Customer Reviews

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (Stonewall Inn Editions)

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Randy Shilts's intricately researched biography of one of the greatest gay activists of all time, Harvey Milk, is not only a political biography, but a chronology of an entire political movement.
This is the second book I've read by Randy Shilts, the first being And the Band Played On. While there are certainly some differences between the two, Shilts's imaginative narrative writing is the same. The Mayor of Castro Street is proof positive that he [the author] can turn even the most mundane of political machinations into high drama.
Starting out when Harvey Milk was growing up in Woodmere, New York, the book traces his life from there. From his high school athletic career, to his college years, his time with the Navy, and his Manhattan years. When Harvey makes the move from New York to San Francisco, the book changes pace, and a gay political hero is born. The book is filled with snippets of his speeches, and in the back appendices, the eloquent words of Harvey Milk come alive, as some of his more famous speeches are reprinted there.
At a solid 380 pages (including appendices and sources) the book never drags. Everything appears to be cause and effect, which makes for some white-knuckle reading even if the reader is already familiar with the budding gay movement, Harvey Milk's participation in it, and the untimely tragic assassination of he and Mayor George Moscone by a homophobic zealot.
I must admit, there were certain parts of this book that gave me chills: Harvey Milk's beautiful speeches, the candlelight vigils, the many marches, and the White Night Riots. The sheer epic proportions of it all can overwhelming.
However, epic or not, this remains the simple story of a man and his dream, vision, and hope for his gay brothers and sisters, and all of humanity.

Randy Shilts has taken great pains to present the man honestly, exploring his political and personal lives. The result is an illimunitating portrait of the Gay Rights champion, documenting his triumphs and ideals alongside his personal ambiguities and foibles. Milk's rise to power, as well as the city's rich gay history, are depicted with candor and clarity.

The assassinations are reported in graphic detail, as is the reaction of the people. Intial shock and grief turn to righteous indignation when, on May 21, 1979 White is convicted on two counts of "valuntary manslaughter" with a maximum sentence of seven years, eight months. The city explodes. Justice is thwarted. A martyr is born. Milk's murder galvanizes the Gay Community to stand up and take their rightful place in society. A great book.

Anyone --- heterosexual or homosexual --- would enjoy this book for its interesting facts about San Fransisco's gay and political communities. In fact, it's the book's protagonist Harvey Milk who serves as a bridge between the gay and political communities.

The author does well in portraying Milk as a complex personality. Indeed, Milk's a person unsatisfied with his career on Wall Steet so he turns to the hippy movement. But it is his concern with apparent unethical practices in the White House that leads him to chop off his hair, throw on a suit and head for city hall, but he must first create a strong base of support. It's from there that he brings the unions together with the new gay community. Milk becomes one of the first gay elected officials, a populist if ever there was one.

The author of the book died of AIDS and the book has not been updated since the 1980s. So many of the reader's questions are unaswered at the end of the book. While the information is delicious, the writing complexity is simpler than it should be. Still, the book is a must read for anyone, gay or straight.

In The Mayor of Castro Street, the late Randy Shilts paints a vivid picture, not only of the life of gay politician Harvey Milk, but of the fight for gay rights in 1970's San Francisco and the nation as a whole. After a description of the events immediately following Milk's death, Shilts begins the book with Milk's youth in New York City. He briefly describes Milk's years in New York, and spends the vast majority of the book on Milk's last five years in San Francisco. It was during his San Francisco years that Milk made his critical contributions to gay history, including encouraging the development of the Castro into a gay Mecca, and running for, and finally winning, elected office as an openly gay man in a time when most thought such things simply couldn't happen.

Shilts is a meticulous reporter. In his section on source material he details how he extensively interviewed Milk's former lovers, including Scott Smith and Joe Campbell. Many of the dialogues for the biography come directly from the personal diary of Michael Wong, a longtime Milk supporter. According to Shilts, dialogues with others who knew Milk virtually always corroborated those in Wong's diary. Shilts's history of the Castro area came from over one hundred interviews he conducted with area residents.

One of the best qualities of the biography is its astonishingly objective posture. Achieving something like objectivity is a tremendous challenge for the author of any modern-day history, and nowhere is this more true than in histories of the gay liberation movement. The living participants in that history inevitably portray it in a range of ways and often fight vigorously for placement of credit where they feel credit is due. Shilts allows those participants to speak for themselves, and focuses on telling the details of the story, rather than interpreting that story for the reader. It is this author's unique degree of commitment to researching and conveying all the details that allows him to present such an apparently unbiased account.

It is also Shilts's attention to detail that makes the book so tough to put down. It reads more like a novel than a history, and each segment leads into the next with a sense of a tremendous plot unfolding. In a style that would come to characterize his later books, such as And The Band Played On, as well as Conduct Unbecoming, Shilts manages to draw the reader into multiple stories of individuals that end in cliffhangers, only to be picked up again in a later chapter. It is these stories that make up the fabric of gay history in San Francisco and a portion of that larger tapestry called gay liberation.

I read a lot of biographies and, while I love the genre, I'm often disappointed with the writing. This book, by the late Randy Shilts, is an exception. Shilts was a great writer, able to take a variety of facts and put them into readable passages (his "And the Band Played On" is another good example of this). Harvey Milk and the San Francisco of the 1970s come to life in this book. The tragedy of Milk's assassination and its aftermath are rendered in gripping detail.

Beyond the frank and up front story of the life of Harvey Milk, this book is an incredible source of information and understanding of the gay rights movement from before its beginning to after the death of Supervisor Milk. Easy to read, albeit long, it's definitely worth the effort. No matter your sexual orientation, this brings new light to an often misunderstood movement.

this is an excellent recollection of the life, times, deeds and death of a man who dared to stand and die for the rights of not just gays but all minorities

I found the character of Harvey Milk fascinating. This was the story not only of Mr. Milks ascendency in the political world, but the development of the San Francisco gay community. Randy Shilts writes with sensitivity and understanding for both sides of any issue. The book ends in the early 1980's and it would be interesting to read an afterword or an update by somebody, even if it cannot be Randy Shilts.

It would be hard to imagine a more sensitive biography of Harvey Milk than this one. Randy Shilts leavens his reportorial writing style with occasional poetic touches that allow the reader to grasp the big picture of how and why tremendous change took place in San Francisco's culture in the 1970s. You read about Milk, but you also read about a city and an era. Read this book and see "The Times of Harvey Milk"; both brought tears to my eyes.

This was an well-written and thoroughly researched book about an important person and story. A lot of water under the bridge since the time covered, but critical to understanding where we are now.
What I did NOT expect and what was a pleasant surprise to me was all the nuts and bolts stuff about local politics and local political organizing. We have some local fights going on where I live regarding sell-out development, and Milk's ideas are well-described and inspirational.