The True History of Harvey Milk
How a 2000s Propaganda Machine Inflated the Importance of a Nobody
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Mountains From Molehills
One of the most striking features of San Francisco history are the simultaneous phenomena of how rich the city’s actual history is and yet how it is so heavily sidelined to a boring, insignificant, and unimportant activist history. I first observed this when I visited the city on a university-led tour of San Francisco, and our tour guide kept pointing to the occasional Wal-Greens storefront or empty street corner to let us know how it was formerly one of the first gay bath houses in the city, or that some protest for some group I didn’t even know existed had taken place there. It seemed any piece of fact that I never would’ve cared to know about was brought to prominence as we shuttled through this centuries-old architectural marvel of a city.
Harvey Milk, called by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in the article Harvey Milk: Gay Jewish Icon “the most famous gay man in history,” is perhaps the greatest representation of this feature. In 2019, SFO airport opened the Harvey Milk Terminal One named after him. SFGate reports: “It is the first airport terminal in the world to be named for an LGBTQ leader. Spokesman Doug Yakel said, ‘We think that it’s right for this to happen first in San Francisco.’” Even if you ask San Franciscans who Harvey Milk is, they’ll often tell you they think he was a former mayor of San Francisco. Surely, he must’ve been somebody, considering how he has been elevated to an icon of the city itself. If you ask them how he died, they’ll tell you he was a martyr for the early LGBT movement. Considering how he is treated in the press and how the true story of his assassination is never spoken about, he must’ve been. The problem, however, is that he was neither a major political figure in any stretch of the imagination, nor was he martyred for his homosexuality.
I’m going to address both of these in detail, that he was neither a major political figure nor was he a martyr for gay rights, and then at the end discuss some of the more unsavory aspects of Harvey Milk’s life. This is because there is a huge discrepancy between the importance of Milk politically (which is virtually nil) and the importance of Milk as an icon (which is hugely inflated). This activist push for a hero itself eventually culminated in the film Milk, which was massively influential in the explosion of the Gay Rights movement of the mid-2010s (and the subsequent same-sex marriage legalization in California in 2013 and the United States in 2015). It was pivotal in the construction of the legend, but ultimately Harvey Milk as a person is, essentially, a construct of the activist-propaganda machine.
Neither a Legendary Political Figure nor a Martyr
The SFO Museum writes: “Harvey Bernard Milk (1930–78) was a visionary human rights leader, a groundbreaking political luminary, and a seminal figure of the LGBTQ rights movement,” and the book Gay and Lesbian Americans and Political Participation named Milk “the most famous and most significant openly LGBT official ever elected in the United States.” However, these quotes perhaps highlight the true dearth of gay contributions to American politics rather than uplift the tenure of Milk once we actually comb through his political record. Harvey Milk proclaimed himself the “Mayor of the Castro Street” — he was, in reality, merely a community organizer that helped get a few boycotts and protests off the ground. Such large gaps between his perception of himself and the reality was echoed by one of his friends Tom O’Horgan, who stated that Milk “spent most of his life looking for a stage. On Castro Street, he finally found it.” We have, in effect, become victims to Milk’s desperation for a larger role in life, not because he ever achieved such a feat, but rather because we are subjected to it in his legacy.
The only real political office he ever held was a small supervisor role (particular for the Castro district) that lasted for almost eleven months. He was a sponsor of a bill that banned discrimination towards homosexuals in regards to housing, employment, and public accommodations which has largely been drummed up as a huge accomplishment despite the fact that it was signed 11–1 and signed into law by the mayor, but Milk himself only authored a single ordinance in this role — which was his entire political career — that dealt with requiring San Franciscans to clean up after their dogs defecated in public spaces. This ordinance is Milk’s true personal contribution and legacy.
Secondly, the claim that Harvey Milk was assassinated for his homosexuality is also a myth. Milk was assassinated with Moscone at City Hall by Dan White in 1978, that much is true, while holding the aforementioned supervisor position. Before the assassination, White had opposed the bill dealing with homosexuality and discrimination (he was the one opposition vote) but this was quite well-documented as a political gesture (and not a homophobic one) because Milk had lobbied Moscone to replace White’s seat, leaving White to feel betrayed. White had actually maintained amicable relations with Milk while both were in office, described by The Washington Post as an “odd friendship.” Daniel Flynn in a City Journal article writes how this myth of martyrdom has essentially been circulated since the assassination took place:
“Harvey Milk died because he was a Gay man,” Milk’s friend and fellow Bay Area Reporter writer Wayne Friday claimed in the immediate aftermath of the murders. “George Moscone died because he was a friend of Gay people — they can never convince me otherwise, and I will go to bed every night praying that their killer pays the full price.” When a court allowed White to pay less than that full price, angry activists chanted at City Hall, “Dan White, Dan White/Hit man for the New Right.”
