Archive of Hope

by Milk, Harvey

  5. Heather Love, “The Art of Losing,” in Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive, eds. Mathias Danbolt, Jane Rowley, and Louise Wolthers (Copenhagen: Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, 2009), 69.

  6. Frank M. Robinson, Letter to the Editor, San Francisco Bay Guardian, July 20, 1995, personal papers of Frank M. Robinson.

  7. Some items from the estate, especially ephemera, were donated to the GLBT Historical Society and the ONE Institute. The GLBT Historical Society, for example, now houses Milk’s famous barber chair from Castro Camera, in which we both have had the thrill of sitting.

  8. Vince Emery’s valuable volume The Harvey Milk Interviews is an excellent case in point. We had the happy coincidence of meeting Mr. Emery in the reading room at the San Francisco Public Library and have been bolstered by knowing during our project that he, too, was anthologizing Milk’s archival materials. As we can all attest, there is much more to be done. Vince Emery, The Harvey Milk Interviews (San Francisco: Vince Emery Productions, 2012).

  9. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 9.

  10. In Diana Taylor’s influential theory, the documentary (archive) and performative (repertoire) manifestations, preservations, and deployments of memory are distinct but interrelated and should be cultivated together. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

  11. “Homosexual on Board Cites Role as Pioneer,” New York Times, November 10, 1977, 24.

  12. That is, for those who would welcome individuals functioning, synecdochally and otherwise, as the vehicles of history and memory; many are wary of such (identity) politics of historical representation.

  13. This counternarrative to the “great man” hagiography is deftly crafted in Brett Callis’s work, which has not been given the attention it deserves. Brett Cole Callis, From Castro Street to City Hall: Harvey Milk and Gay Politics in San Francisco, 1973–1977 (Master’s thesis, University of Hawaii, 1991; UMI 1346930).

  14. Jack Fritscher, Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (San Francisco: Palm Drive Publishing, 2008), 117. Fritscher’s claim that “homomasculine” culture has been ignored and erased by those chronicling GLBTQ history is compelling, and his “eyewitness” to GLBTQ culture in San Francisco over the past 35 years has been insightful and invaluable. By way of contextualizing his observations about Milk, it is also worth noting a politics of remembrance perhaps shaped by long-standing intercommunity tensions. Castells and Murphy observe, “[M]any gays . . . started another ‘colonization’ in the much harsher area South of Market. . . . Their marginality from the gay community was not only spatial. Socially, they tended to reject the politicization and positive counterculture of the new liberation movement. They emphasized the sexual aspects of the gay condition. The more the gay community appeared in the process of legitimation, the more a strongly individualised minority, generally poorer and less educated [Fritscher has a Ph.D.], headed toward self-affirmation of a new sexual ‘deviance,’ many of them joining the sado-masochistic networks: South-of-Market became the quarters of ‘leather culture.’” Manuel Castells and Karen Murphy, “Cultural Identity and Urban Culture: The Spatial Organization of San Francisco’s Gay Culture,” in Urban Policy Under Capitalism, eds. Nathan I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982), 254–255. For a more laudatory perspective on the gay community South of Market, see Gayle S. Rubin, “The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather, 1962–1997),” in Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, eds. James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998): 247–272.

  15. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 405.

  16. Fritscher, Gay San Francisco, 117.

  17. Jonathan Bell, California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 259.

  18. Harvey Milk, “On the Milk Stool,” Coast to Coast (Los Angeles), 1978, Harvey Milk Archives–Scott Smith Collection (GLC35), Box 26 (1973–1978), Clippings.

  19. Harry Britt, “Harvey Milk as I Knew Him,” in Out in the Castro: Desire, Promise, Activism, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Leyland Publications, 2002), 78.

  20. Jim Rivaldo, “Remembering How Harvey Milk Helped Pave the Way,” Bay Area Reporter, June 21, 2001, 40.

  21. James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 201.

  22. Streitmatter argues that the significance of such activism in San Francisco, and Milk’s role in it, was amplified because of an expanding gay press: “Seeing that the major events were being covered by the establishment media, lesbian and gay journalists adopted a new tack: they transformed local events into national ones. By the conventional definition of news, the vote on a city gay rights ordinance was of local interest only; by the revised gay press definition, such a vote was the fodder for the front page of gay newspapers everywhere. In short, the newspapers “nationalized” gay news. Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (New York: Faber and Faber, 1995), 220.

  23. Boze Hadleigh, “Harvey Milk: Ten Years After,” Christopher Street, September 1988, 16.

  24. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 403.

  25. Ronald Yates and Michael Coakley, “Milk’s Murder Stuns San Francisco Gays,” Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1978, 7.

