by Milk, Harvey
Election night, 1977, was a night when we looked at each other in the clutter of Harvey’s camera store headquarters in a new way. I don’t think many of us had looked beyond that night—now we allowed ourselves to envision new possibilities, to sense that the magic Harvey had seen in us and built power around could spread and create a different future in which power and acceptance of diversity might come together. The people of District 5—GLBTQ and straight—had understood Harvey’s call to that future. Seemingly, he would now be able to lead us to his Promised Land.110
Milk’s triumphal message consummated the vision he had forged since 1973. “This is not my victory, it’s yours and yours and yours. . . . If a gay can win, it means that there is hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight. We’ve given them hope.”111
Harvey Milk’s forty-two and a half weeks as the first openly gay elected city official in the United States is captured metaphorically by the iconic photograph depicting his walk from the Castro to City Hall on Inauguration Day, January 9, 1978. The joyous occasion appears in the smiles on the faces of Milk and his constituents, including his troubled and troublesome boyfriend Jack Lira, around whose shoulder Harvey’s arm is intimately draped (openly sharing the day with his lover meant so much, personally and symbolically). In glancing at the photograph, it could be a depiction from a Gay Freedom Day parade; indeed, in an important sense, it was. But it might also have been a demonstration, not unlike those that followed the same path after Robert Hillsborough’s murder and Orange Tuesday, marching again for GLBTQ justice and equality. Although Milk now operated officially as a gay rights leader on the inside—as he had always insisted was necessary—rather than struggling against discriminatory power from Castro Street, he never stopped the street theater, the marching, the neighborhood activism, the campaigning. As he had stated in his 1977 Victory Statement, “I understand the significance of electing the first Gay person to public office and what his responsibility is not only to the people of San Francisco but to Gay people all over. It’s a responsibility that I do not take lightly. Whoever shoulders that responsibility must be willing to fight. It won’t be an easy task.”112 Where Milk was concerned, and as the photograph speaks, all political work, even the bureaucratic sort, constituted a mode of activism.
Electing to be sworn in on the steps of City Hall, where more might see and the spectacle might flash more brilliantly despite the falling rain, Milk’s inaugural words foretold the spirit of his leadership to come: “Anita Bryant said gay people brought drought to California. Looks to me like it’s finally started raining. . . . This is not my swearing-in, this is your swearing-in. You can stand around and throw bricks at Silly Hall or you can take it over. Well, here we are.”113 Milk’s first official act as supervisor introduced an anti-discrimination ordinance assuring gay rights in all employment, housing, and public accommodations in San Francisco. In his first major address, included among the 1978 selected documents, Milk told his audience, “I understand that my election was not alone a question of my gayness but a question of what I represent. In a very real sense, Harvey Milk represents the spirit of the neighborhoods of San Francisco. For the past few years, my fight to make the voice of the neighborhoods of this city be heard was not unlike the fight to make the voice of the cities themselves be heard. The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods.” A month later, Milk emphasized that his domestic policy chiefly concerned an “emotional commitment” or “patriotism” regarding the city and its “new demographics”: “The city is no longer primarily white, established, middle class, or even primarily married with children. It’s yellow, brown, black, with a steady influx into the middle economic class of people who were formerly lower economic class. It’s also increasingly young marrieds with no children, or young couples who aren’t married, or extended families, or gays, or singles, and most certainly seniors.” Ever the populist, progressive bridge builder, Milk would pave the way for a city he believed one day in the near future would be most heavily populated and influenced by Chinese and GLBTQ Americans.114
Milk quickly discovered that laboring in City Hall on behalf of San Francisco and its neighborhoods differed substantially from the grassroots efforts that championed it. Anne Kronenberg, now one of Milk’s administrative aides, explained:
