It’s a chaotic 2020, and we’re overlooking the wild story of the secret gay history at the heart of the our Presidential race: With Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the tickets, this election has become a great battle royale between the political legacies of two of the most important figures in LGBT+ history.
Decades after their deaths, Roy Cohn and Harvey Milk are clashing one last, improbable time on this year’s ballots — as candidates with direct ties to them compete for the White House.
When Trump was a young man, he turned for political advice to Cohn, a gay man reviled by the LGBT+ community for his anti-gay record and his ties to far-right politicians.
Democratic Vice President candidate Harris has her own ties straight to the heart of 20th century LGBT+ history. Harris has roots among Milk’s political family and San Francisco’s Gay Freedom era. She is steeped in the community like no national politician before her.
To understand this great clash of LGBT+ political traditions, let’s start with Cohn and his deep ties to Trump. Cohn has a central role in Angels in America, the Pulitzer-Prize winning play about AIDS in the United States — he’s the villain.
Cohn helped Sen. Joseph McCarthy execute a political witch hunt against the early LGBT+ community. Cohn was also a close ally of J. Edgar Hoover, another suspected closeted gay man who used his role as head of the FBI to undermine American democracy at every turn and, of course, enforce legal homophobia.
Even Cohn’s 1986 death of AIDS wins him little sympathy in the LBGT+ community. Cohn was a close ally of President Reagan at the time and was taking advantage of the best medical resources, while ignoring all the other people dying of AIDS.
When Cohn first hooked up with Trump back in 1973, he was a semi-closeted gay man brought in to play the role of legal pit bull fighting off a charge of discriminating against Black tenants. The relationship between Cohn and Trump was a fruitful one that often included their mutual friend Roger Stone.
By 1986, as Cohn lay dying, he was also on the verge of being disbarred as a lawyer. Donald Trump wrote the New York Bar on Cohn’s behalf, saying he had always “been extremely loyal and extremely honest.”
To this day, Trump misses him. “Where’s my Roy Cohn,” he plaintively asked during the Russia investigation, a question so plaintive and pathetic that it inspired a documentary of the same name.
Harris’ roots in the LGBT+ community, however, are far deeper and different than Trump’s. You can’t understand her without understanding this background.
Harris first won office in 2003, when she was elected to be district attorney of San Francisco. She took on an entrenched incumbent and promised modernization to a city always looking for the next big thing.
For campaign strategy in that race she turned to Jim Rivaldo, a historical giant in the LGBT+ community.
Rivaldo was a natural choice. His campaign lit was genius, and over the years many Black and gay candidates turned to him. More importantly, Rivaldo had been friends with Harris for years and shared a special bond with Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan.
Helping Harris win that race was Rivaldo’s last campaign, but he will always be associated with one of his first clients — Harvey Milk.
Rivaldo was the key behind-the-scenes strategist in Milk’s 1977 election as San Francisco supervisor, which resulted in Milk’s victory as the first out gay person to win a significant elected office in America. You can see him in the back of scenes in Harvey Milk’s Oscar-winning biopic Milk.
Rivaldo leaves us two epic pieces of American political art from his work. For Milk, it was the famous blue and white “Milk Supervisor/5” sign from his 1977 race. Artistically, it’s perfect: a riot of emotions, a restrained but powerful color palette, and a sharp message.
The second piece of art-as-history comes from the 1976 “No on Briggs” initiative campaign, when Milk and Rivaldo beat back an effort to fire all of California’s LGBT+ teachers. Rivaldo created an unforgettable “No on 6” sign, dominated by a dramatic, flashy, swoopy, fire-engine-red “6.”
While Rivaldo and Milk were fighting for these teachers, Cohn was back on the East Coast at the very same time saying, “homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children.”
Milk and Rivaldo won that fight — and Cohn lost.
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Their euphoria over these first victories didn’t last long.
Tragedy soon struck: Milk was assassinated at City Hall in 1978, with Rivaldo the last person to speak to him.
San Francisco and the LGBT+ community went into mourning, and Rivaldo might have suffered hardest. He was a gentle soul who had put his heart into making history. Something in Rivaldo broke when Milk was murdered, and he mourned for the rest of his life.
