 Hi, I'm Jim Van Buskert, program manager of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library. I'm here today with Daniel Nicoletta and a very select studio audience, and I've convinced Dan to preserve for posterity his presentation entitled Harvey Milk, A Personal View. Dan originally delivered the slide lecture on November 17, 1998 to an appreciative standing room only audience at the library's Caret Auditorium. The event was held in conjunction with Harvey Milk, Second Sight, an exhibit curated by Bob Kelly, which was on view at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery during the fall of 1998. It included images made by Dan as well as many from the Harvey Milk Archives' Scott Smith collection. This important collection of materials associated with the life and legacy of Harvey Milk was donated to the library by Elvis Smith, Scott Smith's mother, with the support and encouragement of a dedicated group of Harvey and Scott's friends, including Dan. The exhibit, the program, and the making available to researchers of this important collection are all aspects of the goals of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center to preserve and make accessible the record of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history. I'm not going to embarrass Dan today by listing all his credentials. I would just like to mention that his first retrospective exhibition in San Francisco in 1996 was sponsored by the Lesbian and Gay Employees Association of Levi Strauss and Company. On a personal note, I would just like to say how pleased and proud I am that about a dozen of Dan's photographs appeared in Gay by the Bay, a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay area. This is an acknowledgment of Dan's important contribution to documenting queer San Francisco over the last two dozen years. Welcome, Dan. Thank you, Jim, and thanks for including my work in Gay by the Bay. I'm very proud of that collaboration. Hi, I'm Dan Nicoletta, and it is an honor to be here sharing my friendship with Harvey Milk and Scott Smith. I had the pleasure of working in Harvey and Scott's Castro Street Camera Store in the heart of what we lovingly refer to as the Gay Ghetto. I was 19 at the time, it was about 1975. I was a budding photographer, and I began to devote myself to documenting the emerging gay and lesbian and transgender and bisexual community. Harvey and Scott became like a parents to me. They took a genuine interest in my work, and both men were determined to deconstruct my last traces of self-doubt about being gay. Working there also provided me the opportunity to become politically active. I worked on three of Harvey's political campaigns, including the Victoria's Campaign, when Harvey became the first elected gay official in California and one of the first in the nation. After he served only 11 months in office, Harvey and then Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in their city hall offices by a homophobic colleague, Dan White. Throughout the years that followed, I continued to document the reverberations of Harvey's life. It was my way of coping, and I remained a close ally of Scott Smith, who lovingly became known as the Widow Milk. Scott and I and a bunch of Harvey's friends formed the fledgling organization called the Harvey Milk Archives, and we cataloged and disseminated Harvey's papers in an effort to continue his message of hope. I essentially stayed behind the camera during those years out of the spotlight. Scott died in 1995, and sort of handed the torch of the family archivist over to myself and that small group of people. As Jim mentioned, together we worked with Alba Smith, the executor of the Milk Estate and the Scott Smith Estate, and transitioned the materials to the San Francisco Public Library, the Hormel Gang Lesbian Studies Center, consistent with Scott's vision for the work. In 1997, I was asked to give a small slide talk as part of a summer-long festival in Berlin honoring the work of Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld formed what could be considered the first gay community center ever. It was called the Institute of Sexual Science, and the German government sponsored a summer-long event honoring the 100 years of the gay liberation movement. The task of speaking about Harvey Milk and also his Jewish heritage in that context fell into my lap and was a little bit unnerving actually. But in the spirit of what Harvey and Scott taught me, which was to find a personal voice and carry on the message of hope, I came out of my public speaking closet and rose to the occasion. And even though Berlin went very well, I remained timid about public speaking, but my friends and colleagues in San Francisco were eager to hear about my take on the Harvey Milk Legacy. So in conjunction with the 20-year mark of Harvey's assassination, I agreed to do the talk one more time publicly here at the San Francisco Public Library, and I felt that Harvey and Scott wanted me to rise to that occasion. And even though the talk went very well, it was a standing room-only auditorium, and I received a standing ovation. The proposal to tour the speech that came after that was too daunting. So this studio tape that you are about to experience is an attempt to capture the material of the talk and make the material available to a wider audience. We hope that it will augment a tour of the installation that premiered back then Harvey Milk's second site, and this is not really a polished piece, per se, because I would most likely resort to much quicker cuts and a much more polished script. So I hope you will be patient with the free-form anecdotes and the long holds on the images and let your mind treat them as meditative material. Incidentally, the images are not exclusively by me. There's many sources and many other photographers involved, including unique, rarely seen images by Harvey Milk and Scott Smith. My hope is that this will provide a unique personal view of the men, Harvey Milk and Scott Smith, my friends. Harvey was 44 when we met, which is my age now. He would be 68 years old today. This image is a photograph that I took around 1977 for his third Supervisorial campaign, which is the campaign that he won. And this particular shot was actually rejected because the tie was blowing in the wind, and we wanted the tie to be straight for the campaign literature. And after Harvey died, we were going through his material and found this strip of negatives and upon reevaluation, I found the energy of it to be much nicer with the tie blowing in the wind, and the smile really exemplifies Harvey's nature. He was a very jovial man, and he had a wonderful, wonderful smile. Scott was 21 when he met Harvey on May 21, 1971, which was Harvey's 41st birthday. Scott would be 49 years old today. On Scott's birthday, they went to the pound in San Francisco, and they got their first child kid and proceeded to tour California in a beat-up old car, driving up and down the coast until their unemployment checks ran out, and then they came to San Francisco and opened Castro Camera on Castro Street. I moved to Castro Street in 1974 in a little flat just above 19th with my then-lover, whose name also was Harvey, and another friend, and the three of us shared a flat which rented for $165, which by today's standard is unheard of, and we could barely afford the $55 each. That first week, I went down the street to determine where I would be processing my movie film and my still film. I was a film student at the time, and I walked into Castro Street Camera, and it was very surprising how wonderfully friendly these two guys were, and I just couldn't get over how overtly friendly this one Harvey was. So I continued to go