by Milk, Harvey
The stakes of the film deepened and widened because of the timing of its release in late fall of 2008, on the eve of the historic Obama election and amid the clamor of battle over Proposition 8 (“California Marriage Protection Act”), the ballot initiative and constitutional amendment that would by definition exclude same-sex marriage in California. Numerous articles marked parallels between the Prop 8 fight and Harvey Milk’s successful campaign against Proposition 6. Proposition 6 failed, perhaps Milk’s greatest political achievement; Proposition 8 passed, for many a devastating reversal of short-lived marriage equality. Despite the wrenching disappointment, many believed that Milk re-politicized GLBTQ peoples, reignited the movement. “We need Harvey Milk now,” someone told USA Today, “This movie reminds us what it’s like to fight for our rights, something I think many of us have forgotten how to do.” Echoing the Advocate, which dramatically announced “the Resurrection of Harvey Milk,” people wondered aloud, “What would Harvey do?” and “What if Milk had lived?” Such questions and the discourses that inspired them revealed a robust public memory of Milk.132
In the few years since the film, Milk’s legacy has remained amplified, as an inspiration for the 2009 Equality March on Washington; in panels sponsored by the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society and featured in its new museum space; in the public performances of Cleve Jones and Dustin Lance Black; in Danny Nicoletta’s photographic exhibitions; in the philanthropic efforts of nephew Stuart Milk and his Harvey Milk Foundation; in the 2009 posthumous awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; in California’s 2010 passage and subsequent annual celebrations of Harvey Milk Day; in public debate about how the space at 575 Castro should be embodied and utilized; in the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force petition to the United States Postal Service to create a Harvey Milk postage stamp; in Congressman Bob Filner’s 2012 proposal that a naval ship be named the USS Harvey Milk in recognition of Milk’s service and the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Our hope with this volume and beyond it is that Harvey Milk will resonate for generations of GLBTQ people fighting for their rights and protections and an end to homophobia and heterosupremacy, and for those engaged in queer world making.
At the same time that we believe An Archive of Hope reflects and extends this resurgence of Milk memory, we also feel strongly that it would be wise to consider this moment fleeting, to fret over the prospects of losing Milk once more. We note that Milk memory faded in the decades between his assassination and Milk, despite the critical acclaim for The Times of Harvey Milk (the Advocate review in February 1985: “Harvey Milk’ Dilemma: Critical Raves, But Apathetic Audiences”), despite his being named one of the 100 most influential figures of the twentieth century by Time in 1999, despite the opening in New York City of the Harvey Milk School in 2003.133 Writing on the 20th anniversary of Milk’s assassination in 1998, John Cloud’s lament accounts for memory’s faltering:
[M] any gays don’t know who he is. “The memory in this community doesn’t last more than a few years,” [gay historian John] D’Emilio says. Elaine Herscher, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who has covered gay politics off and on for two decades, agrees: “The people under 45, even in the Castro, really don’t know him.” San Francisco officials have done their best to change this; every few years they rename a building or two for Milk (including, most recently, an elementary school that became the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy). When two men trying to build a Milk memorial in Washington, D.C., held a ceremony there to honor him last year, fewer than a dozen people turned out. It’s too bad Harvey Milk is being forgotten.134
We have been haunted throughout our research by an editorial Milk protégé and AIDS Quilt founder Cleve Jones published in the Bay Area Reporter in November 2005 in support of the Harvey Milk Memorial Committee. Jones recounted that he and a friend, while having a drink at Edge in the Castro, struck up a conversation with a young gay man who responded to their reminiscing with the question, “Who was Harvey Milk?” More alarming, once having been told Milk’s story, a story that had helped make possible three gay men having such a conversation in a gay neighborhood in the United States, this twenty-something could not grasp the legacy, comparing without irony Milk’s impact to that of pop singing star Avril Lavigne.135 Twenty years earlier, Frances FitzGerald, surveying a decade’s worth of Milk commemoration, concluded:
The Castro mourned Harvey Milk, and yet it could not seem to make him into a living legend—that is, into a legend that would nourish and sustain it. The Castro saw him as a martyr but understood his martyrdom as an end rather than a beginning. He had died, and with him a great deal of the Castro’s optimism, idealism, and ambition seemed to die as well. The Castro could find no one to take his place in its affections, and possibly it wanted no one.136
Jones would likely take issue with FitzGerald, as he did with his new acquaintance in the Castro. His point, which we emphasize, is that GLBTQ history and memory are fragile, rarely taught, and subject to trivialization even by those within GLBTQ communities. We believe the antidote to such presentism and erasure is to engage in an ongoing effort to circulate queer pasts and conjure their presence wherever possible, in classrooms and community meetings, at pride celebrations and fundraising events, and, yes, even in those gay social spaces where “history lessons” might be, well, out of the ordinary. What George Chauncey observed in the context of gay male subculture in the early twentieth century remains vital and necessary for diverse GLBTQ communities today: “[W]e need to invent—and constantly reinvent—a tradition on the basis of innumerable individual and idiosyncratic readings of [queer] texts. . . . embed its transmission in the day-to-day social organization of [our] world. . . . passed on in bars and at cocktail parties, from friend to friend, from lover to lover, from older . . . serving as mentors to younger . . . just beginning to identify themselves as gay.”137 The stories we tell about GLBTQ pasts provide resources, inspiration, and challenge in present struggles—from historic battles over gay marriage and preventing suicides by bullied queer youth, to endemic racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and ageism—and shape the queer futures we imagine and chart.
