How a Murder Changed Gay Rights Forever

Summary

On November 27, 1978, Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor of San Francisco, murdered Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk. This act, initially seen as a local incident, had profound implications for the gay rights movement. Harvey Milk, an advocate for LGBT rights, became a martyr whose life and death significantly advanced the cause of equality. The trial and subsequent light sentence for White, based on a controversial defense, sparked outrage and riots, highlighting issues of homophobia and injustice. Milk's legacy endures as a pivotal figure in the push for gay rights and continues to inspire activism against discrimination.

Highlights

• Dan White murdered Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978 📅.
• The 'Twinkie Defense' led to White's conviction for manslaughter, not murder 🍰.
• Milk's open identity was crucial to his political success and activism 🏳️‍🌈.
• The White Night riots echoed previous LGBT protests like Stonewall 🌟.
• Despite legal progress, similar challenges for LGBT rights persist today 🔄.

Key Takeaways

• Harvey Milk's murder was a catalyst for the gay rights movement 🏳️‍🌈.
• Dan White's light sentence led to outrage and the White Night riots 🔥.
• Milk's life was marked by determination despite personal struggles ✊.
• His approach of emphasizing identity paved the way for modern LGBT activism 🌈.
• Harvey Milk's story remains relevant as struggles for equality continue today ⚖️.

Overview

On a fateful day in 1978, Dan White took the lives of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, thrusting the world of politics and civil rights into turmoil. At the surface, it seemed like a personal vendetta gone violently wrong, but beneath it unearthed deeper societal prejudices that needed addressing. Milk's burgeoning career and unapologetic embrace of his identity made him a symbolic beacon for the gay rights movement, which only gained momentum following his tragic death.

The bewildering 'Twinkie Defense' during White's trial resulted in a conviction for manslaughter rather than murder, a verdict that altared public confidence in the justice system. The outrage led to the White Night riots, a critical point akin to the Stonewall riots, signaling the community's unwillingness to remain quiet in the face of discrimination and injustice. Milk, an advocate who fought with passion against such prejudices, left behind a movement galvanized in the wake of his demise.

Reflecting on Milk's legacy, fifty years later, America's journey toward equality still finds relevance and resonance in his story. Modern parallels in legislation remind us that while progress is real, the fight against outdated divisions remains as imperative. Milk's courageous life and the movements sparked by it continue to influence the trajectory of LGBT rights, illustrating his enduring impact on American society today.

