Hidden History is my Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in the gay and lesbian past.
A short while ago, TNG’s Michael received an e-mail from a gentleman on the West Coast. He hoped that Michael might be able to answer a question about a poster the man owned. The poster, issued by the Washington D.C.-based organization Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists, featured a quote attributed to gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk. Prophetically predicting his own assassination, Milk recorded audio tapes in which he laid forth his desires for what would happen in the event of his death, what Milk biographer Randy Shilts calls a kind of “political will.” This man’s poster attributes to Milk the quote, as regards funerals or memorials after his death, “I want nothing even smacking, or smelling or hinting of religion.”
The gentleman wanted proof of authenticity, that Milk had actually said what GALAH claimed he did on its poster. “I LOVE IT, but I can’t find any proof that he said that. Can you help me?” he asked. “Believe me, if it’s real, I’ll put it up in BIG LETTERS in my window for xmas!”
As I am the nominal historian for TNG’s merry band, Michael threw the query my way. But while I tried, I was ultimately unable to answer the man’s question with any degree of certainty. I failed, but can something still be learned from a search that failed?
Like I tell the students to whom, as a librarian, I teach research: Google is a powerful tool, but it isn’t enough. It can’t solve everything. With quotations, though, it isn’t a bad place to start. This is especially true with modern or marginalized figures. As well known as Harvey Milk may be in the gay community, as well known as he will become to wider audiences with the biopic recently released in theatres, he is not a likely figure to show up in Bartlett’s Quotations.
Several quick searches using Milk’s name and parts of the quotation yield little. In the comments section of a blog posting on the liberal Huffington Post, someone quotes Milk as having said the words, but there’s simply no way to verify the accuracy. With much more famous quotations than this, there are often attribution problems: who first said it? did someone else repeat it, and did their saying it become better known than the original? have a person’s words been misquoted? has a quotation been mistakenly or intentionally attributed to the wrong person?
Just because it’s published—online or on a poster—doesn’t ensure its accuracy. With their broad storage and access capabilities, search engines frequently become a massive version of the childhood game “Telephone.” As the words are posted, passed around, reposted, jotted down, and passed around again offline, information becomes a tangle, and unknotting it a struggle.
My next step was to try to contact the Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists; presumably someone at their organization could answer questions about the poster. Their website was easy to find, but all evidence points to its being maintained without being updated. The organization appears to have been headquartered in Washington D.C. at 1718 M St. NW, with GALAH outposts in Los Angeles and San Francisco. With dead external links, its most recent newsletter from 2000, and no signs of any life after the summer of 2002, though, the website yields no current information. My attempts to e-mail GALAH also failed to bear fruit. The organization could hardly be called ephemeral: it seems to have lasted for at least seven years. It protested against the anti-gay Promise Keepers and President Bush’s discriminatory faith-based initiatives, decried the Boy Scouts’ homophobia and exclusionary practices, and endorsed a boycott against Exxon-Mobil for repealing its own non-discrimination and domestic partnership policies, among other prominent actions. But its own website makes its continued existence seem doubtful, and secondary information about it is scanty.
Having struck out online, I turned to good ol’, old-school print resources. Remembering that Randy Shilts’s biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, had reprinted Milk’s “political will,” I pulled my copy off the shelf. There, I found the lengthiest statement I have seen from Harvey Milk as regards religion:
I hope there are no religious services. I would hope that there are no services of any type, but I know some people are into that and you can't prevent it from happening, but my God, nothing religious. Until the churches speak out against the Anita Bryants who have been playing gymnastics with the Bible, the churches which remain so quiet have the guts to speak out in the name of Judaism or Christianity or whatever they profess to be for in words but not actions and deeds. God--and that's the irony, God--churches don't even know what it's about. I would turn over in my grave if there was any kind of religious ceremony. And it's not a disbelief in God--it's a disbelief and disgust of what most churches are about. How many leaders got up in their pulpits and went to Miami and said, "Anita, you're playing gymnastics with the Bible--you're desecrating the Bible"? How many of them said it? How many of them hid and walked away? Ducked their heads in the name of Christianity and talked about love and brotherhood.
Where does this leave us? Certainly, Milk was virulently opposed to those figures in organized religion who did not have the courage to support equal rights for all, who could not find it in themselves to practice what they preached. There’s no evidence from this transcript, though, that the quote GALAH placed on their poster came from Milk’s “political will.”
But wait: information Randy Shilts includes with the transcript of the tape prevents any clear conclusion at all. As Shilts notes, Milk left behind three different tapes with three different people, and because “Milk spoke from only a bare-bones outline when he recorded the tapes,” each tape has differences in its wording; even whole sentences are included or dropped based on the version. For example, only one version includes Milk’s most famous quote, his desire that “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” Shilts chose the tape left with Milk’s one-time attorney, Walter Caplan, as “the best worded of the testaments,” but given Milk’s distaste for organized religion, another of the three copies could include the statement from GALAH’s poster.
Although it is something I have known for a while, what has become even more clear to me through this search is how ephemeral GLBT history can be. Harvey Milk is both a recent historical figure and a well-known one, particularly for a gay or lesbian person. His life has been documented in at least one biography, two films (including a documentary), many videotapes of speeches, and countless articles. Identifying his specific words, though, can be tricky. Tracing the history and contributions of lesser-known GLBT organizations like GALAH becomes even harder.
How to solve this problem? I believe it is the responsibility of every GLBT person to serve as an informal community historian. Support gay and lesbian archives and historical groups. Save brochures and programs from organizations and events. Write about the things we have seen and done. Even print out e-mails that seem like they might be significant to a future year. No one will preserve our history for us. We are the historians who must make it happen.
Author’s Notes: I plan to attempt to track down the other two versions of Harvey Milk’s “political will” in hopes of finding a definitive answer to the question posed at the column’s outset. Spliced portions of Milk reading part of one of the wills is available on YouTube. Please contact me at philipclark@hotmail.com or place a comment on this blog if you have any more information about the quotation “I want nothing even smacking, smelling or hinting of religion" or about the GALAH organization. This column is the first of a prospective series examining the history behind famous GLBT quotations.
For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.
Next week: TNG will be on hiatus, as will this column. But in the new year, look for pieces about Al Gore's connection to a gay poet; the fabulous '40s through the eyes of Lisa Ben; violent gay protest; and new editions of the Reading Roundup and Queer Quotes.
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I wrote this during the short time I lived in New York and took the Q train back and forth to work. New York subways are so huge that they have a separate driver and conductor, and the conductor on one particular train had a Middle Eastern-sounding accent so thick that no one could understand the station stops he was announcing.
