Harvey Milk: The Camera Shop Owner Who Changed Gay Politics Forever

On May 22, 1930, a kid named Harvey Bernard Milk was born in Woodmere, New York. Forty-seven years later, he became one of the first openly gay people in American history to win an election to public office. Eleven months after that, he was murdered inside San Francisco City Hall. His life lasted only 48 years. The movement he sparked outlived him by decades, and his birthday is now Harvey Milk Day in California, a state holiday. This is the story of how a camera shop owner from Castro Street changed what was possible for queer Americans.

From Long Island to the Navy to Wall Street

Harvey grew up middle class and Jewish in a town on the south shore of Long Island. He was tall, awkward, and a class clown. By his own later accounts, he knew he was gay as a teenager but kept it buried. That was the 1940s. There was no other option that felt safe.

He went to college at the New York State College for Teachers in Albany, then joined the Navy in 1951 during the Korean War. He served as a diving instructor at a naval base in San Diego. The version of events Milk himself told for years was that the Navy interrogated him about his sexuality and pushed him out with an "other than honorable" discharge. His Navy records, released after his death, actually show an honorable discharge. The truth is somewhere in the middle. He was questioned about being gay. He resigned rather than face a court martial. The story he later told fit the political moment he was making.

The next 15 years of Milk's life looked nothing like what came after. He moved back to New York, worked as a high school teacher, then took a job as a stock analyst on Wall Street. He wore suits. He voted Republican. He dated quietly. He even worked on Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. The Harvey Milk who would later stand on a soapbox in front of his camera shop was still buried under a Brooks Brothers jacket.

Castro Camera and a New Neighborhood

By the early 1970s, Milk had quit Wall Street, grown his hair out, and started moving in counter-culture circles in New York. He joined the producing team for the Broadway run of Hair. He met a younger boyfriend named Scott Smith, and in 1972, the two of them drove west to San Francisco with the last of their savings.

They landed in a working-class neighborhood called Eureka Valley that was changing fast. Cheap rent, beautiful Victorian houses, and a tolerant city had drawn thousands of gay men there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The neighborhood was becoming the Castro, the most visible gay neighborhood in America.

In 1973, Milk and Smith opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street. It was meant to be a small business. It turned into a community headquarters. People dropped in to develop film and ended up staying to argue politics, ask for help with a landlord, or sign up to register voters. Milk loved it. He had spent two decades hiding. Now he was at the center of a neighborhood that was building itself in public.

The Mayor of Castro Street

Within months of opening the shop, Milk was running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He had never held office, had no political resume, and no money. He campaigned out of his camera store. He gave speeches on top of a wooden box. He worked the bus stops and the bath houses with equal energy. He finished tenth out of 32 candidates in his first race in 1973. People started calling him "the Mayor of Castro Street," a nickname that was half joke and half prediction.

He ran again in 1975 and lost. He ran for the California State Assembly in 1976 and lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. The local Democratic Party machine wanted him to wait his turn. He refused. He kept running. He built a coalition that no one else had bothered to assemble: gay men, of course, but also union teamsters, neighborhood seniors, Asian American small business owners, and Black families in the Western Addition.

The breakthrough came when San Francisco switched from at-large supervisor elections to district elections in 1977. Now each neighborhood elected its own representative. The Castro got District 5. Milk ran a fourth time. This time he won.

30% Margin of victory in Harvey Milk's 1977 race for San Francisco Supervisor, a district seat representing the Castro. It was his fourth run for office in four years.

Defeating the Briggs Initiative

Eleven months in office is not much time. Milk made the most of it. He pushed through a city ordinance banning discrimination against gay people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. He authored a pooper-scooper law that sounds silly today but was wildly popular with neighborhood voters and proved a gay supervisor could deliver on bread-and-butter local issues. He became the friendly, photogenic face of San Francisco's gay community on national television.

His biggest fight came in the fall of 1978. A California state senator named John Briggs from Orange County put a measure on the November ballot called Proposition 6. It would have banned gay men and lesbians, and anyone who supported gay rights, from working in California public schools. It would have allowed school districts to fire teachers for advocating for gay equality in any context.

