This week's hero: Harvey Milk

May 17, 7:07 PMDenver Gay Parenting ExaminerRene Rosechild

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Harvey Milk in office

This week's hero, because your kids need heroes, and so do you:

America's first out, fabulous, flamboyant, fun and visionary gay politician, Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk lived the first 4/5 of his life as a closeted investment banker and insurance actuary (and political conservative) in New York. Then he got hip, grew his hair, quit his job and moved to San Franciso, along with a few thousand other Gay men and lesbians in the early 1970's, where he started a business in the Castro neighborhood, then coalescing as a sort of Gay Harlem of the West. After becoming increasing frustrated with the San Francisco police department beating up his neighbors while the city authorities tried to drive him out of business, he decided to come out and run for city supervisor. It was only after two failed attempts, and the city being divided into voting districts, that he was elected.

It was one of the first triumphs in the early Gay political movement. At around the same time, Anita Bryant was organizing a national drive against local Gay rights ordinances, and California Senator John Briggs sponsored legislation to prohibit Gay people from teaching school in California. In most of the country, including California, Gay sex was a felony, and homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder. What Harvey Milk saw was that the way to fight for Gay people was for Gay people to come out--to their families, their neighbors, their friends and their co-workers.

Building on the tactic of honesty asking for fairness, Gay rights have progressed beyond Harvey Milk's dreams. If Maine's anti-gay activists succeed in putting Gay marriage back on the ballot this November, and if they are defeated, it will because thousands of Gay and Lesbian Mainers come out to their families, neighbors, friends and co-workers, and ask them to vote against the citizen's recall.

What Harvey Milk found when he helped defeat the Briggs' initiative is the same thing that Black civil rights leaders learned decades before. Once you have the conversation; once you look most Americans in the eye and ask for fairness, most of them will agree, maybe not the first time, but eventually.

As Harvey Milk said to hundreds of thousands of people at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade:

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.

Four months later another Supervisor, Dan White, shot Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone to death. White was a conservative, law-and-order, ex-police officer, pro-death penalty supervisor from a more conservative district. Six months later White was acquited of the murders, found guilty of voluntary manslaughter by an all straight, all white jury, and eventually served only five years in jail.

Daring to come out to the world and stand up for Gay people was only one facet of Harvey Milk's courage. He received death threats every day of his political life. Knowing this, he made a tape recording to be played, "In the event that I am killed." On that tape he said, "I cannot prevent anyone from getting angry, or mad, or frustrated. I can only hope that they'll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that two, three, four, five hundred will step forward, so the gay doctors will come out, the gay lawyers, the gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects ... I hope that every professional gay will say 'enough', come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help." In his honor, thousands have. Let us remember Harvey Milk by doing what he asked, and come forward in honesty to ask for fairness.

Hear Milk speak: