An Archive of Hope. Harvey Milk

became certified as Proposition 6 in May and otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative.¹²⁰ Given Briggs’s disrepute, even within his own party, he undoubtedly surprised most by taking the mantle of Anita Bryant and making the entire state of California the battleground staked elsewhere that year only in municipalities like Wichita and Eugene. Few would have expected this fight to culminate in Milk’s crowning achievement—and swan song.

      Within that broader post-Dade County context, there was little reason to be optimistic about stemming the national wave of homophobia that Briggs had managed to ride into temporary political prominence and menace. Much as in the case of Bryant’s campaign, the Briggs Initiative inflamed the electorate because it concerned children, discourse rife with bogeys of sodomy, molestation and murder of innocents, and the classroom as a breeding ground of homosexual indoctrination. As Briggs argued in an apocalyptic editorial entitled, “Deviants Threaten the American Family”: “Children in this country spend more than 1,200 hours a year in classrooms. A teacher who is a known homosexual will automatically represent that way of life to young, impressionable students at a time when they are constantly exposed to such homosexual role models, they may well be inclined to experiment with a life-style that could lead to disaster for themselves and ultimately, for society as a whole.”¹²¹ Elsewhere Briggs warned, “If you let one homosexual teacher stay, soon there’ll be two, then four, then 8, then 25—and before long, the entire school will be taught by homosexuals.”¹²²

      For potential victims of Prop 6, the scope and implications of its broad language—“advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging, or promoting private or public sexual acts . . . between persons of the same sex in a manner likely to come to the attention of other employees or students”—struck deeply rooted personal and communal fears of (state-sponsored) exposure and ruination, and the greater ease and likelihood of being ensnared. Sol Madfes, executive director of the United Administrators of the San Francisco school district, explained, “The Briggs Initiative would leave teachers in the position of being accused—and then having to prove their innocence. . . . The board or superintendant will listen when a parent starts yelling. The attitude is—where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Under Briggs, the opportunity would be there to crucify somebody by accusation.”¹²³ The first poll in September indicated 61 percent to 31 percent in favor of Prop 6.¹²⁴ GLBTQ press and activists urged calm and solidarity in the face of certain defeat.

      Milk’s response, as we might expect, was to fight. According to his battle plan, articulated and reiterated throughout the documents in this section, one must ceaselessly talk, speaking out to explode the homophobic myths and hysteria that the Religious Right and opportunists such as John Briggs exploited to their ideological and political advantage. Milk implored:

      I believe that we can win in November . . . but only if we mount a full-fledged campaign. One that covers all bases, both positive and defensive. Yes, defensive, too. For not to answer the false charges is, to some, an admission that the charges are not false. Otherwise, we would repudiate them. There is no time like the present to start to repudiate them. For the sooner we start, the sooner we can lay them to rest. So, we need to have every gay person talk to as many non-gay people as possible about the issues—both real and false. It will be a monumental effort and, because many gays will remain in their closet, it makes it that much more important for those of us who are out.

      And talk he did, refuting the lies and distortions that asserted that homosexuality is a choice, that homosexuals are the primary perpetrators of child molestation and abuse, that homosexuals recruit by becoming “role models” for the “lifestyle,” and simultaneously promoting the idea that homosexuality is natural, given, omnipresent, good, and undeserving of discrimination, harassment, and violence. In mobilizing GLBTQ people to rise up against Briggs, Milk employed patriotic collective memory, quoting Patrick Henry, the Declaration of Independence, the Statue of Liberty’s credo, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In characterizing the viciousness of the Briggs Initiative, and as a means of rousing resistance by shattering apathy, Milk favored the Holocaust trope, likening Briggs to Hitler and GLBTQ people to Jews oppressed by the genocidal Nazi regime: “We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads to the gas chambers. On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my Gay sisters and brothers to make their commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country.”¹²⁵ What had become his signature opening line, full of humor and bite, said it all: “I’m Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you.”

      Randy Shilts characterized the public debates Milk and Briggs staged across the state through the fall of 1978 as “fast food politics,” owing to the by now boilerplate responses to questions repeated over and over again, and perhaps in part because these political gladiators fighting for the lives of their constituents had become friendly on the road and in the wings of their public verbal battles.¹²⁶ But even if the message had become prepackaged and efficient, such mantra-like repetition and simplicity, and the familiarity of the performance, offered Milk’s best hope of eroding the bulwark of Briggs’s homophobic invective. We believe it made the difference in defeating Prop 6. Others have offered different and compelling reasons for the shift away from Briggs: heterosexuals’ eventual realization that Prop 6 would create a slippery slope endangering their free speech and privacy; high-powered bipartisan appeals against the initiative by Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, and nearly every other state politician (even if some, namely, the good straight liberal allies Milk had long said could not be trusted, were quieter in their solidarity than the rest); concerted effort by sophisticated GLBTQ politicos and their allies in Los Angeles and elsewhere; and Briggs himself, with his support eroding as election day neared, becoming even more hyperbolic. Nevertheless, these other influences absent Milk’s tireless voice would have been necessary but insufficient to defeat Briggs. Harvey Milk held sway. On November 7, Prop 6 was defeated by more than a million votes, 3.9 million to 2.8 million, 58 percent to 42 percent.¹²⁷

      In his victory speech, Milk cast his gaze on the future: “This is only the first step. The next step, the more important step, is for all those gays who did not come out, for whatever reasons, to do so now. To come out to all your family, to come out to all your relatives, to come out to all your friends—the coming out of a nation will smash the myths once and for all.”¹²⁸ Milk, who often invoked the civil rights movement and especially Martin Luther King, Jr., as analogy, had delivered his mountaintop speech—quite literally, given the events that unfolded in the immediate wake of Briggs’s defeat.

      Much has been said by others about those final weeks between the euphoria of Prop 6’s demise and the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone on November 27, 1978: the emotional unraveling of Dan White; his resignation from the Board of Supervisors; his strong-armed rescinding of that resignation and appeal for reinstatement; the political jockeying and lobbying that ensued during the interim; his learning from a reporter that Moscone would not reappoint him; his armed entry of City Hall through a basement window; his execution of George Moscone; his execution of Harvey Milk; Dianne Feinstein’s devastating revelation to City Hall employees and reporters, “Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot . . . and killed. Police have a suspect. Supervisor Dan White.” Much too has been said about Milk’s eerie fatalism, his longstanding prediction that he would die early, and his preoccupation with the possibility of assassination—existential trembling no doubt exacerbated by proliferating death threats, the deep exhaustion of the anti-Briggs campaign, the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, and the suicide of boyfriend Jack Lira. Because he recorded it a year before his death, we include in this volume a portion of his political will. Milk’s myth is burnished by such hauntings, our retrospective understanding that he knew somehow that he would never get to the promised land with his gay brothers and sisters. But we leave that myth and thirty years’ worth of Milk memory—the candlelight march on the night of the assassination, White’s sham trial, his Twinkie defense and reduced sentence, the White Night riots, the annual commemorations, the archive, The Mayor of Castro Street, The Times of Harvey Milk, Harvey Milk: An Opera in Three Acts, Harvey Milk Plaza, Harvey Milk High School, his bust in City Hall, Milk, Harvey Milk Day, and much more—for another volume.¹²⁹

      Rather, we think it fitting simply to note the profound silence on November 27, 1978. In