How a Murder Changed Gay Rights Forever Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 At 10:20 AM on November 27,   1978 a man exited a car in front of San  Francisco City Hall’s main entrance. He paused to thank his driver, “Thanks  for the ride, Denise. I’m just gonna talk   with George and Harvey…I’ve just gotta see their  faces…Then I’ll grab your keys to borrow the car.” “Of course, Dan, it’s gonna be  alright. You’ll be alright.”[1] But as the car pulled away, he didn’t  walk through the main entrance,   with its newly-installed metal detectors.  Instead, he walked around the block,
• 00:30 - 01:00 descending the side staircase to the basement  and trying the door there. No luck. A few minutes   later, William Melia heard a window in the  neighboring office slide open, then the sounds   of someone climbing through, before catching  a glimpse of someone running by his office. He called out, “Hey, wait a second!” The man stopped and came back to the  office door, “Hey, I had to get in.   My aide was supposed to come down and let  me in the side door, but never showed up.”
• 01:00 - 01:30 "And you are?" "I’m Dan White, the City Supervisor…Say,  I’ve gotta go." And off he went.[2] A moment later he greeted secretary Cyr  Copertini, “Hello, Cyr. Can I see the Mayor?” “He’s with someone now, but let me go check.” The   secretary disappeared into the office.  “Hey, George, Dan’s here to see you.” “Oh, well alright. Give me a minute  to think.” The mayor was apprehensive. “Do you want someone in here with you?” “No, I’ll see him alone.” “Okay.” The secretary exited the office.  “He’ll be with you in just a moment.”
• 01:30 - 02:00 About ten minutes later, a buzzer  sounded. “You can go on in now, Dan.” “Thanks, Cyr.”[3] “Dan, how are you?” “Well, George, well, I’ve been better.  Look, I don’t wanna waste your time. So   just give it to me straight, please,  are you gonna reinstate me or not? I   can’t stand hearing this or that through the  grapevine. I’d like to hear it from you.” [sigh] “Look, Dan, I’m afraid I can’t do it.  I’m sorry, but it’s done. You did resign,
• 02:00 - 02:30 after all. I’m announcing your  replacement in…oh, an hour or so.” The soon-to-be-former city supervisor was at   a loss for words. He felt a  sudden pang like a headache. “Now I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear,   Dan. But how about we have  a drink and talk about it?” Dan White didn’t say a word, just shuffled  toward the door to the office’s back room. The mayor patted him on  the shoulder as he went in,   then headed to the bar cabinet. He  lifted a glass whiskey decanter,
• 02:30 - 03:00 removed the lid, and as he poured two drinks  he asked, “So, Dan, what’ll you do next?”[4] Mayor George Moscone was  dead. But outside his office,   it merely sounded like someone had  trouble closing a car door. Then,   within moments, Dan White burst, running, from  the office’s back exit and down the hall.[5]
• 03:00 - 03:30 Arriving at the City Supervisors’  area, he encountered his colleague,   “Hey, Harvey, can I speak with you a moment?” “Sure, Dan, what’s going on?” “Say, can we meet in my office?” “Alright.”[6] They crossed the hall. Dan opened the door,   gestured for Harvey to go ahead,  then shut the door behind them. “Look, Harvey, I want to get my job back.” “Well I think that’s up to Mayor Moscone.” “I just got done speaking with him, and-” “What did he say?” “Well you know what he said.” “What do you mean?” “Now stop that, I know what you did. He was  going to reinstate me, but you told him not to!”
• 03:30 - 04:00 “Now, Dan, I think there’s some kind  of misunderstanding, I just- Hey!”[7] “Denise, the car keys!”[8]
• 04:00 - 04:30 At first, the events of November 27,  1978 seem like a purely local affair;   a disgruntled San Francisco city supervisor  shot the mayor and his colleague. Bizarre,
• 04:30 - 05:00 yes, and tragic, but otherwise insignificant. But in truth, this double-murder would  prove far more consequential than anyone,   especially Dan White, could have imagined. Even  stranger, it wouldn’t be the mayor’s death which   echoed through history, but that of the  rookie city supervisor. To understand why,   we have to understand the life of this man,  an unlikely leader in what was by the 1970s   perhaps the global capital for the gay rights  movement, and whose legacy fundamentally altered
• 05:00 - 05:30 the reality of LGBT politics and gay rights  in America. We have to understand Harvey Milk. And while he lived a complicated life that  took us many hours to begin to understand,   it turns out accessing any of your  devices from anywhere in the world   at any time is super simple with  AnyDesk, the sponsor of this video. AnyDesk is an amazing program that  lets you use faraway devices as   if they were right there in the room with you.  Whether you need to print something remotely,
