This year marks the 40th anniversary of both Harvey Milk’s swearing in at the Board of Supervisors (January of 1978) in San Francisco and his death. Despite his short career in politics, Milk has become an icon in San Francisco and a martyr in the LGBT community.
His most famous talking points became known as the “Hope Speech,” which became a staple throughout his political career. It opened with a play on the accusation that gay people recruit impressionable youth: “My name is Harvey Milk — and I want to recruit you.” A version of the Hope Speech that he gave near the end of his life was considered by his friends and aides to be the best, and the closing the most effective:
“And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvania’s and the Richmond, Minnesota’s who are coming out and hear Anita Bryant in television and her story. The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us’es, the us’es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone”Harvey Milk
Harvey Milk believed that government should represent individuals, not just downtown interests, and should insure equality for all citizens while providing needed services. He spoke for the participation of LGBT people and other minorities in the political process. The more gay people who came out of the closet, he believed, the more their families and friends would support protections for their equal rights.
Although Milk had not come out to his mother before her death many years before, in his final statement during his taped prediction of his assassination, he urged others to do so:
“I cannot prevent anyone from getting angry, or mad, or frustrated. I can only hope that they’ll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that two, three, four, five hundred will step forward, so the gay doctors will come out, the gay lawyers, the gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects … I hope that every professional gay will say ‘enough,’ come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help.”
The life and career of Harvey Milk have been the subjects of an opera, books, and films including the 2008 drama Milk, which received eight Academy Award nominations, winning Best Actor and Best Screenplay.
In August 2009, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the gay rights movement.
On May 22, 2014, on what would have been Harvey’s 84th birthday, the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp honoring Harvey Milk, the first openly LGBT political official to receive this honor.
On April 3, 2018, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved naming Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport.
In the years since Milk’s assassination, public opinion has shifted on gay marriage, gays in the military, and other issues, and there have been hundreds of openly LGBT public officials in America, yet the work continues.
Milk may have only served less than a year in public office, but his life profoundly changed a city, state, nation and a global community. His courage, passion and sense of justice rocked a country and stirred the very core of a put-down and pushedout community, bringing forward new hope and a new vision of freedom.
Harvey Milk’s dream for a better tomorrow, filled with the hope for equality and a world without hate, continues to motivate advocacy and action in a new generation.