Toward that end, in December 2010, California state senator Mark Leno introduced SB48, the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, legislation that would revise the existing Education Code so as to include GLBTQ people among those other racially and culturally diverse groups already protected against “adverse portrayals” in the state curriculum; moreover, it would require adoption of educational materials that would accurately portray the role and contribution of GLBTQ people in society.138 On April 4, 2011, more than seventy GLBTQ and ally high school students rallied on the Capitol steps in Sacramento and lobbied on behalf of FAIR as part of the annual Queer Youth Advocacy Day; a day later, on April 5, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed SB48 by a 3–2 vote. On April 14, it passed the State Senate, 23–14; and it passed the Assembly, 49–25 on July 5. Governor Brown signed FAIR into law on July 14, 2011; tellingly, the jubilant announcement of FAIR becoming law on the popular GLBTQ blog towleroad.com was accompanied by the well-known photograph of Harvey Milk in the Gay Freedom Day parade, 1978.139 With this legislation signed into law, California’s position as the largest purchaser of textbooks in the United States could greatly influence what the nation’s students are taught, a potentially powerful counter to the social science curriculum as it will be shaped by the second largest textbook purchaser, namely Texas.140 However, as of this writing, multiple anti-gay grassroots efforts have been underway to seek repeal of FAIR. Further hindering the enactment of FAIR, although the law went into effect in January 2012, most school districts may find a loophole created by state budget cuts. Textbook revisions have been deferred until at least 2015.141
Leno justified the bill in part by arguing that a GLBTQ affirmative curriculum may function to reduce homophobic vernacular, bullying, and bashing. Arguably, this vision has been legitimated by the case of Stoke Newington School in north Lond
on, which claimed in 2010 to have all but eradicated bullying by introducing in its classrooms Alan Turing, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, and other prominent GLBTQ figures.142 Put differently, had California Governor Schwarzenegger not vetoed legislation in 2006 prohibiting negative characterizations of homosexuality in textbooks, he would have had less cause to sign legislation in 2007 seeking to protect vulnerable GLBTQ youth from homophobic violence, such as fifteen-year-old Lawrence King, who was shot in the back of the head in early 2008, by a classmate, for being gay and gender nonconforming.143 Dustin Lance Black captured this promise in his 2009 Academy Award acceptance speech:
When I was 13 years old . . . I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to one day live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married. . . . If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches or by the government or by their families that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.144
As a heartening case in Milk memory’s imagined application writ large, the private all-boys Town School in San Francisco took its second grade seven- and eight-year-old students on a field trip to the Castro in the spring of 2011 as part of its annual Day of Service, designed “to give our boys perspective on how they can make a small yet meaningful impact on their community.” This “neighborhood study,” as it was called, “focused on history, social and civil rights, the importance of diversity, and Harvey Milk,” including a tour and lessons by a local historical guide at sites such as Pink Triangle Memorial Park, the Hope for the World Cure Mural, the Human Rights Campaign Action Center, Harvey Milk’s camera shop, and “the Harvey Milk Elementary School, which is adorned with wonderful murals depicting Harvey Milk’s commitment to diversity. While at the school, the guide shared Harvey Milk’s analogy, likening a better world to a sandbox where all children play together harmoniously.”145 In response to a surprisingly few protests by parents and others, headmaster Brewster Ely, who called the endeavor “a wonderful success,” wrote in a public letter:
At Town we have long taught that it is important to be open minded about difference, and we are pleased that we have boys at school who have gay parents. A few families who felt uncomfortable with the Castro trip chose to keep their sons home, and we recognize their decision to do so. One anonymous parent felt compelled to contact the local CBS News desk and register her unhappiness about the trip through the media. On Friday, CBS ran a story in which I was quoted as saying, “The school and the administration see the Castro as a respected community in San Francisco, and we want our students to develop an appreciation for whoever lives in our community.” In an unexpected way, this coverage provided the school and its leadership with a public forum to share the value we see in diversity and in fostering in our boys a respect for and understanding of difference.146
The embodied and mediated engagements of this field trip and its subsequent public discourse—experience, provocation, education, critique, activism, at an early age and cross-generationally—comprise the promises of Milk or any other GLBTQ memories.
