It’s hard to conceive of just how monumental Milk’s 1977 election was in 2019 terms. Openly LGBT individuals have now
held some form of elected office in all 50 states, the last midterm election brought a
“a rainbow wave” of advancements, and Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, is in the field of contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination.
But the late 1970s were a time of radical gay activism and conservative crusades. This was the age of
Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children”campaign and the
Briggs Initiative, a California ballot measure that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.
“If you just look at those two efforts that were happening during the time, they were hugely powerful culturally in California and across the U.S.,” said
Terry Beswick, the executive director of the
GLBT Historical Society and museum in San Francisco. “But they also really empowered gay people. They raised the visibility of people like Harvey Milk.”
Beswick’s Castro museum, which has a permanent exhibit on Milk, is the first stand-alone museum of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history and culture in the United States. The collection includes the blood-stained suit that Milk was wearing the day he was gunned down at San Francisco City Hall.
Knowing of threats to his life, Milk sat down in the back room of his Castro Street camera store just 10 days after he was elected in 1977 to tape-record his will. The museum exhibit is set up so that visitors can listen to that recording, in which Milk talks about what his intentions are in the event of his assassination, while looking at the suit.
Beswick described how he recently took Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of the presidential candidate, on a tour of the museum. The two men paused in front of the suit. “In that moment, I was just thinking about giving him a brief look at Harvey Milk,” Beswick remembered. But when he stepped back to allow Buttigieg to listen to the recording, he recalls thinking, “Ah, what did I just do.”
“I could see the tears in his eyes and I was thinking, he’s got to be thinking about the risk that his husband is taking, even by running for president,” Beswick said, explaining that although San Francisco is “a bit of a queer cultural bubble,” that isn’t the case in the rest of the country.
After Buttigieg finished listening to the recording, he turned to Beswick and said, “This is why we do what we do.”
“That could mean so many things, but for me what it meant was
this is why we hear our history, so that people think about the juxtaposition of the history with today’s current events,” Beswick recalled.
Later, I asked Beswick if he had ever imagined living in an a time where we’d not only see an openly gay man running for president, but pushback that that openly gay candidate was
too establishment.
He laughed. “In some ways, it feels like we have arrived,” he said. “The thing about the queer community is that we are as diverse as the rest of the culture.”
And now,
here’s what’s happening across California:
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