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FOREWORD

Harvey

FRANK M. ROBINSON

Harvey Milk was one of the most significant of the American political figures of the twentieth century. He started as a Goldwater Republican and ended his life as the last of the store-front politicians—those who ran for public office with no money, their stores their campaign headquarters, and their following largely those who stopped in to buy something and stayed to talk politics with the owner.

An “openly gay man,” as the newspapers of the time referred to Harvey, his constituency was the largely closeted gay population of San Francisco. Harvey was anything but—he was openly gay not only in the gay enclave of the Castro, but to the world at large.

He was to become the first gay man to win a major political office in the United States—despite the fact that gays were the last important group in the country who were subject to nationally approved prejudice. Tolerance was the most that a gay man could expect—acceptance was seldom granted.

In the city of San Francisco, the gay community was represented by politicians who were the “friends of gays” but never gay themselves.

It was Harvey’s unique idea that gays should be represented by one of their own. The black community was represented by black politicians—they could hardly change the color of their skin. But gays had the option of hiding, and that was the course that most of them took. You could vote anonymously at the ballot box, but to acknowledge your homosexuality to the world at large could be extremely risky when it came to family, friends, or employment. It might be okay for Harvey to be openly gay, but it wasn’t okay for most gays, and sometimes it could be physically dangerous.

Harvey was out to change all that. He turned his shop into a place for voter registration and urged all gays to “come out”—saying that people would never change their viewpoint on homosexuality unless they had actually met some homosexuals. Families might view their “single” aunts and uncles with suspicion, but as long as gay people “hid,” they were tolerated.

By the time Harvey was elected to office as a San Francisco supervisor, those who suffered from the “love that dare not speak its name” had learned to shout.

Harvey was martyred after less than a year in office. His funeral procession led from 17th and Castro to City Hall and numbered 40,000. He was honored with a play produced locally; a biography, The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts, who wrote it for an advance of ten grand, peanuts in the publishing business; a successful television documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (currently available on DVD); an opera that played in Houston, New York, and San Francisco; and a movie starring Sean Penn (he won an Oscar for it) with a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black (who also won an Oscar and gave an acceptance speech that earned him a standing ovation). After that, the small plaza at the corner of Castro and 17th, the staging area for so many of the rallies and marches Harvey led, was named after him.

And oh yes, you could buy a coffee mug with Harvey’s picture on it from one of the souvenir shops on Castro.

But ask most young gay men about Harvey Milk and you’ll get a blank stare and “Harvey who?”

A simple answer would be, “He’s the man who changed your world.” But memories are usually passed from one generation to another—from the third (grandfathers) to the second to the current one. For the gay community, except for a few, there is no second generation. It was largely wiped out by the AIDS epidemic.

This collection of speeches and writings is aimed not only at professors and researchers but also at a younger generation who might be assigned by their teachers to read it or who pick it up on their own.

Harvey.

In print.

A collection of his speeches and writings that resonated through the gay community and made it into a major political force in the country today.

Harvey was a tall, thin man in his early forties, with the improbable name of “Harvey Milk,” who ran a camera shop on Castro Street. I lived in “Pneumonia Heights,” a hill above the Castro, and used to walk down every morning for breakfast. One day he was out in front of his shop playing with Kid, the store’s dog, and we started to talk. I told him I wrote books for a living, and he said he ran the store and once he’d run for supervisor.

He said he got 15,000 votes his first time out, and I was properly impressed. In Chicago the biggest political event we’d ever held was a “kiss-in” in front of City Hall—all one hundred of us.

He told me he was going to run for Supervisor again and asked whether I wanted to write speeches for him. “It’ll be a hoot,” he said. “We’ll stir some shit.”

Despite Harvey’s 15,000 votes, I never for a moment thought he would win anything.

As a speechwriter, I soon discovered that I was just another cog in Harvey’s embryo political machine. Scott Smith, his lover, ran the day-to-day management of the store as well as Harvey’s campaigns (he and Harvey split after the first two. John Ryckman ran the third, and Anne Kronenberg, the fourth, as well as moved to City Hall with him when he won).

Jim Rivaldo and Dick Pabich wrote most of his campaign flyers. Some of the speeches Harvey gave nobody wrote for him. There were no teleprompters back then, and one of his speeches (Keynote Address, Gay Conference 5, Dallas, Texas) ran to seventeen typewritten pages. I’m pretty sure he spoke from a handful of notes, filling in as he went along. Mayor Feinstein—who had no love for Harvey because he frequently disagreed with her and wouldn’t follow the party line—complained that Harvey talked too long and too often.

I wrote a number of Harvey’s shorter speeches, as well as an occasional article for the Bay Area Reporter’s “Forum.” Harvey was far from illiterate—he could have written most of his speeches himself. But he couldn’t do both and campaign as well. To a large extent, I was the pencil in Harvey’s hand. We were both populists and agreed on practically all of his political positions. He was for the neighborhoods against downtown, and he championed the elderly, the unions, and the ethnic groups that made up the patchwork quilt of the city’s population. He was insistent that those who drew a salary from the city should also live in the city. He never forgot the policeman who lived out of town and told him, “You couldn’t pay me to live there”—meaning San Francisco. He was tight with the unions, who were among his first supporters, and said a kind word about them whenever he could.

He was insistent about three things: The gay community should be represented by a gay man. The “friends of gays” who usually represented the community until Harvey came to town could change their positions depending on which way the political winds were blowing. An African American couldn’t change the color of his skin and voted for one of his own. And an “openly gay man” would never be able to disavow his sexual orientation.