there and started to not only take my film there, but started to hang out there. There was a gaggle of customers that enjoyed just sitting around and shooting the breeze, and Harvey often hinted that I should never have to worry about where my next roll of triax would come from, that we would work out some kind of trade or something. So he never said exactly what we would trade, but I think we both decided to remain vague about that point. I was pretty clueless about cruising then, but within a couple of months I learned the ropes, and one night coming home from after bar closing, and Castro Street was lined up with guys looking for love. There was Harvey Milk, and I swooped him up, and off we went to his apartment, so there you have it. They were both artists, and they would do things like come, if I was involved in a theater production, they would come to the show, and they really cultivated my sexual identity. They wanted to hear about my sexual exploits, and words cannot express how close and how dear the two men became in my life. These were exhilarating times. There was a general consensus that we had found Oz, and my lover at the time had been gently urging me to come out of the closet, and it wasn't long before I stepped out of the doorway of my halfway open closet and joined the kissing and hugging fest that characterized a typical stroll down Castro Street. Incidentally, if you're wondering what the reference of the rainbow flag is, it has something to do with the Judy Garland song over the rainbow. The back porch of my apartment building was a veritable tales of the city. There were six flats, and quite a few of them were gay communes. We did have one typical little old lady from the old guard of the neighborhood, and then there were two straight girls who loved gay boys and one flat, and on the weekends the back doors were open, and it was like one big coffee clutch. The top floor was a commune of gay guys from Ohio, and it seemed like every weekend a new group would arrive, and sometimes there was as many as six to eight guys sleeping in a two-bedroom flat. My lover and I broke up because we were both kind of forming our sexual identity out of the little strip of bars right there on Castro Street or South of Market. I was a regular at the stud. I mostly hung out at a place called Andy's Donuts, though, which was a 24-hour greasy spoon right there on Castro Street, and it was there that I met a lot of the theater people that I would come to photograph and love, including a ten-year stint as a photographer for a group called the Angels of Light, which was sort of the hippie drag aesthetic in its form. About reservations was what the restaurant turned into. We were sort of dismayed by that, so we would just call it without. And now Andy's Donuts up there on 17th is sort of the bastard child of the original Andy's Donuts. The guys would pour out of the bars at bar closing into Andy's Donuts, and sort of all the art fags would already be in there doing drawings and hanging out and drinking coffee all night, and so the place really rocked back then. This was sort of a typical example of the kind of exciting things that were happening. This was the opening of a cafe also on Castro Street, which is now where the Patio Cafe is, and Divine was in town opening a show, and Lily Tomlin happened to be at the party, and then two of the local queens there, Pristine Condition on the far right, who was one of the cockats and sister-ad, who was one of the Angels of Light, and it was just a really wonderful day. It sort of represents one of my early forays into tranny chasing. I used to follow Pristine Condition around like a little puppy dog trying to get the definitive shot of this wonderful iconographic drag queen. I was no fool, Pristine was always surrounded by cute art fags. Harvey and Scott, finally after a year of being friends with them, pulled me in off the street one day. I was walking down, and Harvey was standing in the doorway of the camera store, and he, in a very serious voice, he asked me, could you come on in? I need to talk to you, and he sat me down in the back, and he says, Scott and I would like you to come work for us, you know, I'm going to be entering my second Supervisorial campaign, and I'm going to need an extra pair of hands around here, and of course I accepted, I had, prior to that, I had been doing everything from painting mushrooms on leather belts to bike messenger to busboy, and all that was fine, because we were also thrilled to be in San Francisco, but this moment, this job meant that my life would take flight. The store was amazing, there I am waiting on a customer, this was a photograph taken by Harvey Milk of me, it was shot with infrared film, which is why I had that sort of milky white skin. There was everything from little old ladies to the freelancers of the day, and the place was very, very cruisy. As you can see the countertop is sort of at waist level, so the first thing we see when you walk in is your crotch, and there certainly was a hierarchy of service. Scott was exclusively to wait on the hunky leather queens, and Harvey got most of the little young twinks, and then I would get all the freaks. My first day of work at Castro Camera was the second annual street fair, which was kind of organized out of the store. The street merchants were getting the mapping for the boots that they sell, their artworks in, and the store was selling film, and there were registering voters out front, and it was really crazy. Unfortunately I hadn't been trained yet, and I didn't know film prices, so there wasn't a lot I could do. So Harvey said, here take these rolls of film and go out and document the fair, and that's your first job for the day. It was amazing, I immersed myself into that sea of people, and I just had an amazing time photographing drag queens in theater people and hunky leather numbers. So by now I'm starting to kind of envision myself as the Diane Arbus of the gay community, and that night we sent the film in for processing, and in the next week we would project the slides in the store window so passers-by could see the street fair, and that was possibly one of the first places I exhibited in town. The Castro Street Fair as well as the Gay Freedom Day Parade were like a photographer's dream world come true. People's exhibitionism spilled out into the streets, and the excitement in the fair was tangible. We all had a real strong sense of manifest destiny, especially among us photographers and filmmakers. We networked, we shared resources, we did exhibits together. This is where I first met people like Rink who's still very much part of the community's documentation world, and Crawford Barton who was a photographer for the advocate. There was Guy Corey who ran a funky little portrait studio on Castro Street, and the list goes on. This was two of the guys from Ohio that were sort of early radical fairies. That's Harmonius on your left and Hotay on your right. They're in front of an apartment door also on Castro Street, and behind that blue door was an amazing commune. It was populated by people who were with the Angels of Light, and they would throw parties and show films up there. Mark Hustis, the noted filmmaker, started the Gay Film Festival there. Tattoo Mike lived there. Teddy Matthews, who was an early spokesperson for transgender issues live there, and Steven Brown who was a romantic partner of mine played with the band Tuxedo Moon, and I just have such fond memories of parties in that particular apartment. This is the Street Fair again, and these guys were part of Sylvester's entourage. Sylvester was a disco singer who was sort of rising to fame and was sort of a local treasure because he was