Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not Milk's early interests; he did not feel the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until around age 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Milk moved from New York City to settle in San Francisco in 1972 amid a migration of gay men moving to the Castro District in the 1970s. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighborhood to promote his interests, and ran unsuccessfully for political office three times. His theatrical campaigns earned him increasing popularity, and Milk won a seat as a city supervisor in 1977, a result of the broader social changes the city was experiencing.
Milk served 11 months in office and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back. Milk's rise to political power was as symbolic as it was real. His election signified and was made possible by a shift in San Francisco politics. The assassinations and the ensuing events were the results of continuing ideological conflicts in the city.
Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and "a martyr for gay rights", according to University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak. In 2002, Milk was called "the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States". Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us." Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama on August 12, 2009.
Early life
Harvey Bernard Milk was born in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island on May 22, 1930, to William and Minerva Karns Milk. He was the younger son of Lithuanian Jewish parents and the grandson of Morris Milk, who owned a department store and helped to organize the first synagogue in the area. As a child, Harvey was teased for his protruding ears, big nose, and oversized feet, and tended to grab attention as a class clown. He played football in school, and developed a passion for opera; in his teens, he acknowledged his homosexuality, but kept it a guarded secret. Under his name in the high school yearbook, it read, "Glimpy Milk—and they say WOMEN are never at a loss for words".
Milk graduated from Bay Shore High School in Bay Shore, New York, in 1947 and attended New York State College for Teachers in Albany (now the State University of New York at Albany) from 1947 to 1951, majoring in mathematics. He wrote for the college newspaper and earned a reputation as a gregarious, friendly student. None of his friends in high school or college suspected that he was gay. As one classmate remembered, "He was never thought of as a possible queer—that's what you called them then—he was a man's man".
Early career
After graduation, Milk joined the United States Navy during the Korean War. He served aboard the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake (ASR-13) as a diving officer. He later transferred to Naval Station, San Diego to serve as a diving instructor. In 1955, he was discharged from the Navy at the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
Milk's early career was marked by frequent changes; in later years he would take delight in talking about his metamorphosis from a middle-class Jewish boy. He began teaching at George W. Hewlett High School on Long Island. In 1956, he met Joe Campbell at the Jacob Riis Park beach, a popular location for gay men in Queens. Campbell was seven years younger than Milk, and Milk pursued him passionately. Even after they moved in together, Milk wrote Campbell romantic notes and poems. Quickly growing bored, they decided to move to Dallas, Texas, but they were unhappy there and moved back to New York where Milk got a job as an actuarial statistician at an insurance firm. Campbell and Milk separated after almost six years; it would be his longest relationship.
Milk tried to separate his early romantic life from his family and work. Once again bored and single in New York, he thought of moving to Miami to marry a lesbian friend to "have a front and each would not be in the way of the other". However, he remained in New York and secretly pursued gay relationships. In 1962 Milk became involved with Craig Rodwell, who was ten years younger. Though Milk courted Rodwell ardently, waking him every morning with a call and sending him notes, Milk was discouraged by Rodwell's involvement with the New York Mattachine Society, a gay activist organization. When Rodwell was arrested for walking in Riis Park, charged with inciting a riot and with indecent exposure (the law required men's swimsuits to extend from above the navel to below the thigh), he spent three days in jail. The relationship soon ended as Milk became alarmed at Rodwell's tendency to agitate the police.
Milk abruptly stopped working as an insurance actuary and became a researcher at the Wall Street firm Bache & Company. He was frequently promoted despite his tendency to offend the older members of the firm by ignoring their advice and flaunting his success. Although he was skilled at his job, co-workers sensed that Milk's heart was not in his work. He started a relationship with Jack Galen McKinley, and recruited him in the fight against the proliferation of big government by persuading McKinley to work on conservative Republican Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Their relationship was troubled: McKinley was prone to depression and frequently threatened to commit suicide if Milk did not show him enough attention. To make a point to McKinley, Milk took him to the hospital where Milk's ex-lover Joe Campbell was recuperating from a suicide attempt, after his lover—a man named Billy Sipple—left him. Milk had remained friendly with Campbell, who had entered the avant-garde art scene in Greenwich Village, and did not understand why Campbell's despondency was sufficient cause to consider suicide as an option.
Rise of Castro Street
The Eureka Valley of San Francisco, where Market and Castro Streets intersect, had for decades been a blue-collar Irish Catholic neighborhood synonymous with the Most Holy Redeemer Parish. Beginning in the 1960s, however, young families left the neighborhood and moved to Bay Area suburbs, and the city's economic base eroded as factories moved to cheaper locations nearby. Mayor Joseph Alioto, proud of his working-class background and supporters, based his political career on welcoming developers and attracting a Roman Catholic Cardinal to the city. Many blue-collar workers—often Alioto supporters—lost their jobs as large corporations with service industry positions replaced factory and dry dock jobs. San Francisco had been "a city of villages": a decentralized city with ethnic enclaves that each surrounded its own main street.
As the downtown area developed, neighborhoods suffered, including Castro Street. The Most Holy Redeemer Parish shops shut down, and houses were abandoned and shuttered. In 1963, real estate prices plummeted when most of the working-class families tried to sell their houses quickly after a gay bar opened in the neighborhood. Hippies, attracted to the free love ideals of the Haight-Ashbury area but repulsed by its crime rate, bought some of the cheap Victorian houses.
Since the end of World War II, the major port city of San Francisco had been home to a sizable number of gay men expelled from the military who had decided to stay rather than return to their hometowns and face ostracism. By 1969 San Francisco had more gay people per capita than any other American city; when the National Institute of Mental Health asked the Kinsey Institute to survey homosexuals, the Institute chose San Francisco as its focus. Milk and McKinley were among the thousands of gay men attracted to San Francisco. McKinley was a stage manager for Tom O'Horgan, a director who started his career in experimental theater, but soon graduated to much larger Broadway productions. They arrived in 1969 with the Broadway touring company of Hair . McKinley was offered a job in the New York City production of Jesus Christ Superstar , and their tempestuous relationship came to an end. The city appealed to Milk so much that he decided to stay, working at an investment firm. In 1970, increasingly frustrated with the political climate after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Milk started to grow his hair. When told to cut it, he refused and was fired.
Milk drifted from California to Texas to New York without a steady job or plan. In New York City he became involved with O'Horgan's theater company as a "general aide", signing on as associate producer for Lenny and for Eve Merriam's
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