[Goldstein is an American editor and critic. In the following review of The Mayor of Castro Street, he commends Shilts's objectivity and directness in presenting the events of Harvey Milk's life and career.]

In one of those amply underwritten discussions public television is famous for, Earnest Van den Haag and William F. Buckley held forth recently on the subject of gay rights. Secure in his conviction that homosexuality is "a defect," Van den Haag extended an olive branch by referring to "the gay leadership"—and that caused Buckley's brows to rise so high you'd have thought he was engorged with butyl nitrite. "There is no gay leadership," Buckley snorted, and the point was moot.

In a sense, Old Sawtooth is right. Though there have always been homosexuals in politics—in numbers roughly commensurate with their presence in the population at large—those who are willing and able to conceal their sexuality rise the highest; so it seems that gay people don't exist in electoral politics on any significant level. Indeed, the idea that homosexuals should represent each other rather than relying on the good offices of sympathetic straights is as novel now as when Harvey Milk first broached it in the mid-'70s.

Milk won a seat on San Francisco's board of supervisors—and thereby became the nation's highest ranking openly gay official—in flamboyant opposition to that city's gay establishment. "He'll embarrass the shit out of us," remarked David Goodstein, publisher of the most important gay periodical, The Advocate, when Milk first made his ambitions known. Not only did he build a constituency from the most contentious elements in gay life—making room in his campaign for drag queens, dykes on bikes, and boho exiles who could be counted on to disrupt any respectable brunch; but he drew a powerful connection between personal freedom and economic justice.

Milk's election was part of the coup that occurred in 1977, when San Francisco supervisors ran in district, rather than citywide, races. That experiment in democracy also brought Asians, Latins, and even an unwed mother into municipal government at a time when the mayor, George Moscone, decided to jump on the populist bandwagon.

The newly elected majority on the board of supervisors—often managed by Milk—was well on its way to blocking the corporatist dream for San Francisco. In what is now the most inflated urban housing market in the country, Milk campaigned for laws that would dampen speculation; he urged commuter taxes, higher assessments on skyscrapers, legalization of gambling and even made the dog-shit issue his own.

Milk was a populist whose vote to place a psychiatric treatment center in the district represented by a conservative ex-cop named Dan White swung the board of supervisors. In the ensuing months, White resigned, and then changed his mind; Milk pressured Moscone to prevent White's reappointment. White retaliated by murdering them both.

The assassinations ended Moscone's ambition to "transform San Francisco," and wiped out an openly gay politician who might have grown into a national figure. Milk's capacity to operate as a social activist in coalition with racial minorities and organized labor ("I know the guy's a fruit," one union leader said during an early campaign, "but he shoots straight with us") could have given us the urban alternative to Ed Koch's "liberalism with good sense." Koch is, in some ways, the mirror image of Milk—the populist as "survivor." Who can say how Milk's survival would have altered the spectrum of political possibilities?

Moscone and Milk have faded into the hysterical wood-work of San Francisco's history, along with Carol Doda and the People's Temple. Now a book has appeared, a biography of Harvey Milk that fully explores the political climate surrounding his murder. The Mayor of Castro Street offers, as a counterpoint to Milk's life, a panoramic view of gay culture as it converged on San Francisco—even tracing the basics of clonewear to a particular army/navy store. And it shatters the silence that has deprived us of a man whose life is as exemplary, in gay terms, as Oscar Wilde's.

There's no sense of fear and loathing in Randy Shilts's biography; no aftertaste of sperm and blood. The Mayor of Castro Street attests that Milk was murdered not because he was looking for love, but because he was seeking power. All the back rooms in this book are political. But Shilts is not immune to the lustier aspects of his subject. There was plenty of sex and romance in Milk's life, and he knew how to use his sexuality as a stiletto against the puritans. Squared off against John Briggs in the televised debates that preceded the defeat of Proposition Six (which would have prohibited anyone who even advocated homosexuality from teaching in the California public schools), Milk camped his opponent into oblivion. When Briggs asserted that a quarter of all gay men have over 500 sexual encounters, Milk oozed his eyes at the camera and cooed, "I wish."

A naval officer who began his political life as a Goldwater conservative, Milk moved pell-mell through the antic days of Off-Broadway (an intime of Tom O'Horgan, Milk was described by a New York Times reporter in 1971 as "a sad-eyed man … wearing faded blue jeans and pretty beads"), and the heady days when Castro Street provided him with the impetus for his first campaigns. At one point, Milk laughed off the question, "Are you running for dairy queen," by answering, "If I turned around every time someone called me a faggot, I'd be walking backwards, and I don't want to walk backwards."

Milk was transformed by the counter-culture, but there were more fundamental reasons for his apocalyptic, antiauthoritarian stance. As a New York Jew born in the '30s, he carried the memory of the Holocaust, and as a gay man who came of age in the '50s, he carried the memory of being arrested with other homosexuals for sitting in Central Park without a shirt. That incident became an indelible part of his agenda, and his first act as a supervisor was to propose San Francisco's pioneering gay rights ordinance.

Gliding up the grand staircase of San Francisco's rococo City Hall shortly after his election, Milk remarked to a friend, "How do you like my new theater?" He was notorious for conducting business in full clown drag, assuring startled constituents, "I'm a supervisor … I make laws." His funeral was no less histrionic: "A curious shrine greeted the revelers when they went below into the ship's cabin … a dictionary-sized box wrapped in Doonsbury comics and topped by a single long-stemmed crimson rose. Spelled out in rhinestones on the carton were the initials R.I.P. Arranged neatly around the package was a box of bubble bath and an array of grape Kool-Aid packs…. Once out to sea, Tom Randol tore the funnypapers off the plastic box while Jack ripped open the Kool-Aid packs and the bubble bath … and Harvey was gone, a bubbly batch of lavendar on the cold, glittering Pacific."

Milk was obsessed with assassination, and regarded his violent death before the age of 50 as a foregone conclusion (he was murdered at 48). He left his political will in the form of three tapes, one of which contains the phrase that has evolved into an anthem of the gay rights movement: "Let the bullets that rip through my brain shatter every closet door in America." For Milk, coming out was the gay equivalent of passive resistance, a refusal to go along. His strategy has proven immensely useful as an organizing tool but, as Shilts reminds us, coming out in society is often less traumatic than coming out to parents, lovers, and friends. After the assassination, an old ally of Milk's appeared at the door of the lesbian daughter from whom he had long been estranged, and fell weeping into her arms; after the funeral procession, a young man was confronted by his rabbinical parents, who had seen him on television. When their son confessed to being "a sodomite," they abandoned him to face death from a brain tumor.

Randy Shilts's biography is also part of Milk's legacy. It was written by a journalist who insists—against the grain of his profession—on covering gay people as a gay person, and published by a house whose list comprises the most important gay fiction of recent years (I should add that an early version of this biography appeared in Christopher Street, the nation's premier magazine of gay sensibilities). If the proclaimed task of the new gay lit is to elucidate aspects of the gay experience that are too ambiguous to be contained in politics, then the task of gay journalism must be to expose the social reality that underlies our fantasies—of self and of community.

To read this taut and teeming biography is to understand why "all the news that's fit to print" cannot encompass the experiences that shaped Harvey Milk. For that kind of understanding, you need a journalist with no institutional honor to uphold, an independent—and an insider. Randy Shilts is one of several gay journalists who are challenging a professional property based more on bigotry than on any discernible concern for truth. More to come, I hope.