Harvey Milk was a revolutionary in the United States as in 1977 he became one of the first openly gay elected officials when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors untill he was assassinated.
Harvey Milk’s approach to life and politics made him loved not only by the LGBTQ+ Community in San Fransico, but all over the country.
Milk’s influence affected all walks of life, until he was assassinated on November 27, 1978, when Dan White snuck into City Hall through a basement window and walked down the hall to kill him.
To this day, he is still celebrated around the world, and the reactions to his death and his film have been immense.
JD Doyle, radio host of Queer Music Heritage, said: “I did a show from 2000 until 2015 called Queer Music Heritage, which the goal was to capture and share our music history and that went all kinds of directions; I covered hip-hop, choruses, soul.
“I go off on these weird tangents that no one would think of doing, hence Harvey Milk. I wanted to honour him, and I wanted to approach it with songs about him, and I found that I also wanted to do songs about Dan White.
“The songs about Dan White were almost immediate because they were based on anger. They were honouring Harvey Milk, but they were angry about Dan White, and a lot of those were from 1979, the next year. I was pleased that I had enough for a decent two-hour show.”
After Milk’s death, a silent candlelight vigil was held on Castro Street and marched to City Hall the same night.
Doyle continued: “Several songs used quotes from his speeches, especially the dance song at the very end of the Harvey Milk Show has quotes of his in it.”
In 1994, A documentary obout him was released and in 2008, the feature film about Harvey Milk, titled Milk was released to audiences, which reinginated the role Milk played in American history.
Miriam Richter, Director and General counsel for the Harvey Milk Foundation, said: “Harvey is probably, at this point in history, more well known outside of the United States in LGBTQ communities around the world even though he lived and worked in the US.
“Things right now aren’t as great as they were for the LGBTQ community in the US , but outside of the US, where there are a lot of places where it is not that welcoming to be LGBTQ, Harvey is still a touchstone. He was a trailblazer.
“There’s two major films. One was the award-winning, the Oscar-winning documentary, ‘The Times of Harvey Milk’, and the second being simply ‘Milk’ both of them are are really good. I think that the documentary is clearly a lot more realistic
“The Sean Penn movie, a lot of people get the impression from that movie that Harvey got to San Francisco, because Harvey was a nice Jewish New Yorker, and he gets to San Francisco and they think that all of a sudden he became this out and proud activist, and that’s not accurate. That’s the thing that the movie doesn’t really communicate.
Harvey was always very socially aware and active, he did not turn into this person when he got to California. He already was. And that’s understandable that a movie can’t really communicate that.
Harvey’s message was one of hope, that’s what he’s famous for. You can’t be sad. You can’t be resigned to it. You need to have hope because there’s always the vision of the future where things are better and you can’t let it get you down.”
