by Milk, Harvey
Something queer was happening in San Francisco; indeed, it had been going on for quite some time. Always a haven for outsiders, San Francisco since World War II had become home to a sizeable population of GLBTQ people. Though more familiar for its 1970s blossoming, and overshadowed by mythic Stonewall, San Francisco should be remembered well for its much longer history of GLBTQ lives, cultures, and politics. In the 1950s Hal Call formed a chapter of the Mattachine Society, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the Daughters of Bilitis, making the city a stronghold of homophile outreach. Jose Sarria, a drag institution at The Black Cat, who had tirelessly and resiliently stood up for his harassed, arrested, and beaten brothers, ran for Board of Supervisors in 1961, amassing 7,000 votes more than a decade before Milk’s audacious first political campaign. Sarria’s voice sounded the clarion call of a developing movement comprised of the organizations formed during that decade, including the League for Civil Education, Tavern Guild, Society for Individual Rights, and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH). The protest press conference held by the CRH in response to shameful police disruption of the New Year’s Day Ball in 1965, as well as the trans people and other queers who resisted police brutality at Compton’s Cafeteria in August 1966, stand alongside Stonewall as transformative events in the burgeoning national movement for GLBTQ liberation, rights, and pride. California establishment politicians were already responding to these grassroots activists in the nascent politics for sexual justice before the New York “birth” of liberation on Christopher Street in 1969.29
What GLBTQ San Francisco had been through the 1960s, though significant, would not have necessarily led one to predict the massive influx of immigrants and the expansion of cultures and politics in the subsequent decade.30 John D’Emilio observes, “By the mid-1970s San Francisco had become, compared to the rest of the country, a liberated zone for lesbians and gay men.”31 Such growth was enabled by changing economic and demographic landscape of the city. San Francisco’s transformation from a manufacturing center into a metropolis of corporate headquarters, tourism, and conventions, depleted the population’s blue-collar, straight families in the many ethnic neighborhoods; consequently, it also enticed young professionals who found inexpensive housing in places like the Castro. Development politics were fraught, and tensions flared throughout the 1970s and beyond, inside and outside GLBTQ communities.32 With San Francisco’s development, however, accompanied by a growing reputation for sexual freedom, a GLBTQ homeland blossomed. D’Emilio explains that communities rapidly grew in a number of neighborhoods—Castro, Polk Street, Tenderloin, South of Market, Folsom Street, Upper Mission and Bernal Heights—constituting a “new social phenomenon, residential areas that were visibly gay in composition.”33
With such visibility came more immigrants, social and sexual networks and spaces, communications, businesses, civic groups, political organizations, movement mobilization and action, public festivals, and celebrations. Reporting on the “economic boom” and “political clout” of GLBTQ San Francisco during the 1970s, the Washington Post concluded that it was the “most open of any [homosexual community] in the nation.” Frances FitzGerald described the Castro as the “imminent realization” of gay liberation, “the first gay settlement, the first true gay ‘community,’ and as such it was a laboratory for the movement. It served as a refuge for gay men, and a place where they could remake their lives; now it was to become a model for the new society—’a gay Israel,’ as someone once put it.” Danny Nicoletta’s recollection is equally effusive: “Into the Seventies, people arrived in San Francisco from all over the world with hopes of creating a life characterized by the consciousness attributed to the Sixties communal, holistic, non-violent, mystical, theatrical, and avant-garde. A facet of this idealism for myself and many others was that we were people who were gay searching for a place to be open and honest about this part of our lives—a place without fear of the hatred and persecution which had kept us in closets for so long.”34
With such concentration, circulation, capital, and confidence, GLBTQ people also developed politically. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on its front page in 1971, “San Francisco’s populous homosexual community, historically nonpolitical and inward looking, is in the midst of assembling a potentially powerful political machine.”35 With the first gay rights marches, creation of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, Jim Foster’s path-breaking speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1972, and thriving lesbian-feminist communities, one might readily have believed the Chronicle’s hyperbole, which became all the more manifest as the decade unfolded. Jonathan Bell’s incisive analysis demonstrates that a broader confluence of contextual elements in California politics dating back more than a decade enabled such queer auspiciousness. From Bell’s perspective, left liberalism guided a generation of influential and ascending politicians who fused economic and civil rights in a progressive vision of inclusion; politicians who were influenced by and collaborated with grassroots activists and who helped create the conditions under which such disenfranchised groups could make gains through electoral politics. This is not to say that Willie Brown, George Moscone, Phil Burton, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Hongisto, and other key political players of the era were unfettered champions of or exclusively responsible for gay rights, as Harvey Milk’s critiques of superficial campaign courtship and battles with “the Machine” would later demonstrate. However, this analysis does help explain the conditions of possibility, “the distinctive contours of political life in San Francisco in the 1970s,” within and through which Milk could emerge, mature, and ultimately succeed as a gay rights and community activist with a populist vision articulated through the discourses of economic justice, individual rights, political power, solidarity, and coalition.36
But of course it was not only because San Francisco existed as the “political base” and “spiritual home of California liberalism” that GLBTQ people flourished.37 The intensifying, intensely satisfying, and interanimating dimensions of cultures and politics forged identification and identity, cultivated emotional bonds, deepened communities, fomented movement, and resulted in the sexual embodiment of freedom. Especially for gay men, such freedom was made all the more available and fluid by proliferating and booming bars, bathhouses, and clubs. With such growth came inevitable tensions, and there have been critiques, for example, of the gay male sexual culture.38 However, sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong argues persuasively that those committed to gay rights (interest group politics and legal protections), gay pride (cultural identity and visibility), and sexual pleasure (its enactment and commercialization) created a synergistic movement of “unity through diversity.”39 Armstrong observes, “The political logic of identity made it possible to reconcile pride, rights, and sexual expression,”40 despite differences among and the uniqueness of individuals, that solidified in economic power, political influence, and a sense of the collective instantiated through pleasure.
