Love and Hope: How Harvey Milk Broke the LGBT Barrier in Politics

Home , Anita Bryant, Anne Kronenberg, Castro Camera, Daniel Nicoletta, Dan White, Harvey Milk

Julian Cunningham, Emily Gillies, Maxwell Kahn, Asif Sattar, Jonathan Schneiderman

Senior Division

Group Performance

Process Paper: 499 words

Annotated Bibliography

Primary Sources

Associated Press. "Milk Left a Tape for Release If He Were Slain." The New York Times. Last modified November 28, 1978. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://nyti.ms/1kSczMC.

This short article provides quotations from the tape that Milk left in case he was assassinated. Although we were not able to incorporate these quotations due to time constraints, this provided helpful context for Milk's mentality that encouraged gay visibility. Milk urged those around him to "come out" and this knowledge helped us phrase some of the non-direct quotations spoken by the character of Harvey Milk in our performance.

Barnes, Clive. "Theater: The New York of 'Inner City.'" The New York Times (New York, NY), December 20, 1971. Accessed December 5, 2019. https://nyti.ms/1kJRbcp.

This article is from Harvey Milk's producer days. His appearance is pretty much just a cameo; he is mentioned as a producer of Inner City. That is enough, though, for our purposes; it provides primary documentation of Milk's activities before he went to San Francisco and went into politics.

"Body of Harvey Milk Being Removed from His Office." In Gale U.S. History Online Collection. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1978. Gale In Context: U.S. History (accessed November 12, 2019). https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/HZUKYM943312170/UHIC?u=nypl& sid=UHIC&xid=41fe512.

This is a photo of Milk’s body being removed from his office. It’s not graphic, but it’s upsetting. If we were working in any category other than performance, we would have used it.

"Burn, Baby, Burn!" National Review, February 10, 1984, 21. https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A3132852/UHIC?u=nypl&sid=UHIC &xid=7061ff91.

This is a contemporaneous conservative article about the San Franciscan protests by gays against the White's early release from prison; it argues that that "Of all reasons to get upset, the gay angle seems least consequential" because White killed Milk for personal political reasons rather than for homophobia. Given that White was openly homophobic, we think that his murdering of Milk was in part driven by homophobia, and that his personal resentment was partly in response to having been "beaten" by a gay man. However, it is partly a matter of interpretation, and it is incorrect to view Milk's assassination as the apotheosis of homophobic opposition to him; it was much more about Dan White's career than it was about the Briggs Initiative or any other policy issue. The article provides a good example of a perspective of the killing that de-emphasizes the homophobia of it entirely.

1 Cohen, Marc. Scott Smith and Harvey Milk. Photograph. Accessed February 28, 2020. http://www.strangebillions.com/harvey/.

This photo, which we used on our poster, is suboptimal for a number of reasons. Namely, it is quite low-resolution and it is very difficult to track down (note the lack of a year in this citation). But it’s a beautiful and touching display of the love between Milk and Smith.

Crewdson, John M. "Harvey Milk, Led Coast Homosexual Rights Fight." The New York Times. - Last modified November 28, 1978. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://nyti.ms/1iifMmH.

This is the New York Times's obituary for Milk. It mostly sums up Milk's life, emphasizing the fact that he broke a barrier but understating the importance of the barrier; Milk was the first openly gay elected official in the country, but the article only states that he was the first in San Francisco. Its treatment of Milk's life and death leaves out some key details. For instance, it states that Milk "moved [to San Francisco] in 1969." This is technically true, but his 1969 move was more of a sojourn than a move. He moved back to New York in 1970 (a fact that is stated in several other sources in this bibliography, including The Mayor of Castro Street), and his political story is best traced back to his 1972 move, which we reflected in our performance. Similarly, the only information it presents about White is that he voted against one of Milk's gay rights ordinances; it thus implies that his assination of Milk was motivated entirely by homophobia. As previously discussed in this bibliography, this is inaccurate. However, in spite of all its flaws, the article gives a good overview of Milk's life and does an excellent job at describing his political persona and summarizing his policy stances. Interestingly, it spends a fair deal of space describing Milk's pre-murders-and-suicides support of Jonestown, a reflection of the fact that what was important to people when history was happening is not necessarily what gets remembered or what ultimately ends up being the most important part of the history's legacy.

