by Milk, Harvey
131. Mathias Danbolt, “Touching History: Archival Relations in Queer Art and Theory,” in Lost and Pound: Queerying the Archive, eds. Mathias Danbolt, Jane Rowley, and Louise Wolthers (Copenhagen: Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, 2009), 27, 28.
132. Marco R. della Cava, “Timing Is Finally Right for ‘Milk’ Amid Uproar over Gay Marriage,” USA Today, November 24, 2008, 2D. See also Jesse McKinley, “Back to the Ramparts in California,” New York Times, November 2, 2008, 5; Michael Cieply, “Activists Seek to Tie ‘Milk’ to a Campaign for Gay Rights,” New York Times, November 22, 2008, C1; Matt Budd, “’Milk’: We Need Him Now More Than Ever,” The Huffington Post, November 26, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/story/108847/; and Michael Martin, “The Resurrection of Harvey Milk,” The Advocate, November 18, 2008, 33-44.
133. Edward Guthmann, “Harvey Milk’ Dilemma: Critical Raves, But Apathetic Audiences,” Advocate, February 5, 1985, 34; and John Cloud, “Harvey Milk: The Pioneer,” Time, June 14, 1999, 183.
134. John Cloud, “Why Milk Is Still Fresh,” Advocate, November 10, 1998, 33.
135. Cleve Jones, “Support Milk Memorial Project,” Bay Area Reporter, November 24, 2005. For an interesting corollary, see Josh Getlin’s lament about the dimming memory of George Moscone on the 30th anniversary of the assassinations, and on the eve of Milk’s premiere. “Remembering George Moscone,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-getlin23-2008nov23,0,1670616.story.
136. FitzGerald, “The Castro,” 80.
137. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 283. See also Greg Vogel, “Gay Historians: Remembrance of Rich Heritage,” Advocate West, July 23, 1986, 8.
138. Mark Leno, “Senate Bill No. 48,” December 13, 2010, http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0001-0050/sb_48_bill_20101213_introduced.pdf; Gerry Shih, “Clashes Pit Parents vs. Gay-Friendly Curriculums in Schools,” New York Times March 4, 2011; and Susan Ferriss, “New Bill Requires Gay History in Textbooks to Fight Bullying, The Sacramento Bee, December 13, 2010, http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2010/12/sen-leno-hopes-gay-history-bil.html.
139. Karen O’Camb, “FAIR Education Act and Gender Nondiscri-mination Act Pass Key California Legislative Committees,” LGBT/POV, April 6, 2011, http://lgbtpov.frontiersla.com/2011/04/06/fair-education-act-and-gender-nondiscrimination-act-pass-key-california-legislative-committees/; Jennifer Medina, “California May Require Teaching of Gay History,” New York Times, April 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/us/16schools.html?_r=2&scp=3&sq=gay&st=cse; MatthewS. Bajko, “California Schools Already Teaching Gay History,” Bay Area Reporter, April 21, 2011, http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=5645; Stacy Teicher Kha-daroo, “Could California Lead Nation in Teaching of Gay History in Schools?” Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/ Education/2011/0707/Could-California-lead-nation-in-teaching-of-gay-history-in-schools; and “California Governor Signs Fair Education Act, Requiring Schools to Add LGBT History to Curriculum,” towleroad.com, July 14, 2011, http://www.towleroad.com/2011/07/breaking-california-governor-signs-fair-education-act-requiring-schools-to-add-lgbt-history-to-curri.html.
140. Huma Kahn, “Politics of Education: New Texas Social Sciences Curriculum Standards Fraught with Ideology, Critics Say,” ABC News, May 21, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Media/education-texas-social-sciences-curriculum-standards-stirs-nationwide/story?id=10700720.
141. Lyanne Melendez, “Opponents Working to Repeal ‘Fair Education Act,’“ KGO-TV San Francisco, March 7, 2012, http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/education&id=8572972; and Seth Hemmelgarn, “Repeal Effort of California’s FAIR Education Act Cleared for Signatures,” Bay Area Reporter, February 24, 2012, http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2012/02/repeal-effort-of-californias-fair-education-act-cleared-for-signatures/.
142. Miranda Bryant, “Anti-Gay Bullies Are Taught a Lesson or Two,” The Evening Standard (London), October 26, 2010, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23891416-anti-gay-bullies-are-taught-a-lesson-or-two.do. On bullying, see C. J. Pascoe, Dude You’re a Pag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Robin Kowalski, Susan Limber, and Patricia Agatston, Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); Michelle Birkett, Dorothy Espelage, and Brian Koenig, “LGB and Questioning Students in Schools: The Moderating Effects of Homophobic Bullying and School Climate on Negative Outcomes,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 38 (2009): 989-1000; Stuart Biegel, The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America’s Public Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Chapter 5; Rebecca Haskell and Brian Burtch, Get That Freak: Homophobia and Transphobia in High Schools (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwod Publishing, 2010); Bullied, dir. Bill Brummel, 2010; Bully, dir. Lee Hirsch, 2012; and The Queering Education Research Institute, accessed June 1, 2012, http://www.queeringeducation.org/.
