Harvey Milk and California Proposition 6: how the gay liberation movement won two early victories

Abstract

iv Acknowledgments v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Historical Conditions that Made LGBT Rights Victories Possible.....7 Chapter 3: Milk’s Progressive Strategies 35 Chapter 4: How California Proposition 6 Was Defeated 73 Chapter 5: Conclusion 131 Appendix 136 Bibliography 137 Chapter 1: Introduction As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children. Anita Bryant In November 1977, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) movement scored an historic victory by electing Harvey Milk as the first openly gay male candidate to political office in the United States. According to historian Elizabeth Armstrong, “more than any other single event, the election of Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977 signaled the ascendance of gay electoral power in San Francisco.” Only three years after Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives as the first openly lesbian or gay candidate to political office in the U.S., Milk’s election was a momentous victory that visibly demonstrated the rising political power of the growing LGBT population not only in San Francisco but in the United States as a whole. The victory also reflected the dramatic rise in the 1970s in the number of LGBT people “coming out of the closet” and openly identifying themselves as gays and lesbians. This electoral victory for the LGBT rights movement is particularly fascinating because it came at a time when there was a growing conservative backlash against the gay liberation movement and other left-wing protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977 and 1978, ordinances protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination were being repealed in state after state. Conservative forces emerged victorious in ballot initiative elections that 1 Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 123.