40 Years After Assassinations, Assessing the Legacies of Harvey Milk and George Moscone
This month, Colorado elected the nation's first openly gay governor and voters across the country sent a record number of LGBT candidates to Congress. Here in California, Los Angeles state Sen. Ricardo Lara was elected state insurance commissioner, making him the first openly LGBT candidate to win a statewide election.
It all comes 40 years after the assassination of the first openly gay elected official in California: Harvey Milk.
Back then, the recent success of LGBT candidates in the midterm elections would have been hard to imagine.
In California, a conservative state senator named John Briggs was pushing a statewide ballot measure, known as Proposition 6 or the Briggs Initiative, to ban gay and lesbian teachers. Milk, an openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, led the fight against the proposition, debating Briggs around the state, and that November, voters overwhelmingly defeated Proposition 6.
But just 11 days later, San Francisco was thrown into shock. More than 900 Peoples Temple followers of the Rev. Jim Jones died at Jonestown on Nov. 18, 1978, after following his orders to drink fruit punch laced with cyanide.
Then, nine days after that, Dianne Feinstein, then the president of the Board of Supervisors, announced to the world that Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone had been gunned down in City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11706248/40-years-after-assassinations-assessing-the-legacies-of-harvey-milk-and-george-moscone