Harvey Bernard Milk was born on May 22, 1930 and was taken from us on November 27, 1978. He became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and "a martyr for gay rights", according to University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak. In 2002, Milk was called "the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States". Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us." Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
Robin Galbraith never thought she'd be a gay-rights activist.
Then the 46-year-old military ship designer moved home to Mobile, Ala., from Houston four years ago and encountered a gay community where many are afraid to live openly.
Taking inspiration from slain gay-rights leader Harvey Milk— the San Francisco supervisor whose struggle inspired the 2008 movie Milk— Galbraith is helping gays and lesbians be more visible in the mostly conservative city. She speaks to local colleges and created a website to make it easier for people to connect.
Today, she'll celebrate the first official Harvey Milk Day on what would have been his 80th birthday. Galbraith will host a viewing of the movie, then a forum on issues vital to gays and lesbians in the South, such as electing openly gay politicians.
California is the only state with an official Harvey Milk Day, but 26 cities in 20 states scattered nationwide will hold rallies and events to honor the first openly gay man to be elected to public office and icon of the gay-rights movement. "He knew you had to make change," Galbraith says. "Our community has to understand you have a voice, and if you don't use it, nothing will change."
Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He fought to end discrimination against gays and lesbians and built coalitions of gay-rights groups, labor unions and small-business owners. He was 48 when he was killed a year later by a former supervisor, Dan White.
The Milk Day events come as gay-rights advocates are stepping up pressure on Congress to pass a bill that ending job discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and to repeal the military ban on gays and lesbians serving openly. Twenty-one states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and 12 ban discrimination based on gender identity, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Advocates are lobbying Congress to include a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" — the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military — in a spending bill a House committee took up Wednesday and a Senate committee plans to take up next week.
Gay-rights activists stepped up their protests this week, rallying at the U.S. Capitol and in front of legislators' district offices and chaining themselves to the White House gates to call attention to their causes. Robin McGehee, co-founder of GetEQUAL, one of the groups leading the rallies, says that despite gains since Milk served, gays and lesbians still lack full equality. "Thirty-two years later, sadly, we still wait," she says.
On monday we will be hosting Robin in a special edition of WGLB. Please try to stop in with any questions. We will publish around 1:00 PM Eastern.
Opponents are just as passionate. Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis at the conservative American Family Association, says the lack of movement so far shows "these issues are radioactive enough" that Congress doesn't want to go there. Gay-rights activists, he says, are trying to steamroll unpopular legislation through Congress and using Harvey Milk Day to "force acceptance of homosexual behavior." "They know they are running out of time," he says.
Both efforts face hurdles as legislators dealing with tough re-election campaigns hesitate to back the bills, says Paul Yandura, a political consultant who works on gay-rights issues. If Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections, he says, the bills have even less chance of passing.
(Well it now appears both bills are dead in the water for this session of Congress.)
Education as first step. Advocates say Harvey Milk Day allows them to celebrate Milk's legacy as they fight for full equality. Raymond and Byron Moya, who are married with twin 3-year-old daughters and a newborn son, plan to spend the day going door-to-door in East Los Angeles with their family, talking to residents about same-sex marriage and gay rights. The couple is among hundreds canvassing neighborhoods in nine cities with Equality California, the group that led the two-year effort for Harvey Milk Day. "We want to educate people about who we are as a family," says Raymond Moya, 38. The couple has been together seven years and married in 2008 during the five months that California allowed same-sex marriage.
Galbraith dreams of the day when gays and lesbians in her community will feel free to live so openly. "We should not be hiding," she says.
-from USA Today-
Milk's nephew, Stuart, who is gay, says it is inspiring that communities such as Mobile are celebrating the day. "It is difficult in places like Mobile," he says. "These people are standing on Harvey's shoulders and creating new shoulders for others to stand on."
From The Harvey Milk Foundation-
Harvey Milk’s dream for a better tomorrow filled with the hope for equality and a world without hate guides the Foundation. Harvey Milk’s ground breaking election in 1978 as one of the world’s first openly gay elected officials-and its most visible one- symbolized the freedom to live life with authenticity to millions of LGBT women and men around the world.
Harvey served less then a year in public office before his brutal assassination 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 pushed out community, bringing forward new hope and a new vision of freedom.
As a start up not- for-profit organization, our program goals – to empower local, regional, national and global organizations so that they may fully realize the power of Harvey Milks story, style, and collaborative relationship building - are large and bold as Harvey taught us! The Foundation, through Harvey’s dream for a just tomorrow, envisions governments that celebrate the rich and universally empowering diversity of humanity, where all individuals – gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, the young, the disabled – all who had been excluded can fully participate in all societal rights without exception.
Harvey’s inspiring life has been the subject and inspiration for Academy award wining films (1984 The Times of Harvey Milk and 2009 Milk), operas, books including children’s books, plays, music, awards, proclamations and starting in 2010, an annual official governmental day of recognition. Harvey showed us all what one person, standing up loudly and clearly, against a fierce societal fear and prejudice can accomplish. He created a rich and vivid message of hope and an enduring dream, teaching us how to create our own and leaving them for us to realize.
Education-
Harvey often spoke of the need for a community to pass on at the global level its own stories of strength, authenticity, value, and accomplishment. The Foundation puts particular emphasis in supporting both conventional and new forums and media for Harvey’s story and the LGBT community’s collective story to be told across broad and culturally diverse audiences.
Working with the CA Museum in Sacramento, the Foundation leadership worked to provide a year long educational and interactive exhibit geared to adults and school children that covers Harvey’s full life from Childhood and College activist in the late 1940’s to avant-garde theatre producer in the late 60’s and early 70’s to his election in San Francisco and the aftermath of his assassination.
The very first educational partnership of the Foundation is the play, "Dear Harvey – Stories of Harvey Milk" written by Patty Loughery and commissioned by the Diversionary Theatre, the Foundation and play write have partnered to provide the play to schools, universities, and community organizations throughout the US. Work is in progress to have the play translated into Spanish and Italian and the play is currently in the final stage of competition for the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC.
Beginning in 2009, the Foundation leadership has been working to build effective collaborative partnerships in order to enable the LGBT youth organizations to access Federal funding in the US and EU funding in Europe.
Scholarships-
Because Harvey had a very special desire to empower individual youth, the foundation has set a goal to provide support in education and educational projects to young people on a international level that includes targeted educational scholarships and mentoring meant to expand cross cultural interaction and growth.
32 years after Harvey Milk's brutal assassination, just how far towards equality have we come as a nation? At the federal level? We can now make love in the privacy of our own homes, and those who brutalize and murder us will get prosecuted. Thanks.