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| Image: SFGate / Harvey Milk |
John McMurtrie | SFGate, 2018-05-21
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-many-lives-of-Harvey-Milk-An-excerpt-from-a-12927063.php
In his brief but epochal political career, Harvey Milk fought passionately, and famously, for gay rights. Being Jewish had much to do with his zeal.
That’s the persuasive claim that historian Lillian Faderman makes in her new biography, “Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death.”
Yale University Press is publishing the book as part of its Jewish Lives series. It comes out on Harvey Milk Day, May 22, which this year would have been Milk’s 88th birthday.
“As a Jew and a homosexual,” Faderman writes, “he felt himself to be doubly an outsider; and even when he was invited inside through his election to political office, he clung to his sympathies for the outsider, which he extended far beyond his own tribe.”
In the excerpt below, Faderman details Milk’s teenage years in Bay Shore, N.Y., the sleepy hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island — long before he served in the Navy, worked on Wall Street, got involved in the theater and ultimately moved to San Francisco, where he became one of the first openly gay men elected to public office in the United States, and, in death, a hero to millions around the world.
Harvey’s best friends in high school were Roman Catholic. In fact, there were few Jews in Bay Shore in 1945, and there were still traces of anti-Semitism in town, left over from the days when the Klan had a chapter there. The in-crowd at the high school excluded Jews, and Harvey’s stereotypical Jewishness was obvious to them, as one girl of the in-crowd observed of him: “He has the largest nose of anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.” But Harvey was as upfront about being Jewish in that uncomfortable atmosphere as he would always be. When he declared to his classmates that his real name was Milch, they nicknamed him Glimpy Milch after the character Glimpy McClusky in the East Side Kids movies that were hugely popular in the early 1940s. What Harvey shared with Glimpy, played by the actor Huntz Hall, was a substantial nose, soulful eyes, and a tough-sounding New York accent.
Harvey cultivated a tough image. It was a good disguise. In secret he could be an opera queen; but for the world he would be a man’s man, as much as he could. He played varsity football and basketball in high school. He ran track. He wrestled for the school team. His hypermasculine enthusiasm for sports was surely a way of placating Bill, who would not have been tolerant of effeminacy in his son. But Harvey also felt compelled to “butch it up” because he saw what his fate could be at Bay Shore High School if he did not. One of his classmates, the local paint store owner’s effeminate son, who was miserably inept at passing a basketball, had been teased and bullied until he broke down in tears. Harvey resolved that this would never happen to him.
To further prove his manly bona fides and heterosexual appeal he dated girls. He was slim and muscled, with dark brown hair and an engaging smile. Some of the prettiest girls, who were not in the in-crowd and were not prejudiced against Semitic features, found him good-looking. To confirm his interest in heterosexual activities, he even got himself on to the junior prom committee. He kept mum about his passion for opera, of course. And for good measure he cultivated a persona as the class clown, always ready with a wisecrack — lest anyone think he was not talkative because he had something to hide.
His parents’ new home was on the direct road to the ferries that went to Fire Island, a premier gay haunt. During the warm months there was a nonstop procession of gay men rushing to catch a ferry or returning home from the sorts of good times for which Harvey yearned. To observe them was both scary and thrilling. He went on double dates with his brother, Robert, to make sure his family did not suspect his fantasies.
In June 1947, Harvey graduated from Bay Shore High School. He had not been a stellar student and was not sure what he wanted to do next. But his parents let him know that drifting was not an option. Though neither Bill nor Minnie had gone to college, they urged him to apply to New York State College for Teachers at Albany. He could be a teacher. That was a good, steady profession. There was a lot to recommend the place too: Georgian-style red-brick buildings with classical white columns and verdant lawns that made it look like an expensive private liberal arts college; a student population of only fifteen hundred, which promised small classes and personal attention from professors. And best of all, since Bay Shore Furriers was only two years old and still getting a foothold, tuition was totally free.
Harvey was determined to have fun that last summer before he had to knuckle down and prepare for the rest of his life. Having fun meant going to the city as often as possible and cruising in the gay area he had discovered in Central Park. One broiling day in August he took his shirt off in the park — because of the heat but also to show off his muscled torso. Vice squad officers spotted him, ordered him into a paddy wagon with the other gay men they had collected in the cruising area, and deposited them all at the police station. Years later, when Harvey became political, he would wage energetic campaigns against such harassment of gay men, whose alleged crimes were victimless. But now he only swore when questioned that he was just trying to get a suntan, that he was a high school kid who was completely innocent. Though he was released without being booked, he was shaken. How calamitous it would have been had the police notified his parents that their seventeen-year-old son had been arrested in Central Park while trying to pick up homosexuals.
