An Archive of Hope. Harvey Milk
as “Orange Tuesday.” Gay rights operatives from both coasts took their stand on the battleground of Miami. But their rational arguments proved to be no match for commercials featuring provocative images from the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade, and the refrain of children in peril, accompanied occasionally by Bryant’s rousing version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (and her labeling of gay people as “human garbage”).97
Harvey Milk brilliantly rose to the challenges of this shameful episode in U.S history (though children are not taught this blight in today’s classrooms). For months prior to the vote in Dade County, Milk used “Milk Forum” as a bully pulpit to mobilize against Anita Bryant, calling for a boycott of Florida orange juice, her firing, and an indictment against her for “inciting violence against Gay people.” He chided those who did not take her seriously, who were apathetic about participating in the boycott, and he excoriated the National Gay Task Force (NGTF), which defended her right to free speech. In response, he exclaimed, “Well, what about the rights of all those people who are fire-bombed because they are Gay? What about the rights of all who are, and will be, discriminated against because they are Gay? What about the rights of all who become victims of Anita Bryant’s preaching? What about the rights of Ovidio Ramos? Where is our great NGTF when it comes to Gay people who are beaten and lose their jobs?”98 Milk linked Bryant’s hate speech to recent public discourse by Supervisor Feinstein and Assistant District Attorney Douglas Munson in San Francisco that homophobically associated the “crime wave” with public sex spaces in their effort to relocate such businesses to a dilapidated section of the city.99
On June 7, the repeal passed with nearly 70 percent of the vote. Milk had not been enlisted by the gay establishment for the fight on the ground in Florida, but unlike more “respectable” representatives he became the de facto leader of the throngs of GLBTQ and allied people in the Bay Area who reacted to the repeal. Arguably, Milk was now a national leader of the gay rights movement. As in cities around the country, thousands took to the streets of San Francisco on Orange Tuesday and every night for the better part of a week thereafter, during which Milk’s presence towered. That first night is best remembered because Milk transformed the massive demonstration that threatened to turn violent (“Out of the Bars and into the Streets!”) into a five-mile peaceable march throughout the city, culminating in a rally of 5,000 at the steps of City Hall; the front-page Chronicle photograph of Milk with his familiar bullhorn captured well the spirit and achievement of the massive demonstration and its leadership. Clendinen and Nagourney observed:
[T]he midnight march was wholly a product of the city’s new gay population, one angry and aroused, with its own neighborhood, its own distinct cultural values, its own community organizations and leaders, and its own way of reacting to events. Anita Bryant’s victory had helped bring them into focus. As a large red banner emblazoned with the words “Gay Revolution” was run up the flagpole on Union Square that night, there was a new reality in San Francisco, and it was emerging in the middle of a crucial political campaign.100
Milk quelled violence even as he wasted no time in escalating his bellicose rhetoric so as to frame Dade’s outrage as a catalyst for intensified activism. “Without the President and the national leaders taking a stand, this will be a struggle like the black civil rights or the anti-Vietnam movements. . . . There will be violence and bitterness and the nation will be seared, but if we have to do battle in the streets we are ready to.”101
As the selected 1977 documents vividly convey, Milk believed Orange Tuesday to be a watershed event, “a victory deeper than the actual vote,” a swiftly rising tide of visibility, consciousness, and mobilization. “This was our Watts, our Selma, Alabama.” In a powerful turn of affect and logic, Milk thanked Anita Bryant, for “she herself pushed the Gay Movement ahead and the subject can never be pushed back into the darkness. . . . [S]he has, in fact, started what so many of us have talked about—a true national Gay Movement.”102 And Milk did shape his public discourse on Orange Tuesday with an eye toward the coming election. In his candidacy announcement later that month, during the Gay Freedom Day celebrations, Milk asked where the city’s elected officials had been during those days of protest, where had been the “appointed gay officials,” such as his replacement on the Board of Permit Appeals and soon-to-be campaign rival, Rick Stokes. “Like every other group,” Milk averred, “we should be judged by our leaders.”
And GLBTQ leadership was needed more than ever. Anita Bryant’s homophobic discourse surely had something central to do with the rise of anti-GLBTQ violence in San Francisco as elsewhere. Although city gardener Robert Hillsborough was murdered by a young man deeply conflicted about his own sexuality, John Cordova’s chanting of “faggot” while repeatedly stabbing his victim marked it as a crime constituted if not directly caused by the same hate speech that Milk found politically galvanizing. Hillsborough’s mother said of Anita Bryant, “My son’s blood is on her hands.”103 This very same fund of hate speech provided gubernatorial hopeful and California state senator John Briggs with an expedient platform, announcing just days after Orange Tuesday his campaign to remove from the public schools “gay teachers” or anyone affirming homosexuality in the classroom. Local politicians took the opportunity to attempt repeal of the recently won district elections and to recall GLBTQ-friendly officials such as Moscone, Hongisto, and Freitas, a nail biter not resolved favorably until the mid-summer special election. Across the nation, concerted efforts began to roll back gay rights, repeal campaigns that by 1978 would prove successful in St. Paul, Wichita, and Eugene.104 Assemblyman Art Agnos decided not to pursue promised gay rights legislation within the current climate created by Bryant and the Dade repeal.105
Within this broad combustible and propulsive political context, Milk stayed true to the vision he had forged through three previous campaigns. He never wavered from his position that GLBTQ people needed an “avowed gay leader” in office, one who was not beholden to those straight liberal “allies” who retreated from their pledged support whenever the political temperature on homosexuality rose precipitously. During this campaign, Milk first called for a statewide “gay caucus” and convention that would mobilize community across political, social, and other lines to create a unified front and influential bloc designed to test the commitment of any aspirant politician—local, state, or national—on gay rights issues. In the 1977 selected documents and elsewhere, Milk again was writing about what he called “gay economic power” and the representational power of a visible “lifestyle.”106 In his speech to the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, he claimed that his motivation for running (running and running and running) was that “I remember what it was like to be 14 and gay.” Inspiring that kid from Altoona, or Des Moines, or wherever the closet needed to be opened in the now familiar refrain of the evolving Hope speech, was Milk’s sine qua non.107
Yet, even with a heightened emphasis on gay rights, Milk’s campaign vision and platform still embodied the populist, neighborhood activist fighting for all people in District 5 and across San Francisco, voicing issues that mattered to African Americans, Latinos, women, the elderly, and heterosexuals. In “Milk Forum,” he openly called for a coalition with other minorities.108 As he declared in his 1973 Address to the San Francisco Joint International Longshoremen & Warehousemen’s Union and Lafayette Club, “People are more important than buildings and neighborhoods, more important than freeways.” This was still Milk’s mantra, one that made his call to GLBTQ people that “we must learn from history that the time for riding in the back of the bus is over” broadly resonant, even in this virulently homophobic period.
Milk’s campaign, despite more favorable circumstances than in any of his previous attempts, nevertheless required a fight.109 He was once again openly opposed by prominent members of the gay establishment, including his accommodationist challenger, wealthy attorney and bathhouse entrepreneur Rick Stokes, who outspent him nearly three to one. Moreover, the threat loomed that a split gay vote in District 5 could lead to a victory for the formidable straight liberal candidate, Terence Hallinan. However, Milk had momentum in this electoral season that nearly perfectly reversed his showing in 1976. He won the endorsements of the GLBTQ press, including longtime antagonist Sentinel, as well as most of the GLBTQ Democratic clubs, and unexpectedly gained the straight press support of the liberal Bay Guardian