Harvey Milk: The First Openly Gay Elected Official in California

Harvey Milk arrived in San Francisco in nineteen seventy-two and opened a camera shop at five seventy-five Castro Street. He ran for public office three times and lost three times. On November eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. He had won by running in a district that had only just been carved out for neighborhood representation, and he won with thirty percent of the vote against sixteen other candidates. He was forty-seven years old.

Eleven months later, on November twenty-seventh, nineteen seventy-eight, a fellow supervisor named Dan White entered San Francisco City Hall through a basement window to avoid the metal detectors, walked to the office of Mayor George Moscone, and shot him four times. Then he walked down the hall to Harvey Milk's office and shot him five times. Both men died. White turned himself in the same afternoon.

White's lawyers argued diminished capacity. The defense became famous, inaccurately, as the Twinkie defense, after testimony that White had changed his diet to junk food as a symptom of his depression. The jury found White guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder. He received a sentence of seven years and eight months and was released after five years.

The night of the verdict, May twenty-first, nineteen seventy-nine, ten thousand people marched from the Castro to City Hall. The march became a riot, known as the White Night Riots. Twelve police cars were burned. One hundred sixty people were injured.

Harvey Milk had prepared for the possibility of his death. He recorded a tape before his assassination, with instructions that it be played in the event he was killed by an assassin. The tape said: if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.

Half of his ashes were scattered in San Francisco Bay. The other half are mixed into the cement beneath the plaque at five seventy-five Castro Street, the camera shop site.