Politics: Harvey Milk: Never-Changing Times
Way back in June, around the time I first began to write for TNG, I published a piece that was based on my having recently read Randy Shilts’ biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street. Now, in our “post-Prop. 8″ world (not, I think, all that different from our pre-Prop. 8 world), with Sean Penn’s movie Milk currently in the theatres, I thought it might be worthwhile skipping my more formal “Hidden History” column in favor of returning to that column. I thought readers might have more to say about it now than they did then. You’ll find the original text of that review/commentary below the fold.
Two events occur simultaneously: I read Randy Shilts’s biography The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk and I read blog postings on The New Gay bashing the Human Rights Campaign. I needn’t summarize the arguments against HRC posted on this site: you can easily enough reference the posts yourself. But having finished Shilts’s astute biography of Milk, a tricky and controversial politician turned martyr, my reaction to the arguments was: Yawn. These are never-changing times.
In 1977, Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, the first openly gay politician to be elected in the United States. A year later, both he and San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, were assassinated by Milk’s fellow supervisor, Dan White, who was given the lightest possible sentence for the crime. All this is rather well-known history; it is chronicled very effectively in the Oscar-winning documentary film The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). It should achieve renewed and even wider renown when Sean Penn’s Hollywoodization of the story hits the screens this December.
Where Shilts’ biography of Milk transcends the movies, though, is that it vividly illustrates why gay politics haven’t changed much in the past 30 years and probably never will. Whether or not you would go so far as to say that HRC is an organization of pandering mainstreamers that wastes contributions on high salaries and lavish parties, it is undeniable that they are eager to achieve acceptance for gays – at least gays who fit one particular image – from the hetero-dominated national political structure. Harvey Milk was also looking to take gay rights to the national stage, as he spent time during his year in office making plans for a gay rights march in Washington similar to the African American civil rights march of 1963. But as Shilts shows, Milk was most interested in ensuring that gays in San Francisco were free from beatings by both gay-bashers and the police, couldn’t be fired for their sexual orientation, and would achieve enough visibility to serve as inspiration and hope for “those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvania’s.”
Milk agitated – loudly and frequently – for more openly gay politicians, for acceptance of all types of gays and lesbians, for local, neighborhood organizing that could change individual lives quickly, rather than waiting years for the national political scene to make concessions to sexual minorities. He spent much of his time in San Francisco politics fighting against timid, upper-middle-class gays who begged handouts from the power structure; who continued to support supposedly-liberal politicians who demanded gay votes while allowing anti-gay initiatives to pass; who told Milk that his brashness in dealing with the political elite would only push further back the efforts on behalf of middle-class gay rights. In looking at the Human Rights Campaign thirty years after Milk’s death, does any of this sound familiar? It’s hard not to think that Harvey Milk would have hated HRC. If the purpose of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s was to ensure the safety of drag queens and gay youth rather than, say, to provide opportunities for politically-connected gays to be able to dress in suits and be smiled at by the powers-that-be, and if HRC is now the main gay political group in the country, then the gay liberation movement has lost its purpose and its soul.
Milk and his policies were denounced and despised by many mainstream gays, a fact largely forgotten in the wake of the martyr status he gained upon his murder. The tension between groups like HRC and more radical gay activists mirrors the same arguments that Harvey Milk had with his detractors. If thirty years of history is any indication, there is no way to bridge that gap and ever achieve a coherent gay rights movement.
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I think that that tension still exists is good evidence that queer rights movements still have plenty of purpose and soul.
What exactly is “mainstream gay”? Can it have multiple meanings?
The problem with the “gay rights movement” at times is that simply being homosexual is not enough to galvanize all the gay folks into action as a unified group. It seems there are so many different ways to be “gay” and different oppressions to go along with them that finding common ground isn’t as easy as one would think.
Sometimes you just have to pick the one thing you want the most and are willing to fight the hardest for and pursue it with all your might. In this fight multiple champions are needed, like generals in the same army, coordinated and aware of each other, but with different mission objectives.
One day the war will be won, it just takes a lot of time because humans tend to be fundamentally the same creatures. We must rely on a slow, constant and ineluctable update to our “institutional memory”.
What exactly is “mainstream gay”? Can it have multiple meanings?
The problem with the “gay rights movement” at times is that simply being homosexual is not enough to galvanize all the gay folks into action as a unified group. It seems there are so many different ways to be “gay” and different oppressions to go along with them that finding common ground isn’t as easy as one would think.
Sometimes you just have to pick the one thing you want the most and are willing to fight the hardest for and pursue it with all your might. In this fight multiple champions are needed, like generals in the same army, coordinated and aware of each other, but with different mission objectives.
One day the war will be won, it just takes a lot of time because humans tend to be fundamentally the same creatures. We must rely on a slow, constant and ineluctable update to our “institutional memory”.
Great post. I have only one quibble. Sean Penn’s movie? Gus Van Zant is a pretty important gay filmmaker — it’s very exciting that a film about Harvey Milk made by Gus Van Zant is going to be a big hit. Van Zant is the original New Gay. He made some of my favorite movies: Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Gerry.
Since we’re learning history here, let’s give Gus Van Zant his due!
I’ll give him his credit when you spell his name right!
:-P
Gus Van Sant, Sant, Sant… (How embarrassing!)
considering that the great agent for change that we just elected is just another centrist in progressive clothing, this post is all the more prescient. Milk, martin Luther king….Legacy of radicals always get whitewashed and reinterpreted. HRC is actually selling milk shirts, if you can believe it
One historical correction is in order: Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician elected in California, but not the first in the United States — especially if we use “gay” in the 1970s sense.
Lesbian activist Kathy Kozachenko was elected to the Ann Arbor (Mich.) city council in January 1974, more than four years before Milk’s election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
In January 1975, open lesbian Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. And Minnesota state senator Alan Spear, who came out publicly in 1974, was reelected as an openly gay man in 1976.
And for the prehistory: The first known openly gay candidate for elective office was José Sarria, a celebrated San Francisco drag performer, who ran for Board of Supervisors in 1961 at the height of a police crackdown on gay nightlife. Sarria received several thousand votes — and thereby launched the LGBT push into electoral politics in San Francisco.
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