Significant, too, is the still broader context of national culture and politics, as well as the larger gay rights movement. Bruce Schulman writes in The Seventies, “[T]he emphasis on diversity, on cultural autonomy and difference, echoed throughout 1970s America. White ethnics picked it up, as did feminists and gay rights advocates and even the elderly. A new conception of the public arena emerged.”41 Contrary to narratives about cultural reversals and moribund activism, Dominic Sandbrook argues, “For all the efforts of the religious right and for all the talk of backlash against the legacy of the sixties, the fact remains that in moral and cultural terms, American society became steadily more permissive. More marriages broke up, more pregnancies were terminated, more children were born out of wedlock, and more gays and lesbians came out. In this respect at least, liberalism not only survived the 1970s but emerged triumphant.”42 Moreover, GLBTQ activism in particular should be understood as not only a legacy of the “long sixties” but as a distinctive influence on U.S. culture. Schulman goes so far as to conclude, “The gay ri
ghts movement transformed Americans’ understanding of homosexuality, and of masculinity in general” elsewhere he wrote, “Looking back . . . it is clear that the grassroots struggles for racial justice and sexual equality have exerted a more thoroughgoing impact than the liberal political economy of the Great Society.”43
Such superlative assessments are warranted by hard-earned achievements of GLBTQ people and organizations, and the widening visibility that came with them. The often-cited Time cover story, “Gays on the March,” from September 1975, remarked on the transformation:
There are now more than 800 gay groups in the U.S., most of them pressing for state or local reforms. The Advocate, a largely political biweekly tabloid for gays, has a nationwide circulation of 60,000, and the National Gay Task Force has a membership of 2,200. . . . Since homosexuals began to organize for political action six years ago, they have achieved a substantial number of victories. Eleven state legislatures have followed Illinois in repealing their anti-sodomy laws. The American Psychiatric Association has stopped listing homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, and AT&T, several other big corporations and the Civil Service Commission have announced their willingness to hire openly avowed gays.44
Little wonder, then, that even as the movement shifted from the brief revolution of gay liberation to the mainstay of gay rights reform (growing in numbers while contracting its agenda to single-issue politics), a heady mood of historic transformation pervaded. Like other GLBTQ people, John D’Emilio, himself both chronicler and activist, rode high on the collective effervescence: “The goals of activists had narrowed, yet activists in the mid-1970s almost uniformly displayed an élan that made them feel as if they were mounting the barricades. Activists increasingly engaged in routinized and mundane organizational tasks, yet they believed they were remaking the world.”45
Harvey Milk emerged from within these layered political and cultural contexts, reflecting them but also, improbably, harnessing their energies and promises into a unique activist vision that would help define the rest of decade, locally and nationally, as an epoch in GLBTQ history. Of course, Milk did not commence his political career as the leader he would become. He began it quite sparsely and unremarkably in the spring of 1973 in his newly opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street. The always threadbare business, which kept Milk in the financial straits to which he had not been accustomed during his earlier life, seems destined to the storied political front and headquarters it became. The real work of Castro Camera and its regulars focused not on rolls of film but on people, their freedoms, struggles, and neighborhoods in San Francisco.
Although Milk’s deeper political inclinations may be attributable, by his own accounting, to the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and his 1947 arrest as a teenager in Central Park for “indecent exposure,” Milk often identified three moral shocks46 in 1973 as effecting his awakening and sparking his first campaign for Board of Supervisors, the eleven-member body representing San Francisco’s consolidated city-county government. First, shortly after Castro Camera opened, Milk had a heated altercation with a local bureaucrat who demanded a $100 deposit against sales tax in order for the business to operate, which seemed to him an outrageous violation of free enterprise and symptom of class inequity. Second, Milk blanched at the disparity between haves and have-nots in this “developing” city, disparity which appeared proximately in the form of a young teacher from a resource-strapped school asking if she could borrow a slide projector to teach her lessons. Finally, Milk had a visceral response to Attorney General John Mitchell’s mendacious and evasive testimony during the Watergate Hearings, which he watched animatedly on a portable TV in the shop. Shortly thereafter, standing on a crate inscribed with the word “soap,” Milk launched his first candidacy.47
A more auspicious political debut, short of winning, is hard to imagine. Perhaps especially so given the long odds Harvey Milk faced as an unknown newcomer, both to the city and to politics, with the wrong look and surprisingly fierce opposition. For starters, there was that ponytail few could ignore, the signature symbol of his troubling hippie persona. Milk was also openly and unabashedly gay, which, needless to say, for an at-large candidate in a citywide election battling five incumbents, made for a political liability.48 We should recall and underscore how few GLBTQ candidates preceded Milk on any ballot in the United States, so few in fact, and with decidedly less candor and bravado, that it is not surprising (mythmaking notwithstanding) that he is often mistakenly celebrated as the first.
