by Milk, Harvey
So much commemoration in those early years of Milk’s afterlives, in fact, that you might have thought Frank Robinson, Milk’s speechwriter and campaign advisor (named as one of only four potential successors in Milk’s political will), was unnecessarily concerned when he fretted in the inaugural 1983 issue of The Harvey Milk Archives Newsletter: “I do not know what Harvey’s fate would have been if the Harvey Milk Archives had not been established. I am not sure what historians would have done, how they might have edited his speeches, how they might have subtly reshaped the past, how they might have interpreted the man who was the man who might have been.”4
Robinson’s insightful words should not be misunderstood as sentimental hero worship or hagiography. Archival materials and their consignation matter, always and profoundly, for histories and memories to survive and thrive, especially for those histories and memories that malignant individuals and institutions would readily consign to oblivion, and for those people who struggle for many reasons against manifold constraints to preserve and promulgate the past. Certainly this is true for GLBTQ histories and memories. Heather Love has written,
The queer past has long served a crucial role in the making of queer community. . . . The desires that queers have invested in the past have transformed it. There are, as a result, many queer pasts: Some versions glitter with the collective fantasies of greatness; others have been rubbed smooth by constant handling; some are obscure, having been forgotten or put away; other versions of the past have been rendered ghostly through the weight of accreted longing; and some are covered by shadows, forgotten traces of ways of life that many would rather leave behind.5
There are, we believe, many queer pasts in Harvey Milk, as varied and valuable, as vulnerable, as those pasts Love describes and Robinson cherishes. The Milk archive, in whatever forms it exists and may eventually take, should never be taken for granted.
The extensive, largely behind-the-scenes efforts during the 1980s and 1990s to amass and preserve Harvey Milk’s words, images, and ephemera deserve greater visibility. Scott Smith, heir and executor of Milk’s estate, who, during their years as lovers, business partners, campaigners, and confidants, had done more than perhaps any other to influence Milk’s transformation into the activist he became, devoted himself to cultivating and protecting Milk’s legacy. He had help, too, from longtime friends and loyal supporters such as Frank Robinson, Danny Nicoletta, Anne Kronenberg, Jim Gordon, Linda Alband, Terry Henderling, Jim Rivaldo, Dick Pabich, Harry Britt, Denton Smith, Wayne Friday, Walter Caplan, John Wahl, John Ryckman, Alan Baird, Rich Nichols, Tom Randol, and Bob Ross, among others. After Scott Smith died in February 1995, some of those friends and associates contributed, culled, sorted, and inventoried materials in preparation for donation by Elva Smith, Scott’s mother, to the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL). Correspondence suggests that negotiations among Elva Smith; co-executor Frank Robinson and the Ad Hoc Milk Archives Committee; and Jim Van Buskirk, Director of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the SFPL, did not always proceed smoothly. Robinson’s Letter to the Editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian in July 1995 offers a sense of these archival politics: “Political regimes change, so do library personnel, and the intent of the ad hoc group is to make sure that the Archives will be protected for the use and benefit of future generations.”6 Nevertheless, The Harvey Milk Archives-Scott Smith Collection was officially donated to the SFPL in 1995 and transferred to the library in 1997.7 It opened to the public in 2003.
Although for us this volume has been an enriching venture in GLBTQ memory work, which we hope readers will share, we should emphasize from the beginning that what we exhibit and narrate here—a substantial sample of transcribed documentary holdings representing Milk’s typed, handwritten, recorded, and/or published words—constitutes but a fraction of Milk’s public discourse. Many of Milk’s speeches and writings have been lost because they were originally performed extemporaneously or published in outlets now remote; some of that corpus remains extant if as yet fully extracted in other archives and libraries, such as in microfilm series holdings of GLBTQ periodicals, objects, and documents housed at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco or the ONE Institute in Los Angeles, or materials in private collections. Despite Milk’s presentiments of early death and his poignant foresight to tape-record a political will, he evidently was not much concerned with preserving or organizing his own archive for posterity; the state of his effects and affairs might fairly be described as chronically disheveled, a casualty of a devotedly engaged public life. We have decided to predominantly feature, with just a handful of exceptions, documentary texts of Milk’s public political rhetoric derived from the Harvey Milk Archives-Scott Smith Collection at SFPL because of the concentration and diversity, history, and symbolism of this archival cache. However, we have been keenly aware from the start of this project, and cumulatively so throughout its production, that the Milk materials at the SFPL, invaluable for what they do contribute to Milk and GLBTQ history and memory, are nevertheless incomplete and should and undoubtedly will be beneficially complemented and supplemented in the future.8
It is also the case, as these selected documents evidence, that the traces of Harvey Milk’s actual public discourse—scribbled or typed, scratched out, stump recycled, always in motion—bear the marks of having been lived rather than packaged. Milk’s words are sometimes fragmentary, typically unpolished, and occasionally banal. At the same time, they always crackle with his energetic engagement. We might usefully think of these addresses, columns, statements, press releases, fliers, and open letters as quotidian translations from a single emergently public life; a locally situated if nationally aspirant gay street activist, consummate politician, and municipal official; a gay, white, Jewish, able-bodied, financially strapped but middle-class man. These words are embedded in complex, multitudinous, and intersectional contexts that enabled or thwarted Harvey Milk’s presence, resonance, meaning, and influence in the 1970s, in the United States, in California, in San Francisco, in District 5, and in the Castro. We view such incomplete, tantalizing traces and echoes of distant times and larger stories, both inspirational and workaday texts, as rich enactments of Milk memory. As importantly, they constitute invitations to conversation, debate, reflection, teaching, learning, collaboration, community building, inter-generational relationships, and coalitional and oppositional politics—“how publics are formed in and through cultural archives”9—that inspire performative repertoires10 of GLBTQ pasts that will be queerly reconfigured as the future unpredictably unfolds.
We also have usefully come to realize that some fairly will ask, “Why Harvey Milk?” Not everyone, then or now, considers Milk a pioneer, an icon, as he himself did, remarking to the Associated Press about his election in November, 1977: “I can really appreciate what Jackie Robinson was up against. . . . Every black youth in the country was looking up to him. . . . He was a symbol to all of them. In the same way, I am a symbol of hope to gays and all minorities.”11 Immodesty aside, Milk’s claim on the GLBTQ pantheon might be rebuffed, or at least cause some bristling, despite his progressive populism and multi-issue advocacy, electoral success, visibility, assassination.12 As some have argued, Milk was, after all, a local politician who served less than a year in municipal office, and we will never know what he might have accomplished politically had he lived.13 Many in San Francisco thought him an arriviste. Drummer editor Jack Fritscher remembered that Milk was not well liked by many because he was “a political carpetbagger, because he was Manhattanizing laid-back San Francisco. He wasn’t particularly cool. He was a New Yorker telling ‘The City That Knows How’ what to do in his ‘Milk Forum’ column in the Bay Area Reporter.”14 Many inside and outside of San Francisco, such as Minnesota activist Stephen Endean, who would go on to direct the Gay Rights National Lobby and founded the Human Rights Campaign Fund, despised “Milk’s manner—his ego, his abrasiveness, his insistence on doing things his way—[which] ground on Endean’s Midwester
n sensibilities, and also probably on his insecurities.”15
There are also perspectives that help us account for Milk’s legacy in relation to broader cultural and political contexts. Fritscher offers gay immigration, single-issue voting, and assassination as crucial factors: “He was elected because he was gay, not because he was ‘Harvey Milk.’ . . . Beyond even Harvey’s control, he was swept up in a symbolic role in ritual politics. The convergence of his times, not his life, propelled him. His latter-day sainthood came through a martyrdom that could have happened to anyone playing the role of gay supervisor. It was his bad fortune that ‘Tonight the role of gay supervisor will be played by Harvey Milk.’”16 Historian Jonathan Bell more generally links historical visibility with place and contingent circumstance, observing that San Francisco’s attention is chiefly attributable to “the flamboyance and media-consciousness of its politicians and its importance as a microcosm of the social movements that have come to form the bedrock of the rights revolution of recent times.”17 From these vantages, Milk’s posthumous renown should be understood as a complex production of his accomplishments, the where and when of his public life, the volume of his persona, and his dramatic demise.
