Who was Harvey Milk?

The list of individual Americans with an entire day marked for their honor is slim—Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr.., and George Washington. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently added to that shortlist by issuing a public declaration designating May 22 as “Harvey Milk Day,” echoing a 2009 declaration from then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Who was Harvey Milk?

You may have seen his face on your mail since the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp in Milk’s honor. You may have seen him among Time magazine’s “100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century.” He ranked third in The Advocate’s “40 Heroes of the 20th Century.” Active Members of the United States Navy may recognize the name from the USNS Harvey Milk that has traversed the seas since 2021 (but that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly planning to rename). Travelers through San Francisco’s International Airport shuffle through a $2.4 billion terminal that bears his moniker, complete with a walk-through exhibition. Then there’s Harvey Milk High School in New York, Harvey Milk Street in Portland, Harvey Milk Square in Paris, Chicago’s Legacy Walk, and the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at Stonewall, among other landmarks. Then there is the opera, the cantata, the children’s book, the historical novel for young adults, and the Academy Award-Winning 2008 Hollywood biopic Milk, starring Sean Penn. As if all of that were not enough of a hero’s tribute, Harvey Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009.

In the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, we can easily overlook the ways in which Western cultures have come to make heroes out of men who could not legally live in close proximity to a school and would nowadays turn up on sex offender registries.

Alfred Kinsey, whose famous Kinsey Report was considered to be the Bible of the Sexual Revolution, was recently glorified as a bronze statue by Indiana University to demonstrate “the university’s pride in the living legacy of [his] research....” Yes, this is the same Alfred Kinsey who testified before legislatures that “pedophilia was a less dangerous problem than the public intolerance of it.” It is the same Kinsey whose research indisputably included the sexual abuse of minors.

Then there is Austrian Marxist Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) who coined the term “Sexual Revolution” and advanced the if-it-feels-good-do-it sexual expressivism indoctrinated into so many young minds today. Despite the sexual violation of children that Reich perpetrated in his research, along with his staunch defense of pedophilia, Reich is honored with his own museum in Maine committed to helping new generations discover his “rich, living legacy.”

Next there is the godfather of the queer theories being advanced in so much public education, Michel Foucault. Yes, this is the same Foucault who argued for “consensual” sex between adults and children and campaigned to legalize pedophilia in France. Foucault has been honored as the most cited author in all of the humanities, with his own square in Paris, and a seven-ton statue of his head installed in the Dutch town of Hoogezand.

John Money received highest awards from the American Psychological Society and a wing bearing his moniker at an art gallery in Gore, New Zealand, thanks to former Prime Minister Helen Clark. This is the John Money whose egregious sexual abuse of children and defense of pedophilia have been well documented. And let us not forget the many honors bestowed by the left today upon their ideological forefathers Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida, both advocates for pedophilia and proud signatories of a reprehensible petition to abolish age of consent laws in France. You can learn much about someone’s true character and values from the men they choose to venerate.

What, then, of Harvey Milk?

Biographer Daniel Flynn notes that “Milk’s taste in men veered toward boys.” Milk’s close friend Oliver “Bill” Sipple “knew that Harvey Milk slept with boys.” In a laudatory biography written by esteemed LGBTQ journalist and close friend of Milk, Randy Shilts documents how, in 1963, a 33-year-old Milk invited a 16-year-old drug-addicted runaway “looking for some kind of father figure” named “Jack” Galen McKinley to be his live-in lover. Describing his typical day in a letter to a friend, Milk said he would “cook dinner, [expletive] Jack, take a bath, [expletive] Jack, listen to some music, [expletive] Jack, wash the dishes, [expletive] Jack.” Shilts notes that “Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems.” Milk was a well-documented pederast, “a man who engages in sexual activity with a boy or youth.”

That was the Harvey Milk California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants us to “honor” as a “hero,” and who mere weeks ago was commemorated around deep blue California. In the starkest imaginable contrast to those in power who honor those who sexually harm youth, Jesus had strong words for those who would lure little ones into evil, something about a millstone and the depths of the sea (Matthew 18:6). If we follow the child-defending Christ, we must expose the false heroes of the Sexual Revolution and its ideological ancestors. We must protect precious, young image-bearers of God, not honor those who preyed upon them.