The latter was put to the test when gays had been granted civil rights in a few states, which upset Anita Bryant, a spokeswoman for the Florida orange juice growers. She started a campaign against gays that rolled across the country, gathering support as it went. In California, State Senator John Briggs picked up on it and introduced a bill to ban all homosexual teachers in the public school system. The bill was winning in the polls, and suddenly the “friends of gays” faded into the background.

It was Harvey who debated Briggs up and down the state (including the conservative stronghold of Orange County). Nobody wrote for him when he was on the road—he shot from the hip. (“How do you teach homosexuality? Like you’d teach French.”)

The proposition lost.

High on Harvey’s list of things to talk about was voting. He was well aware that power came from the ballot box, but many gays didn’t bother to vote. He urged everybody in his audiences to “come out” and publicly acknowledge that they were gay. “How can people change their minds about us if they don’t know who we are?”

Voting was easy. “Coming out” was another story. You could lose your family, your friends, and your job. Harvey was admired for being openly gay, but it wasn’t a decision that many others were willing to make. It was easy to be “out” in the Castro—you could live there for weeks without meeting a straight man.

But being “out” in the world at large was a vastly different cup of tea.

Most of Harvey’s positions were easy to write about—I’d been active in gay politics in Chicago and Harvey and I were two peas from the same pod.

The speech he gave most often was a barnburner, but I couldn’t tell you who wrote it. It was Harvey’s “hope” speech, and like Topsy it just grew. Harvey was fond of talking about “hope” in many guises and how it was important that younger gays, confused about their orientation, should be given “hope.”

“You gotta give ’em hope.”

The punch ending was that this kid in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had heard one of his speeches and called him. His parents would never understand him. Harvey was flattered by the call and told the boy that when he was of age, he should grab a bus and come out to California. There was silence for a moment and then the boy said quietly, “I can’t. I’m crippled.” (This was a highly emotional scene in the movie.)

Harvey polished the speech and used it often, though the rest of us kidded him because some days the boy lived in Altoona, other times in San Antonio or Buffalo. The boy really got around, we thought.

Harvey didn’t have a battery of professional speechwriters who could make him sound like a latter-day John F. Kennedy. The strength of his speeches lay in his visceral connection with his audience.

It would take time for “gay power” to emerge, and it would bring hardships, but it would also bring freedom. Anybody who belonged to a minority group in the audience would nod and agree with that.

We expect our leaders to be exactly like us, and then we’re disappointed when they turn out to be mere mortals—exactly like us. The attempt to impeach President Clinton failed because his audience instinctively understood that.

The police in Nazi Germany were brutal when it came to the Jews, because the Jews were undesirable anyway. Police brutality against homosexuals in the United States was tolerated because homosexuals were also undesirable. Right? That attitude spread like a cancer, and soon most of the country accepted it.

When it comes to taxes, you pay your fair share—but the insurance companies, the banks, the big corporations “pay little or nothing.” You pay yours, but you’re also paying theirs. Harvey wrote that thirty-five years ago, but it sounds very familiar today.

When it comes to our leaders, most of us instinctively recognize that “no person is born to greatness, but many people rise to it.” Who knows what that scruffy kid down the block playing touch football will become? Harvey’s audience recognized that and gave the kid the benefit of the doubt. Someday they might be voting for him.

“Nixon’s appointments to the Supreme Court will affect our lives to a greater degree than anything he can do as president.”

That’s true of any president, and Harvey’s audience knew it. The struggle for one political group or another to control the court is still going on today—the country swings left or right depending on the decisions of that court.

Harvey was prescient. His audience realized that the problems he pointed out in his lifetime would also be the problems of the future. Two steps forward, one step back: the history of our country.

Harvey was more than just a politician, more than a man running for political office.

He was an oracle and his audience identified with it. He spoke not only for today but also for tomorrow.

Speeches are important not only for the information they convey but for the insight they give into the people who delivered them. Hitler was brutal and sadistic, and it showed in his speeches. John F. Kennedy was altruistic; it came out in the man like sweat. Theodore Roosevelt—the first Roosevelt—was probably responsible for the expression “the bully pulpit.” America had a manifest destiny—let’s go get it!

The second Roosevelt, Franklin, was a healer. The country was bleeding when he took it, bound up its wounds, and bit by bit taught it to believe in itself again.

And Harvey?

Read his speeches and writings. He taught the gay community to respect itself; he taught it to believe in the power that it had and how to use it. A few of Harvey’s campaigns and the local politicians knew that no anti-gay ordinance would ever be accepted by the city. The gays held veto power and they voted as a bloc.

Harvey wore a coat of many colors. He laughed a lot; he could be very funny; he could deliver a speech like an African American preacher, using the repetition of words and phrases until the crowd was roaring.

He started the first Castro Street Fair and showed the rest of the town how to throw a party. When the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus came to town, he dressed as a clown and rode the cable cars to the delight of the tourists.

He never forgot those who had been less fortunate in life, and most of all, he showed his constituents how much he loved them. Some of us thought he loved campaigning more then he liked legislating.

He campaigned as a businessman, but in reality he was a terrible one. He wore hand-me-down suits, ground the beans for his coffee, and was an ace at a good spaghetti sauce. He was a man of the people—especially poor people (being a supervisor paid $9,000 a year; he had a very vivid idea of what being poor was like).

Why did he do it? Is there a lesson to be learned from reading what Harvey had to say? Can you see the man behind the curtain? You should; he never made any attempt to hide himself.

Harvey Milk was born into a world that didn’t want him and left behind a world that discovered it would be difficult to do without him. Through his speeches and his courage he changed the lives of millions.

As teenagers, most gays used to haunt the library searching for mention of a gay man they could be proud of who in turn would make them proud of themselves. We desperately wanted to find a gay hero.

I never realized I had found mine until the day that Harvey died.