Milk

Having really enjoyed Gus Van Sant’s Milk, and being a big fan of San Francisco, I’m keen to see what IBSS can tell me about the history of the gay rights movement in California.

The film Milk stars Sean Penn as America’s first openly homosexual politician in public office, Harvey Milk. For the last eight years of his life Milk was a gay activist in San Francisco, and was assassinated one year after being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Milk is based on true events and shows many issues faced by the gay community in the ‘70s, rather than focussing exclusively on Harvey Milk’s rise to political prominence. I thought it would be interesting to see how I could supplement what I’d learnt from the film with academic research in the social sciences.

I decide to focus more on the historical events covered in the film than on Harvey Milk himself, so I search for ‘homosexuality’, ‘history’ and ‘San Francisco’. This is really successful, uncovering papers on several issues which the activists in Milk focussed their efforts on. The most shocking of these, and an issue which brought Harvey Milk into direct conflict with his eventual assassin Dan White, is Proposition 6, or the Briggs Initiative, which attempted to ban homosexuals and even supporters of gay rights from teaching in California’s public schools. In ‘Butterflies, whistles, and fists: gay safe street patrols and the ‘new gay ghetto’, 1976-1981’ C. Hanhardt (2008) discusses the Butterfly Brigade in Castro, San Francisco’s gay district, and their role in the protest against the Briggs Initiative. Their role in the Coors beer boycott, another event covered in the film, is also explored. I learn that the Butterfly Brigade was established to respond to the police’s ineffectiveness in dealing with violent homophobia. Operating from a bakery delivery truck in Castro, members of the brigade recorded homophobic acts and were police informants.

An insight into the police’s relationship with the gay rights movement is provided by C. Agee’s ‘Gayola: police professionalization and the politics of San Francisco’s gay bars, 1950-1968’ (2006). This is very interesting as Milk has many scenes in gay bars. Agee’s paper is a case study of John Mindermann’s work as a police officer in San Francisco in the 1960s. Mindermann gives a first hand account of police crackdowns on gay bars, and the relationship between the San Francisco Police Department and homosexuals. Agee explores the idea that police crackdowns were key to making the gay rights movement better organized and more effective. This theme is developed in ‘Wide-open town: a history of queer San Francisco to 1965’, N.A. Boyd (2005). Boyd suggests that communities in gay bars had a strongly politicised identity which developed in response to contemporary policing. The book looks fascinating in its variety of sources: it uses police and court records, oral histories, tourist literature, and manuscript collections from local and state archives. I think the book would be complemented nicely by S. Stryker and J. van Buskirk’s (1997) ‘Gay by the bay: a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area’, which has over 200 photos of the gay rights movement.

Searching for ‘Social movements’ and ‘San Francisco’, I discovered E. Armstrong’s 2005 paper ‘From struggle to settlement: the crystallization of a field of lesbian/gay organizations in San Francisco, 1969-1973’, which discusses how the social movement changed over time. Armstrong argues that “In 1968 gay liberation displayed a contradictory mix of civil rights, identity, and revolutionary political ideologies. By 1972 the movement had stabilized around building gay identity and pursuing civil rights.” She suggests that the collapse of the New Left movement in 1970 allowed activists to unite around central themes, and made their aims less fragmented. In ‘Movements and memory: the making of the Stonewall myth’ (2006), E. Armstrong and S. Crage compare the effect of the Stonewall riot and 4 other gay activists riots in the 1960s (including ones in Los Angeles and San Francisco) on collective memory in the gay rights movement.

I’m impressed by the number of records in IBSS which are specific to the history of gay activism in San Francisco. Much of the research taps into first hand accounts of the events covered in Milk. I end with a straight search for Harvey Milk, and one particular hit corroborates the film’s description of Harvey Milk as “Icon. Inspiration. Hero.”: a Harvey Milk Institute has been established in San Francisco for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies.