Harvey Bernard Milk (22 May 1930 – 27 November 1978) was the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco, California, and gay rights activist. He was, according to Time magazine, “the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet.”
He was assassinated in 1978, along with Mayor George Moscone, by recently resigned city supervisor Dan White, making him a LGBT community “martyr”. White’s relatively mild sentence for the murders led to the White Night Riots, and eventually the abolition of diminished capacity defense in California.
