Gag Glasses, a Toy Cow and a Hard Hat: The Lighter Side of Harvey Milk

 By Daniel Nicoletta and Ramón Silvestre

Googly-eyed gag glasses! A milkable, mechanical, mooing bovine! A yellow, hideous halogen hard hat! These are not images that we usually associate with Harvey Milk (1930–1978), the activist and politician who made history in 1977 as the first openly gay elected official in California when he won election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Yet these images help us better understand the personality of the groundbreaking figure.

On May 7, the GLBT Historical Society is debuting a new quarterly program series, “Queeriosity Corner,” which features our museum registrar and curatorial specialist Ramón Silvestre showing off rarely seen objects and artifacts from our archival collections, with a special focus on the Art and Artifacts Collection. Our first installment focuses on materials associated with Milk, whose birthday on May 22 is celebrated as Harvey Milk Day in San Francisco. Silvestre is being joined this month by photographer Daniel Nicoletta, who worked at Milk’s Castro Camera store in the 1970s.

Silvestre and Nicoletta have each shared their thoughts about one of the items to be presented. Taken together, their selections show a fascinating, unexpected dimension of Harvey Milk. We’ve all seen the iconic images during his campaigns for political office and at Gay Freedom Day events, but these selections demonstrate that Milk had a fun-loving, silly side to him that we should remember during this annual celebration of his life.

Ramón Silvestre: This photograph taken in January 1978 by Efren Ramirez shows Harvey Milk posing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall with the judge, Ollie Marie-Victoire, who swore him into office—along with a toy cow! 

“Milky the Marvelous Milking Cow,” as he’s formally known, was donated to the society with Harvey Milk’s personal collection in 2002 and is recorded in the archival finding aid, but we didn’t have much information about its significance. When I first came across it in its cardboard box, I scratched my head. It’s this ridiculous, mechanical toy cow produced by Kenner in 1977 to promote General Mills’ breakfast cereals. You fill it with water and it’s milkable if you pull the udders, and it even moos at you! It really is the weirdest thing, but it speaks to one of the enjoyable aspects of working with our collections—you never know what you’re going to discover.

Something like six months later, I was thumbing through photographs in the Efren Convento Ramirez Collection for photographs of Milk. We have quite a number in other collections, but I wanted ones that we hadn’t seen. It was actually Danny Nicoletta who suggested checking the Ramirez collection. And lo and behold, I turned a page and I almost fell over—staring up at me was a photo of Harvey on the day of his swearing-in, sharing the limelight with Judge Marie-Victoire and Milky the Cow! The cow was probably given to Harvey on the day of his swearing-in as a gag gift riffing on his last name, and it’s clear that Harvey loved it.

Daniel Nicoletta: In December 1977 I took this photo of Harvey hamming it up wearing a toy plastic construction-worker’s helmet that one of his constituents gave him as a joke. The photo is a lone shot on a full roll of pictures of other things.

In those weeks after Harvey’s election to the Board of Supervisors, the mood in the camera store and the entire city was giddy from that sweet and hard-earned victory. The yellow helmet had a battery-operated red light that rotated and made an unnerving grinding sound when activated. It was given to Harvey with a note that said something to the effect of, “for those moments when you have difficulty getting the attention of the other Supervisors….”

I was beginning my third year working for Harvey and his partner Scott Smith, and I loved that our days at the store were peppered with jocular moments. They had and loved a good sense of humor. Harvey could often be heard saying, “if you’re not having fun doing politics, you’re missing the point.” What I believe he meant subtextually was that since politics usually stank to high heaven, the only way through was to have fun with it.

After Harvey’s death, Scott formed a group of volunteers to organize and identify Harvey’s papers and ephemera. For those of us involved, it was a way to work through our devastating loss. We called ourselves the “Harvey Milk Archives” and at one point we met with the then-nascent GLBT Historical Society to explore the possibility of partnering on some things, so it is fitting that Scott’s mother Elva Smith donated his ephemera to the society.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the hard work of the ad-hoc group that surrounded Elva and who did the trench work to preserve Harvey and Scott’s papers. This year we lost Terry Henderling, who was the caretaker of the materials until Elva had a chance to figure out what she wanted to do with them. I do hope the community recognizes the good work of the GLBT Historical Society with continued yearly support. This kind of work cannot continue and flourish without that level of community investment.

NOTE: Please join us for the inaugural event of “Queeriosity Corner” on Friday, May 7, at 6:00 p.m. PDT.

Ramón Silvestre is the museum registrar & curatorial specialist at the GLBT Historical Society.

Daniel Nicoletta is a photographer who has devoted most of his adult life to documenting the LGBTQ civil rights journey. His work can be found at www.dannynicoletta.com.