Milk and More

Shilts, Randy. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

This biograpy of Harvey Milk was intended for a popular rather than scholarly audience, and as such it lacks things like footnotes, which makes me more than a little suspicious of all the dialogue and recreated conversations in it. There's a lot of it that's rather silly and sentimental and other bits that are really hard to follow, but I definitely learned something. I now know a lot more about the city politics of San Francisco, including some reasons to be suspicious of Senator Feinstein. But in many ways, it's a fairly exhaustive and engaging biography and urban history.

I am, however, going to dwell on my complaints. My first is a very minor pet peeve. Shilts kept repeating, over and over, what type of man Harvey Milk liked. With every one of Milk's new boyfriends, Shilts lingered over the "deep sultry eyes, thick dark hair, and a compact build" (30) and especially the age (even when Milk was 48 he never started a relationship with anyone over the age of 22). Shilts emphasis made the similarities quite redundant very quickly.

The overall irritant about this book was Shilts' attempts at storytelling that left the book feeling confusing and choppy. He wove weird foreshadowing bits about Jonestown throughout the book, for example, and added glimpses at all of Harvey's ex-lovers at strange and incongrous times. I also had a lot of trouble keeping track of some of the people, especially Harvey's political allies and enemies, and Shilts' could have done a better job at reminding the reader about who each one was. Occasionally, Shiltd jumped forward and backward in time without specifiying the date, which was also rather confusing. In his attempts to make the book dramatic, occasionally Shits' editorializing went a bit over the top. The last line of the book, for example, is "Harvey Milk did live, as a metaphor for the homosexual experience in America" (348).

I did, however, learn a great deal about how politics in San Francisco work and what the town was like in the '70s, which was both fun and fascinating. While it is in many ways a dubious historical volume, it is an easy-to-read historical and biographical portrait and its 350 pages went fairly quickly. While I don't trust Shits, I did enjoy this and learn quite a bit. I kind of wish it wasn't written so closely following Milk's death; it would have been interesting to follow up with more information about Milk's political legacy, the continued careers of Harry Britt and Anne Kronenberg and future gay supervisers who followed in Milk's footsteps.