Harvey Milk

For other uses, see Harvey Milk (disambiguation).

File:Harvey milk.jpg

Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician who was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States, as a city supervisor in San Francisco. Milk was born and raised in New York, where he realized as an adolescent that he was homosexual, but chose at the time to pursue a financial career that required secrecy and discretion. He held an assortment of jobs and moved frequently, as friends recalled he was constantly restless and had no tolerance for boredom. Milk joined the counterculture of the 1960s, shedding many of his conservative views, and took the opportunity to move to San Francisco in 1972.

Milk settled in the Castro District, a neighborhood that was experiencing an mass immigration of gay men and lesbians. He opened a camera store and decided to run for city supervisor in 1973, where he came up against the existing gay political establishment, earning their resentment. Milk, who was brash, outspoken, animated, and outrageous, equated politics with theater and earned media attention and votes, although not enough to be elected. However, he campaigned in the next two supervisor elections, dubbing himself the "Mayor of Castro Street". He also ran for the California State Assembly and led the gay political movement out of his camera store in fierce battles against anti-gay initiatives. Not until 1978, when San Francisco re-organized their supervisor selection to come from neighborhood districts—as opposed to city-wide ballots—was Milk successfully elected.

Harvey Milk served almost eleven months as city supervisor, passing a gay rights ordinance for the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by another city supervisor, troubled because he had recently resigned and wanted his job back. Milk has become an icon in the city's history and an historical figure in the gay rights movement. While established gay political organizers in San Francisco were encouraging gays to work with liberal politicians and to use restraint at reaching their objectives, Milk was vocal about gays seizing their growing power in the city, supporting each other, and giving hope to gays around the country who were disenfranchised. His legacy, writes Randy Shilts—his most comprehensive biographer—is that he struggled, had hope and won, at least for a while—and made it seem as if it were possible for gay people to be able to do the same. The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality states of his impact, "[B]ecause of his personal gifts, and the time and place in which he lived, he was able to make it work more effectively for gay and lesbian politics than any other single individual has done before or since".

Early life and education

Harvey Bernard Milk was born in Woodmere, New York on Long Island on May 22, 1930 to William and Minerva Karns Milk. He was the younger son of Russian-Jewish parents and the grandson of a Lithuanian salesman who eventually owned a department store. He showed an early tendency to grab attention as a class clown. His appearance—ears that stuck out, big nose, and oversized feet earned him the nickname "Glimpy Milch". He also played football in school, and developed a passion for opera. In his teens, he acknowledged his homosexuality, but kept it a very guarded secret. Under his name in the high school yearbook, it read, "Glimpy Milk—and they say WOMEN are never at a loss for words".

Milk attended New York State College for Teachers in Albany (now Albany State University) from 1947 to 1951 majoring in math. He wrote for the college newspaper, and earned a reputation as a gregarious, friendly student. None of his friends in high school or college ever suspected his sexuality. One remembered, "He was never though of as a possible queer—that's what you called them then—he was a man's man". Milk soon joined the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. He was stationed in San Diego and earned the rank of junior lieutenant as a deep sea diver on an aircraft carrier. He was discharged from the Navy in 1955.

Early career

Few clues arose in Milk's early life to suggest he would eventually become so significant in politics. He began teaching at Hewlitt High School on Long Island. In 1956 he met Joe Campbell at Riis Beach, a popular location for gay men in Queens. Campbell was seven years younger than Milk, and Milk pursued him passionately. Even after they moved in together, Milk wrote Campbell romantic notes and poems. Quickly growing bored, they decided to move to Texas, but they were unhappy there and moved back the New York where Milk got a job as an actuarial statistician at an insurance firm. Campbell and Milk were together for a little less than six years—his longest relationship. Milk, once again bored and untethered in New York, offered to marry a lesbian friend in Miami in order to "have ... a front & each would not be in the way of the other". However, he remained in New York and chose to pursue relationships secretly.

Wall Street

In 1962 Milk became involved with another man ten years younger named Craig Rodwell. Though Milk courted Rodwell ardently, waking him up every morning with a call, sending notes, and giving him earnest attention, Milk was put off by Rodwell's involvement with the New York Mattachine Society, a gay activist organization. When Rodwell was arrested for walking in Riis Park, charged with inciting a riot and indecent exposure (the law required men to be wearing swimsuits above the navel and below the thigh), he spent three days in jail. The relationship soon ended as Milk became alarmed at Rodwell's tendency to agitate the police.

Milk abruptly changed jobs from an insurance salesman to a researcher at a Wall Street company, where he was frequently promoted despite his tendency to offend the older members of the firm with his brash speech. Though he was clearly talented and successful at what he did, his co-workers sensed that his heart was not involved with the work. He started a troubled relationship with Jack Galen McKinley. To Milk's friends, they saw a pattern emerge: Milk could not stand to be bored in jobs, and without fail he chose romantic partners who were younger and needed an inordinate amount of attention. He persuaded McKinley to work with him in conservative Republican Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. McKinley was a stage manager for Tom O'Horgan, a producer who started his career in experimental theater, but soon graduated to much larger Broadway productions. McKinley was also prone to depression and frequently threatened to commit suicide if Milk did not show him enough attention.

To make a point to McKinley, Milk took him to the hospital to show him an unsuccessful suicide: Milk's ex-lover Joe Campbell made an attempt when the man he was in love with, Billy Sipple, left him. Milk had remained friendly with Campbell, who entered the avant garde art scene in Greenwich Village. Milk disapproved of his relationship with Sipple and did not understand Campbell's despondency.

Move to San Francisco

Castro Street

The Eureka Valley of San Francisco, where Market and Castro Streets intersect, had for decades been a blue-collar Irish Catholic neighborhood to the extent that it was synonymous with the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Parish. Beginning in the 1960s, however, suburbs in Berkeley and Oakland attracted young families to raise their children. Mayor Joseph Alioto, proud of his working class background and supporters, based his political career on welcoming developers, and attracting a Cardinal to the city. Many of the blue collar jobs (and Alioto's supporters) were forced out, prompting more Castro Street residents to leave, and a more educated, professional voting base to move into the city. The Most Holy Redeemer Parish shops shut down, houses were abandoned and shuttered, and the neighborhood entered a depression. In 1963, a gay bar opened on Castro Street and real estate prices plummeted even farther. The population began to change gradually. Hippies, attracted to the free love ideals of the Haight-Ashbury area but disillusioned with the crime, bought some of the cheap Victorian houses. San Francisco, a major port city, also had a sizable number of gay men expelled from the military who had decided to stay rather than return to their hometowns and face ostracism. By 1969, San Francisco had more gay people per capita than any American city. As evidence, when the National Institute of Mental Health asked the Kinsey Institute to survey homosexuals, the Kinsey Institute chose San Francisco.

Among the thousands of gay men attracted to San Francisco was Milk, who arrived in 1969 with the Broadway touring company of Hair. McKinley was offered a job with the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar in New York City; their tempestuous relationship was brought to an end. The city appealed to Milk so much he decided to stay, working in an investment firm. The revolutionary times caught up with Milk, however, in 1970. Increasingly frustrated with the political climate after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Milk started to grow his hair. When told to cut it, he refused and was fired.

Change

Change did not come easy to the political authorities in San Francisco. Oral sex was still a felony. In 1970, nearly 90 people were arrested for it. Facing eviction if caught having homosexual sex in a rented apartment, and unwilling to face being arrested in gay bars, some men took to having sex in public parks at night. Alioto's influence in trying to win Catholic influence with a Cardinal for San Francisco, prioritized cracking down on gay sex in public places. In 1971, 2,800 gay men were arrested for public sex in San Francisco. By comparison, New York City recorded only 63 arrests for the same offense that year. Any arrest for a morals charge carried with it mandatory registration as a sex offender.

Milk returned to New York and became involved with the O'Horgan's theater company, signing on as associate producer for Eve Merriam's Inner City and Lenny. He was described as a "general aide" in O'Horgan's productions in a detailed story by The New York Times on O'Horgan's groundbreaking theater. The time he spent with the cast of flower children began to wear away Milk's conservatism. Milk drifted from California to Texas to New York without any steady job or plan. The New York Times story described Milk as "a sad eyed man—another aging hippie with long, long hair, wearing faded jeans and pretty beads". Craig Rodwell read the description of the tightly controlled man he knew and wondered if it could be the same person. One of Milk's Wall Street friends worried for him, with no plan or future, but remembered Milk's attitude: "I think he was happier than at any time I had ever seen him in his entire life."

Milk met Scott Smith—20 years his junior—and began another relationship. He and Smith returned to San Francisco, now indistinguishable from the other long-haired, bearded hippies, and lived on money they had saved. In 1972, a roll of film Milk dropped off to be developed had been ruined. With their last $1,000, Milk decided they would open a camera store on Castro Street.

Getting into politics

In the late 1960s, two organizations in San Francisco, the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), began to mount defenses against the persecution of gay bars, police entrapment, and lack of legal rights for gays and lesbians coming out of divorces. Several politicians recognized the growing clout and organization of homosexuals in San Francisco, and decided to attend SIR and DOB meetings. Among the early ones were Representative Phillip Burton and Assemblyman Willie Brown, who made a priority to legalize all sex between consenting adults. Brown's 1969 attempt failed, although SIR was again courted by surprisingly popular moderate Supervisor Dianne Feinstein in her bid to be elected mayor, opposing Alioto. Ex-policeman Richard Hongisto worked for ten years to change the conservative views of the San Francisco Police Department, and also actively appealed to the gay community, who responded by raising a significant amount of funds for his campaign for sheriff. Though Feinstein was unsuccessful, when Hongisto won in 1971, political clout in the gay community was apparent.

SIR had become powerful enough to branch out into political maneuvering. In 1971 SIR members Jim Foster, Rick Stokes, and publisher of The Advocate David Goodstein, formed the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, or simply "Alice" as it was known. Alice took the approach of befriending liberal politicians to get them to sponsor bills granting equal rights to gays and lesbians, proving successful when Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon asked Feinstein to pass an ordinance outlawing employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in 1972. They chose Stokes to run for a relatively unimportant seat on the community college board. Though Stokes got 45,000 votes, he was quiet and unassuming and did not win. Foster, however, shot to national prominence by being the first openly gay man to address a political convention. His speech at the Democratic National Convention ensured that his voice, according to San Francisco politicians, was the one to be heard when they wanted the opinion of the gay community. His influence was the most important when they wanted the gay community's vote.

One day in 1973 a state bureaucrat entered Castro Camera to tell Harvey Milk the he owed $100 as deposit against state sales tax. Milk was enraged and got into a screaming match with the man, and eventually got the deposit shaved down to $30 by complaining for weeks at state offices. A teacher came into his store to borrow a projector because the equipment in the schools did not function, and Milk fumed about government priorities. Friends also remember around the same time having to restrain Milk from kicking the television while Attorney General John Mitchell gave consistent "I don't recall" replies during the Watergate hearings. Milk decided to do something: he would run for city supervisor.

Campaigns

Milk's reception by the gay political establishment in San Francisco was icy. Jim Foster, who had by now been active in gay politics for ten years, resented the newcomer asking for his endorsement for a position as prestigious as city supervisor. Foster told Milk, "There's an old saying in the Democratic Party. You don't get to dance unless you put up the chairs. I've never seen you put up the chairs." Milk was furious at the patronizing snub, and the conversation marked the beginning of an antagonistic relationship between Alice and Harvey Milk. Some gay bar owners, still battling police harassment and unhappy with what they saw as a timid approach by Alice to established authority in the city, decided to endorse him.

