# Harvey Milk Born May 22, 1930 in Woodmere, New York; assassinated November 27, 1978 in San Francisco City Hall. **The first openly gay person elected to public office in California**, and one of the first in U.S. history. Milk served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for approximately 11 months between his January 1978 swearing-in and his murder, alongside Mayor [[George Moscone]], by former Supervisor Dan White. ## Political Career Milk ran unsuccessfully for the Board of Supervisors in 1973 and 1975, and for the California State Assembly in 1976, before winning the District 5 seat (Castro / Eureka Valley) in November 1977 — a victory enabled by the city's shift to district-based supervisorial elections, which finally translated the Castro's concentrated gay population into electoral power. In his short tenure, Milk: - **Authored and passed San Francisco's gay-rights ordinance** (April 1978), one of the strongest municipal LGBTQ-protection laws in the country at the time - **Led the campaign against Proposition 6** (the Briggs Initiative), a November 1978 California ballot measure that would have banned gay teachers from public schools. Prop 6 was defeated 58-42, including a critical late endorsement of "No" from former Governor [[Ronald Reagan]] that Milk and allies had aggressively cultivated. This was the **first major statewide electoral defeat of an explicit anti-gay ballot measure in U.S. history** - **Authored the "Hope Speech"** ("You gotta give 'em hope") that has remained the canonical Milk speech in queer political memory ## Assassination Milk and Mayor [[George Moscone]] were shot to death by Dan White on November 27, 1978. White had recently resigned his own seat on the Board of Supervisors, regretted it, and was refused reinstatement by Moscone after Milk lobbied against it. White's defense at trial used what became known as the **"Twinkie defense"** — an argument that junk food had contributed to his diminished capacity — and he was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, serving five years. The verdict triggered the **[[White Night Riots]]** in San Francisco on May 21, 1979. ## Legacy Milk's biography is one of the most-told stories in American queer political history — the subject of the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary *The Times of Harvey Milk* and the Oscar-winning 2008 biopic *Milk* starring Sean Penn. [[President Obama]] posthumously awarded Milk the **Presidential Medal of Freedom** in 2009. The [[U.S. Navy]] named a fleet replenishment oiler the **USNS Harvey Milk** in 2016; in 2025 the Trump administration moved to rename the ship, an attempted symbolic erasure that produced significant backlash. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]]