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• 06:00 - 06:30 Born to a Jewish family in New York, in 1930,  Milk was expected to follow family tradition,
• 06:30 - 07:00 working at the department store his immigrant  grandfather, Morris Milch, had started. But even   in his earliest years, Harvey knew he didn’t  quite fit the traditional mold. It wasn’t as   though he stuck out in some way. He was a junior  varsity athlete, a popular guy by all accounts.   But something about the social expectations  for young men just didn’t quite fit.[9] After high school, fitting in proved  even tougher. He attended a college   for teachers in upstate New York, but  opted for the Navy after graduation,
• 07:00 - 07:30 until he was forced out in 1955 after  nearly four years of service, after being   spotted in a park popular with gay men.[10]  Homosexuality was still a crime in America. So he returned to New York to teach. But after  only two years, he moved to Dallas, Texas.   Dissatisfied again, he returned to New York, once  more only for a short time. And so began Harvey   Milk’s wandering life: ping-ponging between  New York, Dallas, Miami, and San Francisco,   taking up jobs in department stores, schools,  insurance companies, and investment banks.
• 07:30 - 08:00 In the words of one biographer and San  Francisco contemporary Randy Shilts,   “He was something of a drifter. It  was as if Harvey spent his first   four decades trying to figure out what  he wanted to do when he grew up.”[11] Perhaps Milk remained so unmoored because at any  moment he could be found out and lose his job:   as if living some secret double life as  a criminal. So, he kept his distance,
• 08:00 - 08:30 holding his work at arm’s length as a sort  of self-defense mechanism. He was safe,   but at the cost of never really  finding a sense of belonging…for now. Over the course of the 1960s, the  politically conservative Milk found   himself increasingly influenced  by the hippie movement, until he   reached his breaking point with America’s  invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970. On his lunch break, Milk left his desk at a  downtown San Francisco bank and found a mass of   protestors outside the Pacific Stock Exchange.  Filled with an unfamiliar sense of purpose,
• 08:30 - 09:00 Milk leapt in front of the  crowd, pulled out his wallet,   and set fire to a bank card: a denunciation of big   business straight from a pinstripe-suited  banker. The crowd went wild.[12] For Milk,   something about this combination of righteous  politics and public performance just…clicked. But Milk’s boss gave him an ultimatum: cut his  long hair or lose his job. Milk kept his hair,
• 09:00 - 09:30 and within about a year he settled in this  building in San Francisco’s Castro district,   a burgeoning hub of gay emigrés from all over the  country. On the first floor, he opened a camera   shop; upstairs, his apartment, where Milk lived  in domestic bliss with his partner Scott Smith:   finally comfortable, finally belonging. That is,   until in 1973 Harvey Milk was once more  unsettled…by a visit from the tax man.
• 09:30 - 10:00 A California state bureaucrat walked through  these doors behind me, into Castro Camera,   and informed Milk he’d need to pay the state  a substantial deposit to keep his business   license. For Milk, it was as though a gangster  was demanding payment for protection. He cursed   the pseudo-mafioso out of Castro Camera and spent  weeks hounding officials to reduce the fee. Harvey   Milk was finally a man filled with a sense of  purpose. He knew he had to run for office.[13] But becoming the preeminent figure in a  world-historical human rights movement
• 10:00 - 10:30 doesn’t happen overnight. For one thing, Milk  was late to the party. All those years spent   holding everyone and everything at arms-length  meant Milk lacked connections and credibility in   the gay community. Moreover, he didn’t seem  all that interested in gay issues anyways,   focusing his campaign more broadly  on social policy, public spending,   and the perceived endemic corruption he  witnessed firsthand in his camera shop.[14] In turn, Milk was stuck in a catch-22. The social  issues he campaigned on were dear to liberals,
• 10:30 - 11:00 but he was hostile to the establishment, which  was dominated by liberal leaders. Coupled with   his lack of credibility or real interest in the  gay movement, endorsements were hard to come by,   and Milk fell flat in his first contest for public  office, placing tenth in the five-seat race.[15] But there were glimmers of hope yet. Tenth  wasn’t so bad in a 32-person contest,   and Milk had run his campaign on a  shoestring budget.[16] Most importantly,