Milk ran on a campaign of conservative financial management, promoting individuals over large corporations and government. His campaign literature read, "I stand for all those who feel that the government no longer understands the individual and no longer respects individual rights". He supported the re-organization of supervisor elections from a city-wide ballot—that gave influence to candidates with the most money—to district ballots that gave neighborhoods more control over their representatives in city government. But he also put liberal social points in his platform, including sexual freedom and the legalization of marijuana. Milk's fiery, flamboyant speeches and savvy media skills earned him a significant amount of press during the 1973 election. He earned 17,000 votes—sweeping the Castro District and other liberal neighborhoods—coming in 10th place out of 32 candidates. Had the elections been reorganized to allow districts to elect their own supervisors, he would have won.

Mayor of Castro Street

One of Milk's first displays of influence was with organized labor. The Teamsters union wanted to strike against beer distributors who refused to allow the union to organize beer drivers. An organizer asked Milk with assistance with gay bars; in return, Milk asked the union to hire more gay drivers. Milk canvassed the gay bars in and surrounding the Castro District, urging them to refuse to sell the beer. With the help from a coalition of Arab and Chinese grocers, the boycott was immensely successful. Milk earned a strong political ally in organized labor, and it was around this time he began to style himself "The Mayor of Castro Street". As Castro Street grew, so did Milk's reputation. As one retrospective of his life states, "he not only absorbed the genus loci but was largely instrumental in creating it".

As an example of this, tensions between the older citizens of the Most Holy Redeemer Parish and the "invasion" of gays entering the Castro District were heightened in 1973. When two men tried to open an antique shop, the Eureka Valley Merchants Association (EVMA) tried to prevent them from receiving a business license. Milk and a few other gay business owners then started the Castro Village Association (CVA), with Milk as the president. He often repeated his philosophy that gays should buy from gay businesses. Milk organized the Castro Street Fair in 1974, to attract more customers to the area. More than 5,000 attended, and some of the EVMA members were stunned; they did more business on the day of the fair than in previous decades.

Serious candidate

Although he was a newcomer to the Castro District, Milk had shown influence and leadership. He was starting to be taken seriously as a candidate and decided to run again for supervisor in 1975. He also reconsidered his approach and cut his long hair, swore off smoking marijuana, and vowed never to visit another gay bathhouse again. Milk's campaigning earned the support of the teamsters, firefighters, and construction unions. Castro Camera became the center of activity in the neighborhood. Milk would often pull people off the street to work his campaigns for him—many discovered later that they just happened to resemble the type of men Milk found attractive.

Milk prioritized the sustaining of small businesses and the growth of neighborhoods over the growing city-wide trend to support large businesses and develop the downtown area. This clash of interests between Alioto's emphasis on downtown development and the maintenance of local neighborhoods resulted in a political overhaul. Milk came in seventh place, only one position away from earning a supervisor seat. George Moscone was elected mayor. Moscone had been instrumental in repealing the anti-sodomy law earlier that year in the California State Legislature, and recognized Milk's influence in his election when he visited Milk's election night headquarters, thanked Milk personally, and offered him a position as a city commissioner. Liberal politicians now held the offices of the mayor, district attorney, and sheriff.

Heroic things

On September 22, 1975, President Gerald Ford was visiting San Francisco, walking from his hotel to his car. In the crowd was Sara Jane Moore, who raised a gun to shoot the president. Beside Moore was an ex-Marine who saw her, grabbed her arm as the gun discharged toward the pavement. The bystander was Oliver "Bill" Sipple, who had left Joe Campbell years before, prompting his suicide attempt. Sipple, on psychiatric disability from the military, lived in a "sleazy" apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood, and refused to call himself a hero. National spotlight was on him immediately, and Milk responded. While discussing if the truth about Sipple's sexuality should be disclosed, Milk told a friend: "It's too good an opportunity. For once we can show that gays do heroic things, not just all that ca-ca about molesting children and hanging out in bathrooms." Milk contacted the newspaper.

Several days later Herb Caen, a columnist at The San Francisco Chronicle, exposed Sipple as a gay man and a friend of Milk's. Sipple was beseiged by reporters, as was his family. His mother, a staunch Baptist in Detroit, refused to speak to him. Although he had been involved with the gay community for years, even participating in Gay Pride events, Sipple sued The San Francisco Chronicle on the grounds that they invaded his privacy. President Ford sent Sipple a note thanking Sipple for saving his life. Milk stated that the note, instead of a customary invitation to the White House, was the result of Sipple's sexual orientation.

Race for state assembly

Keeping his promise to Milk, newly elected Mayor George Moscone appointed him to the Board of Permit Appeals in 1976, making him the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States. Milk, however, considered seeking a position as an assemblyman in state government. The California State Assembly district was weighted heavily in his favor, as much of it was based in the Castro District, and the surrounding neighborhoods where Milk's sympathizers voted. In the last race for supervisor, Milk received more votes than the currently seated assemblyman. However, Moscone had made a deal with the assembly speaker that another candidate should run—Art Agnos. Furthermore, Milk was not allowed to run a campaign while seated on a city commission.

Milk spent five weeks on the Board of Permit Appeals before Moscone was forced to fire him because he decided to run for the California State Assembly. Rick Stokes replaced him. Milk's firing, and the backroom deal made between Moscone, the assembly speaker, and Agnos fueled his campaign as he took on the identity of a political underdog. He railed that high officers in the city and state governments were against him. He complained that the prevailing gay political establishment, particularly the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, were shutting him out. He enthusiastically embraced a local independent weekly magazine's headline: "Harvey Milk vs. The Machine".

