There’s nothing wrong with you – listen to me: You just get on a bus, to the nearest big city, to Los Angeles or New York or San Fransisco, it doesn’t matter, you just leave. You are not sick, and you are not wrong and God does not hate you. Just leave.
My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you!
All men are created equal. No matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words.
This is Harvey Milk speaking on Friday, November the 18th. This is only to be played in the event of my death by assassination. During one of my early campaigns I began to open speeches with a line that became kind of a signature. “My Name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you.” If I was speaking to a slightly hostile audience, or a mostly straight one, I might break the tension with a joke. “I know, I’m not what you expected, but I left my high heels at home.” I fully realize that what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, makes himself a target for someone who is insecure, terrified, afraid and disturbed themselves. It’s a very real possibility, you see, because in San Fransisco, we have broken the dam of a major prejudice in this country.
I am here tonight to say that we will no longer sit quietly in the closet. We must fight. And not only in the Castro, not only in San Francisco, but everywhere the Anitas go. Anita Bryant did not win tonight, Anita Bryant brought us together! She is going to create a national gay force! And the young people in Jackson Mississippi, in Minnesota, in the Richmond, in Woodmere New York, who are hearing her on television, hearing Anita Bryant telling them on television that they are sick, they are wrong, there is no place in this great country for them, no place in this world, they are looking to us for something tonight, and I say, we have got to give them hope!
Without hope, life’s not worth living.
I ask this… If there should be an assassination, I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out – – If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door… And that’s all. I ask for the movement to continue. Because it’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power… it’s about the “us’s” out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us’s give up – I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. So you, and you, and you… You gotta give em’ hope… you gotta give em’ hope.
