The recent success of the movie “Milk”, and the attention brought to it by Sean Penn’s Academy Award winning performance as “Best Actor”, has created broader interest in Harvey Milk, the subject of the biographical film. The film has created curiosity about the influential figure and that has driven an increase in San Francisco tours which recount the historical impact of the man on the city of San Francisco and gay rights nationwide. Tours have sprung up which recount and review the locations of significance around the city’s Castro District in which he lived and worked.
The film “Milk” highlights a number of the Castro locations of significance surrounding Harvey Milk’s personal and political life, many of which are seen in the film. Tourists can now be seen gathered around these locations, such as the Twin Peaks gay bar launched in the seventies. Milk ran a camera store at 575 Castro Street, and lived above the store. A mural adorns the wall of the shop and a plaque commemorates the man on the sidewalk of what today is a home décor shop. It was from this location that he became a neighborhood figure and launched his gay rights activism. He launched his political career by running as an openly gay candidate for the Board of Supervisors but lost on numerous occasions. He succeeded when the city’s districts were redistributed and his district became defined largely by his gay dominant Castro neighborhood. The ornate Castro Theater which factored into the film, and also hosted the premier of the film, remains a beacon in the gay community, and now draws San Francisco tours with added interest from the movie going public since the Academy Awards. Harvey Milk Plaza stands at the intersection of Market Street and Castro Street - a gateway to the Castro District - and offers a lasting memorial to the man and his impact, which thanks to the film, seems to be alive and well thirty years after his assassination at City Hall in 1978.