His campaign, run from the storefront of Castro Camera, was a study in disorganization. Although volunteers were plentiful and happy to perform the paperwork of mass mailings, Milk's notes and volunteer lists were kept on scrap papers. Anytime the campaign required funds, the money came from the cash register without any consideration for accounting. An 11-year-old neighborhood girl, unable to be persuaded otherwise by her mother, ingratiated herself among the gay men and older Irish grandmothers, and happily ordered people to work. Milk himself was hyperactive and prone to fantastic outbursts of temper, only to recover quickly and shout excitedly about something else. Many of his rants were directed at his lover, Scott Smith, who was becoming disillusioned with the man who was no longer the laid-back hippie had had fallen in love with.

If the campaigner was manic, he was also dedicated, filled with good humor, and he had a particular genius for getting media attention. He spent long hours shaking hands at bus stops, movie theater lines, and registering voters. He took whatever opportunity came along to promote himself. With the large numbers of volunteers, he had dozens at a time stand along the busy thoroughfare of Market Street as human billboards, holding up "Milk for Assembly" signs while commuters drove into the heart of the city for work every day. He distributed his campaign literature anywhere he could, including one of the most influential political groups in the city: the Peoples Temple. Milk's volunteers dropped off brochures there, but came back with vague feelings of apprehension. Because the Peoples Temple leader, Jim Jones, was politically powerful in San Francisco (and supported both candidates), Milk was happy to allow Temple members to work his phones. But to his volunteers, he said, "Make sure you're always nice to the Peoples Temple. If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They're weird and they're dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side."

The race was close, but Milk lost by 4,000 votes. Agnos, however, taught Milk a valuable lesson, when he criticized Milk's frequently given campaign speech as "a downer... You talk about how you're gonna throw the bums out, but how are you gonna fix things—other than beat me? You shouldn't leave your audience on a down."

Broader historical forces

The fledgling gay rights movement had yet to meet their first organized opposition. However, A few well-connected gay activists in Miami, Florida were able to pass a civil rights ordinance that made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal in Dade County in 1977. Responding to them was a significantly well-organized group of conservative fundamentalist Christians, headed by singer Anita Bryant. Their campaign was titled "Save Our Children", and Bryant claimed the ordinance discriminated against her rights to teach her children Biblical morality. Bryant and the campaign gathered 64,000 signatures to put the issue to a county-wide vote. With funds raised in part by the Florida Citrus Commission, of which Bryant was the spokesman, they ran television advertisements contrasting the Orange Bowl Parade with San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade, stating that Dade County would be turned into a "hotbed of homosexuality" where "men ...cavort with little boys". Bryant agreed to an interview with Playboy magazine, in which she was quoted saying that the civil rights ordinance "would have made it mandatory that flaunting homosexuals be hired in both the public and parochial schools ... If they're a legitimate minority, then so are nail biters, dieters, fat people, short people, and murderers." Bryant would often break into her standard "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while speaking during the campaign, and called homosexuals "human garbage" and blamed the drought in California on their sins.

Jim Foster, now the most powerful political organizer in San Francisco, went to Miami to assist the gay activists there as election day neared, and a nationwide boycott of orange juice started. But the message of the Save Our Children campaign was strong, and their reach was very effective. A Florida state senator read the Book of Leviticus out loud to the senate, and the governor went on record against the civil rights ordinance. The result was an overwhelming defeat for gay activists; the largest turnout of voters in any special election in the history of Dade County voted to repeal the law by 70%.

Just politics

Christian fundamentalists were inspired by their victory, and found a political cause. Gay activists were shocked to see how ineffective they had been. An impromptu demonstration of over 3,000 Castro residents formed the night of the Dade County ordinance vote. Gay men and lesbians were simultaneously angry, chanting "Out of the bars and into the streets!" and elated at their passionate and powerful response. The San Francisco Examiner reported that members of the crowd pulled others out of bars along Castro and Polk Streets to "deafening" cheers. Milk declared, "This is the power of the gay community. Anita's going to create a national gay force," as he led marchers (consciously avoiding a riot) through the Castro district that night and the next. Activists had little time to recover, as the scenario replayed itself when civil rights ordinances were overturned by voters in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Wichita, Kansas and Eugene, Oregon, all throughout 1977 and into 1978. California State Senator John Briggs saw an opportunity in the Christian fundamentalists' campaign. He was hoping to be elected governor of California in 1978, and was impressed with the voter turnout seen in Miami. Though there was no statewide gay rights law to overturn, when Briggs returned to Sacramento he wrote a bill that would outlaw gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools throughout California. Briggs never claimed in private to have anything against gays, telling Randy Shilts, "It's politics. Just politics." Random attacks of gays rose in the Castro. When police neglected to respond sufficiently, groups of gays patrolled the neighborhood themselves, on alert for attackers. However, on June 21, 1977, a gay man named Robert Hillsborough was fatally stabbed 15 times while his attackers gathered around him and chanted "Faggot!" Both Mayor Moscone and Hillsborough's mother blamed Anita Bryant and John Briggs. The week before Briggs held a press conference at San Francisco City Hall where he called the city a "sexual garbage heap" because of homosexuals.

In August of 1977, voters in the city of San Francisco decided to re-organize supervisor elections to choose supervisors from neighborhoods instead of voting for them in city-wide ballots. Harvey Milk quickly qualified as the primary candidate in District 5, surrounding Castro Street.

Last campaign

Anita Bryant's vitriol and the multiple challenges to gay rights from across the United States fueled gay politics in San Francisco. For the next race for supervisor, 17 candidates from the Castro District entered the race, half of them gay. The New York Times ran an expose on the veritable invasion of gay people into San Francisco, estimating that the city's gay population was between 100,000 and 200,000 out of a total 750,000. The Castro Village Association had grown to 90 businesses; the local bank—formerly the smallest branch in the city—was now the largest and was forced to build a new wing to accommodate its new customers. Milk seized the opportunity to harness all of these issues; biographer Randy Shilts noted the "[b]roader historical forces" that fueled Milk's campaign.

