Small Tribute To Harvey Milk

(sorry I'm a day late in posting this!)

Yesterday, November 27, was the 34th anniversary of the day Harvey Milk was assassinated. Milk's assassination was unlike other notable assassinations in the history of US politics because he wasn't shot once to the head from a distance, such as with Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. He was murdered, along with San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, in 1978.

On November 27, 1978, a half hour before a press conference announcing the new member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a man named Dan White entered the San Francisco City Hall through a basement window. White had resigned as Supervisor just days prior, on November 10, after claiming his salary was too small to support his family. However, he later tried to get re-appointed and was denied. This left him furious with San Francisco mayor George Moscone, who refused to re-appoint him to the Board of Supervisors, and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who lobbied heavily against his re-appointment.

After getting in through the basement window, to avoid going through the metal detectors, witnesses heard shouting between White and Moscone followed by gunshots. White shot Moscone in the shoulder and chest before shooting him twice more in the head after he fell to the ground. Afterwards he made his way to his former office while reloading his pistol. He intercepted Harvey Milk along the way and asked him to step into the office for a moment. Milk was found shot five times, which included also being shot twice in the head at close range just like Moscone. White turned himself into the police an hour later. Harvey Milk was only 48 when he died.

Now some of you are probably wondering who Harvey Milk was and why he is relevant to this blog. Harvey Milk was actually the FIRST openly gay person to be elected to a public office in both California and the United States itself. Milk's political career was actually fairly short. He didn't win a seat in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors until 1977. However, that didn't stop him from becoming a martyr in the gay community as well as an icon in San Francisco during his brief time in office.

During his mere 11 months in office, Milk managed to pass a binding gay rights ordinance for the city. His last work in the city and the gay community was campaigning against Proposition 6, or the Briggs Initiative, which would have made it mandatory to fire any gay or lesbian teachers in the state of California. He attended every Briggs event in the state during 1978. Attendances in the Gay Pride marches in San Francisco, as well as Los Angeles, swelled in the summer of 1978.  375,000 people attended San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade where Milk gave a version of his most famous speech, the Hope Speech, which was reported to "ignite the crowd". On November 7, 1978, the Briggs Initiative lost by more then a million votes. 75% of San Francisco alone voted against it.

His final campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, said about Milk, "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us." This is what makes him a great man even to this day.

In 2002 he was called "the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States", and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The more I learn about Harvey Milk, the more my respect for him grows. Milk was a huge reason the fight for LGBT rights started to become a mainstream issue here in the US. While we might still have a ways to go as far as LGBT equality here in the US, we have to take a moment to see how far we've come in the last 30 years. We owe our thanks to Harvey Milk for kick starting our country's journey towards equality. He was an amazing man, both for US politics and the LGBT community, and a true hero in my book.

"On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country ... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives" 

- Harvey Milk, "Hope Speech"