The Mayor of Castro Street or Long Emergency

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk

Author: Randy Shilts

Known as “The Mayor of Castro Street” even before he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk’s personal life, public career, and final assassination reflect the dramatic emergence of the gay community as a political power in America. It is a story full of personal tragedies and political intrigues, assassinations at City Hall, massive riots in the streets, the miscarriage of justice, and the consolidation of gay power and gay hope.

Harvey Milk has been the subject of numerous books and movies, including the Academy Award–winning 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk.  His life is also the basis of a 2008 major motion picture, Milk, starring Sean Penn.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Author's Note	xiii
	Prologue	xv
Part I	The Years Without Hope	1
1	The Men without Their Shirts	3
2	Gay Everyman	12
3	Judy Garland's Dead	30
4	Sodom by the Sea	47
Part II	The Mayor of Castro Street	67
5	Politics as Theater	69
6	The Early Invaders	81
7	The First Skirmish	95
8	Gay Main Street	111
9	Harvey Milk vs. The Machine	127
10	Orange Tuesday	153
11	Showdown on Castro Street	169
Part III	Supervisor Harvey Milk	187
12	Media Star	189
13	Willkommen Castro	211
14	Deadline Pressure	229
15	Curtain Call	252
16	No Cross, No Crown	263
Part IV	The Legend Begins	297
17	Justice and Thieves	299
18	The Final Act	324
	Epilogue	340
Appendix I.	A Populist Looks at the City Speech to the Joint International Longshoremen & Warehouseman's Union of San Francisco September 10, 1973	349
Appendix II.	A City of Neighborhoods Address at Inaugural Dinner January 10, 1978	353
Appendix III.	The Hope Speech Keynote Address to Gay Caucus of California Democratic Council (San Diego) March 10, 1978	359
Appendix IV.	That's What America Is Speech at Gay Freedom Day Rally June 25, 1978	364
Appendix V.	Harvey Milk's Political Will Tape-recorded November 18, 1977	372
	Notes on Sources	376
	Index	381

Books about: Mes Confitures or Jane Brodys Good Food Gourmet

Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Author: James Howard Kunstler

With his classics of social commentary The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. Now, with The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy, we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance over the last 200 years. But the oil age, which peaked in 1970, is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become a classic of social science.

Publishers Weekly

The indictment of suburbia and the car culture that the author presented in The Geography of Nowhere turns apocalyptic in this vigorous, if overwrought, jeremiad. Kunstler notes signs that global oil production has peaked and will soon dwindle, and argues in an eye-opening, although not entirely convincing, analysis that alternative energy sources cannot fill the gap, especially in transportation. The result will be a Dark Age in which "the center does not hold" and "all bets are off about civilization's future." Absent cheap oil, auto-dependent suburbs and big cities will collapse, along with industry and mechanized agriculture; serfdom and horse-drawn carts will stage a comeback; hunger will cause massive "die-back"; otherwise "impotent" governments will engineer "designer viruses" to cull the surplus population; and Asian pirates will plunder California. Kunstler takes a grim satisfaction in this prospect, which promises to settle his many grudges against modernity. A "dazed and crippled America," he hopes, will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism; strong bonds of social solidarity will be reforged; and our heedless, childish culture of consumerism will be forced to grow up. Kunstler's critique of contemporary society is caustic and scintillating as usual, but his prognostications strain credibility. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

With the discovery of new oil fields at a crawl and alternative energy sources not up to snuff, we're facing some big changes. So argues Kunstler, who writes regularly on economic and environmental issues. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Move over, Malthus. According to suburbia-hater Kunstler (Home from Nowhere, 1996, etc.), the world's going to hell in a handbasket-and in about 15 minutes, too. Aiming at the broadest side of the barn, Kunstler asserts that we're living in "a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War Two." Why so? Well, for one, because the world's population is vastly overextended-never mind that Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich hashed that argument out a generation ago, with Malthusian arguments taking a beating in the bargain. All right, because there's a superplague about to descend on the world, or maybe AIDS in mutated form, or a designer virus unleashed to rid a given polity of its surplus population, the elites having been inoculated beforehand. ("If this sounds too fantastic," Kunstler helpfully adds, "imagine how outlandish the liquidation of European Jewry might have seemed to civilized Berliners in 1913. Yet it happened." No bites? All right, it's because we're about to run out of oil, and there's nothing to replace oil. Now we're getting somewhere-except, oil economists such as Kenneth Deffeyes (Beyond Oil, p. 31) have remarked, the peak in world oil production is probably happening right now, and it will take some time to bleed the pump dry, by which point alternative technologies may have been employed to carry at least some of the load. That presupposes a shared view that the oil-based economy is on the way to profound change and that we're all in big trouble; but we're a delusional bunch, Kunstler avows, content to ugly up and pollute our world so long as we are able "to quickly escape the vicinity in cars luxuriously appointed with the finest digital stereo sound, air-conditioning,and cup holders for iced beverages." Aha. It's the fault of the ice-chewers in this age of global warming. But look at the bright side, Kunstler urges: At least when the air conditioners fail, the mega-churches will have to close down, a death blow to Republican civilization. Cant-filled and overwrought: a crying-wolf approach to real but largely addressable issues, long on jeremiads but absent of remedies.