openly gay. The guy in the middle's name is December. I didn't know him when I took this picture, but he became a very dear friend of mine over the years because we were both born on December 23rd. This is one of the joys of photography for me is photographing somebody, not knowing them very well or not knowing them at all, and then over time getting to know them through the process of photography. It's pretty amazing. Harvey and Scott always used to kid me that I would come back from the Street Fairs with only pictures of drag queens and theater people and all my buddies were photographing hunky numbers, but this picture disproves that theory. This was a conceptual art piece by a guy named Violet Ray who walked around all day with that placard of suntan billboard and people would undo themselves in front of it or camp and mug. Violet Ray was part of a neat collective of people that were some of the early people I exhibited with. They were called the Hula Palace and they were pretty great because they used to astrologically forecast when it would be a good time to do a salon and they would empty their furniture out of their house for a three-day period based on the stars and then they would have three days of artwork and performance art. That was also right there at 19th and Castro. I became obsessed with that theater world, the Angels of Light and they were descended from a group called the Cuckettes which was the original sort of gender fuck theater group that triumphed in San Francisco from about 1969 to 1972 which was before my time. I arrived in 74 but I sought these people out. Sylvester was one of them, Reggie who you see here was one of them and I followed them around like I said earlier, like a little puppy dog and photographed some of the plays that they continued to do under different guises and this really was the main common ground between Harvey and I because he had experience off-Broadway in New York and he loved regaling me with tales of what the theater world was like back then and I loved listening to his stories. I'm going to transition to a photograph that was taken by Harvey and it's a very similar kind of aesthetic. This was probably a post-Cockettes show, circa 1973 and it really demonstrates how, well one, that there was this idyllic period where Harvey and Scott had not really entered the political arena and so they were enjoying the fruits of this magical, wonderful city and going to things like shows and not really focused on political vision and here's another shot from that same collection in Harvey's albums and that's Sylvester on stage. Okay, so I'm going to use this as a way of identifying an idyllic period versus a period when it became all politics. So let's backtrack a little bit to Harvey's early years. He was born in 1930 in Woodmere, New York. He was born into a family of immigrant Russian Jews. We're not quite sure whether Harvey was born with the opera gene or whether he acquired it, but it's been documented that he, as a young lad he found out early that the standing room section of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York was a place that he could find sex and did and that led him to discovering the bushes in Central Park and at age 17 he's nearly busted by the New York City Police Department for cruising Central Park and he was reported to being unnerved by the fact that straight men were allowed to roam around Central Park without a shirt but gay men were constantly harassed. So this is probably a really pivotal point for him in terms of understanding socially how gays were mistreated and excluded. Harvey graduated from Albany State Teachers College and shortly after joined the military. He was a genuine patriot but it would be safe to assume that the same-sex comradery of the military informed Harvey's patriotism. Here he is with two of his friends in boot camp and you can see that there's a sense of slapstick already in place. Harvey was discharged to Los Angeles in 1955 and I love this photograph it's sort of an indicator of the post-service comradery that spilled out into the beaches and the bars and the gyms of LA. Harvey met at that time and fell in love with a guy named John Harvey and they both know a photographer named Bob Meiser who ran what was called the LA Athletics Models Guild and John Harvey is still alive and he lives in the Castro and he was conveying to me that this photo of him was very brave at the time that it was considered a pornography of its day and he was petrified that his parents would find out that he did it. Bob Meiser incidentally is a very strong influence on me because it was the homoeroticism of its time but it was both subversive and theatrical and it sort of gives the little secret that there was a sort of secret society of gay men. I mean we would trade these pictures like baseball cards and there's sort of an innate wink within the framework of the photographs you know they're supposed to be athletic photos but we know better. Harvey then moved back to New York and he met a gentleman named Joe Campbell and this is both of them at Reese Park which was a place that they went a lot and there was a gay beach at Reese Park and they lived in a traditional marriage from about 1956 to 1962 and Harvey would often tell me tales of Joe in those years because Joe was a regular at the Andy Warhol factory and starred in Andy's film My Hustler and is also sung about in the Lou Reed song Walk on the Wild Side his name was Sugar Plum Fairy and I just loved those stories because I can remember when I was a young kid I watched the Warhol superstars on late night TV talk show one night and I determined right then and there that that's what I was going to be when I grew up. We're not sure who this is with Harvey but I think it's kind of a good indicator of Harvey's conservativism breaking down. This is the 60s and he was relatively closeted because he was a Wall Street broker but about this time he meets a couple really important people. He meets Craig Rodwell who is early founder of the Mattachine Society a gay liberation organization in New York and Galen McKinley who becomes his romantic partner after Rodwell and Tom O'Horgan the fledgling off-Broadway director and this is Craig Rodwell at Reese Park also and Harvey's romance with Craig was short but I think it's really a very critical relationship because Rodwell was basically part of the militant division of the Mattachine Society and for example at Reese Park there was again a disparity between the way the cops treated gays and the way the cops treated straight men and gays were not allowed to go up on the boardwalk without a shirt on although straight men were allowed to go up their shirtless and any time a gay person went up their shirtless they were immediately arrested and thrown into jail and Craig defied that several times and got brutalized and thrown into jail several times and it's documented that he often argued with Harvey about the need to come out and the need to be more strident and Harvey was fearful of losing his job as a Wall Street broker and eventually they parted the ways Craig later opened the first gay bookstore in New York and you just have to think that this is probably a really important turning point this is a really important person in Harvey's life with his next romantic partner Galen McKinley who was a close ally of the fledgling director Tom Horgan the three became inseparable friends and there's a lot of photographic material showing them tripping around New York together Harvey even acted in some of the early productions at La Mama Theater which is another area that I just adored hearing stories about Harvey told me that he would often buy hamburgers for Tom because he