When Harvey Met Jimmy...
An unremarkable picture, really.
Taken forty-eight years ago on the 21st of May 1976. There are thousands like it. No, millions! Not least from 2024, the biggest election year ever, when half the world is going to the polls… The handshakes and baby-kissing of a Campaign.
It was a drill both men knew well. Harvey Milk was one shot away from ascension to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; while Jimmy Carter, the erstwhile Governor of Georgia (elected on his second attempt) was a stone’s throw from clinching the Democratic nomination. Just three years earlier, amid the long national nightmare of Watergate, the former was an opera-loving, camera-store-owning San Francisco transplant. “Harvey Milk,” a journalist sassed “is a sad-eyed man, another aging hippie with long, long hair, wearing faded jeans and pretty beads.” The latter – “Jimmy Who?” – was so unknown outside his native Peach State that interrogators on the popular television show What’s My Line? dispensed with blindfolds.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s no historical significance to their meeting. Milk simply scrounged together the hundred bucks necessary to attend a fundraiser. Moreover, he kept his gay rights credentials to himself. While a photo with a potential commander-in-chief looked good on his flyers, his op-ed in the Bay Area Reporter, “Uncertainty of Carter or the Certainty of Ford”, was hardly a ringing endorsement. Much like today’s leaders, he urged his constituents to hold their noses and vote blue. As for Candidate Carter, I dare say he had no idea who the other man was! (Ask poor Rosalynn who, across town, was naively snapped with Jim Jones, the Kool-Aid preacher.)
But there’s something quite Frank Capra about it, isn’t there?
I don’t know about you, but I’m politically homeless these-a-days. One rather feels they’re squandering their vote on the sensible left. I’m dreading November when the evil of two lessers will be installed in the White House. To say nothing of the dire straits in which we find ourselves in Weimar Dublin. The last few weeks have been spent, as the title of Carter’s famous speech goes (he never actually said it), in a malaise. It’s why Oh, Shut Up! has been (Frances Mc) dormant since February. But I’d be lying if I hadn’t thought about writing an obituary for the man who elevated cardigans to the peak of fashion.
President Carter, ninety-nine, has been in hospice care for fifteen months. His relatives and hangers-on regularly announce that the end, the very end, is nigh. I’d never seen the picture of him with Milk until yesterday when it became a puzzle for me to crack. After all, folks like that are an anomaly in our current climate. Compassionate, charismatic individuals.
There were only six years between them. Both were navy men with indomitable mothers. Minerva Karns Milk encouraged her son to embrace the Jewish spirit of tikkun olam, “repair the world”. Nurse Lillian Gordy Carter, “Miss Lillian”, famously joined the Peace Corps at sixty-eight. They drew upon homespun methods to proselytise: “My name is Harvey Milk,” cried the would-be supervisor from his soap box “and I’m here to recruit you”. With a megawatt smile, the future chief executive harangued powerbrokers for two years in an extraordinary rise to prominence: “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president”. As a young man, Milk toiled as a teacher and Wall Street trader. No mere peanut farmer, Carter was a nuclear engineer. Both were resented by their factions’ Old Guards as interlopers with no call to run for high positions. “It’s not my election I want, it’s yours,” said Milk “a light that says to the lost and disenfranchised that you can go forward.” Carter, similarly, titled his 1975 manifesto: Why Not the Best?. Hope springs eternal!
Of course, the Harvey of this article is the goyish everyman played by Sean Penn in his Oscar-winning turn. Jimmy might well be the other “J.C.”. (No, not Joan Collins – but a comparable deity.) Milk’s martyrdom at the hands of Dan White made him immortal. Living half a century more and inventing the post-presidency, Carter saw society’s scruples loosen. It’s crucial to evaluate his actions on the attitudes of his time, not ours. “I don’t consider myself one iota better than anyone else because I happen to be a Christian, and I never have done anything other than keep strictly separated my political from my religious life.” But, by and large, they remained ordinary citizens running for office. Admired for their approachability and willingness to prioritise society’s needs before their own. To others, their hubris earned them many enemies.
Their paths crossed again. In October 1978, the President’s attempts to reorganise the civil service threw up gay rights as “an inflammatory collateral issue”. “We must not be hamstrung by taking an unpopular stand,” a Carter aide warned “it will cost us votes in the Senate and muddy the waters. I strongly recommend going all out for the reform legislation and redressing specific groups’ (gays) problems later.” Meanwhile in California, State Senator John Briggs, inspired by Anita Bryant’s crusade, introduced Proposition 6. If passed, the Briggs Initiative required schools to identify and fire gay teachers.
“Jimmy Carter,” Milk pleaded “how many lives must be destroyed before you speak out? You want to be the world leader in human rights. There are 15 to 20 million gay people in this nation. When are you going to talk about their rights?”. The President eventually voiced his opposition, but not before ensuring it was kosher. (“You’ll get your loudest applause on Proposition 6,” counselled Jerry Brown, California’s governor seeking re-election “so, I think it’s perfectly safe.” After all, even Ronald Reagan denounced its infringement on individual liberties.) On the 7th of November 1978, Proposition 6 was handily defeated. Three weeks later, Harvey Milk was dead.
“He was a good and kind man, and he will be sorely missed,” Carter eulogised “as supervisor, Milk had come to be widely regarded as a symbol of the aspirations of gay people to participate openly in mainstream politics, and in society at large.”
Nothing to gain and much to lose. That’s how a civil servant had the gay cause at the end of the seventies. Blissfully unaware that a sinister decade would begin with the President’s crushing loss in 1980. “I don’t know what people have against Jimmy Carter,” Bob Hope quipped “he’s done nothing.” Conversely, in his eleven months in public office, Harvey Milk’s only legislative achievement outside of gay rights was a law requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets.
But in the succeeding forty-four years, both have lived on. Political survivors who never resorted to underhand tactics. Their stars undimmed, they are our Camelot.
Read Next:
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Well said.