Harvey Milk was loud. He was theatrical. Unapologetic. And a grand visionary.
Though his incredible, groundbreaking life was cut tragically short, the strides Milk made as an icon of the repressed LGBT community in the United States will never be forgotten.
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Harvey Milk was born on May 22, 1930, in the middle-class community of Woodmere, New York.
In primary school, he was teased for his distinctive features, but would later be revered by his peers as the class clown. With interests as diverse as football and opera, Milk became a popular student. His high school yearbook picture read “Glimpy Milk – and they say WOMEN are never at a loss for words”. Such a love for theatrics would serve him well in the later years.
Milk accepted his homosexuality as a teen, but never admitted it to anybody, scared as he was of the repercussions. He hid it well; classmates would later remark in surprise that they had no idea he was gay.
It was while studying mathematics at the New York State College for Teachers that Milk first used his unrelenting voice to address social issues. His weekly column raised questions of the country’s failure to embrace diversity following the conclusion of World War II half a decade earlier.
When he graduated in 1951, Milk enlisted in the army. For the next four years, he worked as a diving instructor for soldiers preparing to enter conflict in the Korean War. He was discharged in 1955 with the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
The next 15 years would see Milk take on a range of roles after moving to New York. He taught at George W. Hewlett High School on Long Island for several years, before working as a statistician for an insurance firm, and a production associate for Broadway shows. In between the first two jobs, Milk met Joe Campbell, and the two would be romantically involved for the next six years. Bored of their lives in New York, they moved to Dallas, before eventually returning to New York after growing unhappy with Texas life.
During the 60s and early 70s, Milk became exposed to the activist movements centred around gay communities in areas like Greenwich Village. They would completely change his life. He joined them in protests against the Vietnam War, but wanted to be more proactive in inspiring change. He began to dabble in politics and advocacy.
For all of this, Milk was reluctant to come out of the closet. He considered moving to Miami to marry a lesbian friend so they would both have a front, but was eventually drawn, like thousands of other gay men, to San Francisco. The Bay Area had become a hub for homosexual men who had left military service at the many bases in the region, but had chosen not to return to their old lives.
When Milk first entered the city in 1969 while on tour for the stageshow of Hair, he became so entranced that he decided to stay. He embraced the hippy lifestyle, and was subsequently fired from his job at a local investment firm due to his long hair.
For the next two years he floated around the country with no aim or money, his conservative shackles unbound by his time spent in San Francisco. It was no surprise then that he returned to the city in 1972, along with his new partner, Scott Smith.
The following year, Milk and Smith used their last $1000 to fund Castro Camera in the heart of the burgeoning gay community. Milk’s theatrics and bold personality soon drew the attention of locals, and the store became a hot zone for neighbourhood activity.
Milk’s activist mentality flared again in 1973 when a state bureaucrat entered the shop and demanded a $100 deposit against state sales tax. Infuriated by the assumption that he should hand over money in case he didn’t pay his tax, Milk fought the deposit for weeks. Shortly after, he raised complaints to local government when a teacher was forced to borrow a projector from the store because none of the equipment functioned at their school.
These events saw Milk idolised as a leader of the local community, and he accepted the role wholeheartedly. Less than a year after first arriving in San Francisco, he decided to run for the position of city supervisor on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. “I finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or shut up.”
It initially proved difficult for Milk to find support for his campaign. Democratic activist Jim Foster, who had been involved in gay politics for 10 years, felt that Milk did not have enough experience nor influence. “You don’t get to dance unless you put up the chairs. I’ve never seen you put up the chairs.” Nevertheless, many members of the gay community looked on Milk as a force for change, one stronger than Foster and his contemporaries had ever been, and were quick to endorse him.
His platform included gay rights as one of many issues which he vowed to address. Others included financial management, education, and an opposition to government interference in the personal lives of citizens.
Though he did not win, Milk placed in the top 10 out of 32 candidates, proving that he was a force to be reckoned with.
Milk was soon styling himself as ‘The Mayor of Castro Street’. He formed the Castro Village Association to support gay members of the community’s rights to open local businesses, and organised the Castro Street Fair in 1974 to attract a broader customer base. 5000 people attended the fair, and more business was done on that day than any previous.
“Harvey spent most of his life looking for a stage. On Castro Street he finally found it,” said Tom O’Horgan, a Broadway director who Milk had previously worked for.
In 1975, Milk decided to run for city supervisor once more. Wanting to be taken seriously, he cut his hair, and stopped smoking marijuana. He championed community growth through small business, in direct opposition to the mayor’s push for larger corporations to take up residency in San Francisco.