Any glamorous illusions I had about coming to City Hall were quickly dispersed. I learned that the job was difficult, often thankless and always frustrating. Everybody thought we could solve their problems whether it was cars parked on sidewalks, dog poop in the park or street signs that needed repair. We were district representatives and Harvey was elected to handle these problems, to be the voice of District 5 in City Hall. Each morning Harvey would empty his pockets stuffed with scribbled napkins filled with names, numbers and constituent problems. . . . Life in City Hall was not as Harvey envisioned it either. It was one thing running a campaign, it was quite another working within a bureaucracy to accomplish your goals.115
Milk was often on the losing end of 6–5 votes on the Board. He often clashed with his fellow supervisors, perhaps especially, as the months passed, with District 8 supervisor Dan White.116 Although White’s campaign discourse in his conservative, Irish Catholic district had been unmistakably homophobic, Milk told his skeptical friends and colleagues that White was “educable” and promising. White’s early solidarity corroborated Milk’s intuition: persuading Board president Dianne Feinstein to appoint Milk chairman of the coveted Streets and Transportation Committee, voting with Milk to save the Pride Center and to honor the twenty-fifth anniversary of a lesbian couple, and endorsement in committee of Milk’s gay rights ordinance. Milk aide Dick Pabich observed, “He’s supported us on every position, and he goes out of his way to find out what gay people think about things.”117 Their relationship soured, however, after Milk reversed his position on the psychiatric treatment facility White sought to keep out of his neighborhood, casting the deciding vote. White’s thin-skinned and grudging character forged Milk’s perceived betrayal into an abiding animus and internecine rivalry. White would cast the only negative vote against the ultimately successful gay rights ordinance. As we know, White’s vindictiveness could and would go beyond the pale—tragically so.
Yet despite the bureaucratic drudgery required to solve the practical problems of his constituents, evidenced by quotidian correspondence found in his archives, and the frictions and frustrations of routine political wrangling on a Board with an opposition majority, Milk thrived. After memorably informing Mayor Moscone that Milk was “number one queen now,”118 the two, once politically at odds, became allies. Moreover, as Mike Wong observed,
Harvey was probably the most popular elected official in San Francisco today. . . . The women . . . who once labeled Harvey as anti-woman were now his supporters. Gay people found a committed defender of gay rights. The Toklas members had come to respect their once enemy. Liberals who once shunned him found him to be most receptive and enjoyable to work with. Neighborhood groups knew that they had a powerful ally on the Board. Harvey’s re-election list [by supervisorial lottery as part of the Board restructuring post-district elections, Milk was among those supervisors who would have to run for reelection in 2. rather than 4 years] now included endorsements from most of his former opponents and people who never gave him the time of day.119
Milk’s leadership also began to become more visible and influential on the state and national political scenes. He successfully helped organize the California Gay Caucus, creating a politically united front that would achieve coalitional solidarity and thus create pressure on political candidates of every stripe to support gay rights. The caucus enacted Milk’s vision long sought in his voter registration efforts and calls for GLBTQ power and indigenous leadership, embodying his belief that “Gay political clout must move forward in the face of the recent defeats in St. Paul and Wichita.”
Dominating Milk’s attention during most of what remained of that first year in office, and solidifying his
reputation as a local activist stalwart with an expanding national reputation, was state senator John Briggs’s crassly opportunistic and virulently homophobic campaign to rid the California schools of GLBTQ teachers—what became certified as Proposition 6 in May and otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative.120 Given Briggs’s disrepute, even within his own party, he undoubtedly surprised most by taking the mantle of Anita Bryant and making the entire state of California the battleground staked elsewhere that year only in municipalities like Wichita and Eugene. Few would have expected this fight to culminate in Milk’s crowning achievement—and swan song.