Davis, Rick. “Flashback: Meet San Francisco Harvey Milk.” Video. NBC News, November 27, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9iYasWREzE.

This contemporary newscast from March 1978 features a number of moving quotes from Milk, but the one that most stood out to us was: “If I'm fighting for the rights of gay people, and I am, then I must fight for the rights of all people and all the minorities—the senior citizens, the handicapped, the disenfranchised people—or I'm a hypocrite. I'm a little too old to give in to becoming a hypocrite.” That sums up the politician Milk eventually came to be very neatly, and was featured in an earlier version of our script. It also emphasizes an element of Milk’s activism that has been left out of the picture: his support for the elderly, whom he called the most oppressed group in the country, saying, “I don’t think we have a right to take people who’ve raised us, who’ve made us strong and healthy, and then toss them away like an empty can of beer. In this society, this government, the entire government structure [inaudible] like an empty can of beer.”

2 Friday, Wayne. "Milk for Supervisor — District 5." Bay Area Reporter, October 27, 1977, 16-17. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BAR19771027.1.16&srpos=2&e=------197-en--20-BAR-1- -txt-txIN-Harvey+Milk----1977---1.

This online reproduction of an LGBT San Francisco periodical contains ads for Castro Camera and for Milk's campaign, as well as an article about Rick Stokes, an opposing candidate in district 5 in the 1977 board of supervisors election, written by Harvey Milk, and a pro-Stokes article on the following page. This was especially helpful in getting a sense of the 1977 campaign, as well as helping us create versions of Milk's campaign posters. Had we thrice the time, we would have included some of the rhetoric Milk and the opposition used in their campaigns, based on the articles written here. This also provided some context for Milk's leadership within gay circles—he's mentioned on six of the twenty-two pages of the magazine.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada). "BRIEFLY Bryant Helps Break All-male Barrier." October 1, 1987, D6. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A165143053/OVIC?u=nysl_me_71_svhs&sid=OVIC&xid =ec728b11.

This article is about Bryant's joining a formerly men-only club after the Supreme Court ruled its gender discrimination illegal, though she said she disagreed with the ruling. It is important to us because it gives some of Bryant's biographical details, mentioning her being a Miss America runner-up. It also introduces her as a "Singer-songwriter," reflecting that it is in this role, and not the role of homophobic activist, that she was thought of at the time--even though the article was written in 1987, and touches on her activism as an afterthought at the end of the aritlce. While we were not able to include this nuance in our ten-minute performance, it is important to us; history is not a straightforward narrative, and how people think about other people and events shifts over time.

"Harvey Milk." In Civil Rights in America. American Journey. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, 1999. Gale In Context: U.S. History (accessed February 29, 2020). https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/EJ2210017139/UHIC?u=nypl&sid=U HIC&xid=95473a5c.

We used this photo on our poster. It captures Dan White’s two victims at a happy moment.

"Harvey Milk Meets John Briggs." MP4 video, 02:54. Bay Area Television Archive. August 6, 1978. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/190667.

This source depicts Harvey Milk and John Briggs engaging in a televised debate over the proposed Proposition 6. This source is critical, as it was used in part to inspire our dialogue during our interpretation of a debate between Milk and Briggs. The video of the debate from the time provides a different perspective on the issue, and very much helped

3 our acting interpretations of Milk and Briggs. It was also useful to compare the archival video of the debates with the version presented in the 2008 film Milk. Harvey Milk. Photograph. HISTORY. The History Channel, August 21, 2018. Getty Images. Accessed February 28, 2020. https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/harvey-milk. We used this photo on our poster.

"Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in San Francisco, was murdered..." In Almanac, edited by Carol Brennan, Kathleen J. Edgar, Judy Galens, and Roger Matuz. Vol. 1 of American Social Reform Movements Reference Library. Detroit, MI: UXL, 2007. Gale In Context: U.S. History (accessed February 29, 2020). https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/PC2587187063/UHIC?u=nypl&sid=U HIC&xid=74f39cee.

This photo, which we used on our poster, shows the centrality of the Holocaust to Milk’s worldview: the poster he’s posing in front of in the shop window reads “DON’T LET IT HAPPEN HERE / REGISTER TO VOTE.”

Harvey Milk's Speech at San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Celebration; 6/25/1978; (Gay Rights--Harvey Milk Speech & Letter) 6/78-7/78 (O/A 5771); Margaret Costanza's Subject Files, 1977 - 1978; Collection JC-1133: Records of the Office of the Assistant for Public Liaison; Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, GA. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/milk-hope-speech, January 4, 2020]

This is an online PDF, from the National Archives, of Harvey Milk's famous Hope Speech, which he gave on June 25, 1978 at San Francisco Gay Freedom Day. In the speech, Milk goes on the offensive towards State Senator John Briggs and pop singer Anita Bryant, the two figures who were the primary opposition to Harvey Milk. He also points out some hot-button statistics including that "95 percent of child molestations are heterosexual and usually committed by a parent." He also puts Bryant and Briggs in a long list of people that includes the people behind the atomic bomb, the people behind the Japanese concentration camps, the people behind the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, and Adolf Hitler. This involves a major facet of the script that we had to cut out for time issues, in that we wanted to show how Milk's Jewish background led to his passion for social justice in light of the Holocaust especially. Although we were not able to include this, it provided some very important context and nuance to Milk's story. Finally, we used the start of the Hope Speech as the opening of the script to show him at one of his greatest moments of activism. However, it's worth mentioning that there are multiple versions of this speech, as this served as something of a stump speech for his activism; this version is the most famous version, given at one of Milk's most noted moments.

Lindsey, Robert. "Dan White, Killer of San Francisco Mayor, a Suicide." The New York Times (New York, NY), October 22, 1985, sec. A, 18. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://nyti.ms/2ZOhQus.

4 This is the New York Times's obituary for Dan White. Its main use to us is that it describes his death, which we reference in our performance and which is very important to understand in evaluating the validity or lack thereof of White's trial defense, which was based on claims that he was suffering from mental instability and was "not himself" (the idea of the "Twinkie Defense'' is largely an urban legend; junk food was mentioned in White's defense, but was not even remotely at its center, as discussed elsewhere in this bibliography); the liberal reaction at the time (and today, as indicated by the urban legend's endurance) was to think that White's defense was ridiculous, and that he only got off the hook for his crime because of homophobia. While it is difficult to dismiss homophobia entirely in either the killing itself or the fact that the jury was inclined toward sypmathy for a double murderer, the fact that he died by suicide lends credence to his defense and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss his claims of mental illness. Notably, the headline prioritizes Moscone, leaving Milk to the article itself, a reversal of White's legacy today. The article also mentions that "White never expressed public remorse for the murders and apparently died without doing so," an important detail that makes him less sympathetic.

Nicoletta, Daniel. Harvey Milk In Front of His Castro Street Camera Store. Circa 1977. Photograph. Accessed February 28, 2020. http://dannynicoletta.com/portfolios/milkandhoney/index.shtml.

This photo is by Daniel Nicoletta, a prominent gay photographer who worked for Milk at Castro Camera in his youth and who has been documenting the gay rights movement for decades. This photo is from the “Milk and Honey” collection on his website; we used it on our poster.

Palmer, James. Flowers and a newspaper were left on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall to honor Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who had been shot there the day before, on November 27, 1978. The newspaper announces their deaths. 1978. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Accessed February 28, 2020. https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/234282. We put this at the center of our poster: the response to Milk’s death is, tragically, the most important element of his story. He is most important as a martyr.

