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would always be that way. Joe thought so even after he withdrew from Harvey sexually, not understanding Harvey’s voracious sexual appetite. Joe had always considered sex little more than an easy way to get attention. Harvey, meanwhile, threw himself into the act like he was some marathon runner in the last days of training for the big race. He could never get enough. Joe felt he was a device for Harvey’s pleasure and pulled back. Harvey pleaded and begged, shouted and threw tantrums.
    Dissatisfaction faced Milk on all fronts by late 1962. His job was boring and there was nothing Harvey hated more than being bored. He had to make a break. He decided to quit and get a new job. Joe was ironing shirts one afternoon when Harvey walked in the room.
    â€œHave you thought about moving out?” he asked with characteristic tact.
    â€œYeah,” Joe said, “but I don’t want to.”
    â€œMaybe you better think about it some more.”
    Joe moved out a few weeks later. That was how Harvey’s longest relationship ended. Harvey regretted the decision immediately. He sent long notes imploring Joe to come back: “Now that I can no longer see or hear you, I have no desire to fight for a job, no desire to make it good, no desire for anything.”
    Joe knew Harvey would make it; he’d just select somebody else.
    â€œWhat did Helen Keller’s parents do to punish her?”
    â€œRearrange the furniture. You told me that one yesterday.” Craig Rodwell looked at the alarm clock next to his phone. Sure enough, it was 9:30 exactly.
    â€œNo,” giggled Harvey, pausing dramatically.
    â€œOkay, okay. What did they do?”
    â€œThey made her read the waffle iron.”
    With boyfriends like Harvey, who needs an alarm clock? thought Craig as he pulled himself from bed. The relationship certainly had its advantages, especially for a boy who had run away from the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago at seventeen to savor big-city homosexual life in Manhattan. Besides the frequent love notes, there were Harvey’s personally guided Sunday tours of the museums, Saturday nights at Milk’s box at the opera and cozy evenings in his Upper West Side apartment where Harvey struggled for just the right texture in the sauce for the chicken and broccoli. Every morning at precisely 9:30 A.M. , Rodwell got his wake-up call so he wouldn’t be late for his ballet classes. The calls always opened with one of Harvey’s sick jokes.
    Harvey’s good humor faded only once in those early romantic days of his relationship with Craig. Harvey mentioned watching Joe Campbell move out of the apartment a few months before, pulling his possessions out the building’s front door while Harvey watched from their apartment window several stories above. “I wanted to jump out the window to follow him,” Harvey told Craig. But Harvey didn’t dwell on the past and Craig spent most of his time being utterly enchanted by his new boyfriend.
    For twenty-two-year-old Rodwell, meat loaf had previously been the most exotic item of his cuisine and Chicago Cubs games were the closest he ever got to cultural events. The affair with Harvey came straight from a Hollywood romance, with Milk cast as the ardent, cultured, witty, and, by Rodwell’s standards, rich suitor. In all, Harvey seemed a Prince Charming.
    Though Milk was only ten years Rodwell’s senior, he genuinely enjoyed the role of teacher and charmer. It would be to such boyish-looking men in their late teens and early twenties that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life. But this relationship would be different, haunted—and ultimately doomed—by strange new ideas that tied homosexuality to politics, ideas that both repelled and attracted the thirty-two-year-old Milk.
    *   *   *
    A soft September breeze blew in from Lake Michigan. The cherry tops of Chicago police cars converged on the corner of Clark