Who is Harvey Milk?

[dsc]

and why is a school named after him? In all the discussion on the Harvey Milk School and why it is or isn't a good idea I think a little something which speaks volumes got lost in the shuffle. Just who Harvey Milk was.

Harvey Milk was a councilman in San Francisco who along with Mayor Muscone was assisinated by a fellow councilman named Frank White. Milk was San Francisco's first openly gay councilman and had just recently been elected when in 1977 he and Muscone were gunned down in cold blood. White was a very conservatve former cop turned councilman who decided to take by violence what he couldn't win electorally. White was tried for the crime.

He used the 'twinkie' defense. The theory was that since he loaded up on junk food and sugar he was not responsible for what he did. A jury of White's peers, but not Milk's, found him guilty of manslaughter and he served 5 years in prision. 5 years for the worst crime in a democracy that of assassination.

This wasn't back in the day but in the lifetime of most Americans. I was 10 when this happened. Things have gotten better of that there is no doubt. But for all too many gays and lesbians we find every day the evidence for why this school is a necessary evil. I would vastly prefer that people like me could go to schools and not be in fear of harrassment or bodily harm. I would much prefer that people like me couldn't be fired from our jobs, lose our apartments, and be bashed on the streets. That, sadly, isn't true yet. So, for now, the Harvey Milk School lives on as a bittersweet testiment to both how far we have come and how far we need to go. I just thought some perspective was in order.

Sorry two errors and thanks for pointing them out.

One the shooter was Dan White and two he served 6 years (I think it was 5 and some actually but rounding made 6)

[Robin Hood]

1. Jeezus!!

He only got five years? He should have been put to sleep for committing a hate crime. Where is he these days?

[dsc]

2. He killed himself

in the 1980's as a free man it must be said.

[Robin Hood]

6. Well,

That's honorable. At least he did something right in his sad and pathetic life. Burn, baby burn.

[Pastiche423]

4. Dan White is dead

He killed himself shortly after getting out of prison.

[Scurrilous]

8. Good riddance.

http://www.mistersf.com/notorious/notwhiteindex.htm


<snip>

"Unable to make a new life for himself nor to escape the impact of his crimes, White attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of the family car, a yellow 1970 Buick Le Sabre and took his life on the morning of October 21, 1985."

[Pastiche423]

10. There were Dan White celebrations

in the City after he died.

I'm just surprised no one got to him 1st.

[jonnyblitz]

3. I remember recently seeing the newsclip of Diane Fienstein announcing

his death. I forget the context. I don't even remember what office she was holding at the time. I am not certain if she was mayor of SF yet.

[RichM]

7. DiFi BECAME mayor because of Moscone's assassination. n/t

[jiacinto]

9. That assination elevated her to mayor

nt

[Ivory_Tower]

5. Minor correction

I think it was Daniel James White, not Frank White. Paroled after six years, committed suicide after his release.

I saw the play "Execution of Justice" shortly after I moved to DC, sometime around 1985. Very powerful. Although I can't remember the details after all these years, I still remember the sense of anger that it portrayed.

(On edit: I see others beat me to it. Found his full name on a web search)

(Time to get some sleep....)

[noiretextatique]

11. yes, the infamous "twinkie defense"

poor guy shot and killed two people...cause he ate too many twinkies. outrageous then...and now. but in the end, for whatever reason, he couldn't live with himself. i don't believe people ever escape the evil they do...one way or another...it catches up to them.

[Coffee Coyote]

12. I played Dan White's jailer

Emily Mann's "Execution of Justice" is a play based on the trial of Milk and Mosconi murderer Dan White. Actual trial transcripts were used for the production, and it is amazing how he got away with it. The legal system's breakdown began long before the White trial or O.J. though. In regards to human rights for gays - 25 years later, we have come a little ways, but not long enough.

