Harvey Milk, Activist and Politician, Led a Revolution for LGBTQ Rights

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to hold public office in California. Elected in 1977 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he was assassinated at age 48, in 1978, by an ex-coworker, barely a year into his first term as an elected official. Ten days before his assassination, Milk recorded himself saying goodbye in case this grim scenario ever played out. “I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbing,” Milk said in the tape. “Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time, I feel it’s important that some people know my thoughts, and why I did what I did. Almost everything that was done was done with an eye on the gay movement.”

Milk had real clarity about what it might mean for him to become a martyr to this cause: “All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” His barrier-breaking has undoubtedly played a role in the strides the LGBTQ+ movement has made since the 1970s, and served as inspiration for how marginalized communities can build solidarity.

“I have no doubt that, had he lived, and had he survived the AIDS epidemic, I have no doubt that he would have been in [Pete Buttigieg’s] position, for instance,” Lillian Faderman, author of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, told Teen Vogue. “I know he would have run for statewide office... I’m sure he would have run for federal office. He was hugely ambitious, and he should have been, since he was so charismatic. I think he would have been an icon not for his martyrdom, but because he was so eloquent and so charismatic, and he would have been in the public eye, and not just in San Francisco.”

Born on Long Island in 1930 and raised in a tight-knit Jewish community, Milk knew from a young age that he was gay, but spent much of his adult life figuring out how out of the closet to be. Milk lived several lives before moving to San Francisco full-time in 1972: He was in the Navy, worked in finance, was a teacher, and was even a Republican, volunteering on Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.

“Harvey Milk offers us a story of political transformation over the life course,” said Marc Stein, a historian of LGBTQ urban history and a professor at San Francisco State University. “[He] had contact with the early gay movement of the 1960s [...] but he distanced himself from it and rejected the idea of being out and proud in the pre-Stonewall era, and was pursuing a business career. But then, like so many, he was really transformed by everything going on in the country in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

After being radicalized by the Vietnam War and fired from his finance day job due to his new hippie politics and appearance, Milk spent a period living in New York City and working on Broadway. He then moved to San Francisco, opening Castro Camera in the city’s Castro District and integrated himself into the local gay community. Milk was committed to attaining public office, and spent years building his credentials, founding the Castro Street Fair and the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, and running several times for office throughout the ’70s before his 1977 win.

One of Milk’s biggest accomplishments happened before he ever took office, back when he was called the “Mayor of Castro Street.” After Milk was contacted by Allen Baird, president of the Teamsters Union, in the summer of 1974, Milk was convinced to support a Teamsters strike against the union-busting Coors Brewing Company. Coors was trying to stop the hiring of union drivers to transport their beer, and Milk agreed to try and throw the weight of San Francisco’s LGBTQ community behind the strike, in exchange for Baird pushing the Teamsters to support the hiring of gay truck drivers. Milk began his campaign with an appeal in his regular column in the Bay Area Reporter, with the headline “Teamsters Seek Gay Help,” and made an argument for solidarity across identity lines: “If we in the gay community want others to help us in our fight to end discrimination, then we must help others in their fights.”

Faderman writes in Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death that coalition-building was central to his politics:

“Gay people must build bridges with workers and racial minorities, he declared. Not only was it the morally right thing to do, but workers and racial minorities were ‘us’s with gays, he said, because they all had common enemies—the ‘them’s who wanted to keep the powerless in their place. Self-interest, too, was a big reason to build bridges, he proclaimed. If gay people fought for the rights of the others, the others would help gays fight for their own rights.”

Milk helped convince gay bar owners to stop selling Coors in solidarity with the Teamsters strike, bringing media along to photograph bar owners dumping out the beer bottles.

Milk ran for office four times in San Francisco, including twice for the Board of Supervisors and also the California State Assembly, and was finally elected in 1977 to the Board after his second run. “There’s a lesson there about persistence, and also about the importance of the political rules, because most people think that the reason he finally won was that San Francisco shifted from a system where the supervisors were elected in all city elections, to a system where people were elected by districts,” which encouraged political wins for marginalized groups that might have struggled to win in a citywide vote, observed Stein. “Most people see a connection between changing political structures and his actual election.” Stein noted that electoral representation has been a key path to power for the LGBTQ community.

In his brief time in office, Milk was a staunch advocate for gay rights at a moment when the political climate was deeply hostile towards LGBTQ people. He helped pass one of the first ordinances protecting LGBTQ rights in the country; the New York Times at the time called it one of the most “stringent and encompassing in the nation.” “This one has teeth; a person can go to court if his rights are violated once this is passed,” Milk told the Times of the ordinance.

Milk also went head to head with the homophobes of his time, using his platform to help beat back Proposition 6. Prop 6, or the Briggs Initiative, named for its sponsor, State Senator John Briggs, proposed banning and firing LGBTQ people and allies from teaching in California public schools. Milk campaigned across California and debated Briggs on television to combat the measure, which had seemed likely to pass. Instead, the Briggs Initiative lost by more than a million votes.

Before his death, Milk had a key role in the formation of the 1979 National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. “This is perhaps a period when lesbians and gay men were at their most divided, as lesbian feminists are coming into their own and calling gay men out on sexism, and even the term ‘lesbian’ came into much greater popularity in the ’70s as distinct from women calling themselves ‘gay women,’” Stein said. Stein described Milk’s relationship with fellow San Francisco LGBT icon and close friend Sally Gearhart, a lesbian activist, as proof of Milk’s effectiveness at working across differences and building solidarity.

Milk and Gearhart’s close relationship was part of a movement to build connections between gay men and lesbians that had grown by the late 1970s. “That proved to be so key in the ’80s, when the AIDS epidemic was first recognized — I don’t like to say ‘when it started,’ because we now know that it’s stretched [back] decades, but when it was first recognized — lesbians did such important and heroic work in relation to AIDS,” Stein said. This coalition-building helped ensure that that first March on Washington included both gays and lesbians in the title.

Milk’s expansive, evolutionary political perspective can serve as inspiration for today’s activists, Stein says. “I think if you believe in political struggle, I think there’s also hope associated with the notion that people can change their minds and can wake up to other political struggles around them, and then become not just participants, but leaders,” he says.

Faderman points to Milk’s efforts towards building support networks between LGBTQ youth and adults, and creating resources for young people, as another key part of his legacy. “There are many, many LGBTQ centers around the country, and now all of them have groups for teenagers,” said Faderman. “Before Harvey, I think that most groups that were gay or lesbian, homosexual groups, or homophile groups, as they called themselves at one point, could not have dreamt of having resources for teenagers. They were too scared. And Harvey said, ‘Don’t be scared. This is a moral obligation, you have to do this.’”

Milk’s real work was to pull LGBTQ Americans out of the closet and into the streets. His death, and a San Francisco jury’s decision to convict Dan White — the former colleague who killed him and then mayor George Moscone — not of murder, but instead, voluntary manslaughter, inspired LGBTQ San Franciscans to demonstrate. The events of May 21, 1978, when the verdict was announced, became known as the White Night Riots. Protesters confronted local police, outraged over the blatant homophobia that allowed White to receive such a lenient sentence.

But Milk’s impact was felt far beyond the Bay Area. Faderman recalled one anecdote from the 1978 local Pride march in which Milk road through the crowd holding a sign reading four simple words: “I'm from Woodmere, NY.” “His whole point was that America had to see that we were everywhere. We are your neighbors, not just in big-city ghettos, but in Woodmere, Long Island, and in the South and in the Midwest and up North, and little towns. It was really a revolutionary idea.”

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