Harvey Milk, the Briggs Initiative and the Campaign That Changed Minds

On election night, November 7, 1978, the returns from across California told a story that almost nobody had predicted at the start of the year. Proposition 6, the ballot measure that would have required school districts to fire teachers who were gay or lesbian, and teachers of any orientation who publicly supported gay rights, was losing. Not narrowly. It went down decisively, with close to six in ten voters against it. At a celebration in San Francisco, a city supervisor who had spent months debating the measure's author up and down the state stood with his allies and cheered. Harvey Milk had less than three weeks to live. The victory he helped win would outlast him by decades, and it was won by people whose names most of us never learned.

In short: The Briggs Initiative of 1978 would have forced California schools to fire gay teachers and their supporters. Early polls showed it ahead. It lost decisively because a broad coalition, including teachers' unions, local organizers, liberal and conservative politicians and even former Governor Ronald Reagan, made the case that it was unfair and dangerous. Harvey Milk was a central voice, but the win belonged to a coalition, and that is the part worth copying.

A wave of repeal campaigns

To understand why Proposition 6 looked like a winner, rewind to 1977. That year, voters in Dade County, Florida, repealed a local ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, after a campaign led by the singer Anita Bryant under the banner Save Our Children. The repeal passed by a wide margin. Over the following year, voters in St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon, also repealed local gay rights protections.

The pattern looked clear to the people running these campaigns. Gay rights ordinances could be overturned at the ballot box, and the most effective message was about children. John Briggs, a Republican state senator from Orange County with ambitions to run for governor, saw an opportunity. He sponsored an initiative to go further than repeal: to require school boards to fire, or refuse to hire, any teacher, aide, counsellor or administrator found to have engaged in "public homosexual activity" or "public homosexual conduct." The second phrase was defined broadly enough to include advocating, encouraging or promoting homosexuality in a way likely to come to the attention of students or coworkers. A straight teacher who spoke at a rally for gay rights could have been fired under it.

Briggs gathered enough signatures to put it on the November 1978 ballot. Early polling showed it with a comfortable lead.

Harvey Milk's path to City Hall

Harvey Milk had come to San Francisco from New York in the early 1970s and opened a camera shop on Castro Street. He was not a natural fit for the role of political leader. He had been a Navy officer, an insurance analyst and a Wall Street researcher, and had once volunteered for Barry Goldwater's conservative 1964 presidential campaign. His politics moved left as he became part of the counterculture and then of the gay community forming in the Castro.

He ran for the city's Board of Supervisors in 1973 and lost. He ran again in 1975 and lost. He ran for the state Assembly in 1976 and lost. Then San Francisco changed its election system, switching from citywide races to district elections, so that each neighbourhood elected its own supervisor. In November 1977, Milk won the seat representing the district that included the Castro and became one of the first openly gay people elected to public office in the country. He took office in January 1978.

What is often overlooked is how Milk won. He did not run only as a gay candidate. He ran as a neighbourhood candidate, talking about small businesses, potholes, parks and the power of downtown developers. He built alliances with unions, with older residents and with people of color in nearby neighbourhoods. One of the stories most often told about him involves the Coors brewing company. Unions in California had been boycotting Coors over its labor practices, and Milk helped persuade gay bars in the Castro to stop serving the beer, in exchange for unions' support for gay rights and for hiring gay truck drivers. That was coalition politics in its plainest form: we will help you with your fight if you help us with ours.

The campaign against Proposition 6

The fight against Proposition 6 was not run by one person or one organization. It was a sprawling effort with competing strategies, and the arguments inside it are as instructive as the result.

One faction, often associated with established, well-funded groups in Los Angeles, wanted to run a cautious campaign that downplayed gay people themselves and argued mainly about privacy, costs and government overreach. Their reasoning was that voters who were uncomfortable with homosexuality could still be persuaded that firing teachers on the basis of rumors was a bad idea. Another faction, which included Milk and many grassroots organizers in San Francisco, argued that the campaign needed gay people to come out and be visible, because voters who knew a gay person were far less likely to vote to fire one. Milk urged people to come out to their families and coworkers as a political act.

In practice, the campaign did both, and the combination worked. Volunteers knocked on doors in suburbs and small towns. Gay and lesbian teachers, at real risk to their careers, spoke publicly. Milk and Briggs debated in person and on television, with Milk using humour to puncture the measure's claims. Activists such as Sally Gearhart, a lesbian professor at San Francisco State, also debated Briggs and were widely seen as effective. Teachers' unions opposed the measure, seeing it as an attack on due process for all teachers.

The surprise allies

Then the campaign got help from places that most activists would not have expected.

In the fall of 1978, former Governor Ronald Reagan, then preparing his 1980 presidential run, came out publicly against Proposition 6. In a newspaper column that autumn, he argued that the measure could ruin innocent people's lives, since any student with a grudge could accuse a teacher, and that it was unnecessary because existing law already allowed schools to discipline teachers for misconduct. He also expressed his view that homosexuality was not contagious in the way the measure's supporters implied. Reagan's opposition gave cover to conservative and moderate voters who were uneasy about the measure but had not wanted to side with gay activists.

