![]() ![]() Milk was a quintessential gay man of his generation, arriving at adulthood long before gay liberation, and flowering as a human being only after he had happily and publicly embraced his homosexuality. Subjected to increasingly violent death threats as his public career flourished, Milk recorded on tape who he wanted to succeed him if he were killed, adding: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door." Moreover, as liberal hero, political pioneer and potential assassination target, Milk resembles no one so much as the US president-elect. California's reactionary Proposition 8, which recently rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, recalls a similar ballot initiative that was faced down by Milk and his constituents in the years before his death. Nevertheless, it is filled with resonances today. In his mournful novel The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White noted of the postwar gay experience, "I thought that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle - oppressed in the 50s, freed in the 60s, exalted in the 70s and wiped out in the 80s." This is a story from the second and third parts of that arc, a tale of liberation and joyfulness that must be viewed from today across the unbridgeable, transformative chasm of the Aids epidemic of the 80s. ![]() Feinstein continued, ".and the suspect is Supervisor Dan White." ![]() It is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed." From behind the camera came howls of grief, rage and disbelief, followed by anguished calls for silence. ![]() Instead, Feinstein spoke, looking shattered and harrowed, announcing, "Today, San Francisco has experienced a double tragedy of immense proportions. The press was, in the meantime, already assembling at city hall for a press conference previously scheduled by Moscone to name the killer's successor on the Board of Supervisors. Several offices down the hallway, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Diane Feinstein, heard more gunfire and immediately alerted the police, before discovering Milk dead in his office, shot five times, with two shots directly to the head. Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in the US. There, he reloaded his pistol and tracked down Harvey Milk, the supervisor from District 5, which included the Castro District, ground zero for the city's large and influential gay population. The mayor was later found with a wound in his arm and three bullets lodged in his head, fired at point-blank range.ĭescribed by many of his constituents as "an all-American boy", the killer then returned to the office he had occupied until his resignation just a few weeks earlier. My decision is final" - followed by five or six gunshots. Later accounts told of a heated exchange between the killer and the mayor - "I'm sorry, what's right isn't always popular, and what's popular isn't always right. From there he went upstairs to the office of the mayor, George Moscone, hoping to beg for his job back. He was carrying his police-issue revolver, so needed to bypass the building's metal detectors. The killer, a 32-year-old Vietnam veteran, ex-cop and, until his recent resignation, elected city supervisor, entered San Francisco city hall through a ground-floor window. ![]()
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