Harvey Milk worked on Barry Goldwater's campaign before becoming a gay icon
Harvey Milk spent his thirties as a buttoned-up Wall Street researcher who kept his private life hidden and even recruited volunteers for conservative Barry Goldwater. A decade later he was a long-haired camera-shop owner on Castro Street, and in 1977 he became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California.
Born on 22 May 1930 in Woodmere, on Long Island, Milk grew up in a Jewish household; his grandfather, a Yiddish-speaking peddler from Lithuania, had helped organise the town's first synagogue. He studied mathematics at the New York State College for Teachers in Albany, then served in the Navy as a diving officer during the Korean War. In 1955 he was pushed out with an other than honorable discharge rather than face a court-martial over his homosexuality.
Years of drifting followed: teaching on Long Island, stock analysis in Manhattan, research at the firm Bache and Company. The change came through theatre. Milk arrived in San Francisco in 1969 with the touring company of Hair, was fired from an investment firm the next year for refusing to cut his long hair, and worked as an aide in Tom O'Horgan's company in New York, where a New York Times profile described him as an aging hippie. In March 1973, after a local shop ruined a roll of his film, he and his partner Scott Smith spent their final 1,000 dollars starting their own camera business on Castro Street.
The city he chose had a large gay population, many of them men expelled from the military after the Second World War, and heavy policing: in 1971 there were 2,800 arrests of gay men for public sex in San Francisco against 63 in New York. Milk ran for supervisor in 1973 and lost, meeting resistance from the established gay political groups, and styled himself the Mayor of Castro Street in later races. A switch to neighbourhood-based districts helped him win in 1977.
In almost eleven months in office he sponsored a bill barring discrimination by sexual orientation in housing, jobs and public accommodations, which passed 11 to 1 and was signed by Mayor George Moscone. On 27 November 1978 both men were killed by Dan White, the former supervisor who had cast the lone vote against it. Milk received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2009.
Source: Harvey Milk
