Gay Power, Gay Myth: Harvey Milk and Randy Shilts

Assassinated less than a year into his term as San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk is remembered today as one of the first openly gay elected officials and a symbol of the struggle for gay rights. But he’s less known for the unique style of gay politics he pioneered: a pragmatic populism grounded in neighborhood power and tactical alliances, combined with a skillful use of the media to broadcast a message of “hope” to gay people nationwide.  In this episode, we reconsider Milk’s vision of gay power through the writings of another figure we think was an underestimated political thinker: the pioneering journalist Randy Shilts, whose biography “The Mayor of Castro Street” (1982) helped create the Harvey Milk legend and impose a narrative coherence onto Milk’s politics. Shilts celebrated Milk as an alternative to two unsatisfactory types of gay politics: either being subordinated to elite Democratic Party insiders or to a broader radical-left coalition. Shilts saw Milk, instead, constructing a novel type of autonomous gay political power that could be used specifically in gay people’s self-interest. By transforming Milk into a political visionary and martyr, Shilts was also theorizing and re-enacting Milk’s savvy manipulation of the media, in which heroes and villains—sometimes ones he invented—could both catalyze gay power at the local level and connect it to a national struggle for gay rights. We talk about what we can learn from Milk and Shilts today and have more to say about the current state of gay media. *Subscribe to our newsletter for bonus content:* https://bit.ly/OCSnewsletter  FOLLOW THE POD --------------------- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christopherstreetmag/  Substack: https://christopherstreetmag.substack.com/  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@christopherstreetpod  X: https://x.com/OffCSPod/  SOURCES --------------------- Randy Shilts, “The Life and Death of Harvey Milk,” Christopher Street, March 1979. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982). Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987). Randy Shilts, “Go EST Young Man,” New West, June 19, 1978. (Note: We incorrectly identified this in the episode as appearing in the gay magazine Blueboy). Randy Shilts, “Cleve Jones Rising,” Christopher Street, October 1980. CBS News, “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” April 26, 1980.  Blake Smith, “Randy Shilts,” September 2024. Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (2017). Michael E. Lee, When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Gay Journalist (2024). Manuel Castells, “Cultural Identity, Sexual Liberation, and Urban Structure: The Gay Community in San Francisco,” in The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (1983). Jasbir Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ (January 2012).  Gus Van Sant, Milk (2008).