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Preface

An Archive of Hope is about Harvey Milk and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) memory and history. We believe that GLBTQ pasts, such as the multifaceted configurations of Milk, are invaluable and underutilized as the inventional resources for GLBTQ well-being, relationships, communities, culture, politics, and movement in the present and future.

This is easier espoused than enacted. Historically and presently, numerous constraints and disincentives have made inhabiting and mobilizing GLBTQ pasts very difficult, and in some instances, impossible. One ongoing challenge concerns the where of GLBTQ history and memory, where it can be found and how it is marked or unmarked; the term archive in this context should signify anything but ample, obvious, accessible, sanctioned. And we say this as people in awe of the gains made by GLBTQ collectors, archivists, librarians, historical societies, and museums in the United States. In an important sense, the more vexing challenge is what we might call the please of GLBTQ history and memory, that is, the will and desire for the past. The challenges come from a systemic problem (rarely if ever are GLBTQ history and memory encountered in schools), a communal problem (indifference to GLBTQ history and memory is acculturated), and a rhetorical problem (inducements to GLBTQ history and memory require much more attention to appeal and audience).

We don’t remember when we first encountered Harvey Milk. Paradoxically, he seems to have been long a presence and also in short supply. Chuck had been screening Rob Epstein’s powerful, Academy Award-winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), in his social protest seminars since the late 1990s; Jason for years had been teaching the “Hope Speech” and had worked with the Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial Committee to select quotations to appear on the Milk bust unveiled in San Francisco in 2008. Yet when we began talking about this project in 2006, we both had a strong sense that despite our belief in Milk’s significant place in GLBTQ history and memory, he did not seem substantially recollected anymore, except perhaps in San Francisco itself (and that was a hunch). Only a handful of Milk’s speeches and writings circulated publicly at the time, as now: four in an appendix in Shilts’s Mayor of Castro Street and a token representative, “You Gotta Give ’Em Hope,” in a small number of anthologies. How could this be? Harvey Milk matters—our mantra—so we decided to figure out what else there might be.

Having successfully persuaded The University of Alabama and Boston College to provide us grant monies for a project on Harvey Milk (rhetorical challenges to GLBTQ memory and history are multiple and varied), we first flew to San Francisco in 2007 to explore the Milk collection at the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL), which we knew had recently opened to the public in 2003. We were not sure what we would find, even though the Harvey Milk Archives—Scott Smith Collection index (GLC 35), available online, had us wide-eyed with imagined possibilities. To our amazement, we discovered at the SFPL a remarkable trove of Milk’s words in various forms: speeches, editorials, columns, press releases, event fliers, campaign materials, correspondences, and interviews. Astonishingly, it became apparent from our conversations with the SFPL archivists and librarians that few others were availing themselves of the Milk archive, despite the rare opportunity here of a well-organized and available, institutionally supported and authorized collection of a GLBTQ historical figure better known and appreciated than most. (Interest seems to have increased significantly as our project has come to its completion, owing perhaps to the visibility generated by the film Milk; see “Condensed Milk: A [Somewhat] Shortlist of Harvey Milk Resources,” http://sfhcbasc.blogspot.com/2012/05/condensed-milk-somewhat-short-list-of.html.)

Walking past Harvey Milk Plaza into the historic neighborhood of many GLBTQ dreams on that day in 2007, we toasted with a celebratory beer at Harvey’s, the gay bar at Castro and 18th named in his memory and adorned with his images, all smiles over Milk’s legacy being alive and well and available to be mobilized. A block away, at 575 Castro Street, marveling like pilgrims in front of what had been Milk’s camera shop and political headquarters, beneath the second-story mural of Harvey wearing a t-shirt with his mantra, “You Gotta Give ’Em Hope,” we committed ourselves as archival queers to doing what we could to help circulate and promulgate this invaluable archive. We went back to the SFPL in 2009, and the five years of this project have been consumed with the challenges of disposition, which is to say the culling, organizing, contextualizing, and rhetorically configuring this selected volume of Milk’s speeches and writings. An Archive of Hope represents our best effort to do so (any shortcomings are squarely our own), an assemblage of artifacts from Milk’s rhetorical and political corpus, most not seen publicly since they were originally published or delivered in the 1970s. Our hope is that Milk’s voice, and ours, will in this book help to constitute one archival queer exhibition that contributes to the where and please of GLBTQ pasts.

Our fortune in this project has been an embarrassment of riches, and these brief lines of gratitude won’t suffice but will have to do, at least in print. We simply can’t believe that the fabulous Danny Nicoletta—so well-known and admired, so busy with his many significant projects—gave so much to our project, generously, copiously, whenever we asked. Danny is a GLBTQ treasure in his own right, and his proximity to Harvey Milk and Milk’s memory, to GLBTQ San Francisco’s past and present, for us made him our muse, our mentor, our Sherpa—electric and talismanic. We knew that An Archive of Hope had promise during our first meeting with Danny over dinner at Catch on Market Street, the very site where the Names Project transformed the world stitch by stitch into the AIDS Quilt. His encouragement has made all the difference.