Palmer, James. Supervisor Harvey Milk called the press together in San Francisco on Oct. 20, 1978 to demonstrate (using artificial dog droppings) how pet owners could obey the city’s new anti-litter law, left, by scooping up the dropping. All went well until Supervisor Milk found he had accidentally stepped into some real dog dropping. 1978. Photograph. NBC Bay Area, Accessed February 28, 2020. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/harvey-milk-day-celebrates-life-work-of-first-o penly-gay-us-official/2034437/.

We used this photo on our poster.

Schmitt, Terry. Harvey Milk at the Gay Pride Parade. 1978. Photograph. San Francisco: San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 2017. Accessed February 28, 2020.

5 https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Supervisor-Ronen-revives-idea-to-honor-Har vey-11350453.php.

We used this photo on our poster.

"The new school tie." National Review, July 12, 1985, 20+. Gale In Context: U.S. History (accessed November 12, 2019). https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A3853974/UHIC?u=nypl&sid=UHIC &xid=3be36a68.

This article from nearly a decade after Milk’s murder provides a conservative but not overtly homophobic perspective on Milk’s legacy, criticizing New York City for creating a school designed for gay children while refusing to fund or assist parochial schools.

Then San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk is seen in San Francisco's seventh annual Gay Freedom parade. 1978. Photograph. MSNBC, Accessed February 28, 2020. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/harvey-milk-stamp-unveiled.

We used this photo on our poster.

The Times of Harvey Milk. Directed by Rob Epstein. New Yorker Films, 1984. The Times of Harvey Milk is an oscar-winning documentary that was released around 6 years after Harvey's death. According to Miriam Richter, it is the most accurate primary source of understanding Harvey Milk. We saw footage of the characters in this such as Dan White, Anne Kronnenberg, John Briggs, and Harvey Milk himself. A key difference between this documentary and the movie Milk, is that we found a portrayal of White's homophobia, as the movie seemed to leave that part out. We saw the live footage of Dianne Feinstein announcing Milk’s and Moscone's deaths, and we could see the raw emotion and the intense reactions. Something we could really understand from the documentary was Milk's eccentricity and his other-wordly personality. This was a good help us understand the mannerisms of all the people in our performance, and most of all a clear and honest layout of Harvey Milk's political career.

Turner, Wallace. "Suspect Sought Job." The New York Times. Last modified November 28, 1978. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://nyti.ms/1iig2Ce.

This article is a detailed account from the day after Milk's assassination of the events in San Francisco's City Hall. This provided some primary-source context to the shooting, which was also reenacted in the film Milk; because of this article, we were able to corroborate what we saw in the film with primary-source accounts, and this helped influence the shooting scene in our performance.

Secondary Sources

Eaklor, Vicki L. "Gay and Lesbian Movement." In Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., edited by Stanley I. Kutler, 513-514. Vol. 3. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Gale In Context: U.S. History (accessed February 29, 2020).

6 https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/CX3401801662/UHIC?u=nypl&sid=U HIC&xid=cd1fac3d.

This short history of the LGBTQ movement makes important reference to how White’s lenient sentence fired up the nascent gay community.

Faderman, Lillian. Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.

This book was especially helpful in writing the script—it provides a detailed account of Harvey Milk's development from his beginnings as a young closeted New York gay man to his ascent as a politician and ultimately his death and aftermath. It is part of a series titled Jewish Lives, so it has a special emphasis on Milk's Jewishness, an aspect of our project which we had emphasized greatly in initial drafts of our script. It was especially helpful in its account of Milk's early life and background, especially the fact that Milk's Jewishness influenced his social justice tendencies in light of the Holocaust. This drive for social justice helped Milk forge alliances with unexpected allies, such as the local teamster union (as mentioned in the script). Although these nuances were lost in the final draft of our script due to the limited amount of time in our performance, we still felt it was an important part of Milk's story. Also, it served as a helpful reference when establishing Milk's chronology and detailing the history of Milk's various campaigns.

Foss, Karen A. "The Logic of Folly in the Political Campaigns of Harvey Milk." In Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer, 7-29. N.p.: NYU Press, 1994. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfw8w.5.