143. Rebecca Cathcart, “Boy’s Killing, Labeled a Hate Crime, Stuns a Town,” New York Times, February 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23oxnard.html.
144. Dustin Lance Black, “Academy Award Acceptance Speech,” February 22, 2009, http://www.glaad.org/2009/02/22/dustin-lance-blacks-moving-acceptance-speech/.
145. Amy Graff, “The Mommy Files: Is San Francisco’s Castro Neighborhood Appropriate for Young Kids?” SFGATE (San Francisco Chronicle), June 5, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=86303; For similar efforts, see Bajko, “California Schools Already Teaching Gay History.”
146. Brewster Ely, “Dear Town School Parents and Community,” April 5, 2011, in Graff, “The Mommy Files” SFGATE (San Francisco Chronicle), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=86303.
147. Biegel, The Right to Be Out, 146. See also Stuart Biegel, “Teachable Moments,” The Advocate (April 2011): 20-21; Therese Quinn and Erica R. Meiners, Flaunt It! Queers Organizing for Public Education and Justice (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Nelson M. Rodriguez and William F. Pinar, eds., Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Eric Rofes, A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); and William F. Pinar, ed., Queer Theory in Education (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998). For the lesson plans in GLBTQ history provided by GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network), see http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/library/record/2461.html?state=tools&type=educator (accessed June 1, 2012).
148. James F. Mills, “Got Milk? Filmmaker Creates a Harvey Milk Documentary,” West Hollywood Patch, June 13, 2012, http://westhollywood.patch.com/articles/got-milk-young-filmmaker-creates-a-harvey-milk-documentary.
149. Kevin K. Kumashiro, Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002); and Kevin K. Kumashiro, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social justice (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).
150. Ely, “Dear Town School Parents and Community.”
151. Stephen O. Murray, “Components of Gay Community in San Francisco,” in Gay Culture in America: Essays from the Field, ed. Gilbert Herdt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 115-116. See also Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven T. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 153-154.
152. See Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
153. Ramirez, “A Living Archive of Desire,” 130.
PART ONE
Milk and the Culture of Populism
1
“Interview with Harvey Milk”
Kalendar, August 17, 1973
Harvey Milk’s political career began in the summer of 1973 in a campaign for San Francisco Board of Supervisors, launched in a principled y
et soon-to-become signature emotional outburst against systemic class bias and its material harms, increasing corporate power at the expense of hard-working ordinary people, and the abuses of Watergate. Milk was an unknown, unlikely candidate, a hippie Castro Street merchant without political connections or experience, whose passion and populist vision had to overcome knee-jerk negative reactions to his ponytail, his being openly gay, and his candor and outspokenness. But as everyone—friends and foes alike—would soon discover, Milk was a “natural” political performer and activist.
This interview fittingly was published in the San Francisco free gay paper, Kalendar, given shortly after declaring on Castro Street his candidacy for Board of Supervisors, while standing upon that wooden box inscribed “soap.” Milk’s motives and mission as a “gay candidate” seeking a diverse constituency and wide-reaching transformative vision are here first articulated, a political platform that remained remarkably cohesive throughout his career. Milk’s preoccupations included homophobic discrimination; gay rights and the means to achieve them; bureaucratic privilege, abuse, and obligation; the economy; victimless crime; answering the needs of ordinary citizens; and nurturing neighborhoods. We also get a glimpse of what would become Milk’s unmistakable political demeanor. Here we experience Milk’s strong and long-lasting first impression.
. . .
“Freedom of speech and action is only tokenism in this country. Where there is repression there is violence that makes a mess of the world. It’s force and repression,” he said.
It was Saturday morning. I sat in a hill-top Castro apartment looking past a lavender-leaved Wandering Jew at the lazy skyline of San Francisco.
Assignment: Harvey Milk, outspoken gay candidate for Board of Supervisors. The Place: His apartment. I had met him a few minutes earlier in the camera shop he runs with his lover Scott. The shop was large with the air of an art studio in the beginning days. (The shop is, in fact only three months old).
Harvey was at the front desk grinning broadly at me as I came through the door.
First impression? A rush of invigorating air. Gemini. It figured.
He showed me photography displays on the walls, telling me he encouraged people to hang their best prints there as a kind of unofficial show of the week. The project obviously excited him.
I made quick physical appraisal of him as we talked and looked at the photographs. Long brown hair pulled back in a pony tail that hung half way down his back. Hazel eyes. Trim body . . . moving with a virile forcefulness.
After a few minutes, we left Scott in charge and walked up to the apartment.
He put some coffee to grind and we sat at the kitchen table talking.
