The Resurrection of Harvey Milk

Cleve Jones has a clear memory from the day his mentor was gunned down in San Francisco’s City Hall in 1978. “In my heart, I believed the gay rights movement was over,” he says. But by the time the sun had set that sorrowful day, “tens of thousands of men, women, and children of every age, race, and background were marching with their candles down Market Street, and I realized the movement wasn’t over at all. It was just beginning.”

While most people were shocked by news of the assassination, it likely wouldn’t have come as a surprise to Harvey Milk. In the last year of his life, the San Francisco supervisor recorded a final testament to be played in the event that he was killed -- an effort at self-preservation that the new movie Milk depicts in several scenes, showing Sean Penn as the politician reciting the events of his life at his kitchen table in the Castro.

Director Gus Van Sant’s moving biopic -- opening across the country in late November and early December -- offers a fresh look at the pioneering leader and his contributions to politics and community organizing 30 years after his death. That’s what everyone will be talking about, and rightfully so. But given the huge impact of his short life—he was 48 years old when aggrieved former supervisor Dan White murdered him and then-mayor George Moscone -- and the tumultuous events of the next three decades, it’s hard not to wonder: What if Harvey Milk hadn’t been killed?

“It may be my biased opinion,” Milk’s speechwriter Frank M. Robinson says, “but I believe that Harvey would’ve ended up as a major political force in this country.”

Alas, we’ll never know. But in talking to some of Milk’s closest friends, campaign aides, allies, and observers (including his nephew Stuart), The Advocate pulled together the likeliest possibilities for the life that could have been.

Although he died penniless -- “in debt up to his ears,” recalls one friend -- Milk was on a seemingly limitless trajectory in 1978. After three unsuccessful campaigns for office, he’d been elected to San Francisco’s board of supervisors the previous year, becoming the first openly gay person elected to any high-profile office in the country. He held the office for only 11 months, but in that time Milk became a City Hall player: He molded the gay community into a united voting bloc, and his populist agenda -- which attracted straight families, working-class voters, and senior citizens -- gave him to a powerful base. Though he and Moscone were initially cautious with one another, they quickly became close allies.

“He was such a neighborhood organizer,” says Sally Miller Gearhart, one of the first out lesbians in the nation to become a tenured professor. Gearhart worked closely with Milk to defeat the infamous Briggs Initiative, the statewide ballot proposition that would’ve barred gay and lesbian teachers from public schools. “He really did listen to lots of people. He really did believe in diversity. He was more than just a supervisor.”

Tory Hartmann, a longtime Democratic Party worker whose husband served as Milk’s treasurer on two campaigns, says, “Moscone was a nice guy, but Harvey could galvanize people. He was like a lightning rod -- he had the electricity in him.”

Nearly a year in office, Milk introduced two successful pieces of legislation. One was an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The other -- less noble but politically shrewd nevertheless -- was a “pooper-scooper” law requiring people to clean up after their dogs. Its passage attracted every media outlet in town and established Milk as a man of the people. But it was the defeat of the Briggs Initiative -- which Milk protested up and down the California coast, debating conservative state senator John Briggs on television and in town hall meetings -- that placed him on a larger stage and earned him a windfall of political capital.