Har­vey Milk — elo­quent, charis­mat­ic, and a smart-aleck — was elect­ed to the San Fran­cis­co Board of Super­vi­sors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homo­pho­bic fel­low super­vi­sor. Milk’s assas­si­na­tion at the age of forty-eight made him the most famous gay man in mod­ern his­to­ry; twen­ty years lat­er Time mag­a­zine includ­ed him on its list of the hun­dred most influ­en­tial indi­vid­u­als of the twen­ti­eth century.

Before find­ing his call­ing as a politi­cian, how­ev­er, Har­vey var­i­ous­ly tried being a school­teacher, a secu­ri­ties ana­lyst on Wall Street, a sup­port­er of Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter, a Broad­way the­ater assis­tant, a bead-wear­ing hip­pie, the oper­a­tor of a cam­era store and orga­niz­er of the local busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty in San Fran­cis­co. He reject­ed Judaism as a reli­gion, but he was deeply influ­enced by the cul­tur­al val­ues of his Jew­ish upbring­ing and his under­stand­ing of anti-Semi­tism and the Holo­caust. His ear­ly influ­ences and his many per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ences final­ly came togeth­er when he decid­ed to run for elec­tive office as the force­ful cham­pi­on of gays, racial minori­ties, women, work­ing peo­ple, the dis­abled, and senior cit­i­zens. In his last five years, he focused all of his tremen­dous ener­gy on becom­ing a suc­cess­ful pub­lic fig­ure with a dis­tinct polit­i­cal voice.