The article notes that this is a distortion of the truth. There are no consistent politics pointing to Dan White as a right-winger. On Dan White’s politics towards homosexuality, Flynn writes:
White’s stands on gay rights appear consistently inconsistent as well. The first person White hired in politics was a gay man, who served as his campaign manager and later his chief of staff and business partner. “That was never an issue,” Ray Sloan told me in an interview for … “In coordinating his campaign, I don’t think anyone knew or cared if I was gay. I neither hid it but I wasn’t out participating in any way that would say that. I sort of lived my own life. As time went on, it was clear that he knew. It just didn’t make any difference to him.”
There was simply no evidence that White had some axe to grind with Milk because of his homosexuality and everything to do with the dispute over White’s seat between Moscone and Milk.
Now that I’ve dealt with Milk’s legacy as a politician and activist, I’d like to address some of Milk’s more unsavory aspects.
The People’s Temple and Underage Lovers
Milk’s activist predilections, knowing no bounds, led him to become a vocal supporter of Jim Jones’ People Temple that eventually resulted in four hundred deaths in a mass suicide. Daniel Flynn, author of the book Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days that Shook San Francisco, said in an interview with The American Conservative:
The Temple’s politicized theology really grabbed Harvey Milk, a man heretofore largely indifferent to faith. Jim Jones promoted gay rights, which appealed to Harvey Milk. Beyond this, he provided his campaigns “volunteers,” a printing press, and publicity through his widely distributed newspaper. When Milk organized a fair on Castro Street, Peoples Temple provided professional-level entertainers. When his lover committed suicide, Temple members sent dozens of condolence letters inviting Milk to visit or even live in Jonestown.
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Milk clearly found his association with Jim Jones exhilarating. “It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach[ed] today,” he wrote Jim Jones after one Temple service. “I was sorry that I had to leave after 4 short hours …. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave.”
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Milk provided legitimacy to Jim Jones. He spoke at Peoples Temple. He praised it in his column in the Bay Area Reporter. He lobbied on Jones’s behalf to President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano, Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, and other powerful figures. As Cult City shows, this proved disastrous for many people.
In the same interview, Flynn tells us about Milk fabricating details about his discharge from the Navy, claiming it was dishonorable: “When a supporter discovered that Milk had fabricated a tale of a dishonorable discharge from the Navy — only in San Francisco would a politician lie about his honorable service to enhance credibility — Milk responded, ‘Symbols. Symbols. Symbols.’” This shows us how Milk was constantly and meticulously working to establish a martyrdom narrative for the basis of his activism.
Milk also dated underage boys, many of whom had developed subsequent drug problems and some of whom committed suicide. Matt Barber in the California Catholic Daily writes:
One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley. As previously mentioned, Milk had a soft spot in his, um, heart for teenage runaways. Motivated by an apparent quid pro quo of prurience, Milk plucked McKinley from the street.
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In [Randy Shilt’s] glowing book The Mayor of Castro Street, he wrote of Milk’s “relationship” with the McKinley boy: ‘… Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. … At 33, Milk was launching a new life…’
McKinley developed an extremely deep drug problem and eventually committed suicide. Milk after this incident lose a second lover, Jack Lira, to suicide. It was Lira’s suicide that prompted “condolences” from the People’s Temple in the previously quoted segment from Daniel Flynn’s book.
How, then, did such a figure become so central to San Francisco?
Victims of Activist History
Such distortions, both about Milk’s contributions to San Francisco and his martyrdom, are part-and-parcel and extremely typical of activist history. They are the reason that we find ourselves living in a century of the internet and self-driving cars, yet our political discourse is stuck in a cycle of discussing transgenderism and which various different human races deserve more than others. Activist narratives are constructed from relatively unimportant micro-facts, falsely bolstered to give power to their alternate history, which is embodied by the 11-month term supervisor becoming a central icon a nationwide movement. This is often why there is a delay between the heroes and events of activist history and their recognition. In the 1990s, no one knew anything nor cared about the Stonewall riots. Such a character as Milk would deserve almost no attention outside of his tragic assassination, and yet his face, likeness, and name are spread as if he played in some great contribution to the city and the wider LGBT movement.
How, then, did Harvey Milk gain so much name-recognition in the wider public? Or, to ask the question more specifically, how did this distortion of his fame enter into the mainstream? This is almost completely due to Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film Milk, which was nominated for eight Oscars and eventually won Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. The film marked the beginning of the nationwide elevation of Milk’s story. Just one year later after the film’s release, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared Harvey Milk Day for every year thenceforth on May 22nd, Milk’s birthday. The release of the film also led to the initial whisperings that Milk would have an airport terminal at SFO named after him, which came to fruition in 2019. In other words, the film served as a huge marketing push for Harvey Milk’s image by making him appear larger than life and more important than he really was. It also contributed to Milk’s martyrdom narrative by throwing some ambiguity on Dan White’s motives in depicting him as a potentially closeted homosexual.
What makes Milk unique is that he was neither a major figure, a martyr, nor an ethical person. In a sense, the Gay Rights movement that his iconographic portrayals helped energize was largely based on leading the viewer to these assumptions without ever delivering any evidence. Just like Harvey Milk’s delusions of grandeur as some kind of “mayor” of Castro Street, those who wanted to likewise draw us into Milk’s phony dialectic has carefully obscured our own ability to discern truth from lies, and importance from mundane.