• 11:00 - 11:30 though, he won more votes than anyone in  the area around the Castro district.[17] So Milk pivoted to focus on bolstering  his credibility in his neighborhood and   in San Francisco’s broader gay community by  establishing a local business association,   starting a political club for gay  progressives, organizing gay bars   to assist union brewery boycotts, and  cultivating a reputation as the local   go-to mediator and extra hand in anything from  domestic squabbles to commercial disputes.[18]
• 11:30 - 12:00 Over the next few years, he campaigned  squarely on his personal identity—once   shunted to the back of a dark closet, now  at the forefront of his public image—as   the gay candidate for gay issues.[19] His  popularity with the gay community only grew,   even as he failed in two more contests for public  office, stifled by establishment organizations and   machine politics.[20] All that would change,  however, four years later in 1977 when San
• 12:00 - 12:30 Francisco voted to approve a massive election  reform championed by the new liberal mayor   George Moscone. Instead of citywide elections for  a pool of supervisors, seats would now be elected   on a district basis, empowering neighborhoods  and grassroots candidates. Crucially for Milk,   the fifth district coincided neatly with the  Castro area.[21] Harvey Milk was now inevitable. He finally landed his long-sought seat in the  1977 election, but success was bitter-sweet. Over
• 12:30 - 13:00 the past seven years, Harvey Milk—the uncertain  drifter—was finally finding his place, discovering   harmony between his private life and public image.  But as a fun experiment quickly transformed into   year after year of endless campaign, Scott  Smith no longer recognized the man with whom   he’d fallen in love, opened a camera shop, and  built a home.[22] So Harvey Milk’s personal life
• 13:00 - 13:30 fell apart, just as he found public success by  placing his personal identity squarely at the   center of his politics: a deeply-felt irony,  but one which he wouldn’t let slow him down. As a city supervisor, he proved a master of  publicity and a refreshingly down-to-earth   local problem solver, most famously combined  when he gained national attention as the “pooper   scooper supervisor,” going on tv to explain  his efforts addressing the city’s epidemic of
• 13:30 - 14:00 public dog droppings, whereupon he closed the  segment by- Oh man, I just stepped in sh-.[23] In Milk’s own words, “All over the country,  they’re reading about me and the story doesn’t   center on me being gay. It’s just about  a gay person who is doing his job.”[24] But of course, Milk had campaigned as the / gay  candidate for gay voters, and one of his first   major proposals was a / human rights ordinance  banning discrimination against homosexuals—a key
• 14:00 - 14:30 step for a community so frequently and randomly  brutalized by police. To get anywhere, though,   he’d have to go through a committee / chaired  by Dan White, a former cop and recently elected   supervisor. White was about as conservative  as you could get in San Francisco politics,   campaigning against “social deviates” who had made  San Francisco into a “cesspool of perversion.”[25] But in those early months of their political  tenures, Milk and White actually got along really
• 14:30 - 15:00 well. For example, White invited only three of  his ten fellow supervisors to his son’s baptism,   one of whom was Harvey Milk. And while he’d railed  against “social deviates” during his campaign, in   office he showed signs of being more moderate and  measured.[26] In fact, White was happy to trade   support for Milk’s gay rights bill in exchange for  his help on one of White’s own efforts. So Milk’s   bill passed the committee, but when the time came  to return the favor, Milk reneged on his promise,   proving the decisive ballot in a narrow 6-5  vote against Dan White’s most prized bill.[27]
• 15:00 - 15:30 Furious at the betrayal, White tried to  stop Milk’s ordinance from going to a   final vote but to no avail. It passed,  10-1. White was the only holdout.[28] Despite the local victory for gay rights, though,  trouble was brewing in California. John Briggs,   a conservative state senator, had placed  Proposition 6 on the November ballot:   an initiative that, if passed, would require the  dismissal of any public school employee not just
• 15:30 - 16:00 for being gay, but for speaking positively  about homosexuality or any homosexual   person in public. He’d gotten the idea from a  similar bill recently passed in Florida.[29]   Briggs set the tone for his campaign with  claims that “I really, sincerely, honestly,   and truly believe, from the bottom of my heart,  that homosexuality is a real threat to the   survival of this country" and that “the reason you  [Harvey Milk] want to be elected to high office   is so you can recruit and convert every young  adolescent to [homosexuality]."[30] Importantly,