Milk narrowly lost, but his call for change had played an influential part in seeing George Moscone elected mayor that year. Moscone, who had established himself as a supporter of the gay community through his move to repeal the sodomy law a year earlier, thanked Milk, and offered him a position as city commissioner.
1976 saw Milk become the first openly gay commissioner in the United States. It was a prestigious position, but he was not content. He soon began campaigning for a position on the California State Assembly, a move that saw him fired from the commissioner role. Moscone put forward a new candidate, Art Agnos, who he felt could compete with Milk, who held a strong position in the district.
This position was further cemented when his former partner Joe Campbell’s ex-lover, a former Marine by the name of Oliver Sipple, saved the life of President Gerald Ford during an assassination attempt. Milk contacted The San Francisco Chronicle to make note of his connection to Sipple, effectively outing the man as gay. Soon after, Time magazine named Milk as a leader in San Francisco’s gay community.
Behind the scenes, Milk’s campaign was a mess, driven by passion rather than organisation. His manager’s assistant was an 11 year old girl. His volunteer list was kept on scraps of paper. Campaign funds were ripped right out of Castro Camera’s cash register.
Milk was manic, but showed an innate gift in attracting media attention, and the goodwill of the community. Dozens of volunteers lined city streets holding billboards and handing out flyers. These volunteers included members of Jim Jones’s cult, the Peoples Temple.
Agnos beat Milk in the election by less than 4000 votes, but the experience left Milk even more focused on realising his goal to become a political figure.
Once again, he campaigned for the position of city supervisor, but he was not alone. San Francisco had come into its own, and by the next race, more than half of the candidates for the role were gay.
Still, Milk stood out from the crowd due to his populist philosophy. He told 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!”
On election day – November 8, 1977 – Milk ran against 16 other candidates. He won the vote by 30%, and returned to Castro Street that night to a hero’s welcome.
Milk’s win saw him become the first non-incumbent openly gay man to be elected to public office. The news made national headlines.
All was not well, however. Milk began to fear that his prominence could mark him as a target for assassination. He began to document his fears, noting “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door”.
Milk returned to Mayor Moscone’s side, and the two became quick allies. A rift broke out between him and fellow newly-elected supervisor Dan White, when Milk went against White to support the building of a mental health facility in the latter’s district. From then on, White opposed every proposal that Milk put forward.
Change came quickly from the moment Milk entered office. He sponsored a civil rights bill that outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. Moscone signed the ordinance into law with a light blue pen given to him by Milk for the occasion.
That summer, former California governor nominee John Briggs proposed Proposition 6, a proposed law that would make the firing of gay teachers mandatory. Milk campaigned against it, delivering his famous ‘Hope Speech’ at the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade:
“On this anniversary of (the Stonewall riots), 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.”
The proposition was voted down across the country by more than a million votes.
10 months after being sworn in, White resigned from his role on the basis that his annual salary was not enough to support his family. Days later, he changed his mind, but Moscone and the other supervisors decided not to reinstate him.
The decision made local headlines, but was quickly forgotten the day after when California Representative Leo Ryan was announced to have been killed during the infamous Jonestown massacre, carried out by members of Jones’s Peoples Temple. Milk and Moscone had both used members of the group as part of their campaign’s volunteer base, and were concerned about reprisals. Security was ramped up at City Hall.
On November 27, 1978, as Moscone prepared to hold a press conference announcing supervisor White’s replacement, White snuck into a basement window, confronted the mayor, and assassinated him. White then intercepted Milk, took him into his former office, and shot him five times, twice in the head at close range.
Harvey Milk died that day at the age of 48.
White turned himself in, and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. With good behaviour, he would be out in five years. It wasn’t enough for the mourning community, who rioted, causing over $1 million in damage to public property. White would later commit suicide.
The nation had lost a herald of gay liberation and the importance of community, but Milk’s political philosophy’s etched themselves in the social conscious.
Several areas in the city of San Francisco have been named after him, including Harvey Milk Plaza, where a large gay pride flag sails in his honour.
Time named him one of the 100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century as “a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in doing so”.
In 2009, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was accepted by his nephew, Stuart. That same year, California governor designated May 22 as ‘Harvey Milk Day’, and Stuart Milk co-founded the Harvey Milk Foundation with Anne Kronenberg and Desmond Tutu.
The world still has a long way to go before members of the gay community are regarded with the same measure of respect and decency as heterosexuals, but Milk certainly played a critical part in setting the path to change. May we never forget it.