Published: 2 August 2018
Last updated: 5 March 2024
ON NOVEMBER 18, 1977, Harvey Milk distributed a secret tape recording to a select network of close friends. “To be played only in the event of my death by assassination,” the audio began, concluding: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
Milk made the recordings shortly after becoming the first openly gay man to be elected to public office anywhere when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Just one year later he was murdered by Dan White, a fellow supervisor on San Francisco’s governing body. White killed Milk because, he claimed, the city was being turned into Sodom by men who insisted on flaunting their homosexuality in public.
As historian and scholar of the LGBT movement Lillian Faderman explains in a telephone call from her home in California, Milk’s murder immortalized him forever, igniting a nationwide call to action from the LGBT community to demand equality, free from prejudice.
“What Harvey Milk will be remembered for is not just fighting for the rights of gay men, but for the rights of all minority groups who were discriminated against,” Faderman says. “He also kick-started a worldwide movement for gay people to come out [of the closet].”
FULL STORY How ‘tikkun olam’ inspired world’s first openly gay politician Harvey Milk (Times of Israel)
Photo: Harvey Milk before a meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978. (Courtesy of Harvey Milk-Scott Smith Collection, San Francisco Public Library)