Milk's most successful opponent was quiet and thoughtful lawyer Rick Stokes, who was backed by the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club. Stokes had come out of secrecy long before Milk had, and had experienced more severe treatment, once hospitalized and forced to endure electroshock therapy. But it was Milk who was more expressive about homosexuality taking a fore in San Francisco politics. Stokes was quoted saying, "I'm just a businessman who happens to be gay", and expressed the view that any normal person could also be gay. Milk's contrasting populist philosophy was relayed to The New York Times:

"We don't want sympathetic liberals, we want gays to represent gays.... I represent the gay street people—the 14-year-old runaway from San Antonio. We have to make up for hundreds of years of persecution. We have to give hope to that poor runaway kid from San Antonio. They go to the bars because churches are hostile. They need hope! They need a piece of the pie!"

However, he branched across neighborhoods and did not concentrate only on gay causes. He promoted larger and less expensive child care facilities, free public transportation, and the development of a board of civilians to oversee the police. For this campaign, Milk had experience in being involved with neighborhood issues, which he promoted at every opportunity. Milk used the same manic campaign tactics as in previous races. Human billboards, hours of handshaking, and dozens of speeches touting the hope gay people should have. This time, even The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed him for supervisor. He won by 30% against sixteen other candidates, and after his victory became apparent, arrived on Castro Street on the back of his campaign manager's motorcycle—escorted by Sheriff Richard Hongisto—to a what a newspaper story described as a "tumultuous and moving welcome".

Milk had recently taken a new lover, a young man named Jack Lira, who was frequently very drunk in public, and just as often escorted out of political events by Milk's aides. Since the race for the California State Assembly, Milk had been receiving death threats increasing in their suggested violence. Aware that his profile had been raised considerably, he recorded on tape who should succeed him if he were killed, also adding: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door".

Supervisor

Milk's swearing in made national headlines, as he became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office. He likened himself to Jackie Robinson and walked to City Hall with Jack Lira under his arm, stating "You can stand around and throw bricks at Silly Hall or you can take it over. Well, here we are." The Castro District was not the only neighborhood to promote someone new to city politics. An unwed mother (Carol Ruth Silver), a Chinese American (Gordon Lau), and an African American woman (Ella Hill Hutch) were all firsts for the city sworn in with Milk, along with Daniel White, a former police officer and firefighter, who spoke of how proud he was that his grandmother was able to see him get sworn in.

Milk's energy, affinity for pranking, and unpredictability at times exasperated Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein. In his first meeting with Mayor Moscone, Milk dictated to him what he would have to do to get gay votes, which were now a quarter of the voting population in the city. Milk, however, became Moscone's closest ally on the Board of Supervisors. The biggest targets of Milk's ire were large corporations and real estate developers. He fumed when a parking garage was slated to take the place of homes near the downtown area, and tried to pass a commuter tax so office workers who live outside the city but drive into work would have to pay for city services they used. Milk voted his conscience, often against Feinstein and other more tenured members of the board. Initially he agreed with fellow Supervisor Dan White, whose district was located two miles south of the Castro, that a psychiatric hospital should not be placed there in an old convent. However, after Milk learned more about the facility, decided to switch his vote, making White's majority—one he had championed while campaigning—a minority. White did not forget it. He opposed every initiative and issue Milk proposed and supported.

During his tenure on the Board of Supervisors, however, Milk was able to pass two pieces of legislation. One of Milk's first priorities in office was to sponsor a civil rights bill that outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. Only Supervisor White voted against it, and Mayor Moscone enthusiastically signed it into law with a light blue pen that Milk had given him for the occasion.

The second legislation Milk concentrated on was solving the number one problem citizens of the city complained about in a recent poll: dog feces. He began to work on implementing a city ordinance to require dog owners to clean up after their pets within a month of his being sworn in. Dubbed the "pooper scooper law", its passing by the Board of Supervisors was covered extensively on television and newspapers in San Francisco. Milk's campaign manager called him "a master at figuring out what would get him covered in the newspaper". He invited the press to Duboce Park to explain why it was necessary, and while cameras were rolling, stepped in the offending substance apparently by mistake. His staffers, however, knew he had been at the park for an hour before the press conference looking for the the right place to walk in front of the cameras. It earned him the most fan mail of his tenure in politics and went out on national news releases.

Milk and Lira soon broke up, but Lira called him some time after and demanded Milk come to his apartment. When Milk arrived, he found Lira had hung himself. Lira, already prone to severe depression, had been upset about the Anita Bryant and John Briggs campaigns.

Briggs Initiative

John Briggs was forced to drop out of the 1978 race for California governor, but received enthusiastic support for Proposition 6, dubbed the Briggs Initiative. Although the proposed law was simple in legislating gay teachers not be allowed in public classrooms, it also was written generally enough to state that any employee of a public school district who supported gay rights, regardless of their own sexual orientation, could also be fired. Briggs' writings and campaigns for Proposition 6 were pervasive throughout California, and Harvey Milk attended every event Briggs hosted, swearing that if Briggs won California, he would not win San Francisco. In their numerous debates, which at the end had been honed to quick statements that they shot back and forth at each other, Briggs maintained that homosexual teachers wanted to abuse and recruit children. Milk responded with the statistics compiled by law enforcement that provided evidence that pedophiles identified primarily as heterosexual, and dismissed Briggs' points with one-liner jokes: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around".

Gay Pride marches during the summer of 1978 in Los Angeles and San Francisco swelled in their numbers. Numbers of participants were estimated between 250,000 and 375,000 at San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade; newspapers claimed were inspired by John Briggs. Organizers asked participants to carry signs to indicate their hometowns for cameras to show from how far people came to live in the Castro District. Milk rode in an open car carrying a sign saying "I'm from Woodmere, N.Y." He gave a version of what became his most famous speech, "The Hope Speech", that The San Francisco Examiner noted "ignited the crowd":

On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives. I know that it is hard and that it will hurt them, but think of how they will hurt you in the voting booths...