And then tragedy struck San Francisco again — with Rivaldo once again in the center of it.
Only 17 months after Milk was killed, the first report appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle about the disease that would become known as AIDS.
A whole generation of Rivaldo’s friends began to die before his eyes. The emotional highs of the 1970s Gay Freedom movement crashed into the pandemic nightmare of the 1980s AIDS tragedy. Disco-fried hippies inspired by the civil rights and feminist movements suddenly found themselves on the front lines of a plague, as the first of more than 700,000 Americans died of the disease.
“Did you know I designed the first safe-sex brochure in the world?” Rivaldo asked me one day. At the time, we were overlooking San Francisco’s Civic Center from the window of his office. It was the year 2000. He was my professional mentor as I was trying to break into politics.
“I think it was 1982. No one knew what to say or do or think; people were dying everywhere. Dying in the streets,” he continued. “You just can’t understand. We talked to some people at SF General Hospital and I made a brochure. It was wrong about a lot, but at least we were trying.”
He sighed the deepest, heaviest sigh I ever heard in my life.
“Do you still have it?” I asked. “Right here,” he answered, patting his trusty Apple Mac.
Rivaldo found more professional success in the 1990s, as the LGBT+ movement got stronger nationally and globally. For a while, he was part of the only firm in the nation dedicated to LGBT+ candidates and causes.
From that perch he got to watch the rise of the modern, global LGBT+ community, when it seemed that Milk’s memories were at danger of being lost even as his ideas were spreading around the world. It was a strange time. While we felt history was being forgotten — it was also the kind of place, I could answer the phone and be greeted with, “This is Gilbert Baker. I invented the rainbow flag. Is Jim there?”
When Rivaldo took over Harris’ campaign in 2003, I didn’t know her and so one day I called him up and told him I wasn’t so sure about this new client of his. I didn’t know if I could trust her. It was during the Iraq War protests, and I wanted a DA who wouldn’t prosecute the peace protestors who had been arrested — and in some cases assaulted — by the police.
Rivaldo screamed down the phone at me: “You HAVE to vote for Kamala Harris. She grew up marching at civil rights protests. She is one of us. She will ALWAYS stand with the gay community, because she comes from it.”
It took me back. His tone was a big change for the kind, cardigan-and-slipper-clad man who had been described as the “Mr. Rogers” of the Gay Freedom movement. Here he was hollering at me. I threw my hands up and promised to vote for Harris in her first race for San Francisco district attorney.
Rivaldo isn’t Harris’ only roots in the LGBT+ community, of course. She went to law school in San Francisco in the summer of 1986, just as Cohn was dying of AIDS in New York. Her law school sits a stone’s throw from the Polk District, and a longer stone’s throw from the Castro district, the two neighborhoods that were ground zero of the AIDS crisis.
And as a member of the long-time political network called the “Brown-Burton” machine, Harris’ closest political allies have for decades been the nation’s leaders on LGBT+ issues. The co-founders of that urban machine, Willie Brown and Phil Burton, together passed the law decriminalized same-sex relations, and were the first and most active campaigns for equal rights and against AIDS.
Brown and Burton were expert vote counters, and so they started campaigning in the gay community as early as the 1960 elections, in a fundraiser at the house of a gay couple — as far as I know they were the first American politicians ever to do. They no doubt noticed that drag queen José Sarria won thousands of votes as the first out person ever to run for office in the country, in 1961, for a spot on the San Francisco board of supervisors, the same office which Milk finally won 16 years later.
All this all adds up to Harris getting a unique cultural education from her years immersed in the city’s historic LGBT+ communities. No other major politician in this country has ever lived this kind of life.
I don’t recall the event, but I vividly remember watching drag superstar RuPaul perform in a bright red dress at a community function back in the 1990s — and seeing Harris laughing in the background with friends, wearing her signature dark pantsuit and pearls.
Amidst all that pomp and glory, all that cultural extravaganza, though, it was always Rivaldo who loved Harris the most, and their family-friend relationship was always tender. ”I guess I’m her gay uncle,” he said one time, eyes twinkling.
