The stories of Antigone, Oedipus. Odysseus, Richard III and Othello all still resonate loudly within modern times. All of these characters had significant flaws that took their greatness and threatened to undo it – and often did undo it when circumstances refused to change. The pride of Antigone was both her strength and her demise; the boldness of Oedipus both brought him the throne in Thebes and sealed his doom. The cleverness of Odysseus brought him through trial after trial, but it also blinded him from fact of his dependence. Richard III’s acumen on the battlefield and in the back rooms of politics was never able to overcome his self-hatred, a problem that also led Othello to believe that his new wife would cheat. While each of these flaws roils with us now, it is more difficult in an age without human titans for stories as deeply powerful to emerge on the written page. While Arthur Miller argues that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” (Miller), it is often difficult to conceive of our own stories as being worthy of the same treatment as that given to the star-crossed prince of Denmark. Even so, the story of Harvey Milk is just one instance of the common man achieving the same level of significance as those who occupied places in society that received more awe from society that a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Arthur Miller identifies the tragic flaw as a “failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters” and goes further to assert that this trait is not even “necessarily a weakness” (Miller). Instead it is an “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity” (Miller). While most people will remain passive in the face of those challenges, those who rise up to meet those challenges are heroic in nature, no matter what their original status is, at least from Miller’s perspective.
There are, of course, exceptions to this in modern times. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men details Willie Stark, the barely fictional representation of Huey Long, the titan who ruled Louisiana with an iron fist and threatened to take national power during the Great Depression. When confronted with his own misdeeds, Stark said “Dirt’s a funny thing.there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt tooa diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot” (Warren, p. 117). Until Stark pushed so hard against the family of the judge that his son ended up assassinating him, Stark had the loving faith of the people of his state squarely behind him. His tragedy lay in his inability to stop attacking those in power, to stop exploiting the “dirt” of others for his own gain. This squares with Miller’s definition of the tragic unwillingness to remain passive. However, the obsession with one’s dignity is often the trigger point that sends people over the edge into destruction. So it was with Willie Stark, and so it is with many.
One factor that keeps more people out of what we consider the scope of tragedy is the shortening of the cultural attention span and information cycle. While there are plenty of stories that seem to rise to the level of the inherent flaw, names ranging from George Zimmerman to Bill Clinton are definitely connected with a flaw, or even an assault on one’s dignity, but they descend into the level of farce (Ehrenfreund). Because information no sooner comes through the mainstream mass media than an outlet like The Onion picks it up and turns it into satire before anyone has the chance to do any lionizing of any sort. The closest thing the United States has to a royal family, for example, is the Kennedys. The classic figure of that tragedy, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated before he accomplished much besides making motivational speeches about the future of the nation. The most accomplished lawmaker, Edward Kennedy, made himself toxic for his party in terms of running for national office by driving off a bridge and killing a woman, somehow escaping any legal consequences. President Kennedy has maintained his tragic transcendence, primarily, by having a lack of any substantive deeds for people to attack. The claustrophic level of attention that the media gives to political leaders means that there is no room to expand into the size of a larger hero to take on tragic proportions.
What, then, should we do with people like Harvey Milk? His origins are not spectacular; he was the son of Lithuanian Jews. While his grandfather organized the first synagogue in the area, Milk himself spent time being the class clown, playing football while also nursing a passion for the opera (Shilts). He bounced around the Navy as a diving officer and diving instructor, reaching the rank of lieutenant by discharge. He taught in high school and then tried to fit in as a gay man in the 1950s and 1960s, when matters were much more closeted than they are in modern times. In fact, when he was trying to date Craig Rodwell, Milk was anything but a hero. Rodwell had joined the New York Mattachine Society, which agitated for gay rights in an era that was much more prone to violent repression than the current era. Rodwell was arrested in Jacob Riis Park for wearing a swimsuit that violated the decency laws of the day (which mandated that swimsuits extend from below the thigh to above the navel), and he ended up staying jail for three days. Milk soon lost interest in Rodwell, because Rodwell spent so much time agitating the authorities and protesting for gay rights (Shilts).
It was when Milk moved to San Francisco that he began taking more of an interest in civic matters. In 1970, oral sex was still a crime – a felony, in fact – and approximately 90 people were arrested for taking part it in San Francisco that year. Because gay sex was cause for eviction from an apartment and cause for arrest in a gay bar, many men started having sex in public parks. In 1971, 2,800 gay men went under arrest for public sex in the city, as compared with just 63 that year in New York City. All of those arrested had to register as a sex offender (Clendinen).
