Harvey Milk

Harvey Bernard Milk May 22 1930 November 27 1978 was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Milk was born and raised in New York where he acknowledged his homosexuality as an adolescent but chose to pursue sexual relationships with secrecy and discretion well into his adult years His experience in the counterculture of the 1960s caused him to shed many of his conservative views about individual freedom and the expression of sexuality Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972 and opened a camera store Although he had been restless holding an assortment of jobs and moving house frequently he settled in The Castro a neighborhood that was experiencing a mass immigration of gay men and lesbians He was compelled to run for city supervisor in 1973 though he encountered resistance from the existing gay political establishment His campaign was compared to theater he was brash outspoken animated and outrageous earning media attention and votes although not enough to be elected He campaigned again in the next two supervisor elections dubbing himself the Mayor of Castro Street Voters responded enough to warrant his running for the California State Assembly as well Taking advantage of his growing popularity he led the gay political movement in fierce battles against antigay initiatives Milk was elected city supervisor in 1977 after San Francisco reorganized its election procedures to choose representatives from neighborhoods rather than through citywide ballots Milk served almost eleven months in office during which he sponsored a bill banning discrimination in public accommodations housing and employment on the basis of sexual orientation The Supervisors passed the bill by a vote of 111 and it was signed into law by Mayor George Moscone On November 27 1978 Milk and Moscone were assassinated by Dan White a disgruntled former city supervisor Despite his short career in politics Milk became an icon in San Francisco and a martyr in the gay community In 2002 Milk was called the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States Anne Kronenberg his final campaign manager wrote of him What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real for all of us Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 Description above from the Wikipedia article Harvey Milk licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia