Free The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts

don his three-piece suit and wingtips to join the business world.
    By the early months of 1970, the country was as bitterly polarized as it had been since the Civil War. Families divided not over mere political issues of liberal and conservative, but on profound questions of values, materialism, patriotism, war and peace. Harvey had lived forty years trying to corral his nonconformist instincts into everything a Jewish boy from Long Island was supposed to do, from leading an upwardly mobile career to settling into insular middle-class marriages. Nothing was more emblematic of the split in Milk’s life than the dichotomy between his home, where he lived with Hair cast members, and his job, working among the most establishment of institutions.
    The break came the day the United States announced the invasion of Cambodia, April 29, 1970. Spontaneous demonstrations broke out on college campuses and in major cities across the country. The escalation infuriated Milk. He blamed the nation’s major corporations for fostering the conflict, because war was good for business. During his lunch hour, Milk joined protestors at the Pacific Stock Exchange. In a burst of characteristic theatricality, he jumped in front of the crowd and angrily burned his BankAmericard, denouncing big business. This gesture got a thunderous ovation, since it came from a member of the three-piece-suit species that generally had no use for such statements. A few minutes later, Harvey was on the phone to his friend Jim Bruton at Bache in New York. Jim was hardly surprised at the news. For years he’d seen Milk getting bored with the establishment life. Jim had long thought Harvey was in a constant hurry to go somewhere, though he didn’t know where he was going. Severing his ties with the business world would at least force the issue, but Bruton couldn’t resist goading his old friend.
    â€œNow, what the hell did you do that for?” he asked.
    â€œThat’s what I felt about it,” said Milk. “I’m sick of putting up with the crap.”
    Milk talked briefly of opening a Jewish delicatessen in San Francisco. But Bruton figured that Harvey wasn’t really worried where his money would come from. As Jack McKinley was fond of saying about Harvey, “She didn’t know what she’d do next, but she knew she’d do something.” Harvey seemed much more concerned with the unpleasantness of getting fired for the first time.
    â€œI’m just sitting here waiting for somebody to say something,” he said.
    The ultimatum came that afternoon. Cut your hair or quit. Milk refused to do either and was fired. Tom O’Horgan summoned his old friend to Los Angeles to help him put together a film about Lenny Bruce, a dead comic who had once roamed the night club circuit with O’Horgan. Even as he watched Harvey pack, roommate Tom Eure thought to himself, “He’ll be back. He loves San Francisco too much to stay away. He fits in too well.”
    The film project fell through. Harvey drove back to New York along Route 66 through the Southwest. He was pale and shaken when he appeared at Jim Bruton’s door days later.
    â€œIt was just like out of Easy Rider, ” he told Jim. A bunch of rednecks taunted Milk’s hippie appearance at a Texas truck stop. Not one to suffer in silence, Milk snapped back and, he said, almost got his head blown off as the locals chased him out of town.
    â€œI thought that was it—the end I’ve always seen coming,” Harvey told Jim. “I thought it was all over.”
    â€œHow did you get out of it?” Bruton asked.
    â€œI ran like hell.”
    *   *   *
    Judy Garland lies delicately on the satin bed, looking angelic in a high-necked gray chiffon gown, her hands folded over a prayer book.
    The lines stretched for blocks around the East Side funeral home where her body lay in a glass-enclosed coffin. Thousands stood for four hours