Within that broader post-Dade County context, there was little reason to be optimistic about stemming the national wave of homophobia that Briggs had managed to ride into temporary political prominence and menace. Much as in the case of Bryant’s campaign, the Briggs Initiative inflamed the electorate because it concerned children, discourse rife with bogeys of sodomy, molestation and murder of innocents, and the classroom as a breeding ground of homosexual indoctrination. As Briggs argued in an apocalyptic editorial entitled, “Deviants Threaten the American Family”: “Children in this country spend more than 1,200 hours a year in classrooms. A teacher who is a known homosexual will automatically represent that way of life to young, impressionable students at a time when they are constantly exposed to such homosexual role models, they may well be inclined to experiment with a life-style that could lead to disaster for themselves and ultimately, for society as a whole.”121 Elsewhere Briggs warned, “If you let one homosexual teacher stay, soon there’ll be two, then four, then 8, then 25—and before long, the entire school will be taught by homosexuals.”122
For potential victims of Prop 6, the scope and implications of its broad language—“advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging, or promoting private or public sexual acts . . . between persons of the same sex in a manner likely to come to the attention of other employees or students”—struck deeply rooted personal and communal fears of (state-sponsored) exposure and ruination, and the greater ease and likelihood of being ensnared. Sol Madfes, executive director of the United Administrators of the San Francisco school district, explained, “The Briggs Initiative would leave teachers in the position of being accused—and then having to prove their innocence. . . . The board or superintendant will listen when a parent starts yelling. The attitude is—where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Under Briggs, the opportunity would be there to crucify somebody by accusation.”123 The first poll in September indicated 61 percent to 31 percent in favor of Prop 6.124 GLBTQ press and activists urged calm and solidarity in the face of certain defeat.
Milk’s response, as we might expect, was to fight. According to his battle plan, articulated and reiterated throughout the documents in this section, one must ceaselessly talk, speaking out to explode the homophobic myths and hysteria that the Religious Right and opportunists such as John Briggs exploited to their ideological and political advantage. Milk implored:
I believe that we can win in November . . . but only if we mount a full-fledged campaign. One that covers all bases, both positive and defensive. Yes, defensive, too. For not to answer the false charges is, to some, an admission that the charges are not false. Otherwise, we would repudiate them. There is no time like the present to start to repudiate them. For the sooner we start, the sooner we can lay them to rest. So, we need to have every gay person talk to as many non-gay people as possible about the issues—both real and false. It will be a monumental effort and, because many gays will remain in their closet, it makes it that much more important for those of us who are out.
And talk he did, refuting the lies and distortions that asserted that homosexuality is a choice, that homosexuals are the primary perpetrators of child molestation and abuse, that homosexuals recruit by becoming “role models” for the “lifestyle,” and simultaneously promoting the idea that homosexuality is natural, given, omnipresent, good, and undeserving of discrimination, harassment, and violence. In mobilizing GLBTQ people to rise up against Briggs, Milk employed patriotic collective memory, quoting Patrick Henry, the Declaration of Independence, the Statue of Liberty’s credo, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In characterizing the viciousness of the Briggs Initiative, and as a means of rousing resistance by shattering apathy, Milk favored the Holocaust trope, likening Briggs to Hitler and GLBTQ people to Jews oppressed by the genocidal Nazi regime: “We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads to the gas chambers. On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my Gay sisters and brothers to make their commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country.”125 What had become his signature opening line, full of humor and bite, said it all: “I’m Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you.”
Randy Shilts characterized the public debates Milk and Briggs staged across the state through the fall of 1978 as “fast food politics,” owing to the by now boilerplate responses to questions repeated over and over again, and perhaps in part because these political gladiators fighting for the lives of their constituents had become friendly on the road and in the wings of their public verbal battles.126 But even if the message had become prepackaged and efficient, such mantra-like repetition and simplicity, and the familiarity of the performance, offered Milk’s best hope of eroding the bulwark of Briggs’s homophobic invective. We believe it made the difference in defeating Prop 6. Others have offered different and compelling reasons for the shift away from Briggs: heterosexuals’ eventual realization that Prop 6 would create a slippery slope endangering their free speech and privacy; high-powered bipartisan appeals against the initiative by Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, and nearly every other state politician (even if some, namely, the good straight liberal allies Milk had long said could not be trusted, were quieter in their solidarity than the rest); concerted effort by sophisticated GLBTQ politicos and their allies in Los Angeles and elsewhere; and Briggs himself, with his support eroding as election day neared, becoming even more hyperbolic. Nevertheless, these other influences absent Milk’s tireless voice would have been necessary but insufficient to defeat Briggs. Harvey Milk held sway. On November 7, Prop 6 was defeated by more than a million votes, 3.9 million to 2.8 million, 58 percent to 42 percent.127
In his victory speech, Milk cast his gaze on the future: “This is only the first step. The next step, the more important step, is for all those gays who did not come out, for whatever reasons, to do so now. To come out to all your family, to come out to all your relatives, to come out to all your friends—the coming out of a nation will smash the myths once and for all.”128 Milk, who often invoked the civil rights movement and especially Martin Luther King, Jr., as analogy, had delivered his mountaintop speech—quite literally, given the events that unfolded in the immediate wake of Briggs’s defeat.