• 16:00 - 16:30 California wasn’t yet the deep blue state  it is today—polls predicted Prop 6 winning   relatively easily.[31] The gay community and their  allies would need to put up one hell of a fight. But there was no consensus about how to do  that. Milk’s clash with the establishment   once more reared its head, as mainline  liberals and old-school gay activists   argued against the bill as a civil liberties  issue, not a gay rights issue—the government   was peering into people’s bedrooms,  and that, naturally, was bad.[32]
• 16:30 - 17:00 Milk agreed that civil liberties were a  core part of the argument against Prop 6,   but he saw the old guard’s approach as a dead end  for gay rights. As he saw it, they were implicitly   apologizing for their sexuality, asking voters  to please ignore it. He knew firsthand from his   forty years spent in the closet that splitting  one’s identity between public facade and private   truth was a recipe for internal torment, not to  mention that homosexuals in hiding could hardly
• 17:00 - 17:30 hope to be handed real political equality. So Harvey Milk started his own campaign against   Briggs’ initiative. With the help of a few  key aides, he organized about 800 volunteers   to go door to door.[33] When Briggs agreed to a  two-on-two debate on the measure, it was obvious   the state’s only openly-gay elected official had  to be on-stage. And together with Sally Gearhart,   a lesbian professor of women’s studies,  they demolished Briggs and his partner   on public television with a combination  of facts debunking Briggs’ homophobic
• 17:30 - 18:00 myths about teachers and powerful appeals to the  constitutional rights of gay men and women.[34] On November 7th, 1978, Prop 6 lost in dramatic  fashion: 58% to 42%.[35] It had been a statewide   battle with national attention, and Harvey  was its standard bearer. Just eleven months   after he’d taken office as a Supervisor, he had  achieved real political prominence. At the time,   the only question was just how high,  and how quickly, he could climb.
• 18:00 - 18:30 But as Milk’s star was on the rise, his  once-friendly, now bitter colleague Dan   White’s was plummeting. White cared seriously  about public service but lacked Milk’s knack   for and love of the political game, unwilling  to put himself at the center of the public’s   attention or, obviously, to successfully  manage the horse-trading of politics.[36] Even worse, the Supervisor position was part-time,  paying nowhere near enough for White to support
• 18:30 - 19:00 himself and his family. But where others  either had private-sector employment or   independent wealth, White’s only other work  had been as a firefighter or a policeman,   and he legally couldn’t hold multiple  government jobs at the same time. He was,   simply, out of luck—ironically not  unlike Milk, whose prior success as   a small businessman had evaporated over the  course of his all-consuming political career. Yet where Milk could envision the path before  him—perhaps the State Assembly in a few years,
• 19:00 - 19:30 or even the mayoralty—White saw no future in  politics. His only concern was district eight.   Frustrated and seeing no path to improving his  finances, White delivered his resignation to   Mayor George Moscone on November 10th,  1978, three days after Milk’s big win. When his constituents heard about White’s  resignation, many urged him to reconsider,   and on November 14th, he visited the  mayor, hat in hand, begging to undo his   resignation. Moscone was sympathetic to his  pleas, and promised White his job was safe.
• 19:30 - 20:00 But when Milk heard the news, he called the mayor  and urged against White’s reinstatement. Moscone,   who now relied on Milk and the well-organized  gay community for political support,   not only agreed but took Milk’s advice  on who to appoint as a replacement. Milk, though, wasn’t as subtle as  he’d thought. Before calling Moscone,   he’d phoned the city attorney’s office  to inquire about the legality of White   undoing his resignation. By sheer chance,  Dan White was in that very same office,
• 20:00 - 20:30 and overheard Milk’s plot of opposition.[37] So  when he soon discovered that Moscone would not,   in fact, give him his job back,  he saw Milk as the culprit. Thus it was with these two pieces  of knowledge—that he’d lost his job   permanently and that Harvey Milk had  intervened against him—that Dan White,   armed with a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and  ten spare rounds in his pocket, climbed through   a basement window of San Francisco City Hall  at 10:30am on Monday, November 27th, 1978.[38]
• 20:30 - 21:00 After escaping City Hall in his  aide’s car White called his wife,   briefly met with her and admitted what he’d done,   then drove to the nearby police station where  he used to work. There, he offered a tearful,   devastating confession, although he insisted that  he hadn’t planned or premeditated the act.[39]