  26. Ed Jackson, “Gay Liberation 101—Plus,” The Body Politic, November 1984, 30.

  27. For biographical material regarding Harvey Milk’s life before politics, see Harvey Milk Archives—Scott Smith Collection (GLC 35); Harvey Milk—Susan Alch Correspondence (GLC 19); Harvey Milk—Joseph Campbell Correspondence; Randy Shilts Papers, Mayor of Castro Street series, James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, San Francisco Public Library; and Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 1982

  28. Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street, 38.

  29. For pre-Castro GLBTQ San Francisco history, see John D’Emlio, “Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco since World War II,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Fast, eds. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library): 456–476; Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Horacio N. Rocque Ramírez, “A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita la Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (San Francisco: Seal Press, 2007); Susan Stryker, Transgender History (San Francisco: Seal Press, 2008); J. Todd Ormsbee, The Meaning of Gay: Interaction, Publicity, and Community among Homosexual Men in 1960s San Francisco (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Allan Bérubé, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History, eds. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Chapters 1–4; John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Chapter 12; and Bell, California Crucible, Chapter 10.

  30. For detailed explanations of the complex changes in San Francisco that made possible the significant growth of GLBTQ culture and politics, and the development of the Castro as we have come to know it, see Fritscher, Gay San Francisco; Timothy Stewart-Winter, “The Castro: Origins to the
Age of Milk,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 16 (January-February 2009), 12–15; Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, dir. Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker (Los Angeles: Frameline, 2005); Joshua Gamson, The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); Winston Leyland, ed., Out in the Castro: Desire, Promise, Activism (San Francisco: Leyland Publications, 2002); The Castro, dir. Peter L. Stein (San Francisco: KQED, 1998); Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, Chapter 10; Benjamin Heim Shepard, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (London: Cassell, 1997); Streitmatter, Unspeakable; Richard Edward DeLeon, Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), Chapter 3; John D’Emilio, “Gay Politics, Gay Community: San Francisco’s Experience,” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, ed. John D’Emilio (New York: Routledge, 1992): 74–95; Frances Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Chapter 10; Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), Chapter 14; Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street; and Edmund White, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980): 30–69.

  31. D’Emilio, “Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco since World War II,” 468.

  32. Chester Hartman, The Transformation of San Francisco (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984; and Stew art-Winter, “The Castro.”

  33. D’Emilio, “Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco since World War II,” 468.

  34. Larry Kramer, “Gay Boom Seen in Bay Area,” Washington Post, April 7, 1978, F2; Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill, 48; and Daniel Nicoletta, “So Long at the Fair,” The Harvey Milk Archives Newsletter 1 (July 1983), 1. See also Danny Nicoletta, “Harvey Milk and the Castro of the 70s,” East Village Boys (January 21, 2009), http://www.eastvillageboys.com/2009/01/21/dan-nicoletta-harvey-milk-and-the-castro-of-the-70s/; and Daniel Curzon, “Why We Came to Sodom,” The North American Review 268 (December 1983): 21–23.

  35. Quoted in Stewart-Winter, “The Castro,” 14. See Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, Chapter 10.

  36. Bell, California Crucible, Chapter 10, 261.

  37. Bell, California Crucible, 263, 265.

  38. D’Emilio observes, “The explosive growth of the gay community and its political activism also made internal differences visible. For some gay men liberation meant freedom from harassment; for radicalesbians it meant overthrowing the patriarchy. Bay Area Gay Liberation participated in anti-imperialist coalitions while members of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club sought to climb within the Democratic Party. The interests of gay entrepreneurs clashed with those of their gay employees. Gay male real-estate speculators displayed little concern for ‘brothers’ who could not pay the skyrocketing rents. Gay men and women of color found themselves displaced by more privileged members of the community as gentrification spread to more and more neighborhoods. Sexual orientation created a kind of unity, but other aspects of identity brought to the surface conflicting needs and interests.” D’Emilio, “Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco since World War II,” 468. On the critique of gay male sex culture, see Sides, Erotic City, Chapter 3.

  39. Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. Chapters 5 and 6.

  40. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities, 104.

  41. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 72.

  42. Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 364.

  43. Schulman, The Seventies, 180; and Bruce J. Schulman, “Comment: The Empire Strikes Back—Conservative Responses to Progressive Social Movements in the 1970s,” Journal of Contemporary History 43 (2008), 697. See also Simon Hall, “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History 43 (2008): 655–672.

  44. “Gays on the March,” Time, September 8, 1975, 32.

  45. John D’Emilio, “After Stonewall,” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 248.

  46. Moral shock, as conceptualized by sociologists James Jasper and later Deborah Gould, is constituted by a singular happening or multiple events, sudden or cumulative, which creates sufficient cognitive, affective, and ethical or moral disruption such that one is compelled toward political action; it might be understood as contextual inducements that awaken or propel, or motivate in a material sense, an activist (or collectively, movement) into being. In rhetorical studies, Bonnie Dow draws on Kenneth Burke to theorize how such “existential disruptions” can be—arguably, must be—rhetorically produced or framed to function effectively. See Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest, 106; Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 134–143; and Bonnie J. Dow, “AIDS, Perspective by Incongruity, and Gay Identity in Larry Kramer’s ‘1,112 and Counting,’” in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed., eds. Charles E. Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne (State College, PA: Strata, 2006): 320–334.