Despite the losses in battles for gay rights across the country that year, he remained optimistic, saying "Even if gays lose in these initiatives, people are still being educated. Because of Anita Bryant and Dade County, the entire country was educated about homosexuality to a greater extent than ever before. The first step is always hostility, and after that you can sit down and talk about it."

Citing the potential infringements of individual rights, then-former governor of California Ronald Reagan voiced his opposition to the proposition, as did Supervisor Dan White, Governor Jerry Brown, and President Jimmy Carter, in an afterthought following a speech he gave in Sacramento. Astounding gay activists on election night, the proposition lost by more than a million votes.

Peoples Temple investigation

Main article: Political alliances of Peoples Temple

Milk spoke at political rallies at the Peoples Temple, attended a rally at the controversial Temple against its opponents during investigations of criminal wrongdoings, supported the works of the Temple in a weekly column after leader Jim Jones' exodus to Guyana, and wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter stating that Jones was known as "a man of the highest character" while stating that the leader of the group attempting to extricate relatives from Jonestown was spreading "apparent bold-faced lies."

Black Monday

On November 10, 1978, ten months after being sworn in, Supervisor White resigned his position on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors claiming that his annual salary of $9,600 was not enough to support his family. Milk had also felt the pinch of the decrease in income when he and Scott Smith were forced to close Castro Camera a month before. Despite White's financial strain, he had recently voted against a pay raise for city supervisors that would have given him an annual $24,000 salary. Within days, however, White requested the position again, and Mayor Moscone initially agreed. However, further consideration—and intervention by other supervisors—convinced the mayor to appoint someone more in line with the growing ethnic diversity of White's district and liberal leanings of the Board of Supervisors. On November 18, news broke of the murder of Representative Leo Ryan in Guyana, and the next day of the mass suicide of members of the Peoples Temple, who had relocated from San Francisco to a build a remote community in Jonestown, Guyana. Horror came in degrees as San Franciscans learned more than 400 Jonestown residents were dead, then the overwhelming number topped 900.

Moscone planned to announce White's replacement one week later on November, 27, 1978. Half an hour before the press conference, Supervisor Dan White entered City Hall through a basement window to avoid metal detectors and made his way to Mayor Moscone's office, where witnesses heard shouting between White and Moscone, then gunshots as White shot the mayor three times in the head and once in the arm. White then quickly walked to his former office, reloading his police-issue revolver along the way, and intercepted Harvey Milk, asking him to step inside for a moment. President of the Board of Supervisors Dianne Feinstein heard gunshots, and called the police. She found Milk face down on the floor, shot five times: twice in the head at close range. Feinstein was shaking so badly she required support from the police chief after identifying both bodies. It was she who announced to the press, "Today San Francisco has experienced a double tragedy of immense proportions... It is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed", then adding after being drowned out by shouts of disbelief, "and the suspect is Supervisor Dan White". Milk was 48 years old. Moscone was 49.

Within an hour, White called his wife from a fast food restaurant; she met him at a nearby church and escorted him to turn himself in to the police. Many residents left flowers on the steps of City Hall. That evening, a spontaneous gathering of people began to move from Castro Street toward City Hall in a candlelight vigil, where their numbers rose between 25,000 and 40,000. The next day, Moscone and Milk laid in state under the City Hall rotunda as mourners passed by. Six thousand mourners attended a service for Mayor Moscone at St. Mary's Cathedral. Two memorials were held for Milk—a smaller one at Temple Emmanu-El, and a more boisterous one at the Opera House.

City in agony

Mayor Moscone had recently increased security at City Hall in the wake of the Jonestown suicides. Survivors from Guyana recounted drills for suicide preparations that Jones called "White Nights". Rumors spread that Moscone's and Milk's murders—promoted by the coincidence in White's name to Jones' codename for suicide preparations—were somehow associated with the Jonestown tragedy. A stunned District Attorney called the assassinations so close to the news about Jonestown "incomprehensible", but denied any connection. Governor Jerry Brown ordered flags to be flown at half mast, and called Milk a "hard-working and dedicated supervisor, a leader of San Francisco's gay community, who kept his promise to represent all his constituents". President Jimmy Carter expressed his shock at both murders and sent condolences. Speaker of the California Assembly Leo McCarthy called it "an insane tragedy". "A City in Agony" topped the headlines in The San Francisco Examiner the day after the murders; inside the paper were stories of the assassinations back to back with updates of bodies being shipped home from Guyana. An editorial described "A city with more sadness and despair in its heart than any city should have to bear" went on to ask how such tragedies occur, particularly to "men of such warmth and vision and great energies". One documentation of the months surrounding the murders called 1978 and 1979 "the most emotionally devastating years in San Francisco's fabulously spotted history".

The 32-year-old White, who had been in the Army during the Vietnam War—but left before he saw any combat, was an ex-police officer and ex-firefighter, ran on a tough anti-crime platform in his district. Colleagues declared him a high-achieving "all-American boy", saying, "If he had been a breakfast cereal, he would have had to be Wheaties". White was to have received an award the next week for rescuing a woman and child from a 17-story burning building when he was a firefighter in 1977. Though he was the only supervisor to vote against Milk's gay rights ordinance earlier that year, he had been quoted saying, "I respect the rights of all people, including gays". Milk and White at first got along well. One of White's political aides (who was gay) remembered, "Dan had more in common with Harvey than he did with anyone else on the board". White voted to support a center for gay seniors, and to honor Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin's 25th anniversary and pioneering work.

After Milk's vote for the mental health facility in White's district, however, White refused to speak with Milk and only communicated to one of Milk's aides. Other acquaintances remembered White as being very intense. "He was impulsive... He was an extremely competitive man, obsessively so... I think he could not take defeat," San Francisco's assistant fire chief told reporters. White's first campaign manager quit in the middle of the campaign, and told a reporter that White was an egotist and it was clear that he was antigay, though he denied it in the press. White's associates and supporters described him "as a man with a pugilistic temper and an impressive capacity for nurturing a grudge". The aide who ran between White and Milk remembered, "Talking to him, I realized that he saw Harvey Milk and George Moscone as representing all that was wrong with the world".