However, the gay movement was building, and its large numbers in San Francisco meant that politicians would soon start paying attention. When Dianne Feinstein ran for mayor, she courted the support of gay activists. When Richard Hongisto was elected county sheriff in 1971, he was the first elected official in the area to have the widespread support of the gay community (Clendinen).
Milk’s involvement in political matters had nothing to do with gay rights but instead centered on the deposit his camera shop had to put down against future state sales tax. When an official came in and asked for $100, Milk went ballistic, leaving to go protest at state offices until the deposit dropped to $30 (Shilts). Later on, a teacher came into the shop to borrow a projector because the projector he had to use in his classroom would no longer work. This lack of supplies for schools outraged Milk about the priorities of government funding. It was Watergate that pushed him over the edge, though; as the nation’s attorney general kept answering “I don’t recall” during the Watergate hearings, Milk decided that it was time to run for the position of city supervisor. He later said, “I finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or shut up” (Shilts, p. 72). His transformation to a hero had bgun.
Initially, Milk ran into resistance from the gay establishment. Because he had done no service or volunteering to help others run, the Democratic Party would not endorse him at first. However, a contingent of gay bar owners who were still fighting police harassment, thought he would raise more of a stink with established authority and gave him their endorsement. Journalist Frances FitzGerald referred to Milk as a “born politician” (FitzGerald, p. 20). His platform was idealistically liberal, trying to change supervisor elections from at-large to district representation, get the government out of regulating sex and legalize marijuana. His speeches were flamboyant and fiery, and he knew how to work the media. His vote totals almost reached 17,000, and if he had run as a potential candidate from his own district instead of in the city at large, he would have earned a seat (Shilts). Milk was not discouraged, continuing instead to be a force for gay rights. He co-founded the Castro Village Association to help gay-owned businesses find a footing against prejudice in the licensing department. When the next round of supervisor elections came in 1975, he cut his hair, stopped smoking pot, and promised to stay away from the gay bathhouses (Shilts). This time the firefighters, teamsters and construction unions supported him, because the city’s mayor had been courting large corporations into the city at the cost of blue-collar jobs (Clendinen). In that year, George Moscone was elected to the position of mayor, assisted largely by the efforts of Harvey Milk. Milk still failed to win a supervisor seat, but there were now liberals in the offices of the sheriff, mayor and district attorney. Moscone appointed Milk to the Board of Permit Appeals a year later, making Milk the nation’s first openly gay municipal commissioner.
The religious wing of the Republican Party was still largely aloof from political matters, a position that would change dramatically over the next decades. Along with the legalization of abortion, the spread of gay rights also attracted the ire of the Religious Right. Because he also shook the cage of the gay establishment, Milk had enemies on many sides. Death threats began to mount up, and so by the time Dan White pulled the trigger on Milk (and Mayor Moscone), there had already been plenty of rage vented. It would take until 2009 for an American President to bestow a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Milk posthumously – that was the amount of time it took for the acceptance of gays to stop being such a hot-button topic – but the fact remained that Milk was a hero to many. His unwillingness to fall in line with political leadership or, really, any form of authority, is what made him a hero to many, and an annoyance to so many others.
Works Cited
Clendinen, Dudley. Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
de Strange, Jim. San Francisco’s Castro. New York: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.
Ehrenfreund, Max. “George Zimmerman’s Girlfriend: ‘He Knows How to Play This Game.’”
Washington Post 19 November 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/george-zimmermans-girlfriend-he-knows-how-to-play-this-game/2013/11/19/f9164b30-5157-11e3-9fe0-fd2ca728e67c_story.html
Hinckle, Warren. Gayslayer! The Story of How Dan White Killed Harvey Milk and George
Moscone & Got Away With Murder. New York: Silver Dollar Books, 1985.
Marcus, Eric. Making Gay History. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man.”
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html
Miller, Neil. Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York:
Vintage Books, 1994.
Shilts, Randy. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1982.
Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. New York: Mariner Books, c1996.
Weiss, Mike. Double Play: The Hidden Passions Behind the Double Assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk. San Francisco: Vince Emery Productions, 2010.
