Never-Changing Times

This post was submitted by soon-to-be-frequent contributor Philip Clark.

Two events occur simultaneously: I read Randy Shilts’s biography The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk and I read blog postings on The New Gay bashing the Human Rights Campaign. I needn’t summarize the arguments against HRC posted on this site: you can easily enough reference the posts yourself. But having finished Shilts’s astute biography of Milk, a tricky and controversial politician turned martyr, my reaction to the arguments was: Yawn. Same shit, different year.

That’s not to say the shit isn’t still sticky when you step in it. Let’s take a look...

In 1977, Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, the first openly gay politician to be elected in the United States. A year later, both he and San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, were assassinated by Milk’s fellow supervisor, Dan White, who was given the lightest possible sentence for the crime. All this is rather well-known history; it is chronicled very effectively in the Oscar-winning documentary film The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). It should achieve renewed and even wider renown when Sean Penn’s Hollywoodization of the story hits the screens this December.

Where Shilts’ biography of Milk transcends the movies, though, is that it vividly illustrates why gay politics haven’t changed much in the past 30 years and probably never will. Whether or not you would go so far as to say that HRC is an organization of pandering mainstreamers that wastes contributions on high salaries and lavish parties, it is undeniable that they are eager to achieve acceptance for gays – at least gays who fit one particular image – from the hetero-dominated national political structure. Harvey Milk was also looking to take gay rights to the national stage, as he spent time during his year in office making plans for a gay rights march in Washington similar to the African American civil rights march of 1963. But as Shilts shows, Milk was most interested in ensuring that gays in San Francisco were free from beatings by both gay-bashers and the police, couldn’t be fired for their sexual orientation, and would achieve enough visibility to serve as inspiration and hope for “those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvania’s.”

Milk agitated – loudly and frequently – for more openly gay politicians, for acceptance of all types of gays and lesbians, for local, neighborhood organizing that could change individual lives quickly, rather than waiting years for the national political scene to make concessions to sexual minorities. He spent much of his time in San Francisco politics fighting against timid, upper-middle-class gays who begged handouts from the power structure; who continued to support supposedly-liberal politicians who demanded gay votes while allowing anti-gay initiatives to pass; who told Milk that his brashness in dealing with the political elite would only push further back the efforts on behalf of middle-class gay rights. In looking at the Human Rights Campaign thirty years after Milk’s death, does any of this sound familiar? It’s hard not to think that Harvey Milk would have hated HRC. If the purpose of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s was to ensure the safety of drag queens and gay youth rather than, say, to provide opportunities for middle-class gays to be able to dress in suits and be smiled at by politicians, and if HRC is now the main gay political group in the country, then the gay liberation movement has lost its purpose and its soul.

Milk and his policies were denounced and despised by many mainstream gays, a fact largely forgotten by the martyr status he gained upon his murder. The tension between groups like HRC and more radical gay activists mirrors the same arguments that Harvey Milk had with his detractors. If thirty years of history is any indication, there is no way to bridge that gap and ever achieve a coherent gay rights movement.