The other guiding light of this project is Frank Robinson. Frank, too, is a great gift to GLBTQ history, and someone, we hope, will write his biography. Brilliant, gruff, witty, big-hearted, and a real “character,” Frank both challenged and fostered our work. He made plain in no uncertain terms that he would not talk about Harvey Milk in a restaurant over lunch. So instead he welcomed us into his home, opened to us his files in the upstairs den, let us spread out materials in his kitchen, and sat for a long interview in his living room. Memory, of course, is both pleasure and pain, and we know Frank’s conjuring of Harvey Milk was not always easy, more evidence of Frank’s generosity of spirit. And what a storyteller Frank is: how lucky we were to be the beneficiaries. Then, when the day’s research was done, Frank looked at us, smiled, and said, “Now you may take me to dinner.” And dine we did, once at the historic Hotel Whitcomb’s Market Street Café, one of his favorite spots.

Numerous others, in plentiful ways, materially and affectively, made our research and writing of this book possible, easier, pleasurable, better. The University of Alabama and Boston College offered financial support of our San Francisco trips through multiple grants.

At the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center in the San Francisco Public Library, Tim Wilson and Susan Goldstein warmly and enthusiastically endorsed and supported us and this project, and provided all the resources and expertise we needed and could have hoped for. Our many wonderful encounters with Tim in the reading room of the San Francisco History Center of the SFPL made us feel at home among friends, and when we returned in 2009, two years after our initial trip, the three of us fell right back into step.

For research and copyright assistance, we offer our thanks to Heather Cassell and Karen Sundheim at Hormel, Rebekah Kim and Daniel Bao at the GLBT Historical Society, Cynthia Laird at the Bay Area Reporter, Walter Caplan, David Lamble, Tom Spitz at KPIX/KBCW, Alex Cherian at the San Francisco Bay Area TV Archive, Ken Liss at O’Neill Library at Boston College, and Patrick Shannon at the Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley. Our research assistants, Benjamin Kimmerle and Gyromas Newman, handled many of our transcription assignments with good humor and good work.

San Francisco visits came with the warmest of welcomes and hospitality from friends and colleagues Gust Yep, John Elia, Ralph Smith and Russel Windes, Dan Saffer, Rink Foto, Jeff Sens, Jack Keatings and Tom Booth at Hotel Frank/Maxwell, and the staff at Harvey’s.

At University of California Press, Kim Robinson’s patience, counsel, and encouragement guided us through project vision and revision en route to a remarkably better book than the manuscript we submitted, for which we are so thankful. And we thank, too, Stacy Eisenstark for all her help during the production process.

Jason: This project, one borne from a mutual admiration of Harvey’s story, has resulted in much more than the glorious fruits of an archival journey. For me, An Archive of Hope has also fostered a lifelong friendship—a story unto itself. Throughout the past seven years—from San Francisco visits and Castro meanderings to writing sessions on a Boston rooftop and planning sessions on a Tuscaloosa riverboat—I have found a brother in Chuck Morris. I want to wholeheartedly thank Chuck for enlivening our work, for teaching me the nuances of queer worldmaking, and for supporting me when I needed it the most. An Archive of Hope would never have been realized and completed without his care and determination. I am genuinely honored and fortunate to consider Chuck a part of my family.

I would also like to express appreciation to my friends at The University of Alabama for all of their encouragement on this project. I am particularly indebted to Adam Sharples and Meredith Bagley for sharing their knowledge about LGBTQ memory and their mutual love for Harvey; to Beth S. Bennett, my good friend and mentor, for supporting An Archive of Hope every step of the way; to students in my undergraduate and graduate seminars for the many productive conversations about Harvey and the “hope trope”; and to my colleagues in the College of Communication & Information Sciences for their willingness to entertain my musings about and ardor for Harvey’s story.

Finally, I am grateful to have a moment to thank my partner Jennifer Black and daughters Anabelle and Amelia for all of their love. I am blessed (and awed) by their understanding and patience—both related to this project and always. This anthology has been a part of our lives for the better part of a decade. My wish is that Harvey’s name and words will remain constantly with us as a reminder of the possibilities of love and the resonance of hope.

Chuck: I beamed late one evening in 2006 when I read an email from Jason Black inviting me to consider collaborating with him on a Harvey Milk project. The idea excited me at that moment, but it would be our unfolding friendship that most enriched and sustained me as that idea transformed into this book. I now feel as if I’ve known Jason my whole life, and he’s become indigenous to my world, for which I am enormously grateful and deeply happy.

During this project I lost two of my sweetest inspirations, Alex and Augustine, whose love and curiosity meant so much to me, and whose spirits still fill me.

Among the living, my friends make daily work and life richly rewarding, and for their laughter and comfort and wisdom I thank Dale, Dan, Rob, Tom, Andrew, David, Mary Kate, Chuck and Ginny, Jackie, Shea, Katie, Andrew, Austin, Vanessa, Karma and Sara, Jeff and Isaac, Kendall, Erin, Lance, Bob, Pam, Bonnie, John, Keith and Bob, the Boston Rhetoric Reading Group, and all my field and Facebook pals.

Finally, I dedicate my effort here to my partner Scott Rose, my Gatto, for giving the deepest meaning and feeling to living and loving and intervening in the GLBTQ world, and to our boys, Jackson and Cooper, with all my heart.