Assassinated less than a year into his term as San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk is remembered today as one of the first openly gay elected officials and a symbol of the struggle for gay rights. But he’s less known for the unique style of gay politics he pioneered: a pragmatic populism grounded in neighborhood power and tactical alliances, combined with a skillful use of the media to broadcast a message of “hope” to gay people nationwide.
In this episode, we reconsider Milk’s vision of gay power through the writings of another figure we think was an underestimated political thinker: the pioneering journalist Randy Shilts, whose biography “The Mayor of Castro Street” (1982) helped create the Harvey Milk legend and impose a narrative coherence onto Milk’s politics. Shilts celebrated Milk as an alternative to two unsatisfactory types of gay politics: either being subordinated to elite Democratic Party insiders or to a broader radical-left coalition. Shilts saw Milk, instead, constructing a novel type of autonomous gay political power that could be used specifically in gay people’s self-interest. By transforming Milk into a political visionary and martyr, Shilts was also theorizing and re-enacting Milk’s savvy manipulation of the media, in which heroes and villains—sometimes ones he invented—could both catalyze gay power at the local level and connect it to a national struggle for gay rights.
We talk about what we can learn from Milk and Shilts today and have more to say about the current state of gay media.
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*SOURCES*
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Randy Shilts, “The Life and Death of Harvey Milk,” Christopher Street, March 1979.
Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982) https://link.amazon/B08TChpBZ
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987) https://link.amazon/B0iIrmgMA
Randy Shilts, “Go EST Young Man,” New West, June 19, 1978. (Note: We incorrectly identified this in the episode as appearing in the gay magazine Blueboy). https://holytitclamps.com/go_est_young_man_Randy_Shilts.pdf
Randy Shilts, “Cleve Jones Rising,” Christopher Street, October 1980.
CBS News, “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” April 26, 1980. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cADLwFd76qE
Blake Smith, “Randy Shilts,” September 2024. https://blakeesmith.substack.com/p/randy-shilts
Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (2017). https://link.amazon/B0a06KuBD
Michael E. Lee, When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Gay Journalist (2024) https://link.amazon/B0fuFBdK3
Manuel Castells, “Cultural Identity, Sexual Liberation, and Urban Structure: The Gay Community in San Francisco,” in The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (1983) https://archive.org/details/citygrassrootscr0000cast/page/n11/mode/1up
Jasbir Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ (January 2012). https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1422179
Gus Van Sant, Milk (2008) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_(2008_American_film)
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