MILK, Harvey

MILK, Harvey (b. 22 May 1930; d. 27 November 1978), San Francisco supervisor, gay rights activist.

Harvey Milk was born in Woodmere, New York, to William and Minerva Karns Milk. He graduated from New York State College for Teachers in Albany in 1951, and joined the navy, becoming a deep-sea diver. After his discharge, Milk worked in New York and Texas at jobs ranging from teaching to investment banking before becoming the producer for a friend's Broadway plays. He followed a production of Hair (1967) to San Francisco, moving between San Francisco and New York for several years before settling in San Francisco in 1972 with Scott Smith, who would become his campaign manager. They opened a camera shop, Castro Camera, in March 1973.

The Watergate scandal, a special tax on small-business owners, and a teacher who borrowed a projector from the camera shop because her district could not afford one propelled Milk into politics in 1973. Milk ran for the Board of Supervisors, the consolidated city council-county commission for San Francisco, with a campaign that emphasized his outsider status—gay, Jewish, hippie, and newcomer to politics and to San Francisco. He ran without the support of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, the city's LGB political organization, which believed in supporting liberal straight candidates sympathetic to gays and lesbians, but not gay or lesbian candidates themselves. Milk made an impressive showing, coming in tenth out of thirty-two candidates.

Milk ran again for supervisor in 1975, winning the endorsement of labor unions for successfully implementing a Coors beer boycott by LGB bars after Coors refused to sign a Teamster's contract. The Toklas Club openly opposed Milk in this election, believing he gave gays a bad name. Milk finished the race in seventh place after the six incumbents. The newly elected mayor, George Moscone, appointed Milk to the Board of Permit Appeals in 1976, making Milk the first openly gay commissioner in the United States.

Milk's third campaign began two months after he took his seat on the Board of Permit Appeals. He decided to seek the Democratic nomination for a seat in the California Assembly after learning that the Democratic leadership had agreed on Art Agnos as its choice for nominee in advance of the primary. Though once again he did not earn the endorsement of the Toklas Club, a cadre of Milk supporters in the club managed to ensure that Agnos did not win its endorsement either. Labor was afraid to oppose the Democratic Party leadership, so Milk was officially endorsed by only a few unions, although privately he had considerable labor support. Despite his lack of support from the groups normally in Milk's camp—LGB organizations, unions, and Democrats—Milk won seventeen thousand votes and lost to Agnos by only four thousand votes.

Milk ran again for supervisor in 1977, and this time his persistence paid off. He was the top vote getter of the

seventeen candidates, winning 30.5 percent of the vote. During his tenure as supervisor, he was responsible for the passage of a LGB rights bill in 1978 and a pooperscooper law that required pet owners to clean up after their pets. He campaigned across the state against Proposition 6, a measure on the California ballot that would prevent anyone who talked about, advocated, or practiced homosexuality from teaching in the schools. The measure—ultimately defeated—allowed Milk to give LGB rights issues center stage. Milk's pooper-scooper bill was equally important to Milk's view of government, according to biographer Randy Shilts: "Harvey's political philosophy was never more complicated than the issue of dogshit; government should solve people's basic problems" (p. 203).

Milk served only eleven months in office. He was killed, along with Mayor George Moscone, on 27 November 1978, by fellow supervisor Dan White. A conservative member of the board, White had resigned his seat and then asked for it back. On the day of the killings, Moscone was planning to announce that he would not reappoint White. White was convicted of involuntary manslaughter with the infamous "Twinkie "defense—that junk food exacerbated his depression—and was sentenced to five years in prison. On 21 October 1985, within a year of his release, he committed suicide.

Harvey Milk remains a powerful symbol of gay liberation whose lasting message was openness, honesty, pride, and hope. Gay historian John D'Emilio summarizes what Milk has left behind: "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" (Cloud).

Bibliography

Cloud, John. "Why Milk is Still Fresh." The Advocate, 10 November 1998. Available from http://www.findarticles.com/m1589/1998_Nov_10/5487936/pl/article.jhtml.

Foss, Karen A. "Harvey Milk: 'You Have to Give Them Hope.'" Journal of the West 27, no. 2 (April 1988): 75–81.

Foss, Karen A. "The Logic of Folly in the Political Campaigns of Harvey Milk." In Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality. Edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Shilts, Randy. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

The Times of Harvey Milk. 16 mm, 87 minutes. San Francisco: Black Sands.

Weiss, Mike. Double Play: The San Francisco City Hall Killings. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1984.

Karen A. Foss

see alsoaids memorial quilt—names project; boycotts; democratic party; electoral politics.