Milk was born May 22, 1930, in Woodmere, New York, and grew up in a middle-class Jewish home on Long Island. Milk was aware of his sexual orientation from an early age. His biographer Randy Shilts has written that Milk's first homosexual experiences were as a teenager in the "standing-room-only" balcony section at matinee opera performances in Manhattan.

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Milk graduated from Albany State College in 1951, and he intended to become a high school teacher. Shortly after graduation, however, Milk entered the U. S. Navy, where he served on active duty during the Korean War. He trained as a deep-sea diver, and advanced to the rank of chief petty officer on the U.S.S. Kittiwake.

Milk was proud of his military service, and wore a brass belt buckle bearing his Navy insignia until the day he died. After Milk entered politics, a rumor circulated that he had been dishonorably discharged from the military when his homosexuality was discovered, but this was untrue.

Milk worked in the insurance and financial services industries in the 1950s and 1960s. Except for a brief period living in Dallas, Texas, Milk's life during these years was centered in New York, where he maintained an apartment on the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Central Park.

He was an avid patron of the arts, particularly opera and theater. This avocational interest, coupled with his financial experience, led to his becoming an associate producer for several Broadway and off-Broadway productions in the late 1960s, including Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar. Milk's lover in the later 1960s, Joe Campbell, a member of the Andy Warhol crowd, achieved pop cultural fame as "Sugar Plum Fairy" in Lou Reed's classic rock song, "Walk on the Wild Side."

Milk in San Francisco

When Harvey Milk traveled to San Francisco with the touring company of Hair in the early 1970s, he fell in love with what was to become his adopted city. By the time he moved there in 1972, Milk had experienced a counter-cultural awakening, and he threw himself into San Francisco's burgeoning post-Stonewall gay liberation scene. He replaced his Brooks Brothers suits with Guatemalan peasant shirts and ripped blue jeans, and opened a camera store on Castro Street, in the heart of San Francisco's new gay enclave.

Milk wholly embraced the new militant gay sensibility, and his decision to move to San Francisco was motivated in part by his desire to "come out" and live in society as an openly gay man. He also wanted to bring the politics of gay pride to City Hall, and began to think about a career in politics almost as soon as he arrived in San Francisco.

Milk was initially regarded as an upstart maverick by San Francisco's established gay community, as well as by the local political establishment, but against all expectations he succeeded in mobilizing gay voters and eventually winning election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The secret of Milk's eventual electoral success was his intuitive grasp of grass-roots activism, combined with a flair for grand theatrical gestures and a great deal of hard work to organize the Castro neighborhood as a political and economic force. Milk founded the Castro Valley Association to represent the needs of small business owners, and launched the first annual Castro Street Fair in 1974. By the later 1970s, the Castro's economy was generating nearly $30 million a year.

Milk also forged pioneering alliances between the gay community and organized labor. In addition, he cast himself in the role of a populist champion representing San Francisco's dense patchwork of ethnically diverse neighborhoods against the interests of downtown corporate culture.

Milk first ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1973, finishing well out of the race in tenth place, with approximately 17,000 votes. He finished seventh in a race with six vacant seats in 1975, when he received more than 52,000 votes. After an unsuccessful bid for the California State Assembly, Milk finally won a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 1977.

A critical factor in his victory was a shift, which he helped orchestrate, from citywide to district elections, which allowed Milk to capitalize on his immense visibility and popularity in the heavily gay Castro neighborhood and its environs.

When Harvey Milk was inaugurated on January 9, 1978, it represented an important symbolic, as well as practical, accomplishment for the gay movement. That day, he and tens of thousands of his supporters marched down Market Street, San Francisco's main commercial thoroughfare, from the Castro to City Hall.

Success and Tragedy

Milk's tenure in office was tragically short-lived. On November 27, 1978, after serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for only 11 months, Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled former Supervisor who had resigned in opposition to the recent passage of Milk's only significant piece of legislation, a landmark gay rights ordinance.

White crawled in through a basement window at City Hall to avoid the metal detectors; he walked into the Mayor's office and shot Moscone at point-blank range; then he reloaded his gun and walked down the corridor to kill Milk.

Milk's fate at the hands of an assassin was not entirely unexpected, given the violence and that have characterized American politics. Milk himself was haunted by the possibility of assassination. He tape recorded several versions of his political will, which he labeled "to be read in the event of my assassination." One of the tapes included the following statement: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."