“I’m forty-three,” he said, “and I can do one of two things. I can concentrate on a lot of money while I enjoy perhaps another ten years of active gay life. Then after fifty-three I can just coast. Call the whole thing good. After all, I’ve had a lot of fun, fantastic experiences.”
“Or I can get involved and do something about all the things I think are wrong in our society.”
“I remember that not too long ago in New York in Central Park, gay people couldn’t bathe out in the sun on the weekend with their shirts off without being busted by police.”
“I’m forty-three, so I’m past that but Scott, my lover, is twenty-three and there’s another generation coming up and somewhere someday somebody’s got to say ‘I’m going to fight, not only for myself, but to make it easier for the next group.’“
“I’ve got to fight. Not just for me but for my lover and his lover eventually, whoever it is. I’ve got to fight for them too.”
“Homosexuals are still criminals; until that changes, we are not free. When Herb Caen in his famous comment about my running said, ‘What do these people want?’ it reminded me of a southern colonel in the war who asked a similar question concerning blacks.”
“I want freedom for gay people. I don’t want . . . laws or citations instead of jail terms. I don’t want more bars or baths or newspapers. I want legal freedom to be who I am.”
“If we take the criminal element off of us, the next generation can’t be told we are criminals. They can accept us.”
“Right now the parent says to the child, “homosexuals are good and bad, nothing to be upset about.”
“The kid says, ‘Then why do you call them criminals?’“
“The parent says, ‘well . . .’“
“The kid is left unanswered and we’re still against the law.”
It was clear to me that Harvey Milk was not afraid to speak his mind. “For years, like everybody else, I’ve been bitching,” he says. “But what really pisses me off, really got me moving, was Watergate.”
“Every day I’d end up screaming at the TV set: ‘You lying mother fuckers.’“
“Also everyone is out to get the gay vote. Politicians are concerned. They want us. They want our votes. But it’s just lip service so long as we remain criminals and nothing is done to change it.”
“The Board of Supervisors says they can’t do anything about it because it’s state law, but they can cut the balls off the police department by cutting the budget. But they pass the police budget like Washington passes the Pentagon’s. Without questioning.”
“So I’m running. It’s going to be a campaign. If other gay people think I’m wrong, let them run, too.”
“I’m not representative politically of the whole gay community. There’s no such thing as being representative of the gay community in that way. There’s some gays who are John Birchers. Others are communist.”
“But when the election’s over, I’m not just another politician who promised to support gay freedom. I’m still gay and I have a lover I am sexual with.”
“If there comes an oppression as there did in Germany for the Jews, it won’t matter where we were different in our economic thinking.”
“Hitler didn’t care if the Jew was an ultra liberal or a conservative. He was Jewish and he went into a concentration camp.”
“We’re in bed together . . . by the fact that we’re all homosexuals. If we don’t understand that, we’re in trouble.”
“The ex-chief of police is running for the Board of Supervisors. If he gets elected, it’s going to get more conservative. It’s going to crack down more. They’ve already closed Broadway. Next month it may be the porno shops. After that. . .”
For the next hour we talked about a variety of controversial subjects including election of the Board of Supervisors by district, full time supervisors, lower taxes, the economy, religion, the theater and drugs.
His ideas came racing out at me as I sipped my coffee. I could feel the excitement in him, the intensity, the idealism he had to build a better world.
Supervisor, he feels, is something that should require a man’s full time.
“If $9,000 a year is not enough for Ron Pelosi, I say, let him step down.”
“All tax income should be invested,” he declares, “so the interest coming in on it will lower our taxes.”
The fact that the people who handled Watergate are building our economy is frightening to him. His experience as a security analyst in New York, Dallas and San Francisco he uses to evaluate the present situation.
“I know, for instance, oil companies can tell you to the gallon how many gallons of gasoline they are going to produce, refine and sell for the next three years. And all of the sudden the oil company says there is not enough oil. That’s bullshit. It’s because they wanted the Canadian/Alaskan pipeline built. They said if we don’t have this built there’s going to be a shortage of gasoline. So the legislation passed and now there’s not going to be a shortage for the rest of the year. The public is spoon fed and the press doesn’t do anything about it.”
His religion is music, Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner and Strauss. He likes the Rolling Stones, too.
“I think Mahler and Bruckner are more religious than the pope,” he says. During his early days on the stock market in New York C
ity he became acquainted with Tom O’Horgan who was later famous as the director of HAIR on Broadway.
In those days O’Horgan was putting plays on in his loft. Harvey helped him produce an all male cast of MAZE there.
The friendship eventually resulted in Harvey leaving San Francisco and the stock market to help Tom O’Horgan in producing LENNY and JESUS CHRIST SUPER STAR.
But Harvey’s heart was in San Francisco and he left the theater to return. He is appearing, however, in a bit part of a film version of Ionesco’s RHINOCEROS to be released in January.
I dreaded my next question, being tired of it and all the answers I thought he might give, but feeling it was too important not to ask.
“What is your stance on drugs?” I asked.