Born to a Jewish family in New York in 1930, Harvey Milk knew that coming out as gay was a death sentence. He told no-one, was politically conservative, and by all accounts maintained a perfect and cautious facade.

Yet by his 48th birthday, Harvey had become the first openly gay politician in California and was a famous icon for the gay movement in the United States - a man who led thousands of gay people through the streets of San Francisco with a megaphone.

What happened in between?

 

This was one hell of a biography. Written in 1982, just five years after Harvey's death by assassination, it's contemporary and well-researched. The author includes a meticulous level of detail and minutiae. With the help of thousands of news clippings and hundreds of interviews, Randy Shilts reconstructs what Harvey wore; where he lived, studied, and worked; what he talked about and with whom; even down to the food he liked and the operas he watched. Harvey Milk was a gay icon, but he was also a person, and the book never forgets that.

 

The biography is also important as a historical account of the immense scale of violence and discrimination against gay people in the United States during the 1930s-1980s. For people who didn't experience it, it's hard to imagine. But the book takes you into the lives of the people who did.

It also shows very clearly how the view of gays as "degenerates and deviants" created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Through rampant discrimination, society drove gays to its margins, making it impossible for them to be genteel and upstanding citizens even if they wanted to. This then generated more evidence for anti-gay legislators to point to and continued the cycle of discrimination.

 

It's also interesting to see Harvey's connection to being Jewish: he was an atheist, but still identified with being a Jew as an ethnicity, similarly to other San Franciscans who were Italian or Chinese. He had been 9 years old when the Nazis enacted the Holocaust in 1939, and saw other American Jews around him trying to help the Jews in Europe through organizations like Joint. So Harvey was all too aware of the Nazis' methods and how they gradually ratcheted up legal discrimination against Jews one regulation at a time. When he saw the same thing happening against gays in California's Proposition 6, he dived into one of his biggest campaigns ever, urging gay people to come out to their neighbours and successfully turning a 2-to-1 win for the anti-gay initiative into a 1-to-2 defeat.

 

This is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary person, and well worth reading.