This is the first in a collection of essays edited by R. Jeffery Ringer. While it presented little new information to us, it was incredibly useful and interesting in its interpretation, which is that Milk's political existence was motivated by the "logic of folly"--that is, that Milk played a similar role to the traditional jester role in his elections. That role, argues the essay, goes far beyond just making jokes; in the guise of humor and ridiculousness, "fools" like Milk can normalize radical ideas and expose the incoherence of binaries (the essay cites drag queens, who by their very existence expose the instability and ridiculousness of the gender binary, as another example of modern-day folly). The article informed much of how we portrayed Milk's campaigns, particularly in earlier drafts, before we made the cuts we had to make to fit the 10-minute constraint. The element of the article that most remained in our final draft is the idea that Milk's losses weren't failures--they were simply important steps in the process of making a successful gay politician a possibility, which survives in Scott's comments about Milk's 1973 campaign in our performance. However, the article makes a number of other salient and less obvious points. In particular, it frames elements of Milk's political life that might be looked at as hypocritical--such as Milk's evolution from anti-establishment to member of the establishment, and his continual claim to anti-establishmentism--as being parts of the logic of folly. Foss argues that the contradiction inherent in being an openly gay politician and being a successful politician in 1977 was a key part of Milk's political

7 existence, and that the more ridiculous and inconsistent parts of his political existence were part and parcel with that.

Harvey Milk Foundation. "The Official Harvey Milk Biography." Milk Foundation.org. Accessed December 8, 2019. http://milkfoundation.org/about/harvey-milk-biography/.

This biography of Harvey Milk provided a reliable source, from the official website of the Harvey Milk foundation, with which to corroborate our other sources. For example, we used this source to confirm much of his chronology. This source was most useful as a reference and corroboration source, as we found that other sources involved more intriguing perspectives than this relatively sterile general description of his life.

Isherwood, Charles, “In ‘Falsettos,’ an Affecting Echo of AIDS anxiety,” New York Times, December 28, 2016, https://nyti.ms/2EuSLuM.

A moving article by the New York Times’s Charles Isherwood that includes reflection on how widespread and affecting the HIV/AIDS epidemic was. We didn’t get to talk a lot about it in our final script, but the HIV/AIDS epidemic was critical in mobilizing the LGBTQ community after Milk, and is seminal in LGBTQ history. In some ways, this is actually a primary source about one man’s experience with the epidemic.

Moore, Lisa L. and Rose, Christopher. "Episode 112: Harvey Milk, 40 Years Later." The University of Texas at Austin, November 26, 2018. Podcast, 20:06.

This was one of the first sources we looked at. In addition to describing Milk's political biography, it focuses on something that gets less attention: how Milk fits into the larger story of gay rights in the United States and how he fit into the larger gay scene at the time. At the time, the dominant forces in the gay community (such as it was, which was not very much) were homophilic organizations like the Mattachine Society, which were male-only (Lesbian organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis existed separately, and were generally not united or even dafke at odds with gay organizations), mostly operated behind closed doors, and were more focused on gradually bettering the situation of gays than on increasing visibility and engaging in militant activism. Though he was in the older segment of the gay community, at 43 years old when he first ran for supervisor, he was aligned with the younger segment, and this often put him at odds with the local gay establishment in San Francisco. His success was important in moving the gay community from homophilia to gay rights, and in moving the gay rights movement from Mattachine-esque gender separation to gay-lesbian unity, the latter of which was particularly exemplified by his choice of Anne Kronenberg for Chief of Staff. The episode also focuses on the gentrification element of people like Milk and Scott Smith moving to the Castro. While a purely materialistic lens is not enough to explain Irish Catholic homphobia, the fact that many gay people, especially gay people of Milk's more militant activist stripe, were in fact gentrifiers, is important. We didn't find any record of Dan White complaining about gentrification, but the complaint he expresses in our performance is very much grounded in reality.

