For Pride: Remember the Little Guys

In case you know the name but don’t know the legend: Milk was the city’s first out gay supervisor--at a time before Brokeback Mountain or Will and Grace, a time when it wasn’t chic even in San Francisco to be out and queer. After a few tries, Milk, a queer activist who ran a camera store on Castro Street, was elected supervisor in 1977. He was murdered a year later (along with Mayor George Moscone) by ex-cop and fellow supervisor Dan White.

The city has had a love affair with Milk ever since. Among other things, Milk has a MUNI stop, a school and a rec center named after him. An annual Milk March and a dinner are organized every year by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club to honor the man whose name is, in many ways, synonymous with gay pride in San Francisco.

In this country we tend to honor a single individual for his or her accomplishments but forget that the person didn’t pop out of a vacuum. Milk was a product of his times. Without the groundwork laid by thousands of other individuals in the homophile and gay liberation movements, Milk might have stayed in New York and continued producing theater instead of moving here and opening a camera store on Castro Street.

The gay movement grew out of the Communist Party of the late 40s. In 1948, Harry Hay, a labor organizer, made the call for a movement dedicated to queer rights. The result was the Mattachine Foundation, as it was called, which formed in the winter of 1950 in Los Angeles. The group of brave men who gathered for those first meetings couldn’t know that they were creating a movement that would eventually topple the country’s sodomy laws (June, 2003), which for hundreds of years kept all of our collective genitals prisoners of an archaic Judeo-Christian tradition.

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