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Harvey
Milk
OutSmart's
celebration of the gay icon.
by
Ann Walton Sieber
Harvey Milk was killed 22 years ago, in 1978, at the
age of 48. Yet his role in the gay rights movement was
so pivotal that we can’t forget him. Like Martin
Luther King Jr., like Cesar Chavez, even like Joe Hill,
Harvey Milk has the impact and vision to represent a
movement. He lived in the era of Anita Bryant, when
middle America was becoming aware of gay issues for
perhaps the first time. As the first prominent openly
gay elected official, Harvey became the outrageous,
outraged, articulate voice of the gay movement.
Yet many people don’t know who Harvey Milk was.
It’s not too late to remedy that, and that is,
in part what this 70th birthday issue is all about.
I’ve known about Harvey Milk for a long time. As
a 22-year-old, I saw the Alley Theatre’s 1985 production
of Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice, a courtroom
drama about the trial of Dan White, the man who murdered
Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and how
the trial slipped out of the hands of the prosecuting
attorney. White was able to convince the jury that he
was mentally unstable due to eating junk food, the infamous
“Twinkie Defense,” and was only convicted
of voluntary manslaughter (what people get for, say,
recklessly hitting someone with your car). I remember
later in 1985 driving my dad’s old ’65 Chevy
pickup through the small town of Hockley with my best
friend Kevin, who was gay, when we heard over the radio
that Dan White had committed suicide. The chill, the
weird feeling. He was the enemy, there was some satisfaction
that, in the end, he really didn’t get away with
it...but we didn’t want him dead.
So I knew and had thought about Harvey Milk—he’d
become part of my own emotional autobiography. But I
guess he still had the status of a story, of news headlines,
of an outrage, a cerebral angry feeling. But Harvey
Milk really came home to me for the first time last
fall. That’s when I saw the documentary The Times
of Harvey Milk. Seeing Harvey was different from just
knowing the skeleton of his story.
1970s San Francisco, Castro Street, the ground zero
of the first-being-born gay liberation movement in America,
perhaps anywhere. And Harvey Milk was the mayor of Castro
Street. Not really the mayor, since Castro Street isn’t
a town. But Harvey decided to devote every waking hour
to organizing the gays in San Francisco into a viable
political entity, to create out of the boiling emotions
of the period a gay rights movement.
Once elected to be a city supervisor (like a city councilman),
Milk made the most of this position of prominence, advocating
for his humanist brand of populist politics, showing
through his coalition building with labor and the racial
minorities that he was anything but a one-issue candidate.
It was Harvey who first rallied for a national gay march,
and was engaged in making it happen when he was assassinated
in 1978, just 11 months into his term of office, by
another city supervisor, Dan White.
Here was a man riding the tip of the frothy cresting
wave of his times. He was unspeakably happy to be where
he was. And he knew that the price was more likely than
not early death, assassination. Living fully in the
present, he was a man at the pinnacle of his own self-realization.
And because of that, he opened the road up for so many
others. In Zen it is said, “When you wake up, the
whole world wakes up.” If one person is realized,
it seems, it can spread like bloody wildfire
Seeing all this in his voice, his exultant face the
night of his election, his spirit that just radiated
how absolutely delighted he was to be who he was, where
he was, I decided there and then that Harvey Milk was
one of my heroes. He’s my hero of how one can dare
to do way more than is humanly conceivable, and what
an infectious liberating job that is. My hero about
finding one’s path, and dancing down it. When I
took the job as editor of OutSmart, I put a photo of
Harvey’s unblinking visage, chin on fist, on the
wall right opposite my desk. “Oh yes, Harvey,”
I think, when putting out this bantam-weight good-hearted
magazine just seems too damn much. “Oh yes, Harvey,
I know. It is too much. And that’s utterly irrelevant.
Here we go.”
Part of what made Harvey Milk seem so especially jubilant
about his prominent role in gay liberation was that
he’d spent most of his life in a fairly repressed,
traditional life. Harvey Milk was born May 22, 1930,
to a Jewish family on Long Island, New York. Popular,
funny, and extroverted, Harvey knew he was gay from
early on—and was even briefly arrested at age 17
for his presence in the isolated section of Central
Park known for homosexual cruising—but he kept
his sexuality a secret at school, home, and certainly
in the Navy.
Harvey worked on Wall Street in New York in his 20s
and 30s, and had a few long-term relationships in which
he played the role of the stable businessman supporting
his younger lovers’ and friends’ artistic
and political activities. Interestingly, his first longtime
lover, Joe Campbell, with whom Harvey lived for seven
years, became part of the Andy Warhol crowd. The fey
Campbell was known as the Sugar Plum Fairy. That was
him in Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, “Sugar
Plum Fairy came to hit the streets, looking for soul
food and a place to eat. Went to the Apollo, should
have seen him go, go, go....” Another close friend
was Tom O’Horgan, who directed Hair, Jesus Christ
Superstar, and Lenny. Harvey was transferred to Dallas
in 1967, but after a year he resigned his job and moved
back to NYC, where he and many of his friends immersed
themselves in the production of Hair.
All the flower children and counterculturism started
rubbing off on Harvey around the time of the Stonewall
uprising in 1969 and his 40th birthday in 1970. In 1972,
he and his lover, Scott Smith, spent a year driving
out to California, living off their unemployment checks,
camping out under the redwoods in sleeping bags.
Once in San Francisco, Scott and Harvey rented a place
on Castro Street, a blue-collar neighborhood where an
increasing number of gay hippies were moving because
of its funky affordability. It took them a little while
to figure out what they felt like doing, but they eventually
settled on the idea of opening a camera shop.
“Harvey
spent most of his life looking for a stage,” O’Horgan
commented years later. “On Castro Street, he finally
found it.”
Harvey’s entry into politics started more as a
lark, a counterculture nose-thumbing at the mainstream
developers and business types who were changing San
Francisco from a city of ethnic neighborhoods into a
shiny urban center. Harvey also ran up against the gay
establishment, which had been quietly building power
through behind-the-scenes politicking in liberal circles,
without ever getting too outrageous—such as the
“outrageousness” of actually backing an openly
gay candidate. Harvey first ran for city supervisor
in 1973, only spending $4,500 on his entire campaign.
He knew how to attract press, and he started building
his band of devoted volunteers. He got labor on his
side after he helped a truck-drivers’ union protest
of Coors by engineering a boycott in all the gay bars.
Harvey ran and lost twice for the city supervisor’s
seat, and once for state Assembly. Each time he built
followers and recognition.
Meanwhile, Harvey was becoming the spokesman for the
massive gay community in San Francisco. He started the
San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, the Castro Street
Fair, and the Castro Village Association, an alliance
of neighborhood business owners. When a riot threatened
to break out over a gay murder in 1977, it was Harvey
who was able to keep the demonstration from turning
violent.
Harvey also successfully campaigned to change the structure
of San Francisco’s city campaign, so that supervisors
weren’t all elected from a general citywide election
(which tended to elect the most wide-appeal, white,
Middle America candidates) to district elections, where
each neighborhood in the city got to choose their supervisor.
In the 1978 elections, under the new system, Harvey
won by a two-to-one margin, and he exuberantly, triumphantly
began his term as city supervisor.
In his time in City Hall, Milk built a strong alliance
with liberal San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. On
the other side of the political spectrum was Dan White.
A former policeman and fireman, White came from a blue-collar
traditionalist district. Midway through his first year
as a supervisor, White unexpectedly quit, saying he
couldn’t support his family on the meager supervisor’s
salary. What happened next is largely speculative, but
many believe that the real estate bigwigs visited White
and told him that they needed his pro-development vote
back on the board of supervisors. White asked to be
reappointed. However, once White had resigned, it was
up to Moscone to appoint whoever he wished to the open
position. Moscone initially agreed to reappoint White,
but later reneged, largely at the urging of Milk, who
advised the mayor to capitalize on the opportunity to
get a liberal majority in the council.
The morning that Moscone was to announce his decision,
White brought the gun he had carried as a policeman
to City Hall. To avoid the metal detectors at the front
entrance, White crawled in through an open window in
the basement. He met with Moscone, and loud voices were
heard coming from the office. As White confessed later
that day, he then fired two shots at Moscone from across
the room, then came close and fired two shots into his
head. Moscone’s secretary thought she heard a car
backfiring.
White then reloaded his gun with special hollow-headed
dum-dum bullets that explode on impact. As he rushed
out into the hall, fellow City Supervisor (now California
Senator) Dianne Feinstein called out to Dan that she
wanted to talk to him. “I have something to do
first,” White said as he dashed by.
White went to Harvey’s office and asked him if
they could talk in White’s former office. When
Harvey walked in, White blocked the way and fired a
shot into Milk’s arm. Another went into Milk’s
chest. The final two went into Harvey’s skull.
White left the building without being stopped. He called
his wife and then turned himself in at the police station
where he used to work.
Meanwhile, a shaken and pale Dianne Feinstein told a
group of reporters, “As president of the board
of supervisors, it is my duty to inform you that both
Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot
and killed.” That night there was a huge, silent
candlelight march from the Castro neighborhood to City
Hall.
Dan White was put on trial the following spring. What
happened next, I don’t understand.
For some reason, the prosecuting attorney let the defense
fill the jury with white conservative Catholics, half
of them from White’s district. White’s attorney
portrayed his client as a lone white knight battling
a “city deteriorating as a place for average and
decent people to live....” The jury felt such sympathy
for White that they bought the argument that he had
been driven temporarily insane from the stress, and
from eating too much sugar and junk food the previous
night. Dan White was only convicted with two counts
of voluntary manslaughter.
That’s when the riot came. “The reaction will
be swift and it will be tonight,” said Cleve Jones,
who then led the raging crowd down Market Street chanting
“Avenge Harvey Milk.” Despite efforts to stop
them, the crowd battered through the heavy glass doors
of City Hall and broke every window on the first floor.
A line of police cars stretching for a block was torched,
their exploding gas tanks adding to the chaos. That
was May 21, one day before what would have been Harvey’s
birthday.
A huge celebration had been planned for May 22 for the
birthday. After the previous night, the police were
afraid of another riot. But the Castro Street community
had voiced their outrage, and now they were ready to
celebrate their leader nonviolently. Again the crowd
was led by Cleve Jones, who told them:
“Last night the lesbians and gay men of San Francisco
showed the rest of the city and the rest of the world
that gay people are angry and on the move. And tonight
we are here to show the world what we are creating out
of that anger and that movement. A strong community
of women and men working together to change our world.
“It
seems highly appropriate to celebrate Harvey’s
birthday in this manner, a party on the street he loved....
We have come here from all the old hometowns of America
to reclaim our past and secure our future and replace
lives of loneliness and despair with a place of joy
and dignity and love.”
Harvey Milk was a man who only came into the brightness
of his own purpose later in life. Martin Luther King
Jr. said, “An individual has not started living
until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic
concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
Once Harvey took up the broader concern of the surging
gay movement, he realized that his life was probably
going to be short, and yet he exalted in every bit of
it, abandoning himself into the heaven of his moment.
We can all do the same. Harvey Milk lives in the inspiration
he gave and keeps giving to all of us.
Happy birthday, Harvey.
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