Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk: The Camera Shop Prophet

In June 1978, riding in an open car through a San Francisco Gay Freedom Day crowd estimated at between 250,000 and 375,000 people, the most conspicuous gay politician in America held up a hand-lettered sign: "I'm from Woodmere, N.Y." It was a joke, a credential and a political strategy compressed into a few words of cardboard. Five months later he was shot dead at City Hall. He had held elected office for eleven months.

The Long Apprenticeship

Harvey Bernard Milk was born on May 22, 1930 in Woodmere, New York, to William Milk and Minerva Karns, descendants of Lithuanian Jews; his grandfather Morris Milk had founded the first synagogue in the town. He grew up in a kosher household, encountered religious discrimination as a child, was teased about his appearance, and answered by becoming the class clown — a defensive reflex later refined into a professional instrument. He graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1947 and studied mathematics at the State University of New York at Albany from 1947 to 1951, writing for the college paper along the way.

The Navy followed, from 1951 to 1955, where he served as a lieutenant junior grade aboard the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake. It ended in 1955 with a forced "other than honorable" discharge, accepted rather than face court-martial for homosexuality. For the next decade and a half he was a Long Island high school teacher, a Manhattan stock analyst, an insurance actuary and a researcher at the Wall Street firm Bache & Company. His private life ran alongside: Joe Campbell from 1956 to 1961, Craig Rodwell in 1962, Jack Galen McKinley from 1964, with whom he arrived in San Francisco in 1969 attached to a touring production of Hair, and Scott Smith in the early 1970s. The Rodwell relationship ended because Milk disapproved of Rodwell's activism in the Mattachine Society — the man who would spend his last years demanding that everyone come out spent his early thirties objecting to gay militancy.

Castro Camera

In March 1973 Milk and Smith opened Castro Camera on Castro Street with their last $1,000. The shop was never much of a business and was always a headquarters. Milk founded the Castro Village Association and became its president, organizing gay merchants against neighborhood resistance, and in 1974 he staged the first Castro Street Fair, which drew more than 5,000 people and converted the skeptics. He called himself the "Mayor of Castro Street" and behaved as though the title were real.

Four Campaigns

The established gay political leadership was unimpressed. Jim Foster told him: "There's an old saying in the Democratic Party. You don't get to dance unless you put up the chairs." Milk ran in 1973 anyway, took 16,900 votes and finished tenth of thirty-two candidates while sweeping the Castro; under district elections, which did not yet exist, he would have won. In 1976 he was appointed to the Board of Permit Appeals, becoming the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States, and was fired five weeks later for announcing a run at the State Assembly, which he lost to Art Agnos by fewer than 4,000 votes. Concluding that the Alice B. Toklas Club would never endorse him, he co-founded the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club. His argument was blunt: "We don't want sympathetic liberals, we want gays to represent gays ... I represent the gay street people."

On November 8, 1977, running against sixteen opponents, he won a supervisor's seat with 30 percent of the vote — the first non-incumbent openly gay man elected to public office in America. He took office on January 8, 1978, sworn in alongside Carol Ruth Silver, Gordon Lau and Ella Hill Hutch.

Eleven Months

His signature bill banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing and public accommodations. It passed 11 to 1, with Supervisor Dan White the lone dissent, and Mayor George Moscone signed it with a light blue pen Milk had supplied; it was described as the most stringent and encompassing such law in the nation. His other famous ordinance addressed the city's leading complaint — dog excrement — and he sold it by scouting a location for an hour and then stepping in a pile on camera. It brought him more fan mail than anything else he did in office. He also joined the Teamsters in a successful boycott of Coors beer, fought the closure of a neighborhood elementary school, pushed cheaper child care, free public transit, civilian oversight of police and a commuter tax on out-of-town office workers. Not all of it has aged well: in a 1978 letter to President Jimmy Carter he defended the cult leader Jim Jones as "a man of the highest character."

Anita Bryant and Proposition 6

In 1977 Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign persuaded 70 percent of Dade County voters to repeal a gay rights ordinance. Milk led more than 3,000 people out of the Castro that night and read the defeat as fuel: "This is the power of the gay community. Anita's going to create a national gay force." When State Senator John Briggs put Proposition 6 on the California ballot to force the firing of gay teachers, Milk debated him up and down the state and punctured him with statistics and jokes — "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The measure lost on November 7, 1978 by more than a million votes, with 75 percent against in San Francisco. His set-piece oration, the Hope Speech, opened by seizing the enemy's own language: "My name is Harvey Milk—and I want to recruit you."

Twenty Days Later

On November 27, 1978, Dan White entered City Hall through a basement window to avoid the metal detectors, shot Moscone in the shoulder, chest and twice in the head, reloaded with hollow-point bullets, and shot Milk five times, twice in the head. Dianne Feinstein found the body and told the press, "Today, San Francisco has experienced a double tragedy of immense proportions." Between 25,000 and 40,000 people carried candles from the Castro to City Hall that night. At trial, White's lawyer Doug Schmidt argued diminished capacity, partly on the evidence of a junk-food binge; the papers called it the "Twinkie defense." On May 21, 1979 the jury returned voluntary manslaughter and White drew seven years and eight months. The Castro marched again, this time throwing rocks and burning police cars. "Just tell people that we ate too many Twinkies," one rioter told a reporter. "That's why this is happening." White was released in January 1984 and killed himself in October 1985.

Why Harvey Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Milk in a precise and limited way. What he possessed was a genius for media attention and self-promotion, and, as one observer put it, "he was a master at figuring out what would get him covered." This was not an intellectual gift — he was a mathematics major who ran a camera shop — but a theatrical and tactical one. Deliberately stepping in dog excrement after an hour spent choosing the right patch of sidewalk is not clowning; it is an exact calculation about how attention flows and what a photograph can be made to argue. His last campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, put it more grandly: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary."

The counter-case is substantial and should be stated plainly. He lost three of his four races. He governed for eleven months and left behind one landmark ordinance and a dog law. His campaigns were chaotic, run out of a storefront on scrap paper; he was hyperactive and prone to temper. He vouched for Jim Jones, and he used Oliver Sipple's outing for political advantage. Even his allies conceded the asymmetry: his protégé Cleve Jones argued that the murder and the response to it, rather than the life, "made permanent and unquestionable the full participation of gay and lesbian people in the political process," and the historian Neil Miller wrote that "no contemporary American gay leader has yet to achieve in life the stature Milk found in death." The honest verdict is that Milk's brilliance was craft — the craft of visibility — deployed at precisely the moment when visibility was the whole political question.

Legacy

Time included him among the century's heroes and icons as "a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in doing so." Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in August 2009, saying he "fought discrimination with visionary courage and conviction"; California designated May 22 as Harvey Milk Day the same year. A postage stamp followed in 2014, a terminal at San Francisco International Airport in 2019, a square in the Marais that same year; a Navy oiler named for him in 2016 was stripped of the name in June 2025. He had written his own epitaph on tape, in case: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."