An Archive of Hope. Harvey Milk
their energies and promises into a unique activist vision that would help define the rest of decade, locally and nationally, as an epoch in GLBTQ history. Of course, Milk did not commence his political career as the leader he would become. He began it quite sparsely and unremarkably in the spring of 1973 in his newly opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street. The always threadbare business, which kept Milk in the financial straits to which he had not been accustomed during his earlier life, seems destined to the storied political front and headquarters it became. The real work of Castro Camera and its regulars focused not on rolls of film but on people, their freedoms, struggles, and neighborhoods in San Francisco.
Although Milk’s deeper political inclinations may be attributable, by his own accounting, to the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and his 1947 arrest as a teenager in Central Park for “indecent exposure,” Milk often identified three moral shocks46 in 1973 as effecting his awakening and sparking his first campaign for Board of Supervisors, the eleven-member body representing San Francisco’s consolidated city-county government. First, shortly after Castro Camera opened, Milk had a heated altercation with a local bureaucrat who demanded a $100 deposit against sales tax in order for the business to operate, which seemed to him an outrageous violation of free enterprise and symptom of class inequity. Second, Milk blanched at the disparity between haves and have-nots in this “developing” city, disparity which appeared proximately in the form of a young teacher from a resource-strapped school asking if she could borrow a slide projector to teach her lessons. Finally, Milk had a visceral response to Attorney General John Mitchell’s mendacious and evasive testimony during the Watergate Hearings, which he watched animatedly on a portable TV in the shop. Shortly thereafter, standing on a crate inscribed with the word “soap,” Milk launched his first candidacy.47
A more auspicious political debut, short of winning, is hard to imagine. Perhaps especially so given the long odds Harvey Milk faced as an unknown newcomer, both to the city and to politics, with the wrong look and surprisingly fierce opposition. For starters, there was that ponytail few could ignore, the signature symbol of his troubling hippie persona. Milk was also openly and unabashedly gay, which, needless to say, for an at-large candidate in a citywide election battling five incumbents, made for a political liability.48 We should recall and underscore how few GLBTQ candidates preceded Milk on any ballot in the United States, so few in fact, and with decidedly less candor and bravado, that it is not surprising (mythmaking notwithstanding) that he is often mistakenly celebrated as the first.
What may come as a surprise, however, is that Milk’s gay problem mostly concerned GLBTQ people themselves, or as Brett Callis observes, “His candidacy was itself a major issue for gays in 1973.”49 There was much passionate dispute in the GLBTQ press, social spaces, and political meetings, about how GLBTQ politics should proceed into or against the mainstream. Should the approach be accommodationist or radical? Should GLBTQ people enter politics to gain power or rely on the stewardship and largesse of straight allies? Should candidates make sexuality their defining marker, or should their ideology and platform take primacy over the fact that they happen to be gay? What might public engagement mean in relation to a politics of respectability? Should candidates be single-issue focused on gay rights or be committed to a broad set of issues?
From the beginning of his campaign, Milk was adversely targeted by the gay political establishment—the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and the Toklas Club—whose key players and gatekeepers, by and large, had their own scars and believed in an accommodationist and gradualist approach to gay rights, gained through loyal support of elected straight liberal allies, what Milk derisively would later call the “gay groupie syndrome.”50 Michael Wong, a young, heterosexual, Chinese American who, in launching his own political career, courted counsel and support of prominent members of the Toklas Club, captured well in his diary this attempted fratricide by powerful members of the gay establishment:
Gary Miller told me that Harvey Milk was “dangerous and uncontrollable.” Duke Smith said that Harvey Milk was “high on something.” Rick Stokes told me that Milk “had no support in [the] Gay Community . . . he’s running all on his own.” Jo Daly told me, “Maybe if we just ignore him, he’ll go away.” Jim Foster said that “it would be disastrous for the gay community if Harvey Milk ever received credibility.” I couldn’t have agreed with them more.51
Heeding such advice, Wong helped to block endorsements for Milk with San Francisco Young Democrats and San Francisco Tomorrow. Foster in particular, perhaps the most visible and influential gay establishment politician in San Francisco, openly opposed Milk until the bitter end, even after Milk had won over the Bay Area Reporter, SIR leader and Vector editor William Beardemphl, other publications, and a critical mass of GLBTQ voters.52
The intensity of the vitriol by Milk’s political enemies within the GLBTQ community suggests that they saw in him something more than an upstart of questionable motives and dubious emotional stability. Wong wrote privately what insiders would not admit: “No candidate came close to his dynamic delivery. . . . He stole the show. . . . [Everywhere he spoke, people were drawn to him. He was not slick and people related to him. He was causing the Toklas Club great concerns.”53 Moreover, Shilts astutely observed, “The disparity between Milk’s image and his reality stemmed from the essential act with which he defined himself—rebellion. The campaign biography that emerged from his early media interviews reads like the blueprint for a maverick.”54
And a queer, barnstorming, populist maverick he was. Milk’s broad platform focused on a wide range of issues that prioritized San Francisco residents over the city’s corporate and Chamber of Commerce interests. As the selected documents from 1973 reveal, Milk envisioned San Francisco as a city that would take its place among other great metropolises not for its bankbook or universities but for its populace, “a city that breathes, one that is alive and where the people are more important than the highways.” Instead of downtown development and growth of the tourism industry, for Milk San Francisco’s future depended on reducing wasteful and unfair governmental spending and taxation, promoting childcare centers and dental care for the elderly, eliminating poverty and addressing the unemployment rate by teaching skills and providing economic opportunities. Instead of fringe benefits for MUNI (San Francisco Municipal Railway) drivers, Milk advocated better service for MUNI riders, which would be achieved in part by mandating that city officials ride MUNI to work, and preventing congestion by reducing downtown parking garages. Instead of police harassment and arrests for marijuana possession, prostitution, and gay public sex, what he called “legislating morality” against “victimless crimes,” Milk demanded improved police protection against rape, murder, and mugging, which would be achieved if policemen actually lived in the city they patrolled, and patrolled in greater numbers. As he argued in his September 1973 address to the Joint International Longshoremen & Warehousemen’s Union and Lafayette Club, “It takes no compromising to give the people their rights . . . it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” From promoting street arts and community art centers, to advocating for beer drivers’ Local 888, to the district elections (Proposition K) he championed, Milk imagined the end of disenfranchisement and discrimination, better quality of life, and resurgence of democracy for all.
That Milk had indeed made a statement during the campaign is evidenced by the nearly 17,000 votes he garnered, finishing tenth in a field of thirty-two candidates. More heartening still, Milk realized that had there been district elections, voters in San Francisco’s GLBTQ neighborhoods, despite the Toklas Club’s opposition, would have delivered him to City Hall. SIR official and Vector editor William Beardemphl presciently observed in his Bay Area Reporter “Comments” column that, “Above and beyond his race for Supervisor, Harvey Milk IS opening the door to government a little wider so that all homosexuals of ability can enter politics without a destructive homosexual stigmata imposed on them.”55 Milk appears to have been emboldened by the experience and results, for he almost immediately cast his sights on the 1975 campaign and during the interim would become an even more dedicated and visible community and gay rights activist. During this period, Milk’s political vision solidified and public voice amplified more prominently as he launched biweekly columns for the Sentinel (“Waves from the Left,” February