Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was an American politician and gay-rights activist who in 1977 became the first openly gay person elected to public office in the state of California — and one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. His November 1978 assassination became one of the most-iconic moments of the American gay-rights movement. He was born Harvey Bernard Milk on May 22, 1930, in Woodmere, New York, into a Jewish-American family. He served in the US Navy during the Korean War (1951–1955) before working as a finance analyst on Wall Street through the 1960s.

He moved to San Francisco in 1972 and opened a Castro Street camera shop called Castro Camera. Through the early 1970s he became increasingly active in San Francisco's growing gay-rights movement and the broader Castro neighborhood politics. He ran unsuccessfully for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973, 1975, and the California State Assembly in 1976 — building his political base across the Castro neighborhood and the broader San Francisco gay community.

The 1977 San Francisco Board of Supervisors elections — held under a new district-based voting system that helped neighborhood-anchored candidates — finally produced his victory. He took office on January 8, 1978, and immediately co-sponsored a comprehensive San Francisco gay-rights ordinance that was signed into law by Mayor George Moscone in March 1978. His political collaboration with Mayor Moscone made the pair the most-prominent openly LGBT-supportive American mayoral-and-city-council partnership of the 1970s.

On November 27, 1978 — eleven months after taking office — Milk and Mayor Moscone were both shot and killed in their City Hall offices by Dan White, a former San Francisco Supervisor who had recently resigned and unsuccessfully tried to be reinstated. White's subsequent May 1979 conviction on the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter (rather than first-degree murder) sparked the White Night riots in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. Sean Penn won the 2008 Best Actor Academy Award for playing Milk in Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk.

His name Harvey is from the Old Breton Haerviu, composed of haer (battle) and viu (worthy) — yielding "battle-worthy." Harvey has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2010s vintage-revival wave.