These challenges and contextualizations are important and should shape any engagement with Milk’s memory. We believe that they usefully complicate, but do not disqualify, a claim of Harvey Milk’s significance, the value of his assembled words. Arguably, what materially matters most in GLBTQ worldmaking, then and now, occurs locally, whatever broader sweep and circulation a figure or place or event might foment or by happenstance occasion in the aftermath of activism. Most courageous GLBTQ activists since the first stirrings of political consciousness, during the arduous history of transformative acts and soundings, made a difference in particular spaces and sites, communities and forums, even as news of what they did—or they themselves—may have traveled. Milk remarked in 1978, “History is made by events . . . sometimes by large events with the world watching, but mostly by small events which plant the seeds of change. A reading of the Declaration of Independence on the steps of a building is widely covered. The events that started the American Revolution were the meetings in homes, pubs, on street corners.”18 Milk’s successor on the Board of Supervisors, Harry Britt, came to a similar conclusion about his political fecundity:
History will betray his own sense of who he was if we only remember him as a charismatic genius, a tragic figure wearing the face of a clown, a bigger-than-life model for gay pride. He was all that, of course, but the specialness of Harvey Milk was to be understood in terms of the specialness of San Francisco in the ‘70s and of the people whose hopes and dreams he was to take upon himself. . . . He could not have been what he was in an earlier period, or in another place. Most specifically, Harvey was a leader whose destiny was the destiny of Castro’s Street People, a motley gang of alienated refugees from the struggle to assimilate to the homophobic mainstream of American life.19
Thus a world of difference might be found in those local queer details called Milk, sine qua non inestimable.
Harvey Milk’s words, too, teach us that successful activists speak locally, that the art of activist eloquence should be measured by the singularity of each ordinary persuasive opportunity, quotidian audience, or fleeting performance. Milk’s purple passages and stump clichés teach us that hope’s discourse, at close hearing by real people, is by turns and toil both sublime and hackneyed in situ. And with each of those hit-or-miss moments of rhetorical invention and embodiment, with each handshake, with each overbearing exchange, shameless self-promotion, flirtation, corny joke, and lump-in-the-throat moment when he was on a roll, Milk brought the GLBTQ folk of San Francisco that much closer to sexual justice and freedom, to gay rights. Milk campaign staffer Jim Rivaldo remembered, “I accompanied Harvey around the city and saw how readily people from all walks of life responded to an openly gay man with good ideas and an extraordinary gift for communicating them.”20
Of course Britt’s reminiscence—and he is not alone in this—elevates Milk onto a larger stage. Such hyperbole should not surprise or trouble us, as it is the currency and glue of public memory and social movements, both always replete with the propulsive lore of gods and devils.21 Additionally, close associates of those inscribed into history and memory are often prone to flattering exaggeration. While wanting to avoid the distancing and distortion that comes with hagiography, we nevertheless believe Milk earned his inscription and our attention in GLBTQ history and memory by his contributions to gay rights writ large. Like GLBTQ activism itself during the 1970s, Milk was increasingly emerging on a national stage, with expanding influence. During the spectacular historic fluctuations of GLBTQ fortunes during 1977, Milk proved himself a movement leader and subject of national press coverage. Rodger Streitmatter, in spirit if not letter, conveys Milk’s growing reputation and influence: “If San Francisco was the capital of Gay America, Harvey Milk was president.”22
In a 1978 interview, Boze Hadleigh asked Milk, “As the most visible gay politician, aren’t you going to be in demand as a national spokesperson?” His response: “That’s starting already. A few groups have asked . . . but I’m so busy as it is, there’s no time.”23 Nevertheless, during those few last months alive and working, Milk, along with tireless and talented activists Sally Miller Gearhart, Gwen Craig, Bill Kraus and so many others, led the successful statewide campaign to defeat Prop 6, called the “Briggs Amendment” after its sponsor, state assemblyman John Briggs, which would ban gay teachers from the California school system. Clendinen and Nagourney explain, “The decisive defeat of the Briggs initiative on November 7 [1978] was the greatest electoral victory the gay rights movement in the United States had known. It conferred a particular aura of historical celebrity on Harvey Milk, and at the victory party in San Francisco that night, he called for a gay march on Washington in 1979.”24 Assassinated 20 days later, Milk’s place in the 1979 March for Lesbian and Gay Rights would be memorial, and thereafter sorting out and celebrating the historical contributions of the sanctified leader would be inevitably enhanced and muddled by the tropes of remembered martyrdom. The Chicago Tribune reported on November 30, 1978: “Milk, the leading avowed homosexual politician in California and perhaps the nation, will be especially missed. . . . ‘Harvey Milk’s assassination is a terrible blow to the gay-rights movement in this country,’ said Robert McQueen, editor of The Advocate, San Francisco’s leading gay newspaper. . . . [S]aid Harry Britt, one of Milk’s closest friends and aides, ‘Harvey Milk was the Martin Luther King of this nation’s gay-liberation movement.’”25
Perhaps Ed Jackson was most insightful in capturing Milk’s hold on the historical imagination when, in his 1984 review of Rob Epstein’s documentary, he wrote, “The Times of Harvey Milk works powerfully on the viewer because of the Camelot-like resonances it sets off. On one level the story of one man’s political career, it is also a morality tale about the dream of justice and the American faith in electoral politics. It traces the evolution of a populist hero who came to embody the hopes of an entire community, a hero tragically cut down in the prime of his political life.”26 Whatever the measure, on the street or on the pedestal, we believe Harvey Milk is historically significant, worthy of archiving and anthologizing, deserving of memory, and most importantly, accessible and relevant for cultural and political purposes in which he can prove invigorating and troubling still, and perhaps lifesaving.
HARVEY MILK: A BRIEF POLITICAL GENEALOGY
Given that Harvey Milk’s public life did not begin until he was in his forties, and once begun lasted less than a decade—only ten months, eighteen days in office—it is a wonder that we should be bequeathed this archive. Indeed, it is a wonder such a public life began at all. Milk was not what most would consider destined for activism and politics. For most of his adult life Milk lived a quietly privileged domestic existence, passionately and monogamously devoted to his “marriages,” his home, the opera, and other arts in New York.
Though in retrospect some might consider him closeted, which is not quite the case, it is fair to say that Milk’s private life was compartmentalized. His professional choices—in the Navy, as a schoolteacher, and for years in the financial world—reflected and no doubt solidified this conservatism. To the extent that he was political at all, as chroniclers like to recall, Milk had proven himself to be a Goldwater Republican. One can imagine those who knew Milk during most of life, those unaware of his sexuality but also his former lover Joe Campbell, doing a double take as he began making headlines in, of all places, San Francisco.27
Milk had made one other dramatic transformation prior to emerging as the “Mayor of Castro Street,” and this may make it difficult to fathom Milk as the formidable politician he would become. Owing to the times, a young lover named Jack McKinley, and an experimental theater visionary named Tom O’Horgan (Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Lenny), Milk had become a hippie. As Randy Shilts described it, “Milk found himself surrounded by some of the most outrageous flower children on the continent. Harvey started assimilating the new countercultural values, which spurned materialism, eschewed conformity, and mocked orthodoxy. With each month, Milk’s hair became a little longer. With each political argument, his views became more flexible. With each new apartment, he discarded more of the tasteful furniture, stylish décor, and middle-class comforts he had cherished.”28 While briefly living in San Francisco in 1970, this Wall Street suit memorably burned his BankAmericard in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Two years later, with a new boyfriend named Scott Smith, Milk returned to California, flowers in his hair, roaming the state until finally settling for good in 1973 into a transitional neighborhood known by locals as Most Holy Redeemer Parish—what would become known as Castro Village and then, as now, the Castro.
