Harvey Milk by Lillian Faderman

Author:Lillian Faderman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

10

Supervisor Milk

HARVEY ALWAYS FELT wounded by his older brother’s long-standing opinion of him as a lightweight who never grew out of being a showoff. It was not just an older brother’s difficulty admitting that his kid brother was no longer a kid. Robert harbored a practically endless list of grievances against Harvey: Harvey was the hippie who could not make a decent living; Harvey was the failed man who did not do his manly duty to society and to the Milk family by getting married and having children; Harvey did not even have the wherewithal to put up a nice plaque in the synagogue in honor of their dead parents or to make a big donation in their name to a new hospital in Israel—as, Robert liked to remind Harvey, he himself had done.

But the day Harvey was sworn in as supervisor he received an enormously gratifying letter from his brother. Robert addressed him as “Dear Mr. Supervisor,” wished him “continued success,” and joked, “You may even replace that guy Nixon in the history books.”1 It was too bad that Harvey’s father, who had also always doubted him, did not live to see his big victory; but at least his brother was now forced to acknowledge what an extraordinary success Harvey had become. And the best part was that he had done it by the sheer force of his determination—and on his own terms, as an open homosexual.

It was also important to Harvey that Tom O’Horgan know of his success. Tom had been a good friend; he had given Harvey work in the theater and had come to his aid financially more than once. But it had been Tom who was the celebrity, the star; and it had been Harvey who was nothing, the hanger-on, the gofer. Finally, however, Harvey was where he always felt he should be. There would be a victory dinner for him on January 10, the day after he was sworn in, and the lieutenant governor of California, Mervyn Dymally, who had cast the deciding vote to repeal California’s sodomy law, would be there and would toast him. Harvey sent a printed invitation to Tom and Galen McKinley (who for years had witnessed Harvey in the lesser role). On the invitation addressed to them both he scribbled a droll note: “Who would have ever thought that the Lt. Gov. of the largest state would be the guest speaker for a fag? Well, you all come now, you hear!”2

* * *

As soon as Harvey took office he promised the radical press that had supported him that he was not going to become an insider—he was going to change what the inside looked like. He would do things his way, he told the Berkeley Barb. “I’m not concerned about the Emily Post attitude of life. Emily Post kept the blacks suppressed for hundreds of years. Emily Post kept Jews out of the boardrooms of the major corporations for hundreds of years. Emily Post kept the gay people where they are.

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