Polls in the summer showed Prop 6 passing easily. Milk debated Briggs up and down the state, often in hostile rural counties. He kept his message simple and personal. He told audiences about being a child who would have been crushed by the message Prop 6 was sending. He pulled in unlikely allies, including a former actor named Ronald Reagan, who was preparing his second presidential run and came out against the measure in a syndicated newspaper column that mattered.

On November 7, 1978, Prop 6 lost by more than a million votes. It failed in 39 of California's 58 counties, including Briggs's own.

Fly the flag Milk helped popularize LGBTQ+ Pride Flag Gilbert Baker's original rainbow flag debuted in San Francisco in June 1978, five months before Milk was killed. Milk asked Baker to make it. The flag outlived them both. Claim Your Free Flag →

"If a Bullet Should Enter My Brain"

Milk knew he was a target. He received death threats from the day he was sworn in. In November 1977, he sat down at his kitchen table with a tape recorder and made what he called "a political will." He left instructions for what should happen if he was killed in office.

The most-quoted line from that recording is the one that has been printed on T-shirts, painted on murals, and read aloud at vigils every year since: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."

He named his preferred successors. He warned the gay community not to react with rioting if he died, then added that if rioting was the only honest reaction, he understood. He recorded it twice on two separate nights to make sure people heard the same message. He sealed the tapes and gave them to friends.

November 27, 1978

On the morning of November 27, 1978, a former San Francisco supervisor named Dan White entered City Hall through a basement window to avoid the metal detectors. He had resigned his seat 17 days earlier, then changed his mind and asked Mayor George Moscone to reappoint him. Moscone, after pressure from Milk and other supervisors, said no.

White went first to the mayor's office. He shot and killed Moscone. He reloaded. He walked down the hall to Milk's office and asked him to step into a side room. He shot Milk five times, including twice in the head.

Dianne Feinstein, then the president of the Board of Supervisors, found Milk's body. She announced the killings to a packed press gallery in the rotunda. That night, an estimated 40,000 people walked from the Castro to City Hall in a silent candlelight march. They carried Milk's body, in spirit, the route he had walked a thousand times before.

The Twinkie Defense and the White Night Riots

Dan White's trial the following spring became one of the most notorious in American criminal history. His defense team argued that depression, junk food binges, and impaired mental capacity meant he could not have formed the premeditated intent required for first-degree murder. The press shorthand became "the Twinkie defense," which the lead defense attorney later said misrepresented his actual argument. The result was the same. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced to seven years and eight months.

On May 21, 1979, the night the verdict was announced, the Castro exploded. Thousands marched on City Hall again, this time in fury. They smashed windows, set police cars on fire, and pushed back against riot squads for hours. The night became known as the White Night Riots. It was the most violent reaction the gay community had ever staged against the American justice system.

Dan White served just over five years. He was paroled in 1984 and killed himself in 1985.

The Legacy Harvey Milk Left Behind

Milk's tape recording named Anne Kronenberg as the person who should help carry his work forward. The gay community he served did not riot indefinitely. They organized. The Harvey Milk Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club, founded the year after his death, became one of the most influential local political organizations in San Francisco. The street where his camera shop stood was renamed Harvey Milk Plaza. The U.S. Navy named a fleet replenishment oiler the USNS Harvey Milk in 2021, the first U.S. Navy ship named for an openly gay rights leader.

In 2008, Sean Penn played Milk in a film simply called Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant. Penn won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The screenplay won an Oscar too. A new generation learned the story from a movie theater.

In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. The medal was accepted by Stuart Milk, Harvey's nephew, who has since carried on advocacy work in his uncle's name.

California declared May 22 a state day of significance in 2009. It is now observed in public schools across the state. Children learn his name the same week they would have learned his birthday.

Honor the community Milk built Gay Pride Flag The blue, green, and teal flag is a newer symbol for gay men, born from the same instinct that drove Milk: visibility is the strategy. Fly it for the Castro, for City Hall, for him. Claim Your Free Flag →

What Harvey Milk Taught the Movement

How to Celebrate Harvey Milk Day

May 22 is Harvey Milk Day in California. It is recognized in dozens of cities outside the state too. You don't have to live in San Francisco to mark it. Here are a few ways people honor his memory every year.

1	Listen to the tape. Milk's "political will" recording is online in full. Hearing him say "you gotta give 'em hope" in his own voice hits differently than reading it.
2	Watch the documentary. The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) won an Academy Award and uses real footage of Milk and the community he organized. It is the closest thing to meeting him.
3	Fly a pride flag. Milk asked Gilbert Baker to create the rainbow flag. Putting one in your window on May 22 is the most direct line you can draw to him.
4	Register a voter. Milk lost three elections before he won. He still spent every spare hour registering people to vote. Doing the same in his name is a fitting tribute.
5	Tell a young queer person his story. Most kids in school still don't learn about him. His own request was that adults reach into the closet and pull doors open by sharing the truth out loud. Start there.

Common Myths About Harvey Milk

MYTH 01

He was the first openly gay person elected to office in the U.S.

He wasn't. Kathy Kozachenko won a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council in 1974. Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature later that same year. Milk was the first openly gay man elected to office in California, and the most prominent openly gay elected official in the country at the time.

MYTH 02

Dan White was acquitted on the "Twinkie defense."

White was convicted, not acquitted. The defense argued diminished capacity. The conviction was voluntary manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. The phrase "Twinkie defense" came from a journalist's joke that stuck. The actual argument was about long-term depression and chemical imbalance, with junk food cited as a symptom, not a cause.

MYTH 03

Milk was a lifelong activist.

For most of his adult life, he was a closeted Wall Street stockbroker who voted Republican. He worked on the Goldwater campaign in 1964. He didn't come out publicly or get politically active until he was in his 40s. His radicalization happened fast and late.

MYTH 04

Prop 6 was a fringe measure with no chance of passing.

It was leading in the polls all summer of 1978. As late as September, statewide surveys showed it would win. The defeat was the result of months of door-knocking, debates, and coalition work by Milk and thousands of volunteers across California.

None of these myths are accidents. Some came from sloppy journalism. Some came from people who wanted to flatten a complicated man into an easier symbol. The real story is messier and more useful.

Frequently Asked Questions About Harvey Milk

When is Harvey Milk Day?

Harvey Milk Day falls on May 22 every year, his birthday. California recognized it as a state day of significance in 2009. Public schools across the state observe it, and dozens of cities outside California mark it as well.

How did Harvey Milk die?

He was assassinated on November 27, 1978, inside San Francisco City Hall. Former supervisor Dan White entered the building through a basement window, shot and killed Mayor George Moscone, then walked down the hall and shot Milk five times. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served just over five years.

Was Harvey Milk the first openly gay elected official?

No, though he is often called that. Kathy Kozachenko was elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in 1974, and Elaine Noble won a Massachusetts state legislature seat the same year. Milk was the first openly gay man elected to office in California in 1977 and the most nationally visible openly gay official of his era.

What was Harvey Milk's most famous speech?

It is usually called "The Hope Speech." He delivered versions of it dozens of times in 1977 and 1978. The core line is: "And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, and the Richmond, Minnesotas, who are coming out and hear Anita Bryant on television and her story, the only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope."

What is the Sean Penn movie about Harvey Milk?

The 2008 film is called Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant. Sean Penn won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role. Dustin Lance Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. James Franco, Emile Hirsch, and Josh Brolin co-starred.

Where is Harvey Milk buried?

He was cremated. His ashes were placed in a temporary memorial in San Francisco Bay, scattered between the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. Some of his remains were later interred at the U.S. Naval Academy and other sites, including beneath a bench in Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro.

Did Harvey Milk get the rainbow flag made?

Yes. Milk asked artist Gilbert Baker to design a symbol for the gay community. Baker created the original 8-stripe rainbow flag, which flew for the first time at the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade in June, five months before Milk was killed. The flag has since been simplified to six stripes and adopted around the world.

Is there a U.S. Navy ship named after Harvey Milk?

Yes. The USNS Harvey Milk is a John Lewis-class fleet replenishment oiler, christened in 2021. It is the first U.S. Navy ship named for an openly gay civil rights leader. Milk himself served in the Navy during the Korean War.

If you want to keep going, three more posts on this blog cover figures from Milk's world. Read the story of Gilbert Baker and the rainbow flag, the first Pride parade in 1970 that paved the way for Milk's San Francisco, and the broader timeline of LGBTQ+ history that Milk is now permanently part of.

Give 'em hope. Fly the flag Harvey Milk asked Gilbert Baker to design. Claim a free pride flag and put it where the neighbors can see it. Get Your Free Pride Flag → Shop the Tee →