from behind the shadow of Milk. That there should be an opera based on Milk's life is poetic justice. He was a Puccini devotee �" Van Sant attests to that with sporadic passages throughout the film. If you subscribe to Puccini's verismo schmaltz �" and I do, too �" you're an incurable romantic, no argument.
In reviewing the opera for the New York Times , critic Edward Rothstein complained that the depiction of Milk seemed "a pasteboard character, made more attractive by eliminating the promiscuity and tantrums" Randy Shilts had described in his book, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, later made into an Academy Award-winning documentary. No critic of the current film has made any complaint whatsoever about the characterization of Milk by Penn, though I must submit that Penn's Milk falls sweeter on the eyes and ears than the real-life character.
Penn gives a transformative, spot-on, comprehensively researched and invested, meticulously nuanced, spellbinding, career-topping performance in the title role. It's Penn as you've never seen him before. He takes on Milk's quirky body language and facial expressions, the way the man strode, flailed, smirked, winced, grimaced, and grinned and gives us glimpses into the warring factions of Milk's personality. The voice and dialect are hair-raisingly on the mark. Penn is among the screen's elite actors �" I can't imagine anyone else in this role.
However, Josh Brolin, with an impressive run of memorable turns over the last year (W, In the Valley of Elah, American Gangster, No Country for Old Men ) is almost as transfixing, and terrifying to boot, as the muddled and unhinged White, particularly during the emotional meltdown leading to the twin killings. James Franco (Pineapple Express , In the Valley of Elah , the Spider-Man franchise) is irresistibly endearing as Smith, despite the absence of Smith's captivating Mississippi twang and his deliberately unkempt counterculture scruffiness. The supporting cast, led by Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild, Lords of Dogtown , The Mudge Boy) as Milk's protege activist Cleve Jones, and Mexican actor Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Frida , Before Night Falls ) as the foredoomed outcast Lira, is flawlessly authentic and affecting.
Van Sant's direction is incisive and his attention to factual integrity remarkable in a film that's meant as much to entertain as to inform; his intercutting of archival footage is deft and illuminating. Of course, a large part of this entertainment derives from Milk's sense of irony and his charismatic showmanship. When he first announces his candidacy for the Board of Supervisors, he does so at the corner of Market and Castro perched on a box adorned with the painted word "Soap." The bunch drawn to the candidate are diverse, unconventional, exuberant, sharp-witted, and glib, bringing humor to a tale of destiny and euphoria that turns on a dime and ends with a tragic thud.
That I had no association with the making of Milk has given me a pang or two, but, after all, I've been away from the "scene" for more than a generation. At least, the part of me represented by my photo documentation of the 1970s now resides in the Hormel Collection at the San Francisco Public Library.
The candlelight march down Market Street, from the Castro to City Hall, the evening following the slayings there that morning, haunts my soul to this day, partly because its point of embarkation was the same spot from which Milk launched his political career five years before. Police estimated our total number at 30,000 �" conservative by all other accounts. In a time long before e-mail, cell phones, and text messaging, word had spread that a collective "we" were gathering in a mass show of grief, pride, and veneration. Polansky and I were somewhere in the leading third of that throng.
Van Sant's truncated replaying of the archival aerials of that mournful procession falls short of capturing its manifest solemnity, its dignity, pageantry, and majesty. Absent, of course, is the stirring, sonorous dirge that composer Mark Isham wrote for this sequence in The Times of Harvey Milk. Also absent from the soundtrack are the sounds of near silence �" the rustle of 60,000 feet shuffling along the pavement, filling both eastbound lanes of traffic from the streetcar tracks to the storefronts. Trolleys and automobiles moving westbound freely, emitted only a hushed rumble �" out of respect and awe, no horns blew, no bells clanged.
Shortly after we passed under the Octavia Street spur of the Central Freeway (torn down after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989), the lonely figure of a slight young man standing on the third-floor fire escape of his apartment house came into view �" our communal gaze diverted there because there was a trumpet pressed to his lips and from that trumpet heaved a pristine, penetrating rendering of "Taps." Numb since Polansky's urgent phone call that morning, I finally gave in and let the tears flow. My composure cracked again shortly after our minions reached the steps of City Hall, and Joan Baez greeted us with "Amazing Grace."
Had a movement died with its progenitor that awful day? Not on your life.
Rick Jasany can be reached at [email protected].