worked and Tom was really poor he even had holes in his shoes in the wintertime and he also told me about a story where Ellen Stewart who is La Mama who basically started La Mama Theater wanted to go to a big, elegant cocktail party in order to secure a grant and so she snuck in the maid's entrance in a maid's costume with her gown in a paper bag and then when she got inside she switched into her gown and up she went and she got her grant anyway the hamburgers kind of paid off because Tom eventually came to direct hair on Broadway and then later the other mega hits Jesus Christ Superstar and the friendship with Harvey carried over into those years and Harvey actually went on tour with the Road Company of Hair and so again you see something that happened a long time ago and it definitely has a strong effect on his identity and his political vision after they traveled to California which the pictures convey this amazing journey with the cast of hair and all these really extraordinarily gorgeous hippie boys and stunning women and they came back to New York and Tom produced his next two plays that were not that well received but I think they're pretty important plays one is called Inner City Mother Goose based on the Eve Merriam book Inner City Mother Goose which is an amazing wonderful book and then the second play was called Lenny which was based on the story of Lenny Bruce who was a circuit comedian sort of a burlesque comedian who was a champion of censorship issues who was constantly persecuted by the police and this play was basically a biographical piece about him and I think considering Harvey's life you just have to guess that Lenny was a tremendous influence on Harvey during this period Harvey met Scott Smith at the Christopher Street subway stop and even though this picture was taken after that point by Harvey I think it really evokes what that first moment must have been like and there's Scott in his tight little bell bottoms and they became really close romantic partners and now I want to read a letter from Harvey to Scott and it just gives you a really good sense of when Harvey was courting somebody he was really extraordinarily passionate about it he had gone back to California to live permanently and was waiting for Scott to finish up his duties as stage manager for Inner City and then come back come to him in California he writes Dear Scott this is circa 1972 it's Sunday afternoon sunny grand and I'm alone in the apartment playing one of my favorite operas Dear Rose and Cavalier by Strauss to me the music is some of the most beautiful ever written and I feel like an anal nitrate high throughout it's so romantically exciting I feel so good so excited so happy and just writing to you I feel young and light and I guess I just feel in love I wish all the haters of the world all the nixons of this world all the shits of the world could feel that warmth that excitement that nervousness that fills me at this moment it's just that I consider myself lucky to be able to experience love even at a distance and over a long long time apart I am still lucky very lucky I miss you so fucking much should I stay here or return to New York maybe I was crazy to leave but I was going crazy staying I guess I was boxed in and I had to lose I'm just saddened that I had to lose you somewhere along the line if someone would only push me if someone would tell me for once fuck that's my Gemini Implanets and Gemini that keeps me crazy I just love that astrological reference so, well did I go? I went too far there, sorry about that so Harvey moves to California and he becomes pals with his former roommate in California Tom Yure who is a puppeteer and his lover Denton Smith and these guys form the foundation of Harvey's California theatrical family there's a wonderful series of photographs where that repertoire of people go out to the ocean to do a fashion spread and there's primarily these photographs of these really very beautiful hippie boys and all these really wonderful costumes and then smack in the middle of this one proof sheet is one frame of Harvey standing there wearing one of the costumes so this is Harvey's fashion modeling career in its entirety this is kind of a crossroads photo for me this is back at the camera store and finally after hearing so many stories about him Harvey's old pal Tom O'Horgan came to California to visit and I finally got to meet him and he was wonderful and then immediately to Harvey's right is Frank Robinson Harvey's new dear close friend who was a novelist that lived in the Castro who was as much a regular at the camera store as I and Frank began to help Harvey draft his speeches and was one of the brains behind many of the speeches that we know and love today this is backing up just a little bit and it's probably the camera store right when they first opened in March of 1973 Scott is sitting there on a little upside down bucket and they immediately started exhibiting work on the walls so their love of art and artists and the desire to turn the store into a place of community forum was right from the beginning it eventually turned into a kind of Pee Wee's playhouse that you see here and people helped them build furniture and it was a very colorful place Harvey was angered by the Watergate hearings that he was watching on television every day and he decided to run for office for the first time he also started writing a column for BAR the Gay Weekly Paper at that time and it's here that you see the first foundation emerging of his political vision I'm going to read a campaign ad that gives a clue to the driving idea behind Harvey's political vision it goes let my tax money go for my protection and not my prosecution protect my home, protect my streets protect my life, protect my property let my minister and not some policeman worry about morality let the supervisors worry about childcare centers and not what books I want to read let the supervisors worry about becoming human beings and not how to prevent others from enjoying their lives around that same time Labor Day 1974 Harvey had lost that first Supervisorial campaign but he gained a lot of leverage as sort of the unofficial mayor of Castro Street and one last time the cops came into the Castro and arrested 14 guys for loitering during the BAR hours on the weekend and because of the clout that was sort of formatting in the neighborhood a series of police community relations meetings began in the Collingwood Rec Center which is in that neighborhood and this is right about when I moved to the Castro and I had just met Harvey and Scott and I went over to the Collingwood Recreation Center to take part in these hearings and I was sort of jostled by seeing these sort of sweet and gentle guys that I had just met Harvey and Scott were in a room packed full of facts that were just yelling at the top of their lungs and demanding that the police stop this kind of sort of irrational treatment and that was in fact the last series of arrests for loitering in the Castro this is one of my favorite photos of the camera store by my dear friend Guy Corey and it's just a sort of serene moment of two guys who have just picked up their proof sheet and they're sitting out front looking at their pictures it reminds me of a little story that sort of tells a little bit about the camera store people would often come there because they had heard that we would develop explicit photographs and so people would come timidly walking in and they'd say well do you develop nudes and we'd say yeah you know and then they'd say well do you develop such and such and we'd say yeah we develop just about anything and before long you know they were dropping off their film and then they were telling us that we