Book 658: The Children of Harvey Milk – Andrew Reynolds

I’m not sure how I stumbled across this one, but when I did back in May I requested a copy from the publisher and they kindly obliged.* I was interested because of the subject matter, but also because Reynolds is based at UNC Chapel Hill (my undergrad) and his name rang a bell because he’d chaired the Sexuality Studies program there at some point in the recent past. And then with my master’s degree focusing on the Civil Partnership Act (2014) in the UK, of course I was going to want to read this book and see what he had to say.

I thought this would have a much broader sweep than it did. It mentions a lot of non-Western, non-English speaking politicians, but doesn’t really go into their stories as in-depth (The Netherlands being the primary exception). I think because it has “changed the world” in the subtitle that I thought the breath and depth of the work would be grander. Don’t get me wrong, the list of out parliamentarians is global and appears to be as exhaustive as Reynolds could make it, but really the focus of this story was the English Speaking world, including but not limited to the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.

Where I think Reynolds struggled was trying to balance the expected depth and breadth I and others probably want (stories about first everywhere with details) and focusing on the first/most impact stories that laid the groundwork for bigger things. He turned to some firsts most people know of, but found a few that aren’t as well known. And this road took him a few miles down the road from his job at UNC Chapel Hill.

“North Carolina has long been on the fault line of the battle for the soul of the America: civil rights are the currency of social change. North Carolina was the last state to succeed from the union, last to return to it, and the next to last to sign the Constitution.” (186)

“…the Army town of Fayetteville, where over 50,000 soldiers are stationed at Fort Bragg–the largest military installation in the world.” (191)

“A few miles to the north of [Mark] Kleinschmidt’s home in Orange County is a white clapboard house perched on bricks where Pauli Murray grew up. Murray is perhaps the most consequential American woman you’ve never heard of.” (191)

I’ve already added a book about Pauli Murray (Wikipedia link) who was pushing the boundaries on identity politics (race, sex, and gender) before all of the names we now know. But by far, the the weirdest part was Reynolds focus on the part of NC I grew up in via Clay Aiken (yes, that Clay Aiken). It wasn’t a bad thing, but it was just weird hearing about where I grew up, Fayetteville, and the surrounding towns, Raeford, Sanford and Siler City, in an academic book! I mean there have been plenty of books about Fort Bragg and I even wrote a few academic papers on it in undergrad.

Reynolds’, based on his writing, sounds like he would be a fascinating professor to study with. He had a wonderful way of getting quickly to the point on identity and sexuality and who is being left behind and connecting it to the broader politics he discusses in this book. Add in that he highlighted Tory Pride and Prejudice, a book with a Jane Austen reference in the title—yes please. (Don’t worry it’s already on my list.)

“The way I explain the situation to my students is that when the LGBTQ community has a family reunion, the lesbians and gays sit at the adult table while the bisexuals sit at a card table in the corner that has been repurposed as the kids’ table. They are seen and not heard, but they get to listen to the grown-ups. In years past the transgenders [sic.] would be relegated to serving the food and then told to leave, but now they at least get to sit at the kids’ table with the bisexuals.” (39)

“If there is one part of the LGBTQ community that needs voice it is those who are HIV positive, and especially those of color and gender nonconforming.” (131)

“An identity–whether ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation–is a useful shortcut for voters to assess candidate appeal; what you know, what you like, what you fear, and what you aspire to be. Up until a decade ago, when law and society vilified homosexuals, a gay candidate signaled rebelliousness, deviance, and being out of the mainstream: the very essence of abnormality. Thus, a gay candidate would attract votes if the voter, gay or straight, shared that otherness, that rebelliousness, a yearning not to be part of the mainstream.” (252)

This one is hard to really discuss in a post this short, but overall the effect of having out parliamentarians (elected officials of all types) is that it becomes harder for the types of vitriolic discussions that occurred prior to openly LGBTQ people being elected. And as painful and obnoxious as it may seem, often times the incremental changes that happen (i.e. the slow over turning of anti-gay legislation and laws in the US) lead to faster spurts of laws changing. Specifically in the US we went from Lawrence v. Texas (anti-sodomy laws) being overturned in 2003 to Obergefell v Hodges (marriage equality) in 2015, there was a lot in between on the legislative side and more and more representatives coming out that made this possible.

