29 years later

Twenty-nine years ago today, after serving less than one year on the San Francisco Board of Super- visors, Harvey Milk was assassinated at City Hall by Dan White, a fellow Supervisor. White also killed Mayor George Moscone.

Harvey Milk was one of the first openly gay people elected to public office in the U.S. While his political career was short, he made a profound impact on San Francisco, the state of California (chiefly by his leading the fight against the Briggs initiative, a state proposition that would have barred gay men and lesbians from serving as teachers), and, indeed, America as a whole.

Milk was assassinated only a few short years before AIDS would begin taking the lives of thousands of gay men in San Francisco. The response of many leaders of the gay community in the early days of the epidemic was to defend sexual freedom at all costs, a strategy that time would prove only hastened the spread of the disease at a time when it was unclear how it was transmitted. (Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On is an excellent book documenting all aspects of the early years of AIDS in America.)

I have often wondered about the paths down which Milk might have led the community had he lived... and how many lives might have been saved by his leadership.

We will never know.

To learn more about Milk's life and his legacy, read his wikipedia page or buy/rent the Oscar-winning documentary about his life, The Times of Harvey Milk.