What Really Made Harvey Milk an Icon Worth Emulating

When Harvey Milk was elected 47 years ago this November, he became one of the first openly gay people in public office. With a seat on the San Francisco board of supervisors—essentially the city council—Milk was viewed as a promising political force. His career was cut short just over a year after his election, when he was murdered alongside the then-mayor of San Francisco by a homophobic political rival out to settle a personal score. Today, he is one of the most recognizable gay icons of the 20th century. But his story has been sanitized and sanded down to blurb size over the years, such that mainstream mentions of his life rarely capture much of who he actually was.

I didn’t know a lot about Milk beyond the broad strokes of his brief political career before I started reporting Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs, the latest season of Slate’s narrative history podcast. It wasn’t clear to me whether he’d become a gay rights icon primarily because of his martyring or because he was truly a singular leader. After spending seven months immersed in the story of the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 ballot proposition that would have banned gay teachers from California public schools—which Milk made his name organizing against—I have a much deeper understanding of the man whose name now graces a U.S.
Navy ship and an airport terminal at SFO. I learned, from first-hand accounts, that scores of young queer San Franciscans really did see him as a once-in-a-generation leader who gave them new hope for a brighter gay future, and that he was a natural politician in the purest sense, with a talent for building coalitions, solving problems, and making people feel heard. But I also realized that part of what made Harvey Milk special is that, by most conventional and tangible measures, he wasn’t special at all.

Milk’s young adulthood was a microcosm of gay life in mid-century America. He left the military with a “less than honorable” discharge after a superior discovered he was gay. One night in 1956, when Milk was 25, he was arrested in Miami along with seven other gay men in what a local police sergeant called a “routine crackdown on perverts.” He got a job teaching, but quit after a year, likely due to a fear that he’d be outed. Gay sex was illegal in all 50 states at that time, and teaching licenses were not doled out to criminals.

Milk tried out a slew of different jobs in his 20s and 30s. He worked retail, became an insurance actuary, got into finance, and was even an assistant producer of a Broadway play, which flopped. At the time, Milk was a Republican, and he became an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater. Though Milk had dated a prominent activist, Craig Rodwell, he was skeptical of and indifferent to the early stirrings of a movement for gay rights.

But his politics began to shift in the late 1960s, with the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He moved to San........

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