LGBT POV

Slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame on  Dec. 1 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver.

Along with Milk, 12 others, including tennis great and women’s sports advocate Billie Jean King, will also be inducted and presented with the Spirit of California medal at a formal ceremony in the museum in Sacrament.

Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk – who accepted the posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on his uncle’s behalf from President Obama (see video here) –  Academy Award winner Sean Penn, state Sen. Mark Leno, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, San Diego activist Nicole Murray Ramirez, Milk Foundation Director Mike Colby, Milk’s campaign manager Anne Kronenberg, Milk campaign staffer Gwen Craig, and the late Mayor George Moscone’s children Jonathon and Rebecca are expected to attend the ceremony.

A press release from Gov. Schwarzenegger’s office, gives a succinct description of Milk’s life and a short description of the Milk exhibit, which will open to the public on Dec. 2:

Harvey Milk, born in 1930, was the first openly gay person elected to a significant public office in the United States who encouraged lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) citizens to live their lives openly, believing that was the only way they could achieve social equality.

After serving in the Navy, Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972, immediately becoming a community activist and was voted into office as San Francisco City Supervisor in 1977. In his eight months in office, Milk achieved the enactment of California’s first ordinance barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which was then the most progressive law in the nation. Milk’s promising career ended abruptly on November 27, 1978 when he and Mayor Moscone were assassinated in City Hall.

The California Hall of Fame will feature 13 exhibits for each of the inductees. Milk’s exhibit will include:

▪               A time capsule created in 1987 by his friends and until recently, entombed in a Washington, DC cemetery. Items incased in the urn include: a hair cutting; a campaign button; an audiocassette dated June 10, 1978, titled, “Harvey Milk speech in Dallas;” his city supervisor letterhead; a rainbow flag; an enveloped letter addressed to Scott Smith; and a film negative of Milk.

▪               San Francisco City Supervisor badge

▪               Proposition 6, also known as the 1978 Briggs Initiative

▪               San Francisco anti-discrimination statute

▪               Campaign buttons from his various campaigns

▪               New York State College for Teachers yearbook

▪               Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded in 2009 by President Obama

On June 14, 1999, Time magazine named Harvey Milk one of Time’s 100 Most Important people of the Century.

Ten years later, the retrospective is still poignant:

After Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet, thousands of astounded people wrote to him. “I thank God,” wrote a 68-year-old lesbian, “I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.” Sputtered another writer: “Maybe, just maybe, some of the more hostile in the district may take some potshots at you — we hope!!!”

[snip]

To be young and realize you were gay in the 1970s was to await an adulthood encumbered with dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows.

No one person could change all that, and not all the changes are complete. But a few powerful figures gave gay individuals the confidence they needed to stop lying, and none understood how his public role could affect private lives better than Milk. Relentless in pursuit of attention, Milk was often dismissed as a publicity whore.

“Never take an elevator in city hall,” he told his last boyfriend in a typical observation. The marble staircase afforded a grander entrance.

But there was method to the megalomania. Milk knew that the root cause of the gay predicament was invisibility. Other gay leaders of the day — obedient folks who toiled quietly for a hostile Democratic Party — thought it more important to work with straight allies who could, it was thought, more effectively push for political rights. Milk suspected emotional trauma was gays’ worst foe — particularly for those in the closet, who probably still constitute a majority of the gay world. That made the election of an openly gay person, not a straight ally, symbolically crucial. “You gotta give them hope,” Milk always said.

Milk’s killing probably awakened as many gay people as his election had. His death inspired many associates–most notably Cleve Jones, who later envisioned the greatest work of American folk art, the AIDS quilt. But while assassination offered Milk something then rare for openly gay men–mainstream empathy–it would have been thrilling to see how far he could have gone as a leader. He had sworn off gay bathhouses when he entered public life, and he may have eluded the virus that killed so many of his contemporaries. He could have guided gay America through the confused start of the AIDS horror. Instead, he remains frozen in time, a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in doing so.

And there you have it: WHAT IF HARVEY MILK HAD NOT BEEN ASSASINATED and had rallied gays to fight against AIDS.

Think about it. Milk was assassinated in 1978, just as the HIV virus and Kaposi Sarcoma was beginning to spread silently and rapidly through the gay community. If Milk – who had stopped going to the bathhouses – could have negotiated between public health officials and gay men who considered sexually transmitted diseases acquired through prodigious anonymous sex a badge of sexual liberation – and through self-empowerment encouraged gay men to take care of themselves, perhaps – just perhaps not so many of our brothers, lovers, and friends would have died or be infected now.

That Milk is being inducted into the California Hall of Fame on Dec. 1 – World AIDS Day – is a beyond symbolic.

In the movie “Milk,” part of the narrative shows actor Sean Penn as Harvey Milk making audio tape recordings of his thoughts. Below is an actual recording with Milk’s own voice on Friday, Nov. 18. “This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination,” he says, talking about how he is aware that someone as visible as he is becomes a target for disturbed people. Listen for yourself.