Milk For Supervisor

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Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, the three of us and Ed Ayers are all historians, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh: Let’s start today in a camera shop. It’s 1973 in San Francisco, and an elementary school teacher walks into a store called Castro Camera. They have a simple request.

Lillian F.: She wanted to rent a projector so she could show her kids some slides.

Brian Balogh: That’s LGBTQ historian Lillian Faderman, she says the teacher spoke to a man behind the counter at Castro Camera. That person happened to be a guy named Harvey Milk. And well, Milk wasn’t too thrilled with the teacher’s order.

Lillian F.: And Harvey said, “You mean to tell me that your school doesn’t have a projector?” And the teacher said, “Well, they do have a projector but there are just a couple of projectors and so many teachers want to use those projectors that you have to put your name on a list to reserve them a month in advance.”

Brian Balogh: Today Harvey Milk is remembered as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. His legacy as a gay rights activist and politician helped open the door for future generations of LGBTQ people. For example, next year there’ll be at least 10 LGBTQ members of congress. That record number is in part, due to Harvey Milk’s work in San Francisco 40 years ago. But before he ran for the San Francisco board of supervisors and became a national icon, Harvey Milk ran Castro Camera with his partner Scott Smith. And Faderman says this moment when the school teacher came in asking for a projector, this was one of the things that first motivated Milk to get into politics.

Lillian F.: And Harvey thought that that was just disgraceful that the city could not afford enough projectors for elementary school kids but they could afford to hire policemen to harass gay men on the street of San Francisco or entrap gay men in the bars of San Francisco. And I think those things made him decide that it was time for him to run for political office, that he could do things differently, that he could make sure that San Francisco’s budget went to the right things instead of hiring police to harass the gay community. He would fight for getting rid of corruption in governments so that things such as Watergate on a local scale couldn’t happen.

Nathan Connolly: So Watergate pushed Milk to dive into politics too then?

Brian Balogh: Oh yeah, this is San Francisco in the early 1970s, so Watergate was still on everybody’s mind, specially Harvey Milk’s.

Lillian F.: They lived upstairs from Castro Camera in an apartment that was upstairs. Every morning Harvey would take their little black and white television downstairs into Castro Camera and instead of waiting on the customers, he would put the television on one chair, he would sit on another chair and all day long he would watch the Watergate hearings and he would swear at the television sets over and over again, and Scott Smith said that customers would come in and they would see this guys with long hair and dark circles under his eyes swearing at the television set, they would run off.

Brian Balogh: So in 1973 Harvey Milk said enough is enough, and he decided to run for office, but he was still pretty new in town so things were anything but easy.

Lillian F.: There was a gay democratic club in San Francisco called the The Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, he went to the head of the club, a man by the name of Jim Foster and said, “I’m running for the board of supervisors and I hope your club will support me.” And Jim Foster took one look at this guy that he’d never seen before with a New York accent and looking like a hippie, he had long hair and a big mustache and Jim Foster told Harvey Milk, “You know, in the democratic party we have a saying, ‘You don’t get to dance unless you put up the chairs.’ I’ve never seen you putting up the chairs.” And so he informed him that the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club would not be supporting him. But Harvey Milk took Jim Foster’s advice very seriously and he began to put up the chairs. So he lost the 1973 election but he made himself very well known in the gay community for the two years that followed.

Brian Balogh: He became known as the mayor of Castro Street, right?

Lillian F.: He did, yes.

Brian Balogh: So how did he earn that name?

Lillian F.: Well, in a number of ways. He wrote for the gay papers in San Francisco, he really put himself in the forefront in defending gay people against the police. Castro Camera also became a meeting place for the gay community as he used to tell his partner Scott Smith, he often put on his shrink robes because people came to Castro Camera to ask his advice, or to talk about their problems and Harvey Milk happily advised them about how to proceed with their life and how to function as a gay person in a homophobic society.

Joanne Freeman: Well it definitely sounds like milk’s activism and popularity in the city was on the rise by the mid ’70s. But how did he do in the voting booth?

Brian Balogh: Well, he ran again for supervisor in 1975 and he lost again, but he did better this time thanks in part from support from labor unions. So Harvey Milk pressed on, and finally in 1977 he made history.

Brian Balogh: “Harvey Milk says his election as a San Francisco supervisor Tuesday was a victory for all US homosexuals. Milk captured 30.5 percent of the vote in the fifth district, to become the first known homosexual office holder in San Francisco. ‘The victory will give hope to minorities, hope to the disenfranchised and to people who always felt the government didn’t work.’ Said Milk. ‘They feel if a gay can do it, they can do it. Gays and youth all over the nation will be watching me as a potential role figure.’ Milk said, ‘And I’ll be it.'” The Times, San Mateo California, 1977.

Brian Balogh: But Milk’s life tragically ended less than a year after he took office. On November 27th 1978, former police officer and city supervisor Dan White shot and killed Harvey Milk and the city’s mayor, George Moscone. Last month marked 40 years since the assassination.

Lillian F.: He had only served for 11 months and during those 11 months he did remarkable things but that in itself wouldn’t have been enough to memorialize him, I think. Many of his ideas are things that we take for granted today, but in his days they were absolutely unique. Ideas such as everyone had to come out, that we couldn’t become first class citizens if we fought for our rights from the closet, and Harvey was right. I think that the community has made the progress that it’s made in recent years in good part because so many of us are now out and the rest of America has to realize that we’re your children, we’re your brothers and sisters.

Harvey Milk: But mostly importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in. And once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do you will feel so much better.