Free The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts Page B

Harvey Milk even dropped by the store occasionally and briefly contributed a column on investment tips—written, of course, under a pseudonym.
    Once the social change movements of the 1960s hit, it seemed only a matter of time before gays would leap into the kind of militant movement Rodwell and a handful of early gay activists envisioned. For years civics classes talked about all men being created equal; it was not until the 1960s that blacks and women militantly pushed society to bring theory into practice. Traditional Christian values always talked of the curse of materialism; it was not until the flower children that a generation rejected materialism on a mass scale. “Peace on earth, good will toward men” had long been religious watchwords; it was not until the Vietnam War that millions of Americans took to the streets to make that phrase more than a Christmas card slogan.
    Society had long demanded that homosexuals exist with the greatest incongruity of all—to live without regard for the powerful urges of sexuality. The disharmony between body and soul had twisted the lives of generations of gays. Without the ability to express this most powerful of biological impulses, many turned against themselves in bitter, self-destructive lives. Social institutions compounded and enforced the despair on many fronts—police raids, military purges, and the omnipresent discrimination. Now all this would be challenged as gays demanded the right to live in harmony with their bodies. The birth of gay liberation on a sultry June night in Greenwich Village seemed a natural outgrowth of the Age of Aquarius. Judy Garland was dead.
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    â€œDo you mind critics calling you cheap, decadent, sensationalistic, gimicky, vulgar, overinflated, megalomaniacal?”
    Reporters love asking such tantalizingly combative questions. But Tom O’Horgan, as mild mannered as ever, had little desire to start a row. “I don’t read reviews much,” he answered calmly, if not honestly.
    That such a question could legitimately be asked gave a fair indication of the critical disdain in which O’Horgan was held by late 1971. That the question comprised the cover blurb of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, superimposed over a picture of the long-haired director, indicated the meteoric rise O’Horgan had experienced in the late 1960s. Within the space of three years, he had directed three of the most successful—and wildly controversial—plays on Broadway: Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Lenny.
    O’Horgan’s bohemian coterie shared the success. Jack McKinley—who now went by his middle name, Galen—served competently as stage manager for many of O’Horgan’s productions. The Times story, however, spent an inordinate amount of space discussing another member of the idiosyncratic director’s entourage: “About O’Horgan’s age, Harvey Milk is a sad-eyed man—another aging hippie with long, long hair, wearing faded jeans and pretty beads; he seems instinctively attuned to all of O’Horgan’s needs.”
    Craig Rodwell read the story with disbelief that Sunday morning. “‘Long, long hair. Faded jeans. Pretty beads!’” he thought. “Is this the same Harvey Milk?”
    As usual, when Harvey did something, he did it all the way. Though friends of the conventional Wall Street Milk could not imagine Harvey the hippie, friends of the new Milk had a hard time imagining how he could ever have been straightlaced. He once tried explaining his employment history to author Eve Merriam. She wasn’t sure if he were telling the truth. Still, she noticed that Milk took childish delight in his transformation. Every time he talked of his background, she saw a man impishly amused at what had happened to Harvey Milk, the nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Long Island.
    Harvey moved among the vanguard of New York’s