A Specter at the Feast of St. Harvey

For a politician, getting murdered is an excellent career move. San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was born 85 years ago today, was murdered in 1978 along with Mayor George Moscone.

Moscone is now usually only mentioned in relation to Milk, who has become an iconic figure, and in 2009 was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Why? Because he was the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the U.S., and he was murdered. If he had lived, he would most likely have been forgotten.

Milk’s murder was awful, as was Moscone’s, as is any murder. But there was nothing remarkable about Harvey Milk except for the circumstances of his death. He was an ordinary, opportunistic politician, and he wasn’t particularly liberal; a fiscal conservative, he was liberal on the issues that affected him personally, and so he was strong on gay rights and marijuana legalization.

He is now widely regarded as a gay martyr, the victim of a homophobic killer. The riots that followed the light sentence his killer received are widely regarded as gay riots. This is historical fiction.

The facts: Dan White, who had recently resigned as a Supervisor because it didn’t pay well enough, was not motivated by homophobia (Moscone wasn’t gay), but by anger over his own failing political career. The riots, though started by gay people angry over what had happened, and demanding “vengeance for Harvey Milk,” couldn’t have escalated the way they did if not for a wider and deeper anger. People don’t riot because of the killing of an elected official — they riot because they’re impoverished, afraid, angry, and, most likely, bored.

This was the case with a heterosexual man I talked to who was arrested for torching a police car that night. “I didn’t care about Harvey Milk,” he told me. “I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his opposition to minimum wage. It wasn’t a gay riot. It was a poor people’s riot.”

So it is with every riot. And, while Harvey Milk’s election is an inspiring part of history, and his death a tragedy, the rest of the history of that time and place has largely been eclipsed by hagiography.