8 Penn, Sean. Milk. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Focus Features, 2008. This is a movie directed by Gus Van Sant about Harvey Milk starting with his initial 1973 campaign and going up until the moment he was assassinated. It is, of course, a Hollywood-ized version of his life, but it provided useful background on all of his campaigns and on his relationship with Dan White, as well as on his relationships with Scott Smith and Jack Lira, two of his boyfriends, the former of whom was originally his campaign manager. We have come to the conclusion that this movie severely whitewashes both Milk and White, portraying Milk as far less flamboyant, attention seeking and difficult to work with and White as much less homophobic than in reality.

Reynolds, Andrew. The Children of Harvey Milk: How LGBTQ Politicians Changed the World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Focusing on the widespread influence Harvey Milk has had on global LGBTQ politics in the past two decades, Reynolds manages to concisely hone onto the societal upheaval caused by Milks' election and unfortunate demise. It shows the fact that even after the era of Harvey Milk, his actions continue to have a ripple effect on global affairs. This text provided our group with substantially important aftermath examples of how Harvey Milk truly broke the barrier for LGBTQ politicians to go forth bravely in a forever changing world.

Richter, Miriam. Interview by the author. New York City, NY. November 27, 2019.

Miriam Richter is the education director at the Harvey Milk Foundation. She is very close to Harvey's Nephew Stuart Milk. Talking to her offered an in-person discussion about who Harvey Milk was. She was able to tell us about Maya Angelou's donations to Harvey's campaign, her own experience as a member of the LGBTQ community in relation to Harvey Milk, and she especially mentioned how the movie Milk fails to portray that Harvey had been an activist all of his life. We also learned about the work the Harvey Milk Foundation did, from their travels to other countries to the real-world dangers they face in order to tell Harvey's story and discourage homophobia.

Shilts, Randy. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

This is a book written by Randy Shilts about Harvey Milk and how his childhood and personal life affected his personal and political growth. It discusses his experiences as a gay teenager in New York as well as as an older gay man in both New York and San Francisco. This sheds light on his affinity for younger men and the roles that all of his boyfriends played in bringing him out of the closet and into the limelight. It also tells about how his Jewishness very strongly affected his politics, with some boyfriends even saying he had a persecution complex, a fact that we were unable to include in our final performance due to time constraints. This book helped us with how to structure our dialogue for Milk, having learned much about his personality as well as helping us with general important background knowledge.

9 Smith, Raymond A., and Donald P. Haider-Markel. Gay and Lesbian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002. This book is about gay American history, not Harvey Milk. This makes it a great asset for research because the book only focuses on Milk's place in gay history, and thus contextualizes him. Most of its importance was expanding on the podcast episode also featured in this Bibliography, discussing the nature of the intergender relations and other aspects of the pre-Milk gay community. For instance, it relates Milk to Stonewall, explaining that much of what he did was legitimize and coalesce the movement that Stonewall unleashed. It also discusses what happened after Milk's death: first, it energized gays, giving rise to the largest LGBT protest thitherto in history. Then, in the 1980s, AIDS provided an outlet for that energy by both devestating the gay community and giving it great visibility and urgency, setting the stage for the gay rights movement as it exists today, which has existed roughly since the 1990s. We wanted to focus more on the aftermath of Milk's death--if he, and especially his death, provided a spark for gay galvinization, AIDS provided the kindling--but we had to cut it down because of time constraints. Nonetheless, even if we couldn't make the entirety of it explicit in the performance, the understanding of Milk's place in history the book provided us was invaluable.

The Milk Effect. Directed by Max Geschwind. Los Angeles: Max Geschwind Productions, 2013. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKpeYgeVDDY

This documentary from a 16-year old (something of a kindred spirit to us) features, among other things, a contemporary newsclip of Milk being asked about how well the Briggs Initiative was polling. The defeat of the Briggs Initiative wasn’t just some expected thing that Milk successfully spun—it was an upset, and a real victory. We tried to portray that in Milk’s and Kronenberg’s reaction to the result in our performance.

Weekend Edition Sunday. "40 Years after Assassination of First Openly Gay Elected Official in California." National Public Radio. First broadcast November 25, 2018. Hosted by Sacha Pfeiffer. Written by Scott Schafer. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/25/670631113/40-years-after-the-1978-assassination-of-firs t-openly-gay-elected-official.