Governor Jerry Brown opposed the measure. President Jimmy Carter spoke against it on a visit to California shortly before the election. Many religious leaders and newspapers opposed it.

Why does this matter? Because the lesson of the Briggs fight is not just that progressives were right. It is that they won by assembling a majority that included people who did not share most of their politics. Reagan did not become a gay rights advocate. But on this question, his argument about due process and false accusations reached voters that Milk's arguments could not, and the campaign was wise enough to welcome it.

Why the measure lost

Proposition 6 lost by a wide margin, a reversal of the early polls that surprised its sponsors. Political scientists and historians have offered several explanations, and they reinforce each other.

The measure went too far. Firing teachers for advocacy, not just for their own orientation, struck many voters as a threat to free speech and to teachers generally. The due process argument resonated with people who had no particular view about gay rights but did not want their children's teachers fired on an accusation. The coalition was broad, stretching from unions to Republican leaders. And the coming-out strategy changed the question: when the measure stopped being about an abstract category and started being about Mr. So-and-so who taught biology, many voters balked.

I would add one more, more opinionated point. Milk's most lasting contribution was not his election. It was his insistence that gay people stop asking for permission to exist and start building alliances with people who shared some of their interests. The election made him visible; the coalition made him effective.

Three weeks later

On November 27, 1978, a former supervisor named Dan White, who had resigned from the board and then sought to be reappointed, climbed through a basement window at City Hall and shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk. That night, tens of thousands of people marched silently by candlelight from the Castro to City Hall.

In May 1979, a jury convicted White of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder, and the verdict set off a night of rioting at City Hall that became known as the White Night riots. White served about five years in prison and died by suicide in 1985, not long after his release.

Milk became a symbol, and symbols can flatten people. In 2009, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, and California later created a day in his honour. A Navy ship has carried his name. But the real Milk was a strategist as much as a martyr, a man who had lost three elections before winning one and who had learned in those losses that a gay candidate needed straight allies, and that a movement needed a neighbourhood.

What the Briggs fight teaches now

Ballot measures affecting LGBTQ people have continued to appear in the decades since, with mixed results for each side. Many current fights involve schools again, from curricula to library books to which bathrooms students use. The temptation for progressives is to treat every one of them as a battle between good and evil and to talk only to people who already agree.

The Briggs campaign suggests another way. Find the argument that reaches the voter you do not yet have. For some, it will be fairness to gay and trans people. For others, it will be due process, parents' rights, local control, free speech or the cost of lawsuits. Welcome allies who disagree with you on nearly everything else. And make it personal: the voter who knows your name is much harder to persuade to vote against you.

The rule change that made Milk possible

Here is a fact about Harvey Milk's election that gets less attention than it deserves: he probably could not have won under the rules that were in place for his first three campaigns.

Through the early 1970s, San Francisco elected its Board of Supervisors citywide. Every candidate had to appeal to voters across the whole city, which favoured people with money, name recognition and the support of downtown business and established political organizations. A candidate whose base was concentrated in one neighbourhood, whether that neighbourhood was the Castro, Chinatown or the Bayview, had a hard time. Milk lost two citywide races for supervisor.

In November 1976, San Francisco voters approved a change to district elections, so that each of eleven districts would elect its own supervisor. The coalition that pushed for the change included neighbourhood groups, tenants, labor and activists from communities that felt shut out of City Hall. The first district elections, in 1977, produced the most diverse board in the city's history up to then, including Milk, a Chinese American supervisor, a Black woman and a single mother active in neighbourhood politics.

Rules shape who gets elected, and who gets elected shapes what gets done. This is not a uniquely San Francisco lesson. The way a city, county or state draws its districts, whether it elects officials at large or by district, whether it uses runoffs or ranked ballots, when it holds elections and how it handles registration all affect which communities can turn their numbers into representation. Many progressive victories in American history have begun not with a new policy but with a change to the rules of the game that let new people into the room.

The story did not end neatly. Within a few years of the assassinations, San Francisco voters returned to citywide elections, and it was a long time before districts came back. Critics of district elections argue, with some reason, that they can encourage parochialism, with each supervisor guarding a turf rather than thinking about the whole city. Supporters reply that citywide elections tend to entrench whoever already holds power, and that representation for neighbourhoods is a feature, not a flaw.

You do not have to settle that debate to see the point. If you want to change who holds power where you live, pay attention to the structure of elections as well as the candidates. A charter amendment can matter more than a mayoral race.

What you can do

The campaign against Proposition 6 ran on volunteers, coalitions and one-on-one conversations. You can start any of those this year.

• Register and help others register. The voting page has registration deadlines, voter ID rules and mail and early voting information for every state, linked to each state's election office.
• Know who is on your school board and in your legislature. Enter your address at find your representatives for your state legislators and members of Congress; check your county election office for local school board seats.
• Join a coalition. The organizations directory lists LGBTQ+, civil rights, labor and education groups in every state. Look for the ones that already work across issues.
• Learn from today's organizers. The progressive leaders topic page and the LGBTQ rights topic page gather reporting on candidates and campaigns building the kind of broad coalitions that won in 1978.
• Have the conversation. Pick one person you know who disagrees with you on an LGBTQ issue and talk to them, not to win an argument but to find the one point you share.