What may come as a surprise, however, is that Milk’s gay problem mostly concerned GLBTQ people themselves, or as Brett Callis observes, “His candidacy was itself a major issue for gays in 1973.”49 There was much passionate dispute in the GLBTQ press, social spaces, and political meetings, about how GLBTQ politics should proceed into or against the mainstream. Should the approach be accommodationist or radical? Should GLBTQ people enter politics to gain power or rely on the stewardship and largesse of straight allies? Should candidates make sexuality their defining marker, or should their ideology and platform take primacy over the fact that they happen to be gay? What might public engagement mean in relation to a politics of respectability? Should candidates be single-issue focused on gay rights or be committed to a broad set of issues?
From the beginning of his campaign, Milk was adversely targeted by the gay political establishment—the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and the Toklas Club—whose key players and gatekeepers, by and large, had their own scars and believed in an accommodationist and gradualist approach to gay rights, gained through loyal support of elected straight liberal allies, what Milk derisively would later call the “gay groupie syndrome.”50 Michael Wong, a young, heterosexual, Chinese American who, in launching his own political career, courted counsel and support of prominent members of the Toklas Club, captured well in his diary this attempted fratricide by powerful members of the gay establishment:
Gary Miller told me that Harvey Milk was “dangerous and uncontrollable.” Duke Smith said that Harvey Milk was “high on something.” Rick Stokes told me that Milk “had no support in [the] Gay Community . . . he’s running all on his own.” Jo Daly told me, “Maybe if we just ignore him, he’ll go away.” Jim Foster said that “it would be disastrous for the gay community if Harvey Milk ever received credibility.” I couldn’t have agreed with them more.51
Heeding such advice, Wong helped to block endorsements for Milk with San Francisco Young Democrats and San Francisco Tomorrow. Foster in particular, perhaps the most visible and influential gay establishment politician in San Francisco, openly opposed Milk until the bitter end, even after Milk had won over the Bay Area Reporter, SIR leader and Vector editor William Beardemphl, other publications, and a critical mass of GLBTQ voters.52
The intensity of the vitriol by Milk’s political enemies within the GLBTQ community suggests that they saw in him something more than an upstart of questionable motives and dubious emotional stability. Wong wrote privately what insiders would not admit: “No candidate came close to his dynamic delivery. . . . He stole the show. . . . [Everywhere he spoke, people were drawn to him. He was not slick and people related to him. He was causing the Toklas Club great concerns.”53 Moreover, Shilts astutely observed, “The disparity between Milk’s image and his reality stemmed from the essential act with which he defined himself—rebellion. The campaign biography that emerged from his early media interviews reads like the blueprint for a maverick.”54
And a queer, barnstorming, populist maverick he was. Milk’s broad platform focused on a wide range of issues that prioritized San Francisco residents over the city’s corporate and Chamber of Commerce interests. As the selected documents from 1973 reveal, Milk envisioned San Francisco as a city that would take its place among other great metropolises not for its bankbook or universities but for its populace, “a city that breathes, one that is alive and where the people are more important than the highways.” Instead of downtown development and growth of the tour
ism industry, for Milk San Francisco’s future depended on reducing wasteful and unfair governmental spending and taxation, promoting childcare centers and dental care for the elderly, eliminating poverty and addressing the unemployment rate by teaching skills and providing economic opportunities. Instead of fringe benefits for MUNI (San Francisco Municipal Railway) drivers, Milk advocated better service for MUNI riders, which would be achieved in part by mandating that city officials ride MUNI to work, and preventing congestion by reducing downtown parking garages. Instead of police harassment and arrests for marijuana possession, prostitution, and gay public sex, what he called “legislating morality” against “victimless crimes,” Milk demanded improved police protection against rape, murder, and mugging, which would be achieved if policemen actually lived in the city they patrolled, and patrolled in greater numbers. As he argued in his September 1973 address to the Joint International Longshoremen & Warehousemen’s Union and Lafayette Club, “It takes no compromising to give the people their rights . . . it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” From promoting street arts and community art centers, to advocating for beer drivers’ Local 888, to the district elections (Proposition K) he championed, Milk imagined the end of disenfranchisement and discrimination, better quality of life, and resurgence of democracy for all.
