Aftermath
The murders of Milk and Moscone and White's trial changed
city politics and the California
legal system. In 1980, San Francisco
ended district supervisor elections, fearing that a Board of Supervisors so divisive would be harmful to the city and
that they had been a factor in the assassinations. A grassroots neighborhood
effort to restore district elections in the mid-1990s proved successful, and
the city returned to neighborhood representatives in 2000. As a result of Dan White's trial, California
voters changed the law to reduce the likelihood of acquittals of accused who
knew what they were doing but claimed their capacity was impaired. Diminished capacity was abolished as a
defense to a charge, but courts allowed evidence of it when deciding whether to
incarcerate, commit, or otherwise punish a convicted defendant. The "Twinkie
defense" has entered American
mythology, popularly described as a case where a murderer escapes justice
because he binged on junk food, simplifying White's lack of political savvy,
his relationships with George Moscone
and Harvey Milk, and what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen described as pandemic police "dislike of homosexuals".
Dan White served
a little more than five years for the double homicide of Moscone and Milk. On
October 21, 1985 (a year and a half after his release from prison), White was
found dead by carbon monoxide poisoning in a running car in his ex-wife's
garage. He was 39 years old. His defense attorney told reporters that he had been
despondent over the loss of his family, and the situation he had caused, adding,
"This was a sick man."
Legacy
Milk's political career centered on making government
responsive to individuals, gay liberation, and the importance of neighborhoods
to the city. At the onset of each campaign, an issue was added to Milk's public
political philosophy. His 1973 campaign focused on the first point,
that as a small business owner in San
Francisco—a city dominated by large corporations that had been courted by
municipal government—his interests were being overlooked because he was not
represented by a large financial institution. Although he did not hide the fact
that he was gay, it did not become an issue until his race for the California State Assembly in 1976. It
was brought to the fore in the supervisor race against Rick Stokes, as it was an extension of his ideas of individual
freedom.
Milk strongly believed that neighborhoods promoted unity and
a small-town experience and that the Castro
should provide services to all its residents. He opposed the closing of an
elementary school; even though most gay people in the Castro did not have children, Milk saw his neighborhood has the
potential to welcome everyone. He told his aides to concentrate on fixing
potholes and boasted that 50 new stop signs had been installed in District 5. Responding to city residents' largest
complaint about living in San Francisco—dog
feces—Milk made it a priority to enact the ordinance requiring dog owners to
take care of their pets' droppings. Randy
Shilts noted, "some would claim
Harvey was a socialist or various other sorts of ideologues, but, in reality,
Harvey's political philosophy was never more complicated than the issue of
dogshit; government should solve people's basic problems."
Karen Foss, a
communications professor at the University
of New Mexico, attributes Milk's impact on San Francisco politics to the fact that he was unlike anyone else
who had held public office in the city. She writes, "Milk happened to be a highly energetic, charismatic figure with a
love of theatrics and nothing to lose ... Using laughter, reversal,
transcendence, and his insider/outsider status, Milk helped create a climate in
which dialogue on issues became possible. He also provided a means to integrate
the disparate voices of his various constituencies." Milk had been a rousing speaker since he began
campaigning in 1973, and his oratory skills only improved after he became City Supervisor. His most famous talking points became known as
the "Hope Speech", which
became a staple throughout his political career. It opened with a play on the
accusation that gay people recruit impressionable youth into their numbers: "My name is Harvey Milk—and I want to recruit you." A version of the Hope Speech that he gave near the end of
his life was considered by his friends and aides to be the best, and the
closing the most effective:
And the young gay
people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias
and the Richmond, Minnesotas who are
coming out and hear Anita Bryant in
television and her story. The only thing they have to look forward to is hope.
And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better
tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too
great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays but the
blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if
you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people,
that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move
forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up because if a gay person
makes it, the doors are open to everyone.
In the last year of his life, Milk emphasized that gay
people should be more visible to help to end the discrimination and violence
against them. Although Milk had not come out to his mother before her death
many years before, in his final statement during his taped prediction of his
assassination, he urged others to do so:
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.
However, Milk's assassination has become entwined with his
political efficacy, partly because he was killed at the zenith of his
popularity. Historian Neil Miller
writes, "No contemporary American
gay leader has yet to achieve in life the stature Milk found in death."
His legacy has become ambiguous; Randy Shilts concludes his biography
writing that Milk's success, murder, and the inevitable injustice of White's
verdict represented the experience of all gays. Milk's life was "a metaphor for the homosexual experience
in America". According to Frances FitzGerald, Milk's legend has
been unable to be sustained as no one appeared able to take his place in the
years after his death: "The Castro saw him as a martyr but
understood his martyrdom as an end rather than a beginning. He had died, and
with him, a great deal of the Castro's
optimism, idealism, and ambition seemed to die as well. The Castro could find
no one to take his place in its affections, and possibly wanted no one.” On the 20th anniversary of Milk's death,
historian John D'Emilio said, "The legacy that I think he would want
to be remembered for is the imperative to live one's life at all times with
integrity." For a political
career so short, Cleve Jones
attributes more to his assassination than his life: "His murder and the response to it made permanent and
unquestionable the full participation of gay and lesbian people in the
political process."
