Harvey Milk, the first gay hero

Harvey Bernard Milk (22 May 1930 – 27 November 1978) was an American politician and gay rights activist, and the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco, California. He was, according to Time magazine, “the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet”.

harvey milk

As the self-described “Mayor of Castro Street” he was active during a time of substantial change in San Francisco politics and increasing visibility of gay and lesbian people in American society. After he defied the governing class of San Francisco in 1977 to become a member of its board of supervisors, many people — straight and gay — had to adjust to a new reality he embodied: that a gay person could live an honest life and succeed.
“My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you”. This was Milk’s standard opening line when he gave a stump speech. After this sarcastic allusion to the notion that homosexuals recruited other people into changing their sexual orientation, he would proceed to recruit support for the populist issues to which he dedicated his life. He fought to secure the place for homosexuals in society as equals, not as people who were just tolerated. He professed the importance of Gay people seeking leadership positions in society and not relying on non-Gay friends of the community to act as the leaders of the movement.
Milk had two unsuccessful bids for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in both 1973 and 1975. He emerged as a figurehead for San Francisco’s large gay community, and was known as the “Mayor of Castro Street”, a title which he himself coined. With each campaign, he garnered a larger number of supporters. Milk was successful in reaching out and making alliances among the city’s ethnic populations and among labor union leaders, but not among the rank and file members. Milk’s opponent in the 1976 race for the California State Assembly was Art Agnos, who would win the seat by 3,600 votes out of 33,000 ballots cast.
In 1976 San Francisco voters voted to replace city-wide elections with district elections, effective in the 1977 city elections. This switch to district elections ushered in the most diverse Board of Supervisors the city had ever seen. Milk was the first openly gay elected official of any large city in the United States, and only the third openly gay elected official in all of the US, after Kathy Kozachenko and Elaine Noble. Milk represented District 5, which included the Castro.

The diverse board included the former police officer and firefighter Dan White as well as the gay and liberal Milk. White had to resign from being a firefighter as San Francisco charter barred people from holding two city jobs at the same time so he took up a second job to supplement the pay downgrade, running a restaurant business, which failed. White, a Roman Catholic and outspoken anti-gay conservative, who was elected with strong support from the city’s police union in part to fight “official tolerance of crime and of overt homosexuality” was counterpoint to Milk, an outspoken liberal who “frequently opposed him on the board.”
Milk became highly visible in the media debating California Senator John Briggs throughout the state on Proposition 6, The Briggs Initiative, to “prohibit homosexuals from teaching in California public schools,” a topic on which White and Milk “were sharply divided” because it would have empowered California school boards to fire teachers that “practiced, advocated, or indicated an acceptance of homosexuality.”
Milk also sponsored a pooper-scooper ordinance and a San Francisco law barring “anti-gay discrimination” in the workplace which passed the same time the Briggs Initiative failed. Days later White resigned his city supervisor seat, citing too little salary to support his family and that he was “unhappy with the ethics he found in the political world.” White’s supporters convinced him to rescind his resignation but he was denied by the “liberal-leaning” Mayor Moscone largely at the urging of Milk, who advised Moscone to use the opportunity to get a liberal majority on the Board. Milk and Moscone were friends and Milk reminded Moscone that the mayor’s re-election would be difficult without the gay vote and that many of Moscone’s proposals had been defeated because of the conservative majority.
He was assassinated in 1978, along with Mayor George Moscone, by then recently-resigned city supervisor Dan White, whose relatively mild sentence for the murders led to the White Night Riots and eventually the abolition of diminished capacity defense in California.

Thousands from Milk’s District and all over the city attended a spontaneous candlelight memorial march from the Castro towards City Hall plaza, noted speakers included folk singer Joan Baez. (The Internet Archive has video of the vigil, accompanied by a message Milk recorded preemptively “to be played only in the event of [his] death by assassination”.) Milk had anticipated the possibility of assassination and had recorded several audio tapes to be played in that event. One of the tapes included his now-famous quote,

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door”

Harvey Milk was named in the “Heroes & Icons” section of Time magazine’s Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century. Many institutions and organizations are named for Milk, including the Harvey Milk Recreational Arts Centre, Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, the Harvey Milk Institute, the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library,and the Harvey Milk Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered Democratic Club in San Francisco.
Outside of San Francisco are a number of alternative schools named for Milk in the United States, including Harvey Milk High School in New York City. Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz has an on-campus apartment building named Harvey Milk.
In February 2007, the city of San Francisco agreed to erect a bust of Harvey Milk in City Hall in tribute to his service and memorialize his life’s work. A lengthy process to choose a design took place and a gala installation event is planned for May 2008 to coincide with Milk’s birthday.

Source: Wikipedia