could look at their pictures and that would be a little clue to us that we needed to put a special fly stamp on the envelope to remember to look at their pictures when they come back the guys Harvey and Scott really relished reading the daily paper every morning until the campaign really geared up that was something that they always looked forward to and there was the additional ritual of cutting out a comic strip or two to share with various friends that came by here's Harvey sharing the daily comic strip with Denton they were also big fans of Saturday Night Live so a lot of the dialogue was around what occurred on Saturday Night Live you know a sense of humor was really important in the camera store Harvey used to say that if you can't laugh you're kind of missing the point and that certainly came in handy as the campaign geared up and there became less and less time for recreation this was Scott's birthday and we started the tradition of throwing pies in each other's face and he got two pies that day and he was not happy but the tradition carried on for several years actually and I got two pies on my birthday and I can remember going in that day to work and both guys were sitting there with really big sheepish grins on their face and I knew I was going to get pieed but I just didn't know when and a little while passed and I go to the proof sheet area to give a customer their order and they're sitting on top of the proof sheets is a cream pie so I close the drawer and go on with my business and a little while later I go to the slide area and they're sitting on top of the slides is another cream pie and before the end of the day I got nailed with both Harvey, we threw Harvey into a giant cream pie one year or two we had a really eclectic group of customers that came in, this is a photograph by one of my favorite customers who was a hippie mom who would often come in with her son Dean and that's Harvey with Dean and me holding a toy gun holding Dean's toy gun up to Harvey's head is sort of an uncanny, premonitional photo art imitating life it's also one of the few photographs of Harvey and I together this is one of the best examples of Harvey's merging of theater and politics I'm somewhere in that lineup this is the second Supervisorial campaign and we had very little money so instead of buying billboards we created human billboards and we would greet the morning commuter traffic and it was sort of nice to see people transformed they'd see us and their face would change from dour expressions to broad smiles and this tradition is still to this day is carried on by grassroots political campaigns that can't afford billboard space this is Harvey and the union leader Alan Baird and this was an unprecedented alliance Alan came to Harvey and asked him to rally the gay bar support of a coerced beer boycott and through his column in BAR Harvey eventually got most of the gay bars to join in the boycott which brought the coers really bigoted right wing family to their knees because they dropped down from the number one position in California they eventually flew Alan Baird out to their headquarters in Colorado to the negotiating table and Alan came back reporting that Joe Coers just could not fathom that there was such a thing as a gay community the assembly race which immediately followed the second supervisorial race which he lost even though it was a more well financed campaign it was primarily run on ingenuity good PR Harvey was by this time learned how to play the media like a harp and also a good sense of humor we got our own printing press in the back of the store and this was one of the handmade billboards that were also made there in the back of the store this is John Reichman who was the campaign manager and fundraiser for the campaign he's on the phone trying to shake down donations this is actually Harvey's private office it's sort of the inner sanctum I thought you'd like to see it over the door is a little sign that says fortunes told 25 cents, 50 cents with lipstick appointments only this is probably, in my guess this would be the place where Harvey taped his political will where he left instructions in the event of his assassination it was right about this time that we started to get a lot of hate mail and I can remember this pretty distinctly because Harvey pulled me aside one day and said this stuff that we're getting is really heinous and you might be caught in the line of fire and maybe you should take some time off and I was not interested in doing that Harvey forged alliances with a lot of different communities this is Mike Wong who was a strong ally of the Chinese democratic community and he came over to Harvey's campaign after being very closely associated with a lot of the progressive Democrats and he supported Harvey as many people did because they were tired of business as usual there was a lot of back room politics within the Democratic Party and Harvey represented adversity to that he wanted a whole piece of the pie instead of a little bit of crumbs that they were offering Michael was sort of surprised to come to the camera store and find such an eclectic group of people that he fit in right away especially after the introductory moment when he said to Harvey, God this place is a pigsty there's dust everywhere, is this how your people live? and Harvey retorted, no Michael we've just been waiting for our Chinese house boy now there's the broom and that kind of repertoire, repartee went on throughout the whole campaign there was an 11 year old girl who came to canvas for Harvey her name was Madora Payne and she would often bring her little friend Lizzie Croyle and they would come and stuff envelopes and when she first showed up John Reichman called her mom and said your daughter's filled out a volunteer card and are you aware that she's planning to come volunteer for Harvey and her mom said oh yeah she loves Harvey and she wants to do something for him this is Madora and her mom Gretchen out in front of the camera store with Harvey mugging as per usual behind them you know he was really great at forging alliances this was, we went down to the piers in San Francisco to stage a campaign photo with two of our butcher campaign workers and while we were there two real longshoremen came up and stood there and talked with Harvey for over 45 minutes and you know this is one of the things that I really love seeing how he was really gifted at getting people to open up and it's certainly something that I carried over to my photography one of my favorite places to go with Harvey on the campaign trail was the bingo games and this was in the heart of the mission and these people were sort of blasé because politicians would often court them and hand out literature during the bingo games and it was sort of allowed because the politicians would go up and offer a monetary donation and up the ante a little bit and you know I could very clearly see that when Harvey went up on stage to offer his 20 bucks people really you know the body language was responsive and then when he and I would work the crowd and hand out the literature people actually did want to accept it accept the piece of literature and you know those bingo players there you know the political alliances were just in the nick of time entered the wicked witch of the East, Anita Bryant she was a former Miss America and a star wannabe who launched an elaborate mail order campaign and succeeded in repealing a gay rights referendum in Florida she targeted SF constantly and called a success pool of sex we responded in kind in our 1977 parade with Plackard's drawing analogies between her and what she was doing to some of the more notorious fascists throughout history on the left is Hitler and then Stalin and then Anita Bryant and then the Ku Klux Klan and then Idi Amin who was an African leader at the time who was murdering thousands in his own country and executing anybody who was homosexual during the media furor over Anita Bryant a gay man was murdered in San Francisco and his assailants stabbed him repeatedly and called him fag and everybody felt that Anita Bryant had blood on her hands and that this sort of backlash was occurring because of the high profile over these gay rights referendums that she was defeating Florida and several other American cities were lost during this time her campaign was called Save Our Children and we responded in kind by saying we are your children the analogy to Hitler kept on emerging Harvey certainly found it pertinent and useful and it's about this time that you start to see the pink triangle emerge as an icon right there in the middle of those flowers that was the spontaneous memorial to this slain gay man is a pink triangle this is the 1977 Castro Street Fair and here's Harvey in a dunking tank booth it says Dunk a Fellow for Freedom and that's Anita Bryant's face on the mechanism that makes him go into the water this was a fundraiser for the newly formed gay Democratic Club called Gay Vote at that time and after Harvey was killed it became the Harvey Milk Democratic Club because he helped form it because of Anita Bryant's presence it was a time in our community's history where we really understood to be embattled at war here's Harvey's lover at the time Jack Lear taking sadistic pleasure in getting Harvey wet so Harvey is running for supervisor for the third time this time the mood is giddy because even though there was still a lot of uncertainty it looked really good there's a precinct map behind him district elections had recently passed and so this was elections by district and Harvey was smack in the middle of the heavily gay voting district this is Dick Pavich on the left and Anne Cronenberg in the middle and Jim Robaldo on the right and these were very important strategists and Harvey's volunteer crew Dick and Anne were named Harvey's administrative assistants after he won and Jim today is one of the more brilliant political strategists in town if you can believe that there he is being goofy as usual this is the night of the election victory and we're listening to the returns we're at the camera store and we're listening to the returns on the radio there on KPFA and they just announced Harvey's lead that's Harry Britt on the far left kind of clenching his fists in a victorious gesture that's Wayne Friday, Harvey's very good friend and close political ally just below him and then that's Bill Krause leaning up against the radio there Bill would move on to become a very important political strategist as well as Phil Burton's administrative assistant Harvey arrived from City Hall to a victorious crowd out in front of the camera store he came on Joyce Gehray's motorcycle Joyce was Anne Cronenberg's lever at the time they were two of the very early dykes on bikes and Harvey jumped off the motorcycle and ran with outstretched arms the crowd which was ecstatic and he stopped and made a small speech and people were just incredibly jubilant I'd have to say it was probably one of the best nights of my life in January was the inauguration and Harvey and Carol Ruth Silver who also had won for supervisor decided to have an inaugural ceremony on the steps of City Hall and so they marched from the Castro to City Hall with their constituents following them and then assembled on the steps of City Hall so that there can be a more accessible inauguration ceremony because everybody couldn't fit into the board chambers inside and during the ceremony it started to sprinkle and Harvey looked straight at the media cameras and used it as an opportunity to symbolically discuss gay politics he said Anita Bryant says that the gays in California are the reason for the drought and here I'm being inaugurated as the first openly gay elected official in California and this is my maybe God's response to you Anita Bryant that next few months were fantastic I mean there was a lot of events and I was at this particular event photographing and I remember it clearly because the applause was so thunderous that it felt like the building was shaking and this was the coronation of the San Francisco emperor which is a sort of big drag ball that's held in town every year and here's Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver and the crowd just went wild because these people were there expressing their gratitude and sort of acknowledging that their constituents was really well appreciated and the mayor actually went up to the emperors and put a little peck, you know give her a little kiss on the side of the cheek which I know Harvey took great delight in that and it was these kind of small victories towards visibility which really fueled his joy of politics he considered that kind of gesture the mayor of a major American city paying his respects to the transgender community like that, a really significant gesture Harvey was always, you know using the media to further his cause and here he was mayor for a day George had left town and asked Harvey to be acting mayor for a day and so we staged the opening of a friend of ours restaurant and Harvey cut the ribbon on the restaurant and was quoted in the media as saying I'm probably the only mayor of a major American city who cuts the ribbon and puts it in his hair we all went over to the mayor's office that day and as people walked through the front door Harvey would mock like he was signing an official piece of paper and things like well Mr. Nicoletta what appointment was that that you wanted and he actually also made a special offer to me which had something to do with the mayor's desk but I respectfully declined the guys were pretty funny I mean it was like the Marx Brothers had hit the mayor's office they were completely enamored with the mayor's shredding machine Harvey was fond of calling city hall silly hall but he really took it deeply seriously as well I mean this was his shining moment this was the signing into law by Mayor George Moscone the gay rights protection ordinance on the city level that Harvey had authored and George went along with the fund and signed it in a lavender pen Harvey was often heard saying I'm the head queen in town now and here he is at another drag function with two really important people that's Jose Saria on the left and Mavis on the right and Jose was one of the founding mothers of the Empress and Emperor Coronation and he was one of the first men opened the gay men to run for city office back in the late 60s and Mavis was a bar owner and they were presenting a check to the gay and lesbian marching band that was a check from an anonymous donor who had donated money so that the marching band can buy their first uniforms and Harvey just thought that was great that there was a gay marching band and I want to utilize this to illustrate a really important story and the story tells us a little bit about a community informant under pressure and how different people respond now it was clear that Harvey respected his drag roots but because of another anti-gay initiative that was on the horizon there was a sort of word the word had gone out from various sectors of the community that perhaps in this forthcoming parade we should tone down our act and that people should be mindful of lewdness and nudity and Harvey was part of that voice of asking people to tone down their act his recommendation was that we carry signs saying what cities we were from or what professions we had and to basically modify our appearance and of course the voice