Harvey Milk life and biography

Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician who became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not his early interests; he was not open about his homosexuality and did not participate in civic matters until around age 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Known in the United States as a martyr for the gay community, Harvey Milk began his political crusade in San Francisco, California. While in office, he publicly spoke out for gay rights and established city ordinances that won him popularity; he came to be known as the Mayor of Castro Street.

Harvey Milk was born to a Jewish family from Lithuania who had emigrated from Lithuania. His grandfather was a department store owner in New York City. His father was also successful in the clothing business. By the time Harvey was a teenager, he was aware of his own homosexuality, but kept it hidden. Milk graduated from the New York State College in Albany and went on to join the Navy. He eventually made the rank of junior lieutenant before he was honorably discharged – which he stated later was due to the military’s getting rid of those they believed were homosexuals. He then worked as a teacher and then as an investor.

After some ups and downs in his career, namely his being fired in San Francisco, allowed him to work more in the theater of New York. Following, he moved back to San Francisco with his partner, Scott Smith. The two opened a camera shop and Harvey began becoming more involved in politics, wanting to better the city and bring political awareness and fairness to his and others’ situation. After several attempts at winning a spot on the city’s board of directors, he finally won in 1977, attributed to the power of his club, The San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. He became the only publicly open gay elected to a high office in San Francisco’s political history.

He did much for the city and won great popularity, not only for the changes he made for homosexuals living in San Francisco, but for other laws too. He wanted San Francisco to keep its charm and didn’t want massive buildings taking over the colorful, lively city. He also defeated a Senate bill in California that would have prevented gay teachers from instructing in public schools. He won national recognition for his work on the case.

Tragically, Harvey Milk and the Mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, where shot dead in City Hall by the outraged Dan White, who had resigned his political position, but wanted to be reinstated. When his reappointment into office was not granted, the Mayor was shot in his office. After Milk made a comment to White as he passed in the building, White shot him too. Being sentenced to only seven years in prison, Californians were outraged. White returned to California after his prison term and killed himself when he found no acceptance there. Harvey Milk lives on as a cornerstone to the movements, rights, and acceptance of the individual, regardless of race, ethnicity, color, or sexuality.

Legacy
Politics

Harvey Milk's political career centered on making government responsive to individuals, gay liberation, and the importance of neighborhoods to the city. At the onset of each campaign, an issue was added to Milk's public political philosophy. 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 the fact 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 installed in District 5. Responding to city residents' largest complaint about living in San Francisco—dog feces—Milk made it a priority to enact the ordinance requiring dog owners to take care of their pets' droppings. Randy Shilts noted, "some would claim Harvey was a socialist or various other sorts of ideologues, but, in reality, Harvey's political philosophy was never more complicated than the issue of dogshit; government should solve people's basic problems".

Karen Foss, a communications professor at the University of New Mexico, attributes Milk's impact on San Francisco politics to the fact that he was 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 campaigning in 1973, and his oratory skills only improved after he became City Supervisor. His most famous talking points became known as the "Hope Speech", which 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 version of the Hope Speech that he gave near the end of his life was considered by his friends and aides to be the best, and the closing the most effective:

And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias 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 to help to end the discrimination and violence against them. Although Milk had not come out to his mother before her death many years before, in his final statement during his taped prediction of his assassination, he urged others to do so:

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.

However, Milk's assassination has become entwined with his political efficacy, partly because he was killed at the zenith of his popularity. Historian Neil Miller writes, "No contemporary American gay leader has yet to achieve in life the stature Milk found in death". His legacy has become ambiguous; Randy Shilts concludes his biography writing that Milk's success, murder, and the inevitable injustice of White's verdict represented the experience of all gays. Milk's life was "a metaphor for the homosexual experience in America". According to Frances FitzGerald, Milk's legend has been unable to be sustained as no one appeared able to take his place in the years after his death: "The Castro saw him as a martyr but understood his martyrdom as an end rather than a beginning. He had died, and with him a great deal of the Castro's optimism, idealism, and ambition seemed to die as well. The Castro could find no one to take his place in its affections, and possibly wanted no one". On the 20th anniversary of Milk's death, historian John D'Emilio said, "The legacy that I think he would want to be remembered for is the imperative to live one's life at all times with integrity". For a political career so short, Cleve Jones attributes more to his assassination than his life: "His murder and the response to it made permanent and unquestionable the full participation of gay and lesbian people in the political process".

Tributes and media

The City of San Francisco has paid tribute to Milk by naming several locations after him. Where Market and Castro streets intersect in San Francisco flies an enormous Gay Pride flag, situated in Harvey Milk Plaza. The San Francisco Gay Democratic Club changed its name to the Harvey Milk Memorial Gay Democratic Club in 1978 (it is currently named the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club) and boasts that it is the largest Democratic organization in San Francisco. In New York City, Harvey Milk High School is a school program for at-risk youth that concentrates on the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students and operates out of the Hetrick Martin Institute.

In 1982, freelance reporter Randy Shilts completed his first book: a biography of Milk, titled The Mayor of Castro Street. Shilts wrote the book while unable to find a steady job as an openly gay reporter. The Times of Harvey Milk, a documentary film based on the book's material, won the 1984 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Director Rob Epstein spoke later about why he chose the subject of Milk's life: "At the time, for those of us who lived in San Francisco, it felt like it was life changing, that all the eyes of the world were upon us, but in fact most of the world outside of San Francisco had no idea. It was just a really brief, provincial, localized current events story that the mayor and a city council member in San Francisco were killed. It didn't have much reverberation". Milk's life has been the subject of a musical theater production, an opera, a children's picture book, and the biopic Milk, released in 2008 after 15 years in the making. The film was directed by Gus Van Sant and starred Sean Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White, and won two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. It took eight weeks to film, and often used extras who had been present at the actual events for large crowd scenes, including a scene depicting Milk's "Hope Speech" at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade.


Milk was included in the "Time 100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century" as "a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in doing so". Despite his antics and publicity stunts, according to writer John Cloud, "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". The Advocate listed Milk third in their "40 Heroes" of the 20th century issue, quoting Dianne Feinstein: "His homosexuality gave him an insight into the scars which all oppressed people wear. He believed that no sacrifice was too great a price to pay for the cause of human rights".

In August 2009, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the gay rights movement stating "he fought discrimination with visionary courage and conviction". Milk's nephew Stuart accepted for his uncle. Later in the year, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger designated May 22 as "Harvey Milk Day", and inducted Milk in the California Hall of Fame.

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".

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