You should know what the Superbowl is, even if you are not a football fan. You should know what the Mona Lisa is even if you don’t like art. You should know the Kardashian’s 15 minutes are up, even if they don’t.(1)
And as an LGBT person you should know who Harvey Milk is. Just as the name Martin Luther King, Jr. rings a bell or Abraham Lincoln is more than a question on “Jeopardy,” you should know who Harvey Milk is. He is an important historical person.
If at this point your reaction is either, “Zzzzz,” or “CLUNK” as your head hits the desk, I have some good news for you. Harvey was an actual person who is actually kind of interesting.
This is not to say other historical persons were not actual people. John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was fond of swimming naked in the Potomac.(2) You know this makes him a real person, for if you made that up people would declare you either a lunatic or a Republican.
It’s just that when we get to talk about historical people, they are usually so far removed from our actual experience or times, that it’s impossible to know what about them is real and what is not. George Washington, for instance, is said to have slept in literally hundreds of different places in his lifetime. So many, that if you actually add them up it’s very clear he either lived to be 114 years old or he was a gigolo.
I used to think Abraham Lincoln was an actual accessible person. When I was a kid, I felt like I’d met him when I went to Disneyland. Older and wiser, I realize now he was some animatronic robot thing, (though I still think cyber-Abe looks less plastic than a Kardashian). And given how Disney tends to polish off it’s history -- you do know Pocanantas died of smallpox at 22, right? -- I’m not sure how much faith I want to put in Distory.
Even someone as modern as John F. Kennedy I don’t really have any sense of. He was our greatest modern president, after all. Even if that’s only because by being assassinated he didn’t have time to screw it up. Still, I am reasonably sure he pooped like the rest of us, with both feet on the floor. True, he often had Jackie or Marilyn next door -- Who knows, maybe both? -- but he was a human being. Too bad history never tells you that.
That’s why Harvey Milk is such an interesting and easy person to get to know. He was the first openly gay person to be elected to office in California, in 1977. Elected to the Board of Supervisors, he was one of the more powerful politicians in San Francisco. He was also assassinated 11 months after taking office. His death drove forward the LGBT movement in San Francisco and eventually the rest of the country -- and that’s the long and Wikipedia of it.(3)
If you know nothing else, you should know that.
But you should know more than that, because what’s the point of just being informed when you can actually be intelligent? I ask this not because I presume you’re not intelligent, but because until I went to San Francisco a while back, I have to admit I didn’t know much, either.
Like a lot of people, what I know about Harvey Milk stems from reading a few internet articles and seeing a thing or two on TV. No, I didn’t think he went to the bathroom always standing up, or slept in every hotel in New England. But having the chance to visit The Castro in San Francisco, I see Harvey differently having literally followed his footsteps.
Part of it is getting to visit the places he called home -- literally. Standing in the very space where he made history and lunch, you realize he was a normal guy, just like lots of normal people you already know.
He owned a camera shop, and even though it is now The Human Rights Campaign Action Center & Store, you can appreciate what it must have been like to try out all the old cameras, when the tell-tale “click” was more than a sound effect. True, thumbing through HRC T-shirts doesn’t have quite the excitement of finding the perfect camera. But finding the last rainbow teddy bear buried on a table isn’t too bad either.(4) (It’s for my daughter, I swear.)
Out front, you can look up and see Harvey’s apartment, which sat atop his store. It’s still a private residence today, with a mural of Harvey looking out of a window painted on the wall. Touristy? Sure, although if that’s the kind of thing that isn’t your thing, just look down at your feet. Some of Harvey’s ashes are there under a plaque, along with those of his dog.
You gotta love a guy who loves his dog.
This is not to say Harvey Milk was only some ordinary guy. When he was awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, President Barack Obama, noted, “In the brief time in which he spoke and ran and led, his voice stirred the aspirations of millions of people."(5) I have never stirred the voices of millions of people. Heck, I can’t get more than a dozen to read my Facebook page on some days.
Harvey Milk also knew he lived dangerously. In one speech he said: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet also destroy every closet door.”(5)
There were so many things that made Harvey different than the rest of us. If you want to know more about those things I encourage you to look into the mission of the Harvey Milk Foundation, watch the film “Milk” or check out “‘Gotta Give 'Em Hope': The Legacy Of Harvey Milk.”(6)(7) They’ll both give you a much better idea of Harvey and his amazing impact on LGBT people.
But if the purpose of this is to remember who Harvey Milk was, I think it’s just as important to remember that he was a real guy just like us, even if he did amazing things.
And that maybe people like you and I can do those things, too.
References:
1) If you don’t know what 15 minutes I’m talking about, well, you should know that, too.
Wikipedia: 15 Minutes of Fame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_minutes_of_fame
2) Listverse: 44 Curious Facts About US Presidents
http://listverse.com/2012/10/24/44-curious-facts-about-us-presidents/
3) Wikipedia: Harvey Milk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk
4) The Human Rights Campaign Action Center & Store - San Francisco, CA
https://shop.hrc.org/san-francisco-hrc-store
5) Legends & Legacies: Harvey Milk
http://www.legacy.com/news/legends-and-legacies/harvey-milk/1710/
6) Harvey Milk Foundation: About
http://milkfoundation.org/about/
7) 'Gotta Give 'Em Hope': The Legacy Of Harvey Milk
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96865519