  47. Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street, 10, 71–72.

  48. In his thesis, Callis argues, as did some of Milk’s critics, that during his political ascendancy, and specifically in his first three campaigns, Milk downplayed his sexuality, such as omitting his sexuality or gay rights issues from his official candidate statement, in his alliance with unions, or in his appeals to non-GLBTQ voters, a politically opportunistic calculus intended to strengthen the viability of his candidacies. His opponent in the 1976 Assembly campaign, Art Agnos, declared, “Milk is running a closet campaign in front of straight audiences and an upfront one in the gay community.” This perspective deepens our engagement with the closet politics inevitably imbricated in a gay candidacy at the time—or in our own time, as the documentary Outrage demonstrates. That said, we are not convinced that Milk’s tactics at any time during his political career constituted a variation of what Kenji Yoshino has conceptualized as “covering.” Regardless of tactical foregrounding and de-emphasis, the broader context of Milk’s public persona and framing, and his bedrock personal and political commitment to gay rights, even granting sometimes lamentable variations among outlets and audiences, rendered him functionally and unmistakably “out.” Callis is correct in observing that Milk was never a single-issue, that is exclusively gay rights, candidate. Callis, From Castro Street to City Hall, 31, 51, 70, 97–98. See also Outrage: Do Ask, Do Tell, dir. Kirby Dick (New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2009); and Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006).

  49. Callis, From Castro Street to City Hall, 24, Chapter 2.

  50. Deeper understanding of the gay political establishment in San Francisco can be found in the pages of the two leading gay papers, Bay Area Reporter and the Sentinel, as well as in SIR’s newsletter, Vector.

  51. Michael Wong, “Harvey,” Harvey Milk Archives—Scott Smith Collection, Series 4, Box 13, 2; and Harvey Milk, “Milk Forum: Gay Groupie Syndrome,” Bay Area Reporter, February 20, 1975, 10–11.

  52. Callis, From Castro Street to City Hall, 29–30, 37–38.

  53. Wong, “Harvey,” 1–2. Note, too, Daniel Curzon’s memory of first encountering Milk: “Har
vey wasn’t St. Harvey then; in fact, he hadn’t even been elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, but he was extremely articulate and charismatic as he spoke from his seat at the conference. I was turned on by him, to be honest.” Daniel Curzon, Dropping Names: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon (San Francisco: IGNA Books, 2004), 30.

  54. Randy Shilts, “The Life and Death of Harvey Milk,” Christopher Street (March 1979), 30.

  55. William E. Beardemphl, “Comments,” Bay Area Reporter, October 3, 1973, 6.

  56. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, February 14, 1974, 5.

  57. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, June 20, 1974; and Harvey Milk, “Gay Groupie Syndrome,” Bay Area Reporter, February 20, 1975, 10–11. See also Callis, From Castro Street to City Hall, Chapter 3.

  58. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, May 9, 1974, 3, 5; Harvey Milk, “Clear Choice for Voters,” Bay Area Reporter, May 15, 1974, 1–2; and Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, June 20, 1974, 3.

  59. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, February 28, 1974.

  60. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, July 3, 1974, 5; and Harvey Milk, “Castro Street Fair,” Bay Area Reporter, 8.

  61. Harvey Milk, “Milk Forum: Gay Unity: Fact or Fiction,” Bay Area Reporter, December 23, 1974, 8.

  62. Harvey Milk, “Milk Forum: Teamsters Seek Gay Help,” Bay Area Reporter, November 27, 1974, 2.

  63. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, July 18, 1974, 5.

  64. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, April 11, 1974, 5.

  65. Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, April 11, 1974, 5; and Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, August 29, 1974, 5.

  66. Harvey Milk, “Milk Forum: Castro Busts,” Bay Area Reporter, September 4, 1974; and Harvey Milk, “Waves from the Left,” Sentinel, September 12, 1974, 5.

  67. Historically, indeed by definition, movement leaders do not seek elective office. Milk, however, defied categorization. He was a pastiche, philosophically, politically, and rhetorically, one moment speaking in the tones and absolutes of gay liberation (though he claimed not to be a revolutionary and rebuked the extremes of left and right), then sounding like a gay rights reformist (though he rejected gradualism and assimilationism); little wonder he clashed with both the radicals of Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) and the moderates of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club. As part of this explanation, note that Milk emerged during the period of transition between the movements known as Gay Liberation and Gay Rights/Gay Identity. For discussions of changes in the GLBTQ movement in the 1970s, see Barry D. Adam, The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Movement, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1995); Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good; Craig A. Rimmerman, From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities; and David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).