Harvey Milk: Gay Jewish Icon

Harvey Milk—eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck—was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk’s assassination at the age of 48 made him the most famous gay man in modern history.

Before finding his calling as a politician, Milk variously tried being a schoolteacher, a securities analyst on Wall Street, a supporter of Barry Goldwater, a Broadway theater assistant, a bead-wearing hippie, the operator of a camera store, and organizer of the local business community in San Francisco. He rejected Judaism as a religion, but he was deeply influenced by the cultural values of his Jewish upbringing and his understanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Join the Museum for a program exploring Milk’s life, death, and legacy with Lillian Faderman, a distinguished scholar of LGBTQ history and the author of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death from the Jewish Lives series. Faderman will be joined by Eric Marcus, creator of the award-winning podcasts Making Gay History and Those Who Were There: Voices From the Holocaust.

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