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An Archive of Hope. Harvey Milk
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isbn 9780520955028
Автор произведения Harvey Milk
Издательство Ingram
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.
INTRODUCTION
Harvey Milk’s Political Archive and Archival Politics
CHARLES E. MORRIS III AND JASON EDWARD BLACK
In the Images of America memory book San Francisco’s Castro, there appears a photograph depicting three volunteers anchoring the Harvey Milk Archives (HMA) booth at the 1982 Castro Street Fair.1 Fittingly, the photograph was taken by Danny Nicoletta, Harvey Milk’s protégé and photographer, who, for four decades now, has provided invaluable views of GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer)2 life in San Francisco. For those who personally remember, or for those who, against the odds, have somehow learned some GLBTQ history, the photograph may be haunting, temporally and tragically poised as it is between the immediate past of Milk’s 1978 assassination and the unfolding present and future of HIV/AIDS in Ronald Reagan’s New Right America. Even so, Milk’s signature hope appears richly embodied in the photo’s details—his huge smile beaming from a displayed portrait; the “Supervisor Harvey Milk” posters; the stack of Randy Shilts’s newly published biography, The Mayor of Castro Street; and volunteer Tommy Buxton’s laugh, implying a joyous carnivalesque occasion, communion, reprieve—suggesting that public memory powerfully affords comfort, community, and politics.
Like those HMA volunteers on Castro Street, we hope in this book to deepen and circulate the public memory of Harvey Milk. During the 1970s, Milk passionately lived as an activist and visionary, community builder, and stalwart and savvy campaigner, one of the first openly gay political officials in the United States. And Harvey Milk died with his boots on, a martyr—if not at the moment of his death, as some will quibble, then surely at the pronouncement of the unjust, undoubtedly homophobic verdict in his assassin’s trial. Public memory is fraught, mutable, forceful, and consequential, and we believe it can be transformative in the lives of GLBTQ people—and everyone. What Harvey Milk bequeaths in the pages that follow is An Archive of Hope.
REMEMBERING HARVEY MILK
If you knew and loved Harvey, as so many in San Francisco still did, especially in those first years after his death, you likely took heart and pride in those enthusiastic efforts to kindle his legacy. Perhaps you donated money to the HMA that day in 1982 on Castro Street. Or perhaps you participated in one of the many Milk memorial events that occurred in San Francisco and elsewhere in recent years: traveling aboard the “Gay Freedom Train” en route to “Avenge Harvey Milk!” at the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in October 19793; attending exhibits at the Gay Community Center and Castro Street Fair in 1979; watching photographer Crawford Barton’s slide show at the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club (HMGDC) annual Milk dinner in May 1980; browsing archival materials that accompanied the newly rededicated Harvey Milk/Eureka Valley Library in May 1981; reminiscing at the HMGDC Milk slide show and cocktail party in City Hall that same month; joining devoted throngs in the annual Milk/Moscone Memorial March; standing in line at Randy Shilts’s book signings in 1982; or celebrating at Harvey’s annual birthday party on Castro Street—a bounty of Milk memory!
So much commemoration in those early years of Milk’s afterlives, in fact, that you might have thought Frank Robinson, Milk’s speechwriter and campaign advisor (named as one of only four potential successors in Milk’s political will), was unnecessarily concerned when he fretted in the inaugural 1983 issue of The Harvey Milk Archives Newsletter: “I do not know what Harvey’s fate would have been if the Harvey Milk Archives had not been established. I am not sure what historians would have done, how they might have edited his speeches, how they might have subtly reshaped the past, how they might have interpreted the man who was the man who might have been.”4
Robinson’s insightful words should not be misunderstood as sentimental hero worship or hagiography. Archival materials and their consignation matter, always and profoundly, for histories and memories to survive and thrive, especially for those histories and memories that malignant individuals and institutions would readily consign to oblivion, and for those people who struggle for many reasons against manifold constraints to preserve and promulgate the past. Certainly this is true for GLBTQ histories and memories. Heather Love has written,
The queer past has long served a crucial role in the making of queer community. . . . The desires that queers have invested in the past have transformed it. There are, as a result, many queer pasts: Some versions glitter with the collective fantasies of greatness; others have been rubbed smooth by constant handling; some are obscure, having been forgotten or put away; other versions of the past have been rendered ghostly through the weight of accreted longing; and some are covered by shadows, forgotten traces of ways of life that many would rather leave behind.5
There are, we believe, many queer pasts in Harvey Milk, as varied and valuable, as vulnerable, as those pasts Love describes and Robinson cherishes. The Milk archive, in whatever forms it exists and may eventually take, should never be taken for granted.
The extensive, largely behind-the-scenes efforts during the 1980s