from the streets was swift and the people who could not pass found that kind of offensive this was a mock campaign running against Harvey Milk a drag queen named Silvana Nova and she was mocking Harvey's earlier campaign where he said Milk has something to vote for Milk has something to offer and Silvana's here saying at last something to vote for and there was another great flyer that was mocking official parade drag and I just think it shows that we now know 20 years later that no matter what we do the right wing is going to take footage of our lives and manipulate it into propaganda and that it really is misplaced judgment to modify for their sake who and how we are and this was one area where Harvey and I differed philosophically in fact we argued about it and I can remember sitting in Castro camera with him and the filmmaker Mark Hustis and him and Mark were going at it passionately and Mark was accusing Harvey of being patronizing which he was and I took one look at the situation and I said you cannot win an argument with this man so I just kind of receded into the background on that on the day before his 47th birthday Harvey was invited to promote the Ringling Brothers Circus and he got to be a clown for a day he was a natural he was this was an article to encourage people to attend the circus and so Harvey and six other San Francisco celebrities were invited to dress up like clowns and they were documented and Harvey enjoyed the experience so much and he asked the clowns if he could borrow the costume for a Fort Funston fundraiser that he had to attend later in the day and they said sure and just return it to our hotel room afterwards and so he and I drove down to the ocean where this fundraiser was and he was kind of clowning people the whole way there and when we got there after the fundraiser he and I went out to the shore to go cruise the hang gliders and we did this little mini photo session and this is I feel this is like Harvey's farewell portrait to me because this is the one photo of Harvey Milk that I would take that nobody else would ever take and I think it forever symbolizes our artistic friendship I want to read a letter that he had wrote to Castro camera customers and it's probably the only textual reference to our friendship and I just this letter is my pride and joy so I'd like to share it with you it says yes dear Castro camera customers come on now you knew you would be getting this letter sooner or later as you well know I'm running for the position of your supervisor because of all the time energy and funds that we have at the shop have been putting into the campaign the shop has been crazy our inventory is low our nerves are shall we say thin in short it doesn't look like Castro camera or maybe it does as a candidate I make no promise as a part owner of the shop I make one promise after the election my partner Scott and our number one employee Danny and myself will bring the shop back to where it should be it will take some time and energy so give us a few weeks but it will happen in the meantime thank you for continuing to support our shop thank you for understanding thank you for asking us to continue in the battles I want to say to you that without the help of my partner Scott and our number one employee Danny who over the years has become a great friend to I would have not been able to get so involved with the issues that affect us all of us to them I owe a bit more than just a thanks to them I owe more than words can ever say warmly Harvey I actually stopped working at Castro camera after Harvey was elected although I would occasionally go in there to moonlight to have the opportunity to be friend Harvey's lover Jack Leera and both of us saw less and less of Harvey and we kind of consoled each other Jack felt very much like the politicians wife in the shadow of this person that everybody wanted a little piece of everybody was kind of concerned because Jack's way of coping it was to rage and sort of pull public stunts quite often drinking and embarrassing Harvey and everybody was really concerned about this relationship but Harvey was pretty committed to it and he was really troubled by Jack's behavior but he really wanted to help this guy and unfortunately one night Harvey came home from a board meeting and found Jack had committed suicide and hung himself over their bed he had done things like he had strewn coarsed beer cans all throughout the apartment and left little cryptic notes and you know we were just completely derailed by this but in Jack's defense I want to read a letter that Harvey wrote to him which I think portrays how much Harvey really deeply loved him he wrote on January 24th, 1977 Jack watching the ocean slam against the rock spraying its mists the sun setting in the background and you digging for your joys I could not help myself stop from looking into your wondrous face and last night as I carried you to your bed I saw the day over and over and over I needed no camera yesterday to capture the glorious pictures they are forever burnt into my heart Harvey and after we came to Harvey's side to console him he wrote those of us that showed up a little note and I think this is a really important piece of writing by Harvey because it's one of the few places he talks about spiritual matters in a way differently than the larger world view of politics he says one day shortly after I went down to the ocean I saw a glorious sunset it died into the evening but I knew it would be reborn the next morning with equal splendor and I understood so as we know on Monday, November 27th Dan White snuck into City Hall through a back window and murdered Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in Harvey's pocket were two letters and one was to George to thank him for the opera tickets from the previous night's performance I like to read the Moscone letter because it just demonstrates how Harvey was in the prime of his life and was really enjoying life ironically the bullet went right through the M in the word music it says, George, thanks for the opera seats if there's any chance for Saturday's symphony my true love of music is showing itself now the opera seats that he was talking about were a couple nights prior he got to sit in the box with his childhood opera idol, Bidu Sayu and he was so excited about the experience he came home that night and wrote a letter to Tom O'Horgan his dear friend in New York and he writes, Tom sitting in a box next to him talking with Bidu Sayu and listening to Magda Olivier in her SF debut at age 71 the crowd went so wild that Mick Jagger would have been jealous I can't remember any reaction like that and Sayu was like a youngster hearing her first live opera life is worth living, love Harvey and Tom didn't receive the letter until after hearing of Harvey's murder the night before the killings while Dan White was sitting in his apartment watching television and eating junk food I was in the wings photographing the ballet Trocadero and when we were coming back to town the next day my colleagues and I disembarked off the bus and I heard this bus driver say did you hear, this is him speaking to another bus driver he said did you hear that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were killed and then he said and that Harvey Milk's no loss and I couldn't believe what I was hearing and frankly that phrase just has burned such a deep impression in my brain I'll never hear I'll never forget hearing that bus driver say that well he was certainly a loss to me 50,000 people spilled out into the streets that night it had to be all of San Francisco really it was a huge outpouring of sadness and it kind of didn't hit me until a couple days later when I saw the caskets in