This article looks back on Milk through the lens of a few groundbreaking electoral victories by LBGT politicians in the 2018 midterm elections, and by modern-day LGBTQ politicians generally. It shows that an important part of Milk's legacy is the success of gay politicians that it is easy to take for granted today, and also served to verify some details of Milk's career and the aftermath of his assassination.

10 Process Paper

Three of the five members of our group are part of the LGBT community, so our group wanted to learn about a figure who shaped LGBT history. Because of our interest in political history and the presence of a gay presidential candidate, we felt that studying the barrier of

LGBT politicians that Harvey Milk broke was a perfect topic, and that, since four of us are actors, a performance was an appropriate presentation mode.

We began our project with a bunch of contemporary New York Times articles, an especially useful resource due to the newspaper’s extensive accessible archives. We then each read a unique book about Milk so that we could each learn about him through a different lens.

Reading these books, we were struck by several things: one, though Milk had a genuine drive for social justice, he was also attention-seeking, and he had a propensity to hurt those whom he loved, including his partners, one of whom was sixteen when Milk was in his thirties; and two, at the center of Milk’s social justice drive was his Judaism: Holocaust references abound in his speeches, and that was the product of a genuine hatred and fear of bigotry. When he likened John

Briggs and Anita Bryant to Hitler, he wasn’t just doing it to score political points; he really saw them that way, to an extent.

Eventually, we all gathered together to watch the 2008 film Milk, which gave us a Hollywood-ized outline of Milk’s career; its theatricality definitely provided some inspiration to our dramatization. However, the film was not itself an academic historical resource, and we did not use it as such. Not much later, some of us went to the New York Public Library for the

Performing Arts, where we had scheduled a screening of The Times of Harvey Milk. Miriam

11 Richter, the Director of Education and Outreach at the Harvey Milk Foundation, called it the best source on Milk’s career when we interviewed her. The documentary provided similar inspiration to the film, but it showed the movie’s shortcomings and introduced an interesting fact that the film overlooks. For example, it showed that the film whitewashes both Milk and White, portraying the former as easier to work with and the latter as less homophobic than they were.

We had hoped to include this nuance in our script but were limited due to time constraints.

After we felt like we had a good grasp of the story we wanted to tell, we began the script.

Our first draft, however, was 16 minutes long, so we had to make significant cuts to details such as the importance of Milk’s Judaism, the evolution of his political persona, and the less widely-known subtleties of his personality. These were painful cuts to make due to their centrality in Milk’s story, but were needed and created the required concision. After incorporating some critiques from history teacher Dr. Greenwald that focused on clarity and the elimination of fluff, we had our script finalized.

12 NHD PERFORMANCE SCRIPT COVER PAGE

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PERFORMANCE INFORMATION

Project Title Love and Hope: How Harvey Milk Broke the LGBT Barrier in Politics

Student Name(s) Julian Cunningham, Emily Gillies, Maxwell Kahn, Asif Sattar, Jonathan Schneiderman

Division Senior Division

Performance 9 minutes, 45 seconds Runtime

Thesis By breaking the barrier of open homosexuality in public politics, Harvey Milk ushered in a new level of acceptance of and visibility for all LGBT people in public, setting a precedent for many future LGBT politicians to come.

PERFORMANCE OVERALL SCENARIO

Story Setting(s) Timeframe

The Castro District, San Francisco, 1973-1978 California Briggs-Milk Debate San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, 1978

