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by Myths”

      Public letter, March 13, 1978

      31.“Resolution Requiring State Department to Close the South African Consulate” and “Closing the Consulate”

      Press releases, March 22, 1978

      32.“Letter to President Jimmy Carter”

      Private letter, April 12, 1978

      33.“Untitled (on Gay Caucus and Gay Power)”

      Column, Bay Area Reporter,” April 27, 1978

      34.“California Gay Caucus”

      Article draft, Alternate, May 12, 1978

      PART FOUR. MILK AND THE POLITICS OF GAY RIGHTS

      35.“Keynote Speech at Gay Conference 5”

      Tape cassette transcription of speech, June 10, 1978

      36.“Gay Rights”

      Article draft, Coast to Coast, June 16, 1978

      37.“Gay Freedom Day Speech”

      Reprinted speech, Bay Area Reporter, June 25, 1978

      38.“To Beat Briggs”

      Column, Bay Area Reporter, August 3, 1978

      39.“I Have High Hopes Address”

      Stump speech, 1978

      40.“Harvey Milk vs. John Briggs”

      Televised debate transcription, August 6, 1978

      41.“The Positive or the Negative”

      Column, Bay Area Reporter, August 31, 1978

      42.“Statement on Briggs/Bigotry”

      Public letter, September 22, 1978

      43.“Overall Needs of the City”

      Speech, September 25, 1978

      44.“Ballot Argument Against Proposition 6”

      Public letter (with Frank Robinson), November 7, 1978

      PART FIVE. HARVEY’S LAST WORDS

      45.“Political Will”

      Tape cassette transcription, November 18, 1977

      Document List

      Editor Biographies

      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,

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