Book review: Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death - The Jewish Chronicle

To supporters, Harvey Milk seemed a visionary leader during his lifetime and a martyr after his untimely death: the first openly homosexual man elected to public office in the US was “a Moses for gay people”, according to one activist. Even his political opponent, California State Senator John Briggs, called him “a natural politician, very gifted”. In 2009, Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Milk’s story is well known, especially through Randy Shilts’s 1982 biography and Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic. And now, Lillian Faderman has particularly interesting things to say about three themes: Milk’s Jewish background, his populist politics, and his death.

Her book is appearing next month in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, where Milk will rub shoulders with, among others, King Solomon, Marcel Proust, Rav Kook, and Barbra Streisand

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Hostile to organised religion from youth (though curiously one of the first people he came out to was a rabbi), Milk nevertheless asserted a proud, secular-Jewish identity.

From interviews with relatives and other evidence, Faderman recounts what it was like for him to grow up as a gay Jew in upstate New York during and after the Second World War (he was born in 1930). His earliest experiences of exclusion related to antisemitic employment practices and, when he established his own camera shop, he put a photograph from his barmitzvah on the wall. He was keenly aware of the historic persecution of European Jewry, which he frequently referred to in public speeches.

Having drifted for many years, Milk found his métier in the early 1970s as a leader of the small-business community in San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro Street area. Faderman shows how, through involvement in local issues, he gained supporters in Castro Street and across San Franciscan society, including the fire fighters’ and truck drivers’ unions (though not the gay establishment, which dismissed his “kooky” populism). He won national prominence by combating Anita Bryant’s and Senator Briggs’s anti-gay initiatives, but remained focused on the concerns of local interest groups.

In January 1978, Milk was elected to San Francisco’s legislature, the Board of Supervisors. Eleven months later, he and liberal Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another Board member. White was homophobic; Milk’s death, traumatic for all San Franciscans, and the gay community in particular, has often been portrayed as martyrdom. Faderman respectfully demurs, attributing White’s actions to personal animosity towards Milk and Moscone, and chronic mental health issues, rather than ideology.

Faderman recognises the tragedy of Milk’s death but does not let it overwhelm her account. Milk emerges as a person of compassion, wit, and chutzpah, sometimes even an avowed joker (as in an arresting 1978 photograph wearing clown make-up, reproduced here). And, as Faderman shows, some of his views have Jewish roots.

Alun David is a freelance reviewer

Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death

By Lilian Faderman

Yale University Press, £16.99