Harvey Milk

Harvey Bernard Milk was born on May 22, 1930, in Woodmere, New York, a village on Long Island's south shore. His parents, William and Minerva Milk, were the children of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, and the family ran a department store founded by Harvey's grandfather Morris Milk, a respected figure in the local Jewish community ^[1]. Harvey was the younger of two sons. At Bay Shore High School he played football, developed a lasting passion for opera, and earned a reputation as a class clown who was well liked but guarded about his private life ^[1].

Milk knew he was attracted to men from adolescence, a fact he concealed through his school years and long afterward. After graduating from high school in 1947, he enrolled at the New York State College for Teachers in Albany, where he majored in mathematics and wrote for the college newspaper. He completed his degree in 1951 ^[2].

With the Korean War underway, Milk joined the United States Navy. He served aboard the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake as a diving officer and later worked as a diving instructor in San Diego, reaching the rank of lieutenant junior grade. He left the Navy in 1955. Accounts of his separation differ: Milk later suggested he had been forced out over his sexuality, while naval records indicate a resignation, and the question has remained a subject of discussion among biographers ^[2][3].

Anyone asking who was Harvey Milk before politics finds a restless and varied career. He taught high school mathematics and history on Long Island, then worked as an actuarial statistician for an insurance firm and later as a researcher at the Wall Street investment firm Bache and Company ^[1]. Through the 1950s and 1960s he lived a largely closeted life in New York, holding conventional jobs and, for a time, conservative political views; he supported Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964 ^[2].

The counterculture changed him. Milk grew close to the world of experimental theater through his partner of that period and worked on Broadway productions, including as an associate of the touring company of Hair. His politics drifted left, and in 1969 he was living in San Francisco, a city drawing thousands of gay men and lesbians seeking freedom from harassment elsewhere ^[1][3].

In 1972 Milk settled permanently in San Francisco with his partner Scott Smith, and in 1973 the couple opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street, in a formerly Irish Catholic neighborhood rapidly becoming the center of gay life in the city ^[3]. The shop became an informal community hall. Frustrated by government waste during the Watergate era and by the treatment of gay citizens, Milk declared his first candidacy for the Board of Supervisors that same year. He lost, but drew roughly 16,900 votes and discovered a talent for retail campaigning ^[2][3].

Milk lost three races before he won one: supervisor campaigns in 1973 and 1975, and a 1976 bid for the California State Assembly against Art Agnos. Each defeat expanded his following. He earned the nickname "Mayor of Castro Street," organized the Castro Village Association of gay owned businesses, and helped launch the Castro Street Fair in 1974, which brought thousands of visitors and demonstrated the neighborhood's economic power ^[3]. He also forged an unusual alliance with the Teamsters, urging gay bars to join a boycott of Coors beer in exchange for the union hiring gay drivers ^[2].

His breakthrough came after San Francisco replaced citywide supervisor elections with district elections. Running in District 5, which included the Castro, Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977, making him one of the first openly gay people elected to public office in the United States and the first in California ^[1][4]. He was sworn in on January 9, 1978.

Among Harvey Milk achievements in office, two stand out from a term of less than eleven months. He sponsored a stringent gay rights ordinance barring discrimination in housing and employment on the basis of sexual orientation, which the board passed in 1978 with only one dissenting vote, that of Supervisor Dan White ^[2][4]. He also authored a widely popular ordinance requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. Beyond city hall, Milk campaigned across California against Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative, which would have mandated the firing of gay teachers and their supporters in public schools. He debated its sponsor, State Senator John Briggs, in appearances around the state, and voters rejected the measure in November 1978 by more than a million votes ^[4]. In his speeches Milk pressed a simple strategy: gay people should come out to their families and coworkers, because prejudice weakened when voters knew the people it targeted ^[3].

Milk's longest relationship was with Joe Campbell, whom he met in 1956 at Jacob Riis Park beach in Queens; the two were together for about six years ^[3]. Later partners included Jack Galen McKinley, a theater stage manager, and Scott Smith, who co-founded Castro Camera and managed Milk's early campaigns. His relationship with Jack Lira ended in tragedy when Lira died by suicide in 1978, during Milk's term in office ^[3].

Friends and biographers describe Milk as theatrical, funny, and tireless, a man who loved opera and street corner campaigning in equal measure. He was Jewish by upbringing and secular in adult life, though colleagues noted that his sense of social obligation drew on that heritage ^[1].

Milk understood the danger that came with visibility. He received frequent death threats after his election, and he recorded audio tapes in November 1977 to be played in the event of his assassination. On one tape he asked that his death spur others to action, saying that if a bullet should enter his brain, that bullet should destroy every closet door. The tapes named acceptable successors for his seat and made clear he considered political murder a real possibility ^[2][3].

On November 27, 1978, Dan White, who had resigned his own supervisor seat earlier that month and then sought reinstatement, entered San Francisco City Hall through a basement window to avoid metal detectors. He shot and killed Mayor George Moscone in the mayor's office, then walked to the supervisors' wing and shot Milk five times ^[4][5]. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, president of the board, discovered Milk's body and announced the killings to the press; she became acting mayor that day. That evening tens of thousands of San Franciscans marched in a spontaneous candlelight procession from the Castro to City Hall ^[5].

White stood trial for first degree murder in 1979. His lawyers argued diminished capacity, citing depression, and the jury convicted him only of voluntary manslaughter, a verdict carrying a maximum sentence of under eight years ^[5]. The defense's reference to White's junk food consumption was later caricatured as the "Twinkie defense." The verdict on May 21, 1979, set off the White Night riots, in which crowds attacked City Hall and burned police cars, followed by a police raid on a Castro district bar the same night ^[4][5]. White served about five years in prison and died by suicide in 1985.

Milk's afterlife in American memory has been extraordinary for a city supervisor who served under a year. Randy Shilts's 1982 biography The Mayor of Castro Street fixed his story in print, and the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk won the Academy Award for best documentary feature ^[3][6]. Gus Van Sant's 2008 feature film Milk earned Sean Penn the Oscar for best actor and Dustin Lance Black the award for best original screenplay, introducing the story to a new generation ^[6].

Official honors followed. In 2009 President Barack Obama awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, and California designated May 22, his birthday, as Harvey Milk Day, celebrated in public schools ^[6][7]. Time magazine had earlier named him one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century. San Francisco renamed part of Castro Street's civic space Harvey Milk Plaza, his old camera shop site became a city landmark, and in 2021 the Navy commissioned the fleet oiler USNS Harvey Milk, a pointed gesture given the circumstances of his departure from naval service ^[7].

Any Harvey Milk biography ultimately turns on the argument he made in life: that openness itself was a political act. The basic Harvey Milk facts, four losing campaigns, one victory, eleven months in office, might suggest a minor figure. Instead his insistence that gay people claim public life, and the shock of his murder, helped transform a marginalized community into a durable political constituency, in San Francisco and far beyond ^[4][6].