Story Synopsis

Our performance details the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the United States. Having grown up in the 1930s and 1940s as a Jew under the shadow of the Holocaust, he came to realize the value of social justice. After getting more in touch with his homosexual identity working on Broadway in the 1960s, he moved to the Castro, a notable gay neighborhood in San Francisco, with his boyfriend, Scott Smith. He conducted unsuccessful campaigns for the Board of Supervisors in 1973 and 1975, as well as a failed State Senate campaign in 1976. The constant campaigning led to a breakup with Scott and the hiring of a lesbian activist, Anne Kronenberg, as his campaign manager, who further stoked his sense of activism. He gained further fame after giving a speech and calming a protest in response to the anti-LGBT rhetoric of pop singer Anita Bryant. After an electoral change that made Board of Supervisor elections by-district, he was able to be elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, along with a conservative Irish Catholic named Dan White. After Harvey Milk went back on a gentleman’s agreement between him and White, their relationship deteriorated. This included White’s support of the Briggs Initiative, proposed by State Senator John Briggs, which proposed to fire all gay Califorrnia teachers. After a televised debate between Briggs and Milk, Milk managed to garner enough support to reject the initiative, dealing another blow to White, leading to White’s resignation. Ultimately, after Milk and Mayor George Moscone insulted him and refused to undo his resignation, White assassinated the two. Although justice wasn’t truly served to White, Harvey Milk’s legacy extends far beyond the lack of justice dealt to his murderer. The response to his death, and the lax consequences for White, from the gay community helped it band together during the AIDS crisis, and ultimately set the precedent for many gay politicians to come.

CHARACTERS

Character Performance Description/background for the character

Harvey Milk Jonathan The first openly gay person to be elected to public Schneiderman office in the United States. He ran on a progressive platform of resisting all forms of marginalization, serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for less than a year before he was assassinated.

Dan White Julian Harvey Milk’s assassin, a fellow first-term member Cunningham of the board of supervisors. He ran primarily on the strength of his conservative Irish Catholic neighborhood, and was for the Briggs Initiative, which sought to fire all gay California teachers.

Anne Emily Gillies Harvey Milk’s campaign manager for his winning Kronenberg Supervisor Campaign in 1977; a tough lesbian activist.

Anita Bryant Emily Gillies A famous pop singer and anti-LGBT Christian Evangelist activist, she ignited a passion amongst the San Francisco LGBT community.

John Briggs Max Kahn A California State Senator who attempted to ban gay teachers from being allowed jobs. As Harvey directly opposed his initiative, the two would go head to head in televised debates.

Scott Smith Asif Sattar Vital to Harvey Milk’s political campaigns from 1974 to 1977 as his campaign manager; had a serious relationship with Milk for 7 years.

OVERALL STAGE SETTING

Describe the Stage(s) of the Performance Color Use Scheme Add Photo of Stage (if possible)

UPSTAGE is a depiction of the Castro Background Canvas is a neutral beige Camera storefront, with actors in CENTER Design with a window painted on STAGE going behind the set as needed. A the right. Large detachable seat is placed DOWNSTAGE LEFT for ‘CASTRO CAMERA’ sign is hanging from the top of Dan White, DOWNSTAGE CENTER is the canvas. another seat, for Harvey Milk to stand on, and DOWNSTAGE RIGHT is a podium Props Bullhorn, ‘Castro Camera’ with a microphone. sign, Campaign sign #1, Campaign sign #2, campaign flyers, Candles, fake gun, speaker to play auditory details, two glasses and a pitcher of water.

COSTUMES & PROPS BY SCENE Please add or remove costume & props by scene as needed. This is only a template.

Scene # 1

Costume(s) Visual(s) or Costume(s) Set Design & Props Description(s)

Harvey Milk: navy blue suit pants; white Background Two chairs, one center button-up shirt; tan dress shoes, Design stage one diagonal straight-laced, laces tucked in; rainbow lei; upstage left; a large blue denim jacket; red bullhorn; long brown table pushed all the way wig; hair tie. to the back; backdrop with a window painted Dan White: wide-lapeled brown suit; white on and an attachable button-up shirt; broad mustard tie; cognac sign reading “Castro dress shoes, cross-laced, laces out. Camera”

Props Bullhorn, Castro Camera Scott Smith: red flannel button-up shirt, sign unbuttoned; tie-dye t-shirt; faded blue jeans with wide bottoms; sneakers

COSTUMES & PROPS BY SCENE

Scene # 2