City Hall, Rotunda and that was actually the first time that I reunited with Scott and we were on that upper balcony in City Hall and we saw each other and we started running towards each other and it was like a slow motion scene from a movie I'll never forget it and actually City Hall it has this resonance that I also just can never shake I actually came through the building once when I was a student in Oakland and I had this very strong sense that some scene from my life would be played out in this building I mean, you know anybody that walks into that Rotunda certainly is stricken by its splendor but there was something else that day we scattered Harvey's ashes to see a close group of his friends and we... this is Galen and I this is the first time I'm finally meeting the notorious Galen and that was the first day I met Joe Campbell it was an antique 50-foot schooner called the Lady Free and the captain's name was Gay which I thought was kind of neat Harvey's ashes were wrapped into the funny papers of the day the Dunesbury comics and Galen wrote RIP on a box in rhinestones this is the Gay Widows on board that day that's Scott Smith, Galen McKinley, Joe Campbell and Billy Weigart Doug Franks was also on board but not up on the deck at that moment I want to say a little word about the White Night Riots when Dan White's verdict was delivered the following May in 1979 my pictures from that night are not very literal or graphic because I was really afraid I was afraid of getting hurt a couple of times I felt bricks passing by the side of my head and I'll never forget the guttural sound of the cops as they moved in formation towards the crowd and then the crowd broke up and scattered and all hell broke loose excuse me, I can remember walking towards the caster with my friends and we could see as far as I can see in one lane of Market Street was auxiliary cops from all of the suburbs and so we took that as a bad sign and did not go to the Castro where we now know that the cops were up there retaliating and brutally beating patrons of the elephant walk bar and smashing the windows I can remember traversing my way back to my house and hate Ashbury through back roads so that I wouldn't be singled out and targeted and it was like martial law it was really a frightening, frightening night Dan White served less than five years in jail and he was convicted of manslaughter and he got out on good behavior, I believe that there was a countdown on the corner of 17th and Castro Street I believe Cleet Jones was responsible for this street art and then sort of towards the end of the countdown somebody crossed out the word 85 days till Dan White is free and crossed out the word free and scrawled in the word dead there was a lot of anti-Dan White graffiti at the time there was an angry demonstration earlier that afternoon in a street closing in the Castro that night where the crowd burnt an effigy of Dan White and Sister Boom Boom from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made a riveting speech about the proposition that maybe somebody would get Dan White that later became the opening monologue of the great play about the Dan White trial called Execution of Justice Dan White committed suicide so he ended up being his own executioner In 82, Rob Epstein started a documentary on Harvey and the No On Six campaign it debuted in San Francisco at the Castro Theater on November 1st, 1984 it was a standing ovation and there wasn't a dry eye in the house it was completely disarming to hear Harvey's voice again the film won an Oscar in 1985 and it's probably the most effective piece devoted to continuing the legacy of Harvey Milk here's Scott proudly holding the Oscar at the party at Rob's house on the Oscar night and Scott became the sole executor of Harvey's estate and that Harvey named him as the sole executor I think was a great tribute to the relationship between the two men I've always felt that they were inseparably soulmates even though there was a lot of disparity in the latter campaigns and naming Scott as the executor it went a great way to heal the angst between the two men and Scott remained a very outspoken and articulate spokesperson for Harvey's legacy I always saw his obsessiveness immersing himself in the material as a way of coping so in 83 we rallied behind him and formed the Harvey Milk Archives we published three newsletters and did several public exhibits and facilitated research and access for countless projects here's a little exhibit at the Castro Street Fair we always tried to maintain an honor Harvey's sense of humor quite often we would evaluate incoming projects on the merits based on whether Harvey would have loved it or not so we would always catch ourselves saying oh Harvey would have loved it or Harvey would have hated it and anytime we catch ourselves saying that Scott and I would look at each other and realize how much we really missed him this was one of the projects that got a green light and certainly Harvey would have loved it I mean he would have howled the halo kind of says it all and even though he was somewhat anti-religious person this poster was a fundraiser and it was just such an odd piece that we just had to support it my relationship with Scott centered on deconstructing his angst over the lack of diplomacy on the various projects that came in he rarely made any money from his vigilance and he hated thankless or expectant projects but he would nonetheless always find time to do almost all of them but I would hear about it here in 82 is the debut of Randy Schiltz's book The Mayor of Castro Street The Harvey Milk Archives did an exhibit in conjunction with Randy's book Signing Party I'm the bleach hag on the right there Scott wrote in my book that day to Danny one of Harvey's star pupils the book actually didn't do that well but the movie rights were sold and Scott and Randy became close allies and Scott finally got properly compensated for his hard work Alva, his mom would come visit quite often around Thanksgiving and it would always prompt a gathering of the tribe here's Scott with his lover at the time Chuck Frucci and Alva and Denton Smith probably the final triumph for Scott was the depiction of his character in a same-sex kissing scene on stage for the Houston Grand Opera called Harvey Milk this was unprecedented in opera history and Harvey and Scott were big opera queens so I think they both would have loved being captured in an opera Scott and I played phone tag that week because I wanted to get the report on the Houston experience and unfortunately he went into the hospital and I was the last person to see him consciousness because the next week he died of HRV-related complications and then he left his estate to his next of kin Alva Smith who had the wisdom to deed it to the collection here at the Hormel Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies I want to just close by saying as we navigate and contemplate the issues before us we can find strength in examples of people like Harvey Milk and Scott Smith who knew instinctively that pushing through hardship would lead to improved social conditions at Harvey's Memorial at the opera house in 1978 someone fittingly quoted Victor Hugo who said of all the forces in the world none are as powerful as a time as none are as powerful as an idea whose time has come Harvey and Scott decided to get involved and believed in the power of the individual and their sense of hope quantified even before a bullet took Harvey down but it's important to remember that even though Harvey's murder increased our power his accomplishments occurred during his lifetime because he believed he could make a difference and both men put that belief into action Thank you