But it was a rough 25 years for Rivaldo, from Milk’s killing in 1978 to Harris’ election in 2003. He was tired from bearing the weight of history. His heart was still broken. After marshaling his energy to advise her on her first campaign, he began a long, painful decline due to liver disease.
Gopalan, Harris’ mother, stepped in to help Rivaldo as he struggled with his health. “She fights with my doctors and calls me every day,” he said of her support.
Rivaldo passed away in 2007 and was followed by his dear friend Gopalan just two years later.
I am not sure what happened to Rivaldo’s historical collection of papers after he died. Where are those original Milk campaign signs? That early Harris literature? The world’s first safe-sex brochure? Is it lost to time, like so many memories from those years, or somehow making its way to the Smithsonian? I can’t track them down.
But I do know that Rivaldo’s prediction about Harris’ devotion to the LGBT+ community came true. As part of her promise of modernization to the justice system, she put LGBT+ issues at the center of her work, as both DA and later as the attorney general of California.
Not long after first being elected DA, Harris called a national conference of reform-minded prosecutors and public defenders to declare the end of the “gay/trans panic” defense. She tossed into the dustbin of history the backward idea that the murder of a gay or trans person can be legally justified if someone panics from being in their proximity.
As Democratic Party leaders remained opposed to same-sex marriage — and Vice President Mike Pence was going all drama queen by saying it would lead to “society collapse” — Harris was using her power as California attorney general to push the issue forward. By then, I was her press advisor. I recall sitting in a meeting as her host of lawyers debated legal theories to sway Supreme Court opinion. Harris interrupted to lean in and asked: “What about the kids?”
She kept that focus throughout the conversation: How is this impacting the millions of kids in households with LGBT+ people. Harris’ work as a prosecutor always focused on child victims, and in this case she saw kids victimized by conservatives crusading against them. Harris saw what was happening because she knew those kids. She knew my kids. She knew the kids of all her other staff, and of her lesbian, gay, and trans friends and neighbors.
So when she submitted her brief to the Supreme Court, it advocated specifically for the well-being of these kids. When the Supreme Court ruled the right to same-sex marriage, Justice Anthony Kennedy took care to address this issue in his opinion. I will always believe Harris is to thank for this.
The stark contrast between Roy Cohn and Harvey Milk — and their proxies Donald Trump and Kamala Harris — is clearest on the issue of transgender rights, the new LGBT+ battleground.
Trump has loudly politicized the issue of transgender health care, rolling back Obama-era protections guaranteeing equal access. Trump attacks transgender people hoping he can further divide the nation and win votes for himself.
Harris had her own controversy over transgender health care, over her representation of the California Department of Corrections in a lawsuit when she was attorney general. Harris won the lawsuit, as a court found that the prison system was not required to provide full health care to inmates who are transgender.
But Harris’ role as an LGBT+ champion showed with what she did next; she worked behind the scenes to change the policy that she had defended as legal, because she also knew it was unfair and outdated.
An intense debate has sprung up lately about Harris’ record as a prosecutor and criminal justice reformer. Some folks on the left dismiss her as a cop while some on the right say she wants to defund the police. Researchers are digging into the tens of thousands of cases she worked on to find a thread to support their arguments.
Let those debates rage. It’s the American way.
But you can’t debate Harris’ deep ties to the LGBT+ community. No national candidate has ever had anything like her ties to decades of its history — even though, of course, she is straight and married to Los Angeles lawyer Douglas Emhoff.
Of course, politics is a two-way street. Harris’ loyalty to that community has been paid back many times over. From her first race, she has built an unshakable base of support that always included LGBT+ voters along with Black voters and women. It’s a powerful and unique political coalition.
That affection from the community continues to this day. I’ve ridden in her car at pride parades in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and it is an overwhelming experience. The crowds roar for her like she is gay royalty — like she’s Lady Gaga or Ricky Martin. Like she is Sylvester.
It’s no surprise that Harris ended up on a Presidential ticket. It’s seemed like her destiny ever since that first campaign of hers back in 2003 with Rivaldo. San Francisco is a town full of political heavyweights but not one of them can match the nuclear-level charisma that Harris enjoys.
But that Harris would run on a ticket against Trump of all people? In a historic battle that will decide the future of our democracