Harvey Milk

Harvey Bernard Milk was born on May 22, 1930, in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. Raised in a Jewish household by William Milk and Minerva Karns, he was the younger son of Litvak parents and the grandson of Morris Milk, a department store owner who helped organize the first synagogue in the area. Milk grew up knowing discrimination against Jewish families, and that background helped shape his view of fairness and public life. As a child, he was teased for his protruding ears, big nose, and oversized feet, and he often drew attention as a class clown. He played football, loved opera, and later studied mathematics at New York State College for Teachers in Albany, where he also wrote for the college newspaper.

After graduating in 1951, Milk joined the United States Navy during the Korean War. He served aboard the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake as a diving officer, then worked as a diving instructor at Naval Station, San Diego. In 1955, he resigned at the rank of Lieutenant (junior grade), forced to accept an “other than honorable” discharge rather than face court-martial because of his homosexuality. For years afterward, he kept his romantic life separate from family and work, while moving through a series of jobs that included teacher, stock analyst, insurance actuary, and Wall Street researcher.

The counterculture of the 1960s changed Milk’s thinking. He shed many of his conservative views about individual freedom and sexual expression. In 1972, after years of changing addresses and work, he moved to San Francisco and opened a camera store in the Castro, a neighborhood then seeing a large migration of gay men and lesbians. That move placed him in the middle of a growing gay political community, though not always in agreement with its established leaders.

Milk first ran for San Francisco city supervisor in 1973. The existing gay political establishment resisted him, but his campaign drew media attention and votes. His personality made the campaign feel almost theatrical, and though he lost, he kept running. In later supervisor races he called himself the “Mayor of Castro Street.” His rising support led him to run for the California State Assembly, and he became a leader in gay rights battles against anti-gay initiatives.

In 1977, after San Francisco began electing supervisors by neighborhood rather than citywide, Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. During his almost eleven months in office, he sponsored a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations, housing, and employment. The supervisors passed it 11–1, and Mayor George Moscone signed it into law. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled former city supervisor who had cast the sole vote against Milk’s bill.

Milk’s political career was brief, but his public voice came from a life lived between secrecy and open defiance. He became an icon in San Francisco and a martyr in the LGBTQ community. In 2002, he was called “the most famous and most significant openly LGBTQ official ever elected in the United States,” and in 2009 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His final campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, wrote that Milk “imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us.” That is why his words still carry weight: they belonged to a man who turned personal risk into public work.