by Milk, Harvey
Surely this idea of opposing the “real enemy,” to use his phrase, and not one another, must have been on Milk’s mind as he picketed the film Laughing Policeman, starring Walter Matthau, for its homophobic representation of gay male villainy, a protest action organized by the Gay Activists Alliance—the impetus for this editorial.
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One hundred people seeing the same movie can come out with one hundred different views. If those one hundred people are negative people there will be one hundred negative comments on that film. If they are positive people there will be one hundred positive comments on that film. For every film ever made has good points and bad points. The negative mind will search out and find the faults. The positive mind will search out and find the good points. That makes the film neither good nor bad. It only makes the film good or bad to each viewer based upon his or her own reference towards life in general. Those who search for the bad point, the fault, the error, the mistake, will never let anything sway them from emphasizing what is wrong. The opposite is also true. People are generally either positive or negative and when we hear their comments we usually take that into consideration and automatically discount some of their comment.
Yet, when a person talks about a “leader” we somehow do not discount the frame of mind of the “viewer.” And a person/leader is a lot more apt to make mistakes than any movie . . . for no one has the chance to edit over and over his actions and speeches the way a film is edited before it is released. We somehow expect a human being to be more perfect than a film. We allow a play to have weeks of out-of-town showings before it moves to the big city, yet we hang on every word and action of our leaders and allow them no margin for human error, for correction. When a person comments upon a leader, we never say to ourselves, “That person is a negative force and will naturally find the mistakes of the leader and harp on it.” Nor do we say that the person is a positive person and will look only at the good a leader does and overlook all faults. One reason why so many people in this nation today accept Nixon as a good president is that they are people who will only search for the good that he has done and overlook all his faults.
What must be done is to look at both the good and the wrong a person does and weigh it out. For them, there are no “perfect” leaders . . . no Christs . . . no Gods leading us today. We must find for ourselves what we want and who represents us “best” and not try to find out who represents us “totally.” For in the end, the only person who fully and completely represents us is ourselves. If we expect to find one other person who is exactly like ourselves, we are in for trouble. We are in for 1984!
When we find this and that wrong with anyone who could lead us where we want to go, the final result is that we end up in the wrong place, for we drive away many potential leaders by asking them to become all things to all people. How can one person represent all views at the same time? And yet we chastise the leader for not being exactly like us. In a small community there can be a true “town hall meeting,” but in a city, a state, a nation it is impossible . . . and we seek the impossible. Maybe the church is to blame for telling us that only GOD can lead us and then putting mortals in positions of leadership.
For whatever the reasons may be, there always seems to be more infighting, bitching and rottenness among gay brothers and sisters than among our straight neighbors. Maybe the rejection of homosexuals by the straight world causes homosexuals to try to be superior to other suppressed people . . . and thus comes the rejection of homosexuals by homosexuals. The snobbery, the attitudes, the comments made by gays about other gays is not to be found in any other suppressed group. The jealousy, the enviousness that gays have for other gays is incredible. It is all negative force. It is the tearing down rather than the building up. This gay “leader” is jealous of what that gay “leader” is doing, and he in turn is bitchy toward others. Rather than for all to lead and encourage others to lead so that we all can win what we want, we spend more time and effort in fighting each other than in fighting the forces of oppression. If all that negative energy was united and turned into a positive force there would indeed be heard a cry that would lead to freedom.
The first step towards this must be at the very least a cessation of bitterness towards leaders and groups that have differences from each other. Picture every straight club, church, society and organization spending most of their time fighting and bitching [at] each other. There is indeed always room for different views . . . different thoughts . . . different opinions. No one person, no one group, is wrong. The idea is for all to be able to express their own views . . . to do what they feel must be done . . . for there is only one way to go, and that is to gain freedom. Any energy spent looking for the negative in another person or group is energy wasted from gaining freedom for all homosexuals. It is easy to hate. It is easy to bitch. It is easy to find fault. It is hard to find the strength to love.
Leadership is needed. Joint leadership is needed. Many leaders are needed. Bitching is not needed. Jealousy is not needed. Hate is not needed. We are still a long way from freedom. Until we get freedom there is no room for self-destruction. The goal is freedom. Anyone who fights for that is needed; no matter how he fights, just as long as he fights the suppression! If he is so busy fighting other homosexuals, then HE is keeping us from attaining freedom just as much as the straight oppressor is.
A new era must take place. If joining of arms unfortunately cannot yet be achieved, then at least the stopping of self-destruction must take place. The greatest weapon, the greatest tool that our straight oppressor has to keep us oppressed is the incredible energy spent by homosexuals tearing each other apart. Some one leader, some one group must start by turning the other cheek and finding the strength of love rather than the need of hate.
10
“Letter to the City of San Francisco Hall of Justice on Police Brutality”
Public letter, February 14, 1974
Homophobic discrimination and violence by the police department, often fostered by malignant political aspirations, are as old as the history of GLBTQ San Francisco itself, recurrent and predictable as the ebb and flow of tides. It is also the case that such state-sanctioned bullying and bashing in the city spurred some of the earliest developments in GLBTQ activism and movement anywhere in the United States, from the political nascence of Jose Sarria to the founding of the League for Civil Education, Society for Individual Rights, Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and the National Transsexual Counseling Unit.
Recent years had been noticeably turbulent, owing to GLBTQ migration into Most Holy Redeemer Parish, as well as Mayor Alioto’s self-aggrandizement by means of catering to the homophobic bigotry of the Catholic Church. The year 1974 was particularly bad, with its rash of raids and trumped-up charges for public sex and drunkenness, drug possession, blocking sidewalks, and then, after the beatings, resisting arrest. The harassment crested with a bloody clash between a crowd of gay men and police (with their badges deliberately and cravenly obscured) outside Toad Hall bar during Labor Day weekend. Those who would be dubbed the “Castro 14” defied their indictments, and Milk’s public efforts at raising a defense fund and organizing outraged community response, through his Sentinel and Bay Area Reporter columns and personal conversations, forged more deeply his commitment and status as a gay and neighborhood activist. His rally cry, “I pay taxes for police to protect me, not persecute me,” amplified his now frequent call for GLBTQ Political Power. In this open letter from earlier in the year, Milk deployed the Holocaust trope—used by the previous generation of GLBTQ activists and which would become one of his own favored rhetorical frames in future fights with Anita Bryant and John Briggs—to dramatize homophobic police brutality and seek solidarity with those heterosexuals who might also become victims of licensed governmental assault.
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There are those in our community who claim that police brutality does not exist . . . that police harassment of gays does not exist . . . and I ask why? Why in the
face of facts do they maintain that posture? The answer is that they do not want to know that it exists because once they accept its existence they then have to condone or commend police brutality! And, since they want neither to come out in favor of it nor to attack the establishment, they have to become the ostrich and stick their heads into the dirt—and see no evil. That is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany in the ‘30s. The German people did not see what was happening to the Jews, for, if they admitted that it was happening, then they would have had to take sides. So, the Germans did not know for they did not want to know. Unfortunately, after Hitler eliminated the Jews, he then eliminated the gypsies, then the Catholics, and then one group after another until he had turned the entire nation into a police state where the children were turning their parents in for just talking about the establishment. It had gotten out of hand, those people who would not acknowledge police brutality against the Jews found that they themselves ended up on the list because once the cancer festered, it spread. There were not privileged people or classes. The same can happen in this nation. If police brutality against homosexuals is allowed to take place it will spread to other groups until a police state exists . . . no one will be spared. In Nazi Germany many people said that police brutality was just against the Jews who were undesirable anyway . . . in San Francisco many people say that the police brutality is only against the homosexuals who are undesirables anyway. In Germany after the Jews were beaten brutality became unchecked and group after group fell victim to its force. Once we allow the police force to release hostility against homosexuals by violence then it will soon spread to other people . . . the police state will be evolving . . . the Nixonian philosophy as expressed by the corrupt former Attorney General Mitchell will take hold. We must learn from history . . . the Germans who hated Jews and allowed the Jews to be beaten should have fought for Jewish freedom. For in fighting for the Jews they would have in reality been fighting for their own freedom! When they did not, they gave up their own freedom! The people of San Francisco who hate homosexuals must fight with the homosexual against police brutality. If they do not they are allowing their own freedom to be encroached upon and they will in turn one day find that they too are becoming victims of the police state. But, it will be too late, for there will be no one to help them. As long as we are able to fight now, we must all band together to fight for common freedom before the police silences us one group at a time. It is not a case of police brutality against homosexuals—it is a case of police brutality! It was not just a case of Hitler against the Jews—it was a case of Hitler against humanity. There is no way that the straight can say there is no police brutality just because they do not want to become involved. They must read history books on Nazi Germany. It is a fight against the festering disease that encompasses all people, whether they wish to be involved or not.
11
“Where I Stand”
Article draft, Sentinel, March 28, 1974
To be a maverick is, in political terms, to be ungovernable, demonstrably independent in perspective and platform, beholden only to one’s own principles, and rhetorically unfettered. Although with eventual success four years on (some have argued throughout his campaigns), Milk, like all elected politicians, would become constrained by the very system he hoped to transform, during his political ascendancy, always a struggle, Milk unabashedly and unapologetically embodied the maverick. Of course this had earned him the political ambivalence if not enmity of groups as diverse as the moderate Alice B. Toklas Memorial Gay Democratic Club and the radical Leftist organization, Bay Area Gay Liberation, not to mention the rest of the Democratic Party, prefiguring the larger-scale showdown in his 1976 bid for the California Assembly, which he advertised as “Milk vs. The Machine.” Such a political and rhetorical modality, as Milk articulates in this editorial, allows for seeming contradictions, standing on the Right and the Left, depending on the issue, guided not by party lines but rather abiding the line by line of trusted political philosophy and founding documents. One might, for instance, cite a papal denunciation such as Defensor Pacis while endorsing for State Assembly an activist Catholic priest who had welcomed the Black Panthers into Sacred Heart church in the Mission District and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez, while also publicly criticizing the Catholic Chavez for his homophobia. Milk’s sensitivity here to the freedom of speech, to the limits of representation and the pitfalls of ideological certitude, bespeaks the virtues of independence that makes a maverick at once so alluring and appalling, political boon and bane.
