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Remembering Harvey: 5/22/30-11/27/78
On the 10th Anniversary of The Death of Harvey Milk
Talk about heroes. There was this
nickel-and-dime merchant, this pug-ugly
middle-aged New York fairy, this
hyperbolic, abusive crypto-Goldwaterite
named Harvey Milk. He was a pol-on-the-
make among the rebellious sexual outlaws
of the vaulting Castro. He was set to cut a
deal, glad hand the available world, and
raise high the roofbeams. It was destiny he
had by the throat; it was a date with a
chapter in gay/lesbian American history and
a footnote in the annals of the mostly tawdry
politics of San Francisco. It was also, he
fervently believed, a date with death. He'd
not live to be fifty, he said. Some kook on a
wingding would shoot him down.Only 10
days before he was assassinated Milk
recorded his"political will" saying, "If a
bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet
destroy every closet door."
Harvey was a marvel, and no mistake.
suits that'd put him back ten bucks at used-
clothing stores on Mission Street. It was
some kind of miracle that Glimpy Milch, as
he'd been called as a randy kid on the wrong
end of Long Island, emerged from the
throng to become the first uncloseted
elected official in a nation of 20 million
lesbians and gay men..
Braver men and women preceded Milk.
Many have gone to prison for acts of love;
many have died, lost their careers, their
families, their good names. Has-been pop
singers, gimmie preachers and scabrous
politicians have built their fortunes on the
pain and often the blood of gay men and
women. We are handy. Haven't we too
much to lose if we make public our outrage,
our defiance? Milk won his day and named
our age because he did fight back. He
peddled hope. That's the salt of the loaf:
hope. That he peddled it well made him a
JERRY PRITIKIN
Harvey Milk speaking at Union Square rally on the night of Anita Bryant's
victory in Miami.
The pissy A-gays who'd been clogging
liberal straights with brie and white
zinfandel, who’d seen the town rise from a
day when bashing faggots was City Hall
policy, not merely acts of psychosexual
disarray in rogue cops, despised this Jewish
person from the East. Lesbians wanted
nothing to do with him. Gay men were men
first They'd learned that the hard way.
On the exploding Victorian streets off
Castro and Market the magnet for feisty
young gay men from every backwater,
every scabby boondock, Harvey was
certainly no thrill. How you dressed,
smelled, walked, talked and stood in your
regulation jeans and Pendleton plaid, your
trimmed macho moustache and your boots,
was the common-denominator among the
Castroids. This wobbly, jug-eared, maxi-
snozed sissy draped his narrow shoulders in
hero.
Heroes are wanted in a movement that
consumes its activists, chews them up and
spits them out, and Harvey, who loved the
theatrical and revered the symbol, would
have approved of his becoming an icon of a
movement that is starting to find itself and
meaningfully coalesce. His was a name
invoked when a half-million of us gathered
on the Republican grass in the shadow of
the U.S. Capitol last year at the National
March on Washington.
Harvey had a gift for changing the minds
and hearts of both his own kind and those
who are programmed by priest, family and
state to casually hate anything and anybody
that's not what mama and papa was. As a
Wall Street functionary, he'd flirted with the
OOB theater in New York and learned a
thing or two. Politics is magic time. It's
show biz. Harvey knew how to coo to
newspaper chumps, how to reduce to a
sizzling soundbite the hopes of the millions,
how to get on the six o'clock news. He
knew how to arouse the rabble and rake the
muck. He knew how to rally guys who
thought the world began and ended in the
bars and bathhouses, whose faith was in the
terminal grope, whose private parts were
illuminated like a Caravaggio light source.
Harvey knew too that the human heart is
really an organ of the ego. He knew how to
stroke, how to speak to each as if he or she
were central to the moment. He krtew how
to recruit troops of volunteers whose entire
lives were devoted to the political ambitions
of his camera-store operator on Castro
Street.
What Harvey didn't do was reach
everybody. Not every heart was opened.
An ex-cop named Dan White first murdered
Mayor Moscone, then, reloading his
revolver with dum-dum bullets, the kind that
"If a bullet should enter my
brain, let that bullet destroy
every closet door."
explode inside fragile flesh, paid a
premeditated call on Harvey Milk.
The gays of San Francisco rioted when a
friendly jury let White off with voluntary
manslaughter. Dan was on a sugar-high
from munching Twinkies, you see, and he
couldn't help himself when Harvey
"smirked" at him. So said his lawyer. It is a
sorry tale whose variations in the halls of
American justice are without limit. Then
and now.
There have been ten troubled years since
the rainy fall day of Moscone and Milk's
deaths in San Francisco City Hall. Harvey
would be nudging age 60 now. After him,
the deluge. AIDS. Reagan. Bush. A
younger generation, scored by fear and the
Efren Ramirez
Mayor George Moscone signs the San
Francisco Gay Civil rights bill with
Harvey Milk looking on.
wish to live, would have perhaps grown
weary of Milk had he lived and stayed in the
fray. The star-fuckers who lined up outside
his door would have disappeared. His gay-
Chinese-union alliance would by now be a
tattered thing. That's politics. But there
would be one plus-even if poor little Danny
Boy hadn't gobbled down.so many Twinkies
that bad November day.
That plus was in the air October a year
ago, when hope and rebellion and truth and
elation prodded 500,000 women and men
past a gray and sleeping White House. Milk
showed us what the possibilities are. He ran
against the machine and won. He spread his
message of hope and dignity across the U.S.
and Canada. And thousands, tens of
thousands, of North Americans who are gay
or lesbian discovered there ain't no reason to
be a pariah on native ground.
Get off the lard and rattle the grid. That's
what Harvey would say.
- Gene-Gabriel Moore
ATTENTION GAY & LESBIAN
BUSINESS OWNERS & PROFESSIONALS!!
THE ATLANTA BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL GUILD. .
. . .provides a forum and a focus for its members and the gay and
lesbian business community in the Greater Atlanta area. To
encourage and enhance NETWORKING within our community, the
Guild offers the following networking and advertising opportunities:
■ monthly mixers/dinner
meetings
■ guest speakers
■ business spotlights
■ annual Business Expo
annual Business Directory
referral service
business card exchange
bi-monthly newsletter
special events
For information, contact the Guild Office at (404) 662-4202 or
write to:
The Atlanta Business & Professional Guild
P.O.Box 52785
Atlanta, GA 30355
Member, Metropolitan Atlanta Coalition of Gay & Lesbian Organizations (MACGLO)