Obama: “Milk Harvey Gave Us Hope, Unashamed and Unafraid”

milk carter
milk carter
Harvey Milk meets Jimmy Carter, May 1976

The member of San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk (b. 22 May 1930 — d. 27 Nov 1978) was Gay Rights Activist and Community Leader. The first homosexual politician in the history of American politics of California. The iconic figure often called “the most famous and most significantly open gay (LGBT) official ever elected in the United States”.

Champaign Manager,
“What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head, and then he set about to create it for real for all.”

Harvey gave us hope, all of us, hope unashamed, hope unafraid.

Barack Obama

Milk had very short period in his political career. To make this possible he had to go through and met many unsuccessful paths of his life, but he was not one of them who give up on first thought. Milk tore down many failed pavements and created his existence in politics of California.

I like to sit in the window and watch the cute boys walk by.

Harvey Milk

Milk had very different attitude looking at his life, “I think he was happier than at any time I heard ever seen him in his entire life.” faced many ups and downs in his entire life was hidden under his smily face. Simply to win, he kept walking, learning and facing challenges to reach his destiny. Finely he raised voice against gay freedom and rights.

The vision of Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk’s dream for a better tomorrow filled with the hope for equality and a world without hate guided the Foundation. Harvey Milk’s groundbreaking election in 1977 as one of the world’s first openly gay elected officials-and its most visible one- symbolized the freedom to live life with authenticity to millions of LGBT women and men around the world.

Milk served less than a year publicly office before his brutal assassination but his life profoundly changed a city, state, nation and a global community. His courage, passion and sense of justice rocked a country and stirred the very core of a put down and pushed out community, bringing forward new hope and a new vision of freedom.
As a not- for-profit global organization, our program goals — to empower local, regional, national and global organizations so that they may fully realize the power of Harvey Milk’s story, style, and collaborative relationship building — are as large and bold as Harvey taught us! The Foundation, through Harvey’s dream for a just tomorrow, envisions governments that celebrate the rich and universally empowering diversity of humanity, where all individuals — gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, the young, the disabled — all who had been excluded can fully participate in all societal rights universally. >>Continue reading

Harvey was fired from the naval department of California and asked to resign from his post as diving instructor because of raising a concern on his sexuality. His support and struggle for gay rights brought freedom in the Gay Community and huge changes existing today. He also wanted to dig a wide variety of issues but following years of his selection of city’s officer (in 1977), Milk was murdered with five bullets. Dan White (Daniel James White was an American politician who assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, on Monday, November 27, 1978, at City Hall.) shot Milk, two bullets into the head and three on his body.

Also Read: Letter of Subhash Chandra Bose to Mahatma Gandhi also, Mrs Bixby's letter to Abraham Lincoln

Barbara Gittings: “I discovered the power of the press.”

Barbara Gittings
Barbara Gittings life
Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings (b. 31 July 1932 to d. 18 Feb 2007) was the mother of gay men and lesbian of the late 50s and founder of “Daughters of Bilitis” it was the first lesbian rights organization. Miss Barbara being the first editor of the publication, The Ladder (Magazine of Lesbian she studied deeply what is the definition of Uranian).

I wore drag because I thought that was a way to show I was gay. It’s changed now, but in the early 50s, there were basically two types of women in the gay bars: the so-called butch ones in short hair and plain masculine attire and the so-called femme one's in dresses and high heels and makeup. I knew high heels and makeups weren’t my personal style, so I thought… I must be the other kind!


Barbara Gittings

ㅡ David Carter, author of “Stonewall”,

She was one of the rare people in the homophile movement before Stonewall who took a million stance.

The stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay community. Barbara had also helped the American Psychiatric Association with an understanding of people of homosexuality.

I had to find bits and pieces under headings like “Sexual perversion and “Sexual abbreviation” in books on abnormal psychology. Miss Gittings told the publication in 1999.

Barbara Gittings

She took ownership of ending the discrimination against guy men and lesbians. But how young Barbara had evoked her interest in exploring homosexuality? Her father who spit out the truth about it. At an early age, she had read a book called, “The Well of Loneliness” in 1928 a novel of lesbian love by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. It was the beginning of her journey exploring the various studies of sex and discrimination against being a homophile.

I kept thinking about it, it’s me they are writing about, but it does not feel like me at all.

Barbara Gittings
Barbara Gittings doing protest

Her contribution was remarkable, Gay marriage, openness, and their visibility in the society had never been easy in the late 50s and 60s. Barbara had taken the change, step ahead, and become the mother of thousands of guy men and lesbians community. She fought hard for their rights and quality.

Everybody knew that the battle of ending the intolerance against Uranian was quite difficult, but she stood against it till the end of distinction against LGBTQ (LGBT is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the term is an adaptation of the initialism LGB, which was used to replace the term gay regarding the LGBT community beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s), read more about it here.
Studying deep, Ms Gittings referred to many psychological books and psychologists, a purposeful woman did at whatever she could go to the extent for what she wanted to get for her fellow gay and lesbians friends.

My mission was not to get a general education, but to find out about me and what my life would be like. So, I stopped going to classes and started going to the library. There were no organizations to turn to in those days, only libraries were safe, although the information contained was dismal.

Barbara Gittings

During Gay Pioneer, (July 4, 1965, almost 40 gay and lesbian turned up in front of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell people from New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia) Barbara said,

We are the first to do this in an organized fashion to stand up for ourselves. We were considered weird and sick, perverted, and just being wrong.
Most of the citizens of this country have been brainwashed into thinking that we were that way. First that we are not perverted, we are not sick, we are not weird. We are right and the whole world is wrong. We have a dress code, and we have conduct of code. We are out facing the public for the first time.

Vito Russo interviews Harry Hay and Barbara Gittings