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Writer John Cloud observed in 1998, "It's a mistake to see his central legacy as political. We'll never know what he could have become if he had lived to have a longer political career. Murdered at the height of his popularity, Harvey Milk's assassination is forever entwined with his historical election. White then intercepted Harvey in the hall and shot him in the head, killing him. He immediately attempted to withdraw his resignation, but "opposition to him had developed in his ethnically mixed district, and the affable but politically shrewd Mayor Moscone had decided it would be smarter for him to appoint a more compatible, liberal man to White's position on the board." According to Time, on November 27, 1978, White entered City Hall through a basement window, went to Moscone's office, and shot Moscone dead. Three days later, Dan White, the city supervisor who considered Harvey a rival, quit his position. They must be -– for the good of all of us -– independent, unbought." They must not be content to accept pablum. They must not be content to sit in the back of the bus. He also noted the importance of electing gay politicians: " The first gay people we elect must be strong. In 1978 Harvey "ignited the crowd" at the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade and asked President Jimmy Carter to speak out against Briggs. Harvey attended every Briggs rally and held debates using statistics and one-liners to fight back against claims that homosexuals sought to abuse and "recruit" children, including the particularly quotable quip, "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around!" Dubbed the Briggs Initiative, the proposed California law would have mandated the firing of gay teachers and any teachers who supported gay rights. The virulent campaign also had an unintended consequence It helped ignite the gay rights movement. “Before Stonewall” opens June 28th at the Laemmle Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills.None of this kept him from speaking out against John Briggs's bigoted Proposition 6. Eisenhower declared gay men and lesbians a threat to national security and unfit for government service, inciting a witch hunt and mass firings that lasted more than 40 years. A key part of this story, too, was L.A.-centric, with Harry Hay and his compatriots founding the discreet, small, yet daring Mattachine Society activist group in a house, also in Silver Lake, in 1950.Īs a young, emerging filmmaker, all I could think about for a few years was what an amazing documentary this could be, bringing these stories to the big screen. It wasn’t until one day after college, though, that I read a couple of very long feature stories in the alternative press about the history of gay political organizing back to the 1950s that a light bulb went off inside my head - There was a community that existed in the past, with active resistance, with a deep culture, and human beings who had stories to tell. Two World War II soldiers are featured in “Before Stonewall,” a documentary that looks at LGBTQ life in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. ‘Work for a Million,’ pioneering lesbian pulp fiction, gets graphic novel makeover When the Stonewall patrons fought back in 1969, things reached a real and symbolic turning point. Black Cat protestsįrom the organized protests at Silver Lake’s Black Cat in 1967 Los Angeles to the Compton Cafeteria riot in 1967 in Sanįrancisco where transgender customers acted up, change was clearly on the horizon. There had been sparks of real resistance before, most of us just never knew about them. Stonewall wasn’t the only cause of this change. Within the year, a political movement emerged, with Gay Liberation Fronts forming in many cities, leading marches and demonstrations, and a cultural transformation had begun. This event, almost unreported in the media at the time, helped sparked a sea change for America’s, and the world’s LGBT communities. It led to a few nights of large, spontaneous protests, with a couple thousand people massing on the streets. This harassment, routine for the time, faced unexpected, at times violent, resistance from the patrons.