[Julien Sorel]

13. The so-called 'Twinkie defense' is often portrayed incorrectly.

White was found to be suffering from clinical depression, and the fact that he had been loading up on Twinkies and other junk food was used as evidence of that depression in his trial; it wasn't blamed for the killings itself. White's eventual suicide, by the way, would be further evidence of that depression. Nevertheless, after White's trial, it became extremely difficult to win a 'diminished capacity' case for the defense, as right-wingers (oddly enough, White himself was a right-winger) used the case to deride the entire notion of diminished capacity by mis-representing White's case. The 'Twinkie defense' has since become part of the zeitgeist that has led to the current atmosphere in our judicial system; things like the 'three strikes' law, mandatory sentence guidelines and so on all result from carefully orchestrated distortions of cases like White's. That the left went along with this stuff, in part because of White's homophobia, is unfortunate, to say the least.

[QC]

14. Here are two excellent sites about Milk

for those who aren't familiar with him.

The Forgotten Populist:
http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/milk.html

Discusses Milk as a populist, not only a gay rights advocate, and there's a lot here that should interest any liberal.

This one is also excellent:
http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/milk01.html

Nice little quote from the previous link that explains the atmosphere in which Milk rose to prominence:

When he began public life, though, Milk was a preposterous figure--an "avowed homosexual," in the embarrassed language of the time, who was running for office. In the 1970s, many psychiatrists still called homosexuality a mental illness. In one entirely routine case, the Supreme Court refused in 1978 to overturn the prison sentence of a man convicted solely of having sex with another consenting man. A year before, it had let stand the firing of a stellar Tacoma, Wash., teacher who made the mistake of telling the truth when his principal asked if he was homosexual. No real national gay organization existed, and Vice President Walter Mondale haughtily left a 1977 speech after someone asked him when the Carter Administration would speak in favor of gay equality. To be young and realize you were gay in the 1970s was to await an adulthood encumbered with dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows.

All this stuff was not so long ago. I was in junior high and beginning to experience those "strange twilight urges" when I saw Dianne Feinstein on the news announcing the murders in city hall. I was in college when Warren Burger would write, in an opinion justifying busting into people's bedrooms and hauling them off to jail: "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching."

The lynchings of Matthew Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither were less than five years ago, and in the time since many others have met similar fates, albeit without media attention.

It was only a little over a month ago that I ceased being an unindicted felon in almost half of the states.

Organizations that suck up government funding are exempted from antidiscrimination laws so long as they confine their bigotry to people like me (Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, June 28, 2000) and Bu$hCorp is currently pushing to give more federal funding to discriminatory groups. The vast majority of states hold that firing homos or driving them out of their homes simply for being homos is perfectly OK. Even New York state only passed an antidiscrimination law very recently after the bigots had kept it bogged down in the legislature for three decades. The Congress still hasn't considered the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a tame little proposal with all sorts of exemptions for matters of "conscience."

So I'm a little puzzled by the implicit assumption in some of the posts here and in the other threads on this subject that attempting to deal with this set of circumstances is to ask for special treatment, or in Freeper lingo, "special rights."

[Booberdawg]

15. Utterly barbaric

what gays have had to endure. It is far past time to give up the argument that "equal" treatment means "special" treatment. As justly determined by the Supreme Court, it's simply a matter of basic human rights to privacy and dignity.

And besides that, I have a problem with people who have so much time and energy to rant, rave, piss, moan, and groan, about what OTHER people are doing behind closed doors?? :wtf: Think about it?? I don't spend time thinking about what heterosexuals are doing in privacy?? Do you?? I think the falwells and freeper homophobes need to mind their own fucking business.

Well, that is, I don't think about it except for an occasionally rich fantasy life, but then it's not about what OTHER people are doing! :wow: :wow:

[QC]

16. A newlywed heterosexual couple lives next door to me.

We always wave at one another, and the husband gave me a jumpstart a while back. (No rude jokes, please. It was a purely automotive encounter.)

I never, ever lie awake at night wondering what they might be doing in bed. For what it's worth, I hope they're having a fine old time.

[Booberdawg]

18. LOL!

In my younger days, when someone in my circle of friends needed a jump start, it usually meant their liver. :toast:

[CWebster]

17. Who was Harvey Milk..

Seems he was beloved. I recall seeing the long candle-lit marches in his memory.

[QC]

19. See post #14.

It has a couple of links to sites about him.

[austinboy]

20. Kick this!

Everyone should know about Harvey Milk.