Harvey Milk's Mixed Legacy

An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings, edited
by Jason Edward Black and Charles E. Morris III, University of
California Press, 280 pages, $34.95.

The gay liberation movement burst into the country’s
consciousness in 1969, when thousands of gays in Manhattan rioted
against endemic police harassment following a raid on a gay bar
called the Stonewall Inn. Gays and lesbians began coming out of the
closet in droves, and the city of choice for thousands of them was
San Francisco, home to a large gay subculture since the end of
World War II.

In spite of their large numbers, San Francisco’s gay population
found the city’s conservative Catholic mayor, Joseph Alioto, less
than hospitable, and the police force was constantly on the attack.
By the early ’70s, the city’s gay community was ready to claim its
full legal and political rights alongside other previously
disenfranchised minorities.

In 1973, a Jewish businessman and investment banker from
Manhattan named Harvey Milk thrust himself into this increasingly
volatile mix. His activism eventually led him to be called the
Mayor of Castro Street, the Castro being the mostly gay section of
the city. In 1977, he became the first openly gay person elected to
public office in the country when he won a seat on the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors. He fell to an assassin’s bullet
after serving less than a year in office.

An Archive of Hope is an anthology collecting many of
Milk’s speeches, newspaper columns, and campaign flyers from his
relatively short political career, beginning with his first race
for city supervisor in 1973, when he was opposed by most of the gay
establishment and lost badly, and ending with several pieces
written shortly before his murder on November 27, 1978. Although
the book’s editors, Jason Edward Black and Charles E. Morris III,
frequently lapse into politically correct prose, their introduction
and explanatory text accompanying each piece provide a useful and
interesting history of the political and sexual culture of San
Francisco in the 1970s, though the vocal presence of the city’s
Libertarian Party and its intersection with the gay rights movement
is ignored.

His earliest political beliefs were those of a Goldwater
Republican, but Milk the politician came out of a fairly typical
progressive mold. While gay rights was his signature issue, he
staked out a variety of left-liberal positions—pro-union,
anti-corporation, pro–civil rights, anti–police brutality—that
often put him at odds with the gay political establishment, which
was relatively conservative at the time. Labeled as “gradualist”
and “accomodationist” by the book’s editors, most gay leaders of
the day were content to rely on their straight allies in the
Democratic Party establishment to advance their agenda rather than
turn to a brash, openly gay candidate many considered a
carpetbagger.

Milk took every opportunity to differentiate himself from most
in the city’s gay establishment, at one point telling the New
York Times: “I’m a left-winger, a street person….Most gays
are politically conservative, you know, banks, insurance,
bureaucrats. So their checkbooks are out of the closet, but they’re
not…all the gay money is still supporting Republicans except on
this gayness thing.” His less than engaging attitude toward those
who disagreed with him no doubt played a part in his early
political defeats. But when the city switched from citywide
representation to district elections in 1977, Milk finally won a
seat, primarily because he won a majority of the gay vote. (He
attracted only 30 percent of the total vote, but in a field of 14
candidates that was enough to win.) He served fewer than 11 months
before former supervisor Dan White shot him and Mayor George
Moscone.

Unfortunately, Milk’s sometimes strident and divisive rhetoric
against other gay leaders is still with us today, along with many
of the same political divisions in the gay community. Milk used to
deride his gay opponents as “Aunt Marys,” comparing them to the
Uncle Toms in the black community. Rep. Barney Frank, the
just-retired gay congressman from Massachusetts, for example,
repeatedly derided the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican
group, as gay Uncle Toms for supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential
campaign. In fact, a quarter to a third of gay voters routinely
vote Republican, a fact that would no doubt rankle Milk if he were
alive today.

Perhaps because of their political biases, the editors of
Archive of Hope don’t get everything right. They discuss
at some length Proposition 6 (the so-called Briggs Initiative), a
1978 California ballot measure promoted by an anti-gay right-wing
state senator named John Briggs that would have prohibited any gay
person from teaching in the state’s public schools. As Briggs
argued, “If you let one homosexual teacher stay, soon there’ll be
two, then four, then 8, then 25—and before long, the entire school
will be taught by homosexuals.”

Harvey Milk, by this time a city supervisor, understandably
spent many days campaigning against Prop. 6, debating with Sen.
Briggs and exhorting the gay community to become more active in
campaigning against it. The editors credit Milk with its defeat: It
began with a big lead but lost on election day by a whopping margin
of 58 to 42 percent. Yet far more effective in turning conservative
and middle-of-the-road voters against the proposal was
then-governor Ronald Reagan, who publicly denounced the measure.
The anti-Briggs campaign coalition even produced a flyer
highlighting Reagan’s opposition to the measure, which was
certainly more effective with mainstream voters than anything
Harvey Milk could have said.

Still, Milk rightfully shares some of the credit for the
Proposition 6′s defeat, which was widely considered the greatest
victory to date for the American gay rights movement. His efforts
certainly boosted Milk’s reputation.

One can only speculate about whether Milk, had he lived, would
have widened his base of support and gone on to higher office. In
1999, more than 20 years after his death, Time magazine
named him as one of the 100 most influential figures of the 20th
century. Not a bad legacy for a political career that spanned
barely five years.

2013-03-02 11:15:12

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/02/harvey-milks-mixed-legacy