Tributes and media
The City of San
Francisco has paid tribute to Milk by naming several locations after him. Where Market
and Castro streets intersect in San Francisco flies an enormous Gay Pride flag, situated in Harvey Milk Plaza. The San
Francisco Gay Democratic Club changed its name to the Harvey Milk Memorial Gay Democratic Club in 1978
(it is currently named the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club) and boasts
that it is the largest Democratic organization
in San Francisco.
In April 2018, the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors and Mayor
Mark Farrell approved and signed legislation renaming Terminal 1 at San Francisco
International Airport after Milk, and planned to install artwork
memorializing him. This followed a previous attempt to rename the entire
airport after him, which was turned down. Officially opening on July 23, 2019, Harvey Milk Terminal 1 is the world's
first airport terminal named after a leader of the LGBTQ community.
In New York City,
Harvey Milk High School is a school
program for at-risk youth that concentrates on the needs of gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender students and operates out of the Hetrick Martin Institute.
In July 2016, US
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus advised Congress that he intended to name the second ship of the Military Sealift Command's John Lewis-class
oilers, USNS Harvey Milk. All ships of the class are to be named after
civil rights leaders.
In response to a grassroots effort, in June 2018 the city
council of Portland, Oregon voted to
rename a thirteen-block southwestern section of Stark Street to Harvey Milk
Street. The mayor, Ted Wheeler,
declared that it "sends a signal
that we are an open and a welcoming and an inclusive community". The street is located in an area of the city's
West side that is historically known
as a nexus for Portland's LGTBQ+
community and is the site of many gay bars and nightclubs.
In 1982, freelance reporter Randy Shilts completed his first book: a biography of Milk, titled The Mayor of Castro Street. Shilts wrote
the book while unable to find a steady job as an openly gay reporter. The
Times of Harvey Milk, a documentary film based on the book's material, won
the 1984 Academy Award for Documentary
Feature. Director Rob Epstein spoke later about why he chose the subject of
Milk's life: "At the time, for those
of us who lived in San Francisco, it
felt like it was life-changing, that all the eyes of the world were upon us,
but in fact, most of the world outside of San Francisco had no idea. It was just
a really brief, provincial, localized current events story that the mayor and a
city council member in San Francisco were killed. It didn't have much
reverberation."
Milk's life has been the subject of a musical theater production;
an eponymous opera; a cantata; a children's picture book; a French-language historical
novel for young-adult readers; and the biopic Milk, released in 2008 after 15
years in the making. The film was directed by Gus Van Sant and starred Sean
Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White, and won two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay
and Best Actor. It took eight weeks to film and often used
extras who had been present at the actual events for large crowd scenes,
including a scene depicting Milk's "Hope
Speech" at the 1978 Gay Freedom
Day Parade.
Stuart Milk speaks
with Barack Obama, holding the case
for the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in the White House
Stuart Milk
accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom
from President Barack Obama in
August 2009 on behalf of his uncle
Milk was included in the "Time
100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century" as "a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in
doing so". Despite his antics and publicity stunts, according to
writer John Cloud, "none understood how his public role
could affect private lives better than Milk ... [he] knew that the root cause
of the gay predicament was invisibility". The Advocate
listed Milk third in their "40
Heroes" of the 20th-century issue, quoting Dianne Feinstein: "His
homosexuality gave him an insight into the scars which all oppressed people
wear. He believed that no sacrifice was too great a price to pay for the cause
of human rights."
Personal belongings of Harvey
Milk on display at the GLBT History
Museum in San Francisco's Castro
District
In August 2009, President
Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the gay
rights movement stating "he fought
discrimination with visionary courage and conviction". Milk's nephew
Stuart accepted for his uncle. Shortly
after, Stuart co-founded the Harvey Milk
Foundation with Anne Kronenberg
with the support of Desmond Tutu,
co-recipient of 2009 Presidential Medal
of Freedom and now a member of the Foundation's
Advisory Board. Later in the year, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger designated May 22 as "Harvey Milk Day", and
inducted Milk in the California Hall of
Fame.
Since 2003, the story of Harvey Milk has been featured in three exhibitions created by the GLBT Historical Society, a San Francisco–based museum, archives,
and research center, to which the estate of Scott Smith donated Milk's personal belongings that were preserved
after his death. On May 22, 2014, the United States Postal Service issued a
postage stamp honoring Harvey Milk,
the first openly LGBT political official to receive this honor. The stamp
features a photo taken in front of Milk's Castro
Camera store and was unveiled on what would have been his 84th birthday.
Harry Britt
summarized Milk's impact the evening Milk was shot in 1978: "No matter what the world has taught us
about ourselves, we can be beautiful and we can get our thing together ...
Harvey was a prophet ... he lived by a vision ... Something very special is
going to happen in this city and it will have Harvey Milk's name on it."
In 2012, Milk was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT
history and people.
In November 2017, plans were presented for a stepped
memorial plaza in the Castro district
designed by American architecture
firm Perkins Eastman.
In June 2019, Milk was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and
heroes” inducted on the National
LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall
National Monument (SNM) in New York
City’s Stonewall Inn. The SNM is
the first U.S. national monument
dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall's unveiling was timed to
take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
Also in June 2019, Paris,
France named a square Harvey Milk
square.
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