• 21:00 - 21:30 “I just shot him” When court proceedings commenced, the prosecution  sought the death penalty. But in doing so,   they incidentally shot themselves in the  foot, as selecting jurors who wouldn’t   shy away from sending a man to the  chair also slanted the jury towards   conservatives more likely to sympathize with  the former cop and Vietnam veteran White,   especially measured against the liberal  Moscone and gay liberal Milk.[40] If it weren’t for mistakes like  these, it’s hard to imagine the
• 21:30 - 22:00 defense could have made their story  stick, because their whole argument   was that White lacked the mental presence  to premeditate his crime because he’d been   too depressed and eating too much junk food.  According to one so-called “expert witness”: “There have been some studies…where they  have taken so-called career criminals and   taken them off all their junk food and  put them on milk and meat and potatoes,   and their criminal records  immediately evaporated.”[41]
• 22:00 - 22:30 Seriously. And if you want to dive deeper  into the many fumbles of the prosecution   and bizarre excuses of the defense, we go into  all that on the bonus podcast for this video,   which you can get on our Patreon. Go check it out. Anyways, believe it or not, the jury bought  this “Twinkie Defense.” On March 21st,   1979, Dan White was convicted to a mere  seven years in prison not for murder,   but for “voluntary manslaughter,” which I didn’t  even know existed until making this video.[42]
• 22:30 - 23:00 People, understandably, weren’t happy. That  night, a massive crowd gathered here outside   City Hall. Police cars were smashed  and rioters attempted to break into   the building itself. The episode would go  down in history as the “White Night” riots,   an echo of the Stonewall uprisings  in New York ten years earlier.[43] Dan White was, without question, a deeply unwell  individual who needed help. And personally, I   think the death penalty is wrong. But there is  no reasonable interpretation of White’s actions
• 23:00 - 23:30 that doesn’t involve him premeditating these  murders. And it’s hard to argue that homophobia   and White’s all-American image had nothing  to do with the verdict and light sentence. In fact, when he was elected, Harvey Milk was  acutely aware of the danger inherent in being   a prominent gay man. In fact, in one of his  several wills he recorded, “to be played only   in the event of my death by assassination,”  he said, “I fully realize that a person who
• 23:30 - 24:00 stands for what I stand for—an activist, a  gay activist—becomes the target or potential   target for someone who is insecure, terrified,  afraid, or very disturbed themselves.”[44] As with any martyr, Milk was a human being,  riddled with contradictions and vices ranging
• 24:00 - 24:30 from normal to reprehensible. His political  ambition was not without a heavy dose of ego,   he habitually neglected his romantic partners,  and he mismanaged his personal affairs—ultimately   destroying his private life which he sought  through politics to publicly protect. But it was this very strategy of Milk’s—of  emphasizing rather than staying quiet about   his sexuality—that would later define  the gay rights movement. To some critics,   though, this represented—and still represents—a  dangerous threat to liberalism and individual
• 24:30 - 25:00 rights and equality: that such identity-based  politics risk toppling the delicate balancing   act of legal equality for all, regardless  of identity. And such concerns sometimes,   perhaps often, have good reason to them. But as Milk eventually, and rightly, saw  it—after decades of aimless drifting,   his identity held at arm’s length, hidden  in a closet—public expression of identity
• 25:00 - 25:30 was strategically and morally essential  to realizing the promise of equality   in an as-yet unequal system. Otherwise,  any freedom could only ever be partial. Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how recent  all of this is, but modern threats to gay rights   vindicate Milk’s philosophy. In fact, it was  less than 20 years ago that Milk’s home state   of California voted to ban gay marriage, which was  ultimately legalized across the country less than
• 25:30 - 26:00 ten years ago. And today, most notably in Florida  but in other states as well, state legislatures   have enacted their own versions of Prop 6,  banning teachers from discussing sexual or gender   identity in classrooms, using John Briggs’ own  pernicious, disgusting rationale: that lesbian,   gay, bisexual, and transgender people somehow  pose a threat to the American social fabric.  There’s a great deal of hope to be found in his  life and even his death, but perhaps the greatest
• 26:00 - 26:30 tragedy of his story is that fifty years later,  America still needs a leader like Harvey Milk.