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An explanation is needed . . . “Waves from the Left” . . . “On the Right Side.” What do they mean? Far Right? Far Left? Left of Center? etc., etc. To the dictator, American conservatism is from the Left, and, likewise, to the pure Communist, American socialism is from the Right! The people who feel that only they can represent the Left or the Right are the same types who are for freedom of speech as long as it is speech that they agree with. Witness what took place at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting . . . when one supervisor, who is well known for his “views from the Right” verbally pinned a “liberal” spokesman up against the wall for a letter written and signed several years ago, the “liberals” in the back of the chambers hooted and yelled and exercised a lesson in childish or revolutionary behavior. All regards for equality in freedom of speech went out the window. After all, they lost some points in the argument and thus, rather than resort to intelligent answers, took up the “drown ’em out” philosophy . . . Yet these same liberals who would not allow freedom of speech are the first to complain about unrepresentative government. To this group, anyone who does not see eye to eye with them is from the Right. They probably would rather not win than to give in and work through the government. They sometimes appear to want to be on the losing side, so they can be martyrs. Thus, if winning seems possible, they will even come up with the expression . . . “we are not ready for victory. What happens if we win?” Unbelievable as that may be, that was not the stand taken. There are some people who would rather be for a losing cause, for winning does not satisfy their needs. I do not belong to that school of thought. That’s why to many of those people I am not from the “Left.” Extreme Left I am not, I am from the Left as was Truman and Stevenson. I believe in many of the same things that those on the extreme Left believe in. Our methods of gaining them differ. I believe in many things those on the Right believe in. Our methods of gaining them differ.
Those who claim to speak from the true Left or the true Right are usually people who are not committed to wanting to win. For the only way any extreme group has ever won is by revolution and I’m not ready for that yet . . . try as hard as Nixon does to make me lean that way. There have been very few revolutions that were successful and most of them were in an age long gone. For those who represent the extreme Left and Right, I suggest that they read MARSILIUS OF PADDUA—The Defender of Peace. He lived in the early 14th Century.
I cannot regard myself as from the extreme Left. I stand with the conservative in this nation who is for freedom of individual! The true conservative—politically, not morally—is for the end of victimless crime laws. I stand in agreement with that. Where does the extreme Left stand on that principle?
The “liberal” that I run into so often wants the government to do everything. I disagree. I think that the government does too much. The government started a war in Viet Nam. The government spends millions of dollars in the war against dope. The government spends millions of dollars to put homosexuals in jail for sex crimes. The government runs computer checks on its citizens. I have had enough governmental control in many areas. If that makes me not so far from the Left, well, so be it. Let those on the Left stand up for big daddy doing it all. When you allow the government to get too powerful there are always encroachments. I think that the government should spend more time caring about hospitals, schools and homes and less time caring about the books we read, the movies we go to, the things we put into o
ur own bodies and the acts of sex we may commit. I think the government has long lost its way from being what a government should be . . . I think that everyone in government from those on the Left to those on the Right, and especially those in elite office should reread the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Then read the papers that went into the arguments on the Constitution. Next they should skip to today and see what they believe in. If that happened, then we would not find “liberals” shouting down Supervisors and, more importantly, we would not find Supervisors being in the position of causing themselves to be shouted down. I think our government is deficient . . . I think that almost all our “leaders” are deficient. I think that we need people in our government and not politicians, and certainly, we don’t need people in office who so quickly resort to name calling and who are only willing to accept their own personal views allowing no others. How can any one person “represent” all people? Looking for that, we arrive at 1984. There are people from the Left and people from the Right living in each and every city and state. There is no way that only one person could represent both views on all issues. To demand only your view is wrong. To remember what government is about is primary. To lead is needed. We will never be able to achieve what we indeed can achieve if we insist on only “our way.”
So where do I stand? I stand about as far Left or as far Right as you see me, depending upon where you are standing. I stand with Stevenson and Truman on many issues. I stand with the spirit of revolution that took place about two hundred years ago. I stand disgusted with most of our political “leaders” . . . the Nixons, the Reagans, the Aliotos, the Forans. That is why I turn to people like Father Boyle. I stand for a government which regards the human being as more important than a highway, which regards a hospital as more important than a bomb. Maybe I’m on the Left. Maybe I’m on the Right. Read Marsilius. Read the Constitution. But no matter where you think I stand . . . I stand for winning and that is an important difference between an extremist and myself. The blacks won the right to ride anywhere on the buses in Birmingham for the wrong reasons . . . but they won!
