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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
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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.