Milk's friends went to find a suit for his casket, and then learned how much he had been affected by the recent decrease in his income as a supervisor. They were surprised that all of his clothes were coming apart; they couldn't find any of his socks without holes. He was cremated and his ashes were split. Most of them scattered in San Francisco Bay by his closest friends. Some of them were encapsulated and buried beneath the sidewalk in front of where Castro Camera was located. Harry Britt, one of four people Milk listed on his tape as acceptable replacements should he be assassinated, was chosen by the acting mayor, Dianne Feinstein.

Trial

Further information: Dan White and Twinkie defense

Dan White's arrest and trial caused a sensation, and illustrated severe tensions between the liberal population and the established police force in the city. The San Francisco Police were mostly working class Irish descendants who intensely disliked the growing liberal politics of the Haight-Ashbury and the gay immigration. After White had turned himself in and confessed, he sat in his cell while his former colleagues on the police force told Harvey Milk jokes; police openly wore "Free Dan White" t-shirts in the days after the murder. An undersheriff for San Francisco later stated, "The more I observed what went on at the jail, the more I began to stop seeing what Dan White did as the act of an individual and began to see it as a political act in a political movement". White showed no remorse for his actions, and only exhibited vulnerability during an eight-minute call to his mother from jail.

The seated jury for White's trial were white middle class San Franciscans who were mostly Catholic, and clearly sympathetic to the defendant; gays and ethnic minorities were excused from the jury pool. Some of the jury members cried when they heard White's tearful recorded confession, at the end of which the interrogator thanked White for his honesty. White's defense attorney, Doug Schmidt, argued that he was not responsible for his actions, using the legal term diminished capacity: "Good people, fine people, with fine backgrounds, simply don't kill people in cold blood". Schmidt tried to prove that White's anguished mental state was caused by his being taken advantage of by the politicos in City Hall who had promised to give his job back only to refuse him again—which was illustrated and exacerbated by his binging on junk food the night before the murders, when he was previously known to have been health-food conscious. Quickly, area newspapers dubbed it the Twinkie defense. White was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter for both of his victims. He cried when he heard the verdict.

White Night riots

Further information: White Night riots

Acting Mayor Feinstein, Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, and Milk's successor Harry Britt condemned the jury's decision. A surge of people from the Castro District walked again to City Hall chanting "Avenge Harvey Milk" and "He got away with murder". Pandemonium rapidly escalated as rocks were hurled at the front doors of the building. Milk's friends and aides tried to stop the destruction, but the mob of more than 3,000 ignored them and lit police cars on fire, and shoved a burning newspaper dispenser through the broken doors of City Hall and cheered while it burned. One of the rioters responded to a reporter's question about why they were destroying parts of the city: "Just tell people that we ate too many Twinkies. That's why this is happening." The chief of police, who had been chosen by Moscone and was not favored by the majority of officers, ordered the police not to retaliate, but to hold their ground. The White Night riots, as they became known, lasted several hours. Although the police acted with restraint near City Hall, later that evening, several police cruisers filled with officers wearing riot gear pulled up to the Elephant Walk Bar on Castro Street. Harvey Milk's aide Cleve Jones, and a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Warren Hinckle, witnessed as officers stormed into the bar and began to beat patrons at random. After a 15-minute melee, they left the bar and struck out at people walking along the street. The chief of police finally ordered the officers out of the neighborhood. By morning, 61 police officers and 100 gay residents of the Castro had been hospitalized. Over a million dollars worth of damage had been done to City Hall, police cruisers, and the Elephant Walk Bar.

After the verdict, the District Attorney faced a furious gay community to explain what had gone wrong. The prosecutor had admitted to feeling sorry for White before the trial, and neglected to ask the interrogator who recorded White's confession about his biases and the support White got from the police because, he said, he did not want to embarrass the detective in front of his family in court.

Aftermath

Milk's and Moscone's murders and White's trial changed city politics and the California legal system. In 1980 San Francisco ended district supervisor elections, fearing that a Board of Supervisors so divisive would be harmful to the city, and that they had been a factor in the assassinations. A grassroots neighborhood effort to restore district elections in the mid 1990s proved successful, and the city returned to neighborhood representatives in 2000. California voters decided to change the use of diminished capacity as a result of Dan White's trial. In 1982, the term was clarified to not guilty by reason of insanity, and evidence of a defendant's mental state admissible only during the sentencing phase of a trial. The Twinkie defense has entered the scope of American mythology, oversimplified to explain that a murderer escaped justice because he binged on junk food, neglecting the details of White's relationship with Moscone and Milk, and what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen described as pandemic police "dislike (understatement) of homosexuals".

Dan White served a little more than five years for the double murder of Moscone and Milk. On October 22, 1985 White was found dead, in a running car in his ex-wife's garage. He committed suicide a year and a half after his release from prison. His defense attorney told reporters that he had been despondent over the loss of his family, and the situation he had caused saying, "This was a sick man".

Legacy

Politics

Harvey Milk's three biggest priorities in his political career stressed government being responsive to individuals, gay liberation, and the importance of neighborhoods in San Francisco. His campaigns gradually increased and developed these statements and causes. His 1973 campaign focused on the first point, that as a small business owner in San Francisco—a city dominated by large corporations that had been courted by municipal government—his interests were being overlooked because he was not represented by a large financial institution. Although he did not hide that he was gay, it did not become an issue until his race for the California State Assembly in 1976. It was brought to the fore in the supervisor race against Rick Stokes, as it was an extension of his ideas of individual freedom.

