When the world discovered that actor Kevin Spacey had an alleged penchant for underage boys, the world rightfully shunned him from the public space. Civil rights icon Harvey Milk, on the other hand, has received no such condemnation and has now been lifted to progressive sainthood.
In just this past decade, the former “Mayor of Castro Street” portrayed by Sean Penn in the Academy Award-winning “Milk,” has been given an honorary postage stamp, a naval vessel with his name on it, and now an airport terminal dedicated in his name at San Francisco International Airport.
According to the SF Examiner, San Francisco is “preparing to rename a terminal at the San Francisco International Airport after slain LGBT supervisor Harvey Milk and install artwork memorializing the civil rights icon.”
Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man to serve in public office when he was elected to the SF Board of Supervisors in 1977 before being assassinated by former Supervisor Dan White over a political betrayal, not homophobia as the movie suggested.
“In order to honor one of the nation’s great gay leaders, raise awareness of the history of the LGBT movement, and give hope to young LGBT people in cities everywhere, the Board of Supervisors finds it fitting that a terminal at the San Francisco International Airport be named in honor of Harvey Milk,” reads the legislation for the terminal change.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen even said she would have preferred naming the entire airport after Milk, but will have to settle for the terminal. $357,000 of taxpayer money will be spent on naming an airport terminal after a sexual predator.
So, what were some of Harvey Milk’s sexual exploits with underage men? Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel profiled what Milk’s own biographers admitted of his behavior as well as accounts from Harvey’s victims:
One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley.
Randy Shilts was a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and close friend to Harvey Milk … also Harvey Milk’s biographer. In his glowing book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” he wrote of Milk’s “relationship’ with the McKinley boy: ‘… Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. … At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.”
Randy Thomasson, child advocate and founder of SaveCalifornia.com, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on Harvey Milk. Of the Shilts biography, Thomasson notes, “Explaining Milk’s many flings and affairs with teenagers and young men, Randy Shilts writes how Milk told one ‘lover’ why it was OK for him to also have multiple relationships simultaneously: ‘As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model. … We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason why you can’t love more than one person at a time.’”
The McKinley boy later committed suicide, but he is not the only victim of Harvey Milk. Gerald Dols, a Christian convert, explained in a 2008 radio interview with Concerned Women for America that Harvey Milk convinced him to run away from his family in Minnesota and join him in San Francisco when Dols was just a teenager.
According to Dols, Milk told him, “Don’t tell your parents,” and later sent him a letter with instructions. Thankfully, the letter was intercepted by Dols’ parents who then filed a complaint with the Minnesota attorney general’s office.
The incident was evidently swept under the rug.
As to the prevailing myth that Harvey Milk was gunned down because of former Supervisor Dan White’s homophobia, that narrative was shot to pieces by none other than Dan White’s former chief political advisor, Ray Sloan, an open homosexual who said that White killed Harvey Milk over a political betrayal, not bigoted animus. In fact, Sloan even admitted that the two men admired each other for a time. You can read Sloan’s five-page account of his relationship with Dan White here.