That’s the persuasive claim that historian Lillian Faderman makes in her new biography, “Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death.”
Yale University Press is publishing the book as part of its Jewish Lives series. It comes out on Harvey Milk Day, May 22, which this year would have been Milk’s 88th birthday.
“As a Jew and a homosexual,” Faderman writes, “he felt himself to be doubly an outsider; and even when he was invited inside through his election to political office, he clung to his sympathies for the outsider, which he extended far beyond his own tribe.”
In the excerpt below, Faderman details Milk’s teenage years in Bay Shore, N.Y., the sleepy hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island — long before he served in the Navy, worked on Wall Street, got involved in the theater and ultimately moved to San Francisco, where he became one of the first openly gay men elected to public office in the United States, and, in death, a hero to millions around the world.
Harvey’s best friends in high school were Roman Catholic. In fact, there were few Jews in Bay Shore in 1945, and there were still traces of anti-Semitism in town, left over from the days when the Klan had a chapter there. The in-crowd at the high school excluded Jews, and Harvey’s stereotypical Jewishness was obvious to them, as one girl of the in-crowd observed of him: “He has the largest nose of anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.” But Harvey was as upfront about being Jewish in that uncomfortable atmosphere as he would always be. When he declared to his classmates that his real name was Milch, they nicknamed him Glimpy Milch after the character Glimpy McClusky in the East Side Kids movies that were hugely popular in the early 1940s. What Harvey shared with Glimpy, played by the actor Huntz Hall, was a substantial nose, soulful eyes, and a tough-sounding New York accent.
Harvey cultivated a tough image. It was a good disguise. In secret he could be an opera queen; but for the world he would be a man’s man, as much as he could. He played varsity football and basketball in high school. He ran track. He wrestled for the school team. His hypermasculine enthusiasm for sports was surely a way of placating Bill, who would not have been tolerant of effeminacy in his son. But Harvey also felt compelled to “butch it up” because he saw what his fate could be at Bay Shore High School if he did not. One of his classmates, the local paint store owner’s effeminate son, who was miserably inept at passing a basketball, had been teased and bullied until he broke down in tears. Harvey resolved that this would never happen to him.
To further prove his manly bona fides and heterosexual appeal he dated girls. He was slim and muscled, with dark brown hair and an engaging smile. Some of the prettiest girls, who were not in the in-crowd and were not prejudiced against Semitic features, found him good-looking. To confirm his interest in heterosexual activities, he even got himself on to the junior prom committee. He kept mum about his passion for opera, of course. And for good measure he cultivated a persona as the class clown, always ready with a wisecrack — lest anyone think he was not talkative because he had something to hide.
His parents’ new home was on the direct road to the ferries that went to Fire Island, a premier gay haunt. During the warm months there was a nonstop procession of gay men rushing to catch a ferry or returning home from the sorts of good times for which Harvey yearned. To observe them was both scary and thrilling. He went on double dates with his brother, Robert, to make sure his family did not suspect his fantasies.
In June 1947, Harvey graduated from Bay Shore High School. He had not been a stellar student and was not sure what he wanted to do next. But his parents let him know that drifting was not an option. Though neither Bill nor Minnie had gone to college, they urged him to apply to New York State College for Teachers at Albany. He could be a teacher. That was a good, steady profession. There was a lot to recommend the place too: Georgian-style red-brick buildings with classical white columns and verdant lawns that made it look like an expensive private liberal arts college; a student population of only fifteen hundred, which promised small classes and personal attention from professors. And best of all, since Bay Shore Furriers was only two years old and still getting a foothold, tuition was totally free.
Harvey was determined to have fun that last summer before he had to knuckle down and prepare for the rest of his life. Having fun meant going to the city as often as possible and cruising in the gay area he had discovered in Central Park. One broiling day in August he took his shirt off in the park — because of the heat but also to show off his muscled torso. Vice squad officers spotted him, ordered him into a paddy wagon with the other gay men they had collected in the cruising area, and deposited them all at the police station. Years later, when Harvey became political, he would wage energetic campaigns against such harassment of gay men, whose alleged crimes were victimless. But now he only swore when questioned that he was just trying to get a suntan, that he was a high school kid who was completely innocent. Though he was released without being booked, he was shaken. How calamitous it would have been had the police notified his parents that their seventeen-year-old son had been arrested in Central Park while trying to pick up homosexuals.
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