1 gen 1978 anni - harvey milk assassinated in san fran

Descrizione:

The gay rights movement had achieved notable victories but also encountered determined conservative resistance. By the mid-1970s, more than a dozen cities had passed gay rights ordinances protecting gay men and lesbians from employment and housing discrimination. One such ordinance in Dade County, Florida, sparked a protest led by Anita Bryant, a successful pop singer and conservative Baptist activist. Her “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977, which garnered national media attention, resulted in the repeal of the ordinance and symbolized the emergence of a conservative religious movement opposed to gay rights.

Across the country from Miami, the story of Harvey Milk, a camera-shop owner turned politician, captured both the promise and the peril of gay rights activism. A closeted businessman in New York until he was forty, in 1972 Milk arrived in San Francisco, which had become known for its vibrant gay and lesbian communities, and threw himself into public life. Fiercely independent, he ran as an openly gay candidate for city supervisor (city council) twice and the state assembly once, all three times unsuccessfully.


In November 1977, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States, when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Shockingly, almost exactly a year from the day of his election, Milk was assassinated.


By mobilizing the “gay vote” into a powerful bloc, Milk finally won a supervisor seat in 1977. He was not the first openly gay elected official in the country — Kathy Kozachenko of Michigan and Elaine Noble of Massachusetts share that distinction — but he became a national symbol of emerging gay political power, after working to win passage of a rights ordinance in San Francisco. But Milk’s career was cut short in 1978, when a disgruntled former fellow supervisor named Dan White assassinated him and the city’s mayor, George Mascone. When White was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, which carried a much lighter prison sentence, five thousand lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activists and allies marched on San Francisco City Hall. Confrontations with police turned violent, and protestors attacked police vehicles and City Hall itself in what became known as the “White Night Riots.” Before order was restored, dozens of police officers and more than a hundred protestors were injured.

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