The benefits of Milk and other memory work taught, exhibited, and performed in U.S. classrooms, in the immediate present and near future, come from enacting Stuart Biegel’s advice: “Even just mentioning LGBTs and acknowledging their existence, currently and throughout history, is an important step. Even if nothing else is done, such an act will be a significant contribution.”147 Such appears to be the case with The Milk Effect (2012), fifteen-year-old Max Geschwind’s ten-minute film in which he interviewed West Hollywood’s five City Council members, as well as the four candidates in the state’s 50th Assembly District race, on the impact of Milk’s legacy. The Milk Effect concludes by having “his fellow Fairfax High students recite one of Milk’s most famous speeches, creating a poignant reminder of how future generations are affected by the past.” Prior to seeing Milk, Geschwind had never heard of Harvey Milk, but inspired by the film and his work on West Hollywood’s planning committee for Harvey Milk Day, he decided to make his own commemoration. In turn, Geschwind inspired his own classmates, who did not know what Milk had achieved.148
Longer term, as Kevin Kumashiro has theorized it, such “disruptive knowledge” functions more broadly as a queer world-making initiative called “antioppressive education.”149 Perhaps in the span of time it takes these Town School boys and their generation to grow into adulthood, more systemic transformation can be imagined, as expressed in the headmaster’s closing words: “It is my hope that these events ultimately engender an even greater appreciation for diversity and a respect for all people. I close with a statement from our Town School philosophy: Town values being a diverse community that nurtures integrity, sensitivity and respect in its boys, and prepares them to become productive and contributing members of an ever-changing world.”150
For all of these reasons, we emphasize that when Harvey talked, he was hard to forget, and his memory matters more now than ever. As ongoing instigation and inspiration, we recall sociologist Stephen O. Murray’s refutation of the theory he had read in the influential volume Habits of the Heart, which argued that GLBTQ people, collectively speaking, should not be understood as a community. A “real community,” according to Bellah and his colleagues, “does not forget its past.” Rather it circulates “stories of collective history and exemplary individuals,” as well as “painful stories of shared suffering.” They concluded, “Where history and hope are forgotten and community means only the gathering of the similar, community degenerates into lifestyle enclaves.” Murray admirably invoked history courses and bookstores, the AIDS Quilt, oral history projects, and the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Historical Society (Milk, too, appears in his apologia) to demonstrate GLBTQ “community-generated public remembrance.”151 In this age of neoliberalism, in which the private rewards of marriage and adoption may take us as GLBTQ people deeper into our homonormative domiciles rather than more expansively into community and coalition building, we believe the gains of public remembrance must be constantly fostered and reestablished, and that we might usefully allow Bellah and his colleagues’ ungenerous characterization to haunt us. An Archive of Hope, like Harvey Milk, must always be restless, reaching, establishing grounds of presently unknown possibilities of queerness yet to be.152
By way of closing, we are also reminded of what Horacio Ramírez described, in recounting legendary San Francisco performer Teresita la Campesina and queer Latino communal memory, as the vexing but vital work of “talking history” or developing the “talking archive”: “the process of narrating the lives of those who passed on and the meanings the archives communicate back to those committed to listening.”153 For the sake of the future of GLBTQ pasts, which is to say the future of us all, we aim to keep Harvey talking, and we hope generations will earnestly engage in the work of queer listening.
NOTES
1. Strange de Jim, San Francisco’s Castro (San Francisco: Arcadia Books, 2003), 73.
2. Although the terms gay and lesbian would be historically more accurate in keeping with the vernacular of Milk’s era, we risk the anachronism “GLBTQ” throughout this essay because, although it, too, has many limitations (gender and sexually non-normative people have always exceeded the language that describes, constitutes, enables, and constrains them), we believe it meaningfully gestures toward the great diversity among individuals, enclaves, and communities existing at that time in San Francisco. That said, in certain instances we use the word gay specifically, such as in the case of “gay establishment,” because of its historical accuracy in depicting gay male dominance in a particular social or political sphere or mode, or the phrase “gay rights,” wh
ich functions as exclusionary synechdoche but also circulated as an nearly universal designation of the movement during the 1970s. Any slippage in nomenclature, which we have found vexingly easy to commit, is our own error, and we are comfortable with the frictions inherent in our effort to queerly cross time through available language. Coincidentally, a 1977 three-part series in the Bay Area Reporter explored the genealogy of the term gay, revealing its emergence as an idiom and its sexual politics. The articles did not discuss gay as an exclusive term representing a diverse population of gender and sexual non-normativity. Jack Warner, “’Gay’—Our Word, Their Word? Why Call Them Gay?” Parts I, II, and III, Bay Area Reporter, March 3, 1977, 7; March 31, 1977, 30; and April 4, 1977, 12.
3. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 407.
4. Frank M. Robinson, “Harvey’s History—And Ours,” The Harvey Milk Archives Newsletter 1 (January 1983), 4, Harvey Milk Archives—Scott Smith Collection (GLC 35), San Francisco Public Library.