White, who had been a police officer before entering politics, was convicted not of premeditated murder, as had been widely expected, but of the lesser crime of manslaughter, the result of what is now referred to as the "twinkie defense." White's attorney argued that the defendant could not be held accountable for his actions due to the amount of junk food he had eaten on the day of the crimes.

When White was sentenced on May 21, 1979 to less than eight years in prison, enraged citizens, sensing a conspiracy, swarmed City Hall in what came to be known as the White Night Riots. San Francisco suffered more than $1 million in damages to city property, including rows of police cars set on fire by angry protesters. Later that night, the police staged a retaliatory raid on the Castro, where they vandalized gay businesses and beat passers-by on the street. (White was paroled after serving six years in prison and committed suicide shortly thereafter.)

The Legacy of Harvey Milk

In the years since his untimely death, Harvey Milk--known to his friends as a secular, lusty, hard-drinking, party animal--has been transformed into an almost saintly martyr for the gay liberation struggle. As gay writer Andrew Epstein has noted, this transformation has occurred with good reason; Harvey Milk represents "our Kennedy, our King, our Malcolm X. Our bullet."

In the years since his life was brutally cut short, the presence of Harvey Milk has continued to be felt. In the year following his death, 100,000 people marched on the nation's capitol in support of gay and lesbian civil rights, chanting "Harvey Milk Lives." His successor on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harry Britt, an openly gay man running as Milk's political heir, was the only incumbent to win in the city election subsequent to the assassinations.

There is a Harvey Milk High School for at-risk glbtq students in New York, as well as the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy elementary school in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood, where both the MUNI public transit station and the branch library have been named in his honor. An annual candlelight march down Market Street commemorates the date of Milk's assassination.

Milk's life and legacy have been the subject of a specially-commissioned opera, as well as numerous books and films, including Randy Shilts's The Mayor of Castro Street (1982) and Rob Epstein and Richard Schmeichen's Academy Award-winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (1983).

Boycotts, the refusal to patronize companies or institutions, have in recent decades been organized by glbtq rights advocates to protest discriminatory practices and policies.

The queer community has used documentary film to resurrect historical memory and to permit the marginalized to bear witness, as well as to build an image base that reflects our diversity and counters distorted representations.

In the United States, glbtq candidates have achieved some significant successes at the ballot box in the last three decades, running for and winning local, state, and national elections.

Since cinema began, Hollywood has been fascinated with finding ways of representing homosexuality.

Violence perpetrated against people thought by their attackers to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered occurs with disturbing frequency in the United States and other countries.

Marches on Washington in support of the rights of glbtq people have been a significant part of the modern movement for equality.

Opera, an eclectic synthesis of voice, drama, music, costume, visual arts and spectacle, has played an integral role in queer culture since its development in seventeenth century Venice.

Early in the gay rights movement activists challenged organized labor to broaden its struggle against discrimination to include sexual identity; consequently labor unions became some of the first mainstream organizations to call for equal rights.

Both parades and marches have served to render the glbtq community visible; whereas marches typically attempt to effect political change, parades and pride events affirm identity and community.

San Francisco has enjoyed a reputation as a "gay mecca" since World War II.

Photographer Crawford Barton captured the blossoming of an openly gay culture in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s.

Publisher David Goodstein transformed The Advocate into the leading American gay newsmagazine.

Activist Cleve Jones is best known as the originator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, but his life as a gay man has always been firmly interwoven with his life as a political organizer.

Prolific Jewish femme lesbian-feminist writer of poetry, fiction, and children's books, Leslèa Newman draws on her own multiple identities to describe the complex tapestry that results when a variety of identities are woven together.

A dedicated lesbian activist in the early years of the gay liberation movement, Elaine Noble made history as the first openly gay candidate elected to a state-level office when she won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1974.

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, bisexual rock musician Lou Reed, pencil-thin, craggy, and dressed in tough leather or androgynous glitz, came to symbolize the rebellious outsider.

Randy Shilts pioneered as an openly gay journalist in the 1970s and 1980s and was an astute interpreter of the various issues affecting American gay men and lesbians.

Film director and producer Bryan Singer overturns standard narrative formulae and develops complex characters; he consistently emphasizes the fluidity and ambiguity of identity categories, including those pertaining to gender and sexuality.

Although Andy Warhol is generally remembered either for a single film--Sleep (1963)--or for works that he did not actually direct, his contribution to gay cinema is incalculable.

Prolific film, television, and stage producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron have created a diverse body of work, including a number of theatrical films and television features with glbtq themes.