Why Harvey Milk Still Matters To These Young People

July 1, 2019 at 10:31 AM PDT

Speaker 1: 00:00 Speaker 2: 00:44 Speaker 3: 00:47 Speaker 2: 00:53 Speaker 3: 00:57 Speaker 2: 01:05 Speaker 3: 01:08 Speaker 2: 01:18 Speaker 3: 01:23 Speaker 2: 01:26 Speaker 3: 01:38 Speaker 2: 01:50 Speaker 3: 02:08 Speaker 4: 02:32 Speaker 3: 02:45 Speaker 4: 02:53 Speaker 2: 02:59 Speaker 3: 03:01 Speaker 2: 03:38 Speaker 3: 03:47 Speaker 2: 03:55 Speaker 3: 04:16 One of California's most well known LGBT voices is Harvey Milk. Milk became the state's first openly gay elected official when you want to seed in San Francisco's board of supervisors in 1977 but his time in office was cut short when he was gunned down in city hall a year later by one of his colleagues on the board. Milk is a seminal figure in queer history, but for many people coming of age today, their first exposure to milk and his story was not from firsthand experience or even heard in history books. But from the 2008 Oscar winning film milk KQ Ed reporter Ryan Levi went to San Francisco city college to find out what milk means to young people today. Oh right. Everyone, Brianna by her Hanson welcomes their students to introduction to LGBT studies and introduces them to today's topic, carving up the life and journey of one of the greatest visionaries in the LGBTQ community. And they're surprised when they find out that someone, the class like second year student Matthew fully know nothing about the Gay San Francisco icon. I haven't even heard of him before today, which I feel kind of bad about and most of the students who have heard of him have just seen the Sean Penn movie and really don't know much else. At least one student third year, Miranda labounty is a little more familiar with milk's legacy. I grew up kind of with Harvey milk, mentioned in the same sentence as Martin Luther King, but even she's pretty hazy on the specific and the fact it was so recent, I always assumed that milk was like 50 to 60 years ago that it was only 40 years ago he was assassinated. Our parents, our parents were alive and walking around during that time hearing the details of milk and Muskogee's assassinations for the first time. The students are especially disturbed by the fact that former San Francisco supervisor, Dan White, only served five years in prison for the killing. If Harvey Milk Somehow killed enlightened Moscone who'd be life in prison, but because it was a white straight man doing it, if it were a black guy or a trans or trans person or just a woman. Yeah, like that person would be institutionalized or still in jail. To this day, that last voice belongs to Mckayla Kendrick and she's touched on something that a lot of students brought up during the discussion, race and gender identity privilege, not just for Dan White, but for Harvey milk too. This idea of intersectionality, the way that a person's sexuality combines with their race and gender and socioeconomic status and other identities is something that young queer people talk about a lot and it impacts how they view someone like milk. I do connect with him in some sense because he is a hero and I will never sit down and say that he's not a hero because he literally died fairs, but at the same time he comes from a different background and I don't think he liked encapsulated. Everybody. Lashawn per cell says he can connect with milk because both of them are cisgender males, but for Purcell, who's black? That's where the similarities end. You know what I mean? There's a lot of other trans women of color that can necessarily do what Harvey milk did because of who he is, but even while they look critically at how milk's privileges allowed him to do what he did, students like Michael Thomas still recognize the kind of impact milk had if it wasn't for him. This class when I've been able to even be in college, that's a fact. And milk also opened the door to a generation of LGBT elected officials in San Francisco who felt like they could be political players without hiding who they were. Student Miranda labounty notes that voters almost elected San Francisco's first openly gay mayor last year, former supervisor and state Senator Mark Leno. Leno ended up coming in second ahead of Korean-American, Jane Kim and behind London breed the city's first African American female mayor. The fact that our election was between two women of color and a gay man. I Dunno. That made me kind of happy. After class. I asked Professor Brianna Bahar Hanson why they thought the students, some of whom had never heard of milk before, still seem to feel a connection with him. Many people are living that experience where they're marginalized, they're vulnerable, they, they're not welcome within their spaces. Even here in San Francisco, there's been just some very heart wrenching stories of not being accepted by families. And really it, the issues that Harvey milk talking about in the 70s still so apply to their lives today, and because those issues of oppression are still present for these young people, Harvey Milk in his legacy still mattered to them, even if they only just learned about it. I'm Ryan Levy.

By KPBS Public Media

I first learned about Harvey Milk 10 years ago when I saw the movie "Milk," starring Sean Penn. I was 14 at the time and just starting to come to terms with being queer.