Much has been said by others about those final weeks between the euphoria of Prop 6’s demise and the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone on November 27, 1978: the emotional unraveling of Dan White; his resignation from the Board of Supervisors; his strong-armed rescinding of that resignation and appeal for reinstatement; the political jockeying and lobbying that ensued during the interim; his learning from a reporter that Moscone would not reappoint him; his armed entry of City Hall through a basement window; his execution of George Moscone; his execution of Harvey Milk; Dianne Feinstein’s devastating revelation to City Hall employees and reporters, “Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot . . . and killed. Police have a suspect. Supervisor Dan White.” Much too has been said about Milk’s eerie fatalism, his longstanding prediction that he would die early, and his preoccupation with the possibility of assassination—existential trembling no doubt exacerbated by proliferating death threats, the deep exhaustion of the anti-Briggs campaign, the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, and the suicide of boyfriend Jack Lira. Because he recorded it a year before his death, we include in this volume a portion of his political will. Milk’s myth is burnished by s
uch hauntings, our retrospective understanding that he knew somehow that he would never get to the promised land with his gay brothers and sisters. But we leave that myth and thirty years’ worth of Milk memory—the candlelight march on the night of the assassination, White’s sham trial, his Twinkie defense and reduced sentence, the White Night riots, the annual commemorations, the archive, The Mayor of Castro Street, The Times of Harvey Milk, Harvey Milk: An Opera in Three Acts, Harvey Milk Plaza, Harvey Milk High School, his bust in City Hall, Milk, Harvey Milk Day, and much more—for another volume.129
Rather, we think it fitting simply to note the profound silence on November 27, 1978. In response, we let Harvey, again and again in the pages that follow, speak for himself.
WHY MILK MEMORY MATTERS
In an important sense, the timing of this collection could not be better. Our project promises to be illuminated by the still lingering afterglow of the Focus Features film Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, written by Dustin Lance Black (for which he received an Academy Award), and starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk (he, too, earned the Oscar). This acclaimed biopic rediscovered and, for both GLBTQ and straight audiences, introduced the name and political life of Harvey Milk. We cannot emphasize this enough: We would venture to estimate that a large percentage of an entire GLBTQ generation, and most of multiple generations of straight people, would not have recognized the name Harvey Milk before 2008. Milk retrieved, if within the limits of Hollywood history, the Castro’s first decade as a GLBTQ homeland, Mecca, or Oz, the time before HIV/AIDS when sex, sociality, solidarity, and struggle created affective bonds and visibility never before experienced to such an extent by GLBTQ peoples in the United States. Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed view Milk—and Milk’s appropriation of Rob Epstein’s 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk—as part of the reparative and transformational counter-memory that undoes “de-generational unremembering” and deploys the past for social and political GLBTQ benefits in the present.130 Mathias Danbolt suggests that the film also productively juxtaposes heady memorialization with “archives of homophobic violence”—black and white images of state repression of gay men, the viscera of shame, and Milk’s brutal end—so that we “remember that the fight for a society livable for all continues in the present”—that is, as a mode of activist mobilization.131