Milk strongly believed that neighborhoods promoted unity and a small-town experience, and that the Castro should provide services to all its residents. He opposed the closing of an elementary school; even though most gay people in the Castro did not have children, Milk saw his neighborhood having the potential to welcome everyone. He told his aides to concentrate on fixing potholes, and boasted that 50 new stop signs had been put in District 5. Responding to city residents' largest complaint about living in San Francsico—the dog feces—Milk made it a priority to enact the ordinance requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. Randy Shilts noted, "...some would claim Harvey was a socialist or various other sorts of idealogues, but, in reality, Harvey's political philosophy was never more complicated than the issue of dogshit; government should solve people's basic problems."

Scholar Karen Foss stresses Milk's impact in San Francisco politics is a result of his being completely unlike anyone else who had held public office in the city. She writes, "Milk happened to be a highly energetic, charismatic figure with a love of theatrics and nothing to lose... Using laughter, reversal, transcendence, and his insider/outsider status, Milk helped create a climate in which dialogue on issues became possible. He also provided a means to integrate the disparate voices of his various constituencies." Milk had been a rousing speaker since he began his campaigning in 1973, but his oratory skills only improved after he had become City Supervisor. His most famous speech became known as "The Hope Speech", and it became a staple throughout his political career. It opened with a play on the accusation that gay people recruit impressionable youth into their numbers: "My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you". A Hope Speech that he gave near the end of his life was considered by those who had heard it often to be the best, and the closing the most effective (although the closeted and fearful gays and lesbians seemed to change cities often in his speeches):

And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvnaias and the Richmond, Minnesotas who are coming out and hear Anita Bryant in television and her story. The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.

In the last year of his life, Milk emphasized that gay people should be more visible, and that would help to end the discrimination and violence against them. Although Milk had not come out to his mother before her death many years before, he urged others to do it in his final statement during his taped premonition of his assassination:

"I cannot prevent anyone from getting angry, or mad, or frustrated. I can only hope that they'll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that two, three, four, five hundred will step forward, so the gay doctors will come out, the gay lawyers, the gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects... I hope that every professional gay will say 'enough', come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help."

Tributes

Where Market and Castro streets intersect in San Francisco flies an enormous Gay Pride flag, situated in Harvey Milk Plaza, which doubles as the Castro District San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI) station. The City of San Francisco has paid tribute to Milk by naming the Harvey Milk Recreational Arts Center for him. The recreation center is headquarters for the drama and performing arts programs for the city's youth. Douglass Elementary in the Castro District was renamed the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in 1996. On what was to be Milk's 78th birthday, a bust of his likeness was unveiled in San Francisco City Hall at the top of the grand staircase. In May 2008, the State Assembly of California voted to mark Harvey Milk's birthday in a gesture proposed by Assemblyman Mark Leno, who said he "hopes the date will memorialize Milk and motivate people to learn about and celebrate his legacy".

A school program for at-risk youth, concentrating on the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students in New York City run out of the Hetrick Martin Institute is named Harvey Milk High School. A Democratic organization more liberal than the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club had been organized in 1976 "to keep the gay community free itself of anointed gatekeepers and machine politics". They changed their name to the Harvey Milk Memorial Gay Democratic Club in 1978 and boast that they are the largest gay Democratic organization in San Francisco.

Freelance reporter Randy Shilts completed a biography of Milk in 1982—his first book, titled The Mayor of Castro Street. Shilts wrote the book while unable to find a steady job as an openly gay reporter. A documentary film was based on the book material titled The Times of Harvey Milk, which won the 1984 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. A musical theater production titled The Harvey Milk Show premiered in 1991. Harvey Milk, an opera written by Stewart Wallace that "mythologizes Milk as a symbol for the birth of the modern gay rights movement", debuted in 1996. In November 2008 a film of Milk's life will be released, directed by Gus van Sant, with Sean Penn starring as Harvey Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White. Filming of the movie took eight weeks, and often used extras in large crowd scenes, such as a re-enactment of Milk's "Hope Speech" at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade. Many of the extras were present at the actual events.

Milk was included in the "Time 100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century", on the basis that he was "a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in doing so". Despite his antics that caused him to be easily dismissed as a panderer for publicity, "none understood how his public role could affect private lives better than Milk....[he] knew that the root cause of the gay predicament was invisibility". Harry Britt summarized Milk's impact the evening Milk was shot in 1978: "No matter what the world has taught us about ourselves, we can be beautiful and we can get our thing together... Harvey was a prophet... he lived by a vision... Something very special is going to happen in this city and it will have Harvey MIlk's name on it."

Bibliography

• Clendinen, Dudley, and Nagourney, Adam (1999). Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684810913
• de Jim, Strange (2003). San Francisco's Castro, Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 9780738528663
• Hinckle, Warren (1985). Gayslayer! The Story of How Dan White Killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone & Got Away With Murder, Silver Dollar Books. ISBN 0933839014
• Marcus, Eric (2002). Making Gay History, HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0060933917
• Shilts, Randy (1982), The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312523300

See also

• List of assassinated American politicians
• Violence against LGBT people
• Political Alliances of the People's Temple

External links

• The James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library holds the Harvey Milk Archives - Scott Smith Collection.
• http://thecastro.net/milkpage.html Significant collection of photographs and Milk history
• Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial Organization dedicated to placing a bust of Harvey Milk in San Francisco's City Hall.
• Harvey Milk Opera
• The Times of Harvey Milk - IMDB Entry
• The Forgotten Populist, Harvey Milk an analysis of Milk's politics and political philosophy
• The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society Holds artifacts of Milk, including the suit he was wearing when shot by Dan White
• The Harvey Milk Recreational Arts Centre in SF
• Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Branch Library
• Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy elementary school in SF
• Harvey Milk High School NYC
• "Uncle Donald's Castro Street" A long time Castro resident gives his account of the Riot and Police Assault on Castro street afterward

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