Children of Harvey Milk

Starting in the 1960s, the gay rights movement slowly but steadily evolved from a fringe cause to one of the most important social movements in modern history. Throughout western societies, the movement's successes have upended conventional views on sex, love, marriage, the family, and equality itself. Most scholars who have traced the rise of the gay rights movement have tended to focus on it as a broad-based social movement. That approach is not wrong, of course, but as Andrew Reynolds argues in The Children of Harvey Milk, it tends to downplay the agency of individuals with the power to do more than ordinary citizens. Reynolds instead traces the history of global breakthroughs for gays in the past couple of decades through the lives of out lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender politicians who advanced the cause. Based on interviews with over fifty senior elected officials and high profile candidates from across the globe Reynolds tells a moving narrative of great personal highs and lows. While much of the book focuses on celebrated gay leaders in the US, UK, Ireland, and New Zealand (where successes have been pronounced), Reynolds also uses cases from other parts of the world in order to draw a more measured portrait of the movement's progress, which in the non-western world and global south has been uneven (at best). The Children of Harvey Milk includes rarely seen sketches of courageous LGBT advocates in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. But why focus on individual politicians? As it so happens, when open LGBT individuals have been elected to public office, the public's hostility toward and fear of gays has typically lessened. To be sure, a certain degree of societal tolerance must be pre-existent for gays to be elected in the first place, but the evidence shows that the election of figures like San Franciscan Harvey Milk and scores upon scores of LGBT politicians afterward has had salutary and measurable effects on the advancement of gay and transgender rights in those electoral regions. This is not only a compelling collective portrait of gay politicians around the globe, then; it also offers a powerful explanation of why individual politicians practicing "identity politics" have been absolutely crucial to the successes of this still-expanding global social movement.