Long before Harvey Milk became the groundbreaking, life-changing leader first beloved as “The Mayor of Castro Street” and then the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States as San Francisco City-County Supervisor, he was a typical Jewish kid from Long Island.
Harvey Bernard Milk was born in 1930 to William and Minerva Milk in Woodmere, New York. Originally from Lithuania, Milk’s grandfather Mausche Milch anglicized his name to Morris Milk when he traveled to the U.S. for a new life in 1897. He opened a store, Milk’s Dry Goods, which then expanded into Milk’s Department Store. Morris was a pillar of their local community and started a local synagogue, Congregation Sons of Israel.
Harvey struggled with Judaism growing up — he thought that religion in general was peppered with falsehood and hypocrisy — but it remained still central to his identity. It was something he actively, almost rebelliously shared about himself during a time when being Jewish was still derided by general society. (To wit: not far from Milk’s home growing up, a local Nazi organization took shape, their clubhouse flying the Nazi flag. He would have been seven or eight at the time.) Such awareness of Judaism’s place in culture plus the knowledge from a young age of his own homosexuality gave Harvey a deep understanding of injustice when it came to being othered, Lillian Faderman wrote in her 2018 biography, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death. This understanding carried through his life.
As Milk became a teenager in the 1940s, he felt he had to hide his queerness, which he felt included his love of opera, in sports. Later at the New York State College for Teachers (now SUNY Albany), he even hid it in a machismo attitude. As a teenager, he cruised Central Park and was taken to a nearby police station with a group of other men suspected of cruising, but was released after claiming he was only there to try to get a suntan. In 1951, after graduating college, Milk entered the Navy; he resigned in 1955 after an official questioning of his sexuality. He’d experience — and remember — injustices like these throughout his career, once arrested while living in Miami because of the city’s “Vagrant Pervert” law, which sought to crackdown on “homosexual activity,” which was merely just gay men seeking places to congregate. Milk longed to be openly gay, but it wasn’t an opportunity he’d have for several years.
Milk led a double-life for many years, working on Wall Street and even campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater while still cruising Central Park. In one of these Central Park bouts, Milk met militant gay activist Craig Rodwell, who would go on to coin the term “gay power” and open the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in the United States. Rodwell believed it was important for gay people to be out, to organize and gather in order to make the gay rights movement stronger, a radical thought that Milk rejected at the time, but later accepted wholeheartedly and employed in his life and career. “[Milk] became a gay leader by figuring out how to make Craig Rodwell’s groundbreaking ideas go well beyond an inchoate radical gay community,” Faderman wrote.
In the mid-1960s, Milk became involved in New York’s downtown performance scene through the director Tom O’Horgan at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. He performed for and assisted O’Horgan, who went on to direct a production of Hair in San Francisco, and Milk followed, living in the city for the first time in 1969. His politics changed as he became more and more embedded in the artistic world: he protested the Vietnam War, was fired from his finance job, and returned to New York to work with O’Horgan on Broadway’s Jesus Christ Superstar. But Milk returned to San Francisco permanently in 1972. He opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street, in San Francisco’s famed gay neighborhood. Through his natural charm his store became a community space, always with opera playing in the background.
Milk became an established leader in the community, often called “The Mayor of Castro Street,” and eventually got involved in local politics in part due to the bureaucracy surrounding small business ownership in the city. In 1973, he ran for a position on the city’s Board of Supervisors, but lost. Much of the city’s gay population allied themselves with straight candidates instead, famously believing that Milk, barely living in the city a year, should “wait his turn.” Irrepressible, he disagreed, especially since he placed 10th out of 32 candidates in the election, with nearly 17,000 votes. Continuing to elevate small businesses, he and other queer merchants developed the Castro Village Association; it marked the first time in the U.S. that LGBTQ+ businesses had officially united. In 1974, he founded the Castro Street Fair to bring more attention and business to the neighborhood, an annual event still held today. His work and that of the Castro Village Association would inspire countless other LGBTQ+ business organizations across the country.
Milk ran for supervisor again and lost, but earned a spot on Mayor George Moscone’s Board of Permit Appeals, only to have it taken away after deciding to run for California State Assembly. He lost that election, too. But after developing an amendment allowing for district elections over at-large elections, pledging day care services for working parents, tax code reformation which allowed for abandoned factories to be reused for industry, and the development of housing from military buildings for low-income individuals, “The Mayor of Castro Street” did win the 1977 Supervisor election, and became one of the first elected, openly gay city officials in the United States.
While in office, Milk moved to ban discrimination due to sexual orientation in San Francisco across a multitude of fields, like housing, employment, and public space, a bill which was signed into existence on March 21, 1978, mere months after Milk had been sworn in. He also successfully campaigned against Proposition 6, which would disallow any gay teachers and those who sympathized with gay rights from the California school system. In speaking out against the initiative, he would revert back to the ideals Rodwell had taught him: “Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. … We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out,” he said.
Milk was charismatic and productive, fulfilling promises made in his platform. But he knew because of his outspoken nature and defense of LGBTQ+ rights, that he was also in a great deal of danger. On November 27, 1978, former city employee Dan White murdered Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Milk recorded his will just in case he should be assassinated, a recording you can hear at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, which plays next to the suit he wore when he was shot. “If a bullet should enter my brain,” he famously said, “let that bullet destroy every closet door.” His memory, and the dedication to the destruction of those closet doors, lives on powerfully today.
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