If there was one thing that stood out to me in the work, it was just how backwards the US is when it comes to right-wing conservatism. Now I’m not going to shit on the GOP or even the Trumpers in this post, but I found this very interesting,

“That the stream of high-profile Trump appointees are avowed homophobes is not a shock; what is striking is how out of step the Trump administration is with the rest of the global conservative movement when it comes to sexual orientation. The GOP is one of a small and dwindling band of right-of-center parties who cling to the creed that straight is normal and anything else is an aberration.” (238)

“Some see high-profile right-wing lesbian and gay leaders as merely fig leaves of respectability for unpleasant parties, but there is more to it than that. LGBT voters are increasingly gravitating to such parties with their mix of gay rights policies, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim rhetoric.” (240)

And when I think about it, we’re (perplexingly) starting to see this sort of thing in the US ranging from Caitlin Jenner to the gay guys wearing MAGA hats in the Castro. We are nowhere as far along as the UK, which I’d argue already sits slightly to the left of the US anyway, but I found it incredibly interesting to read that and think about my own experiences interacting with LGBTQ individuals across all sorts of parties in the UK from the Socialist Worker Party to your more run of the mill Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Labour. It was great seeing names of individuals I interacted with via student politics including Wes Streeting (NUS president while I was in the UK), Peter Tatchell (this actually gave me a lot more perspective and more respect for him), and Eddie Izzard (had a drink in a bar after a politics talk he gave with LUU student leadership).

Recommendation: This is a great read and incredibly approachable for an academic nonfiction work. I found Reynolds writing to be engaging and earnest (I teared up occasionally), and the variety of stories covered were as diverse and representative as they could be. I wish there was more racial diversity and more geographical diversity, as did Reynolds. He acknowledged this shortcoming of the work on a couple of separate occasions which was nice to see.

*I received a copy of The Children of Harvey Milk from the publisher in return for my honest opinion. No money or goods were exchanged.

Opening Line: “On April 17, 2013, the parliament of New Zealand met in the modernist dome of a parliamentary building, affectionately known as the Beehive, in the capital Wellington, to debate and vote on the final reading of the Definition of Marriage Amendment Bill.”

Closing Line: “…Cal Anders, Gilbert Baker, Justin Fashanu, Ann Louise Gilligan, Frank Kameny, David Kato, Randy Shilts, Rachael Webb…for Harvey Milk…and for all his children.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Quotes from The Children of Harvey Milk
“At the start of 2018 over one billion people lived in countries where they could marry someone of the same sex: twenty-five nation-states and forty-three other jurisdictions.” (xvii)

“Drag is a mask, armor, a superhero outfit. It is bigger, more colorful, more defined. Attention is drawn to this specialized version of you that is designed for that attention.” (61, Rory O’Neill/Panti Bliss)

“Young gay people today live in a different, more tolerant world, but they still worry about discrimination, marginalization, and how their families and friends will react. One of the most effective ways to dispel this stigma is through the provision of role models. If I had seen gay men in legally recognised public relationships of the sort my parents were in, I would have found it easier to come out and I would have been a much happier person.” (78, John Browne)

“If anything, the real hyphen he battles against is not the gay one; it’s the celebrity. ‘The gay hyphen has not yet been the big issue,’ he stresses, because the celebrity hyphen is so big and bold underlined and italicized. He likes to call it ‘Whatthefuck Mountain’—the knee-jerk reaction of voters bewildered as to why a celebrity winger would be running for office. [Clay] Aiken describes his whole campaign as a mission to climb Whatthefuck Mountain.” (184)

“On February 1, 1960, at 4:30 p.m., four students from North Carolina A&T State University sat down at the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter on South Elm Street in Greensboro and asked for coffee. They were denied service but refused to leave…” (187)

“…others say that marriage equality has trickle-down effects–it normalizes the community further, making progress on other issues easier. Once a conservative legislator votes yes on gay marriage they are more likely to vote for employment nondiscrimination, for example. Once you have a same-sex family in the school car pool, you are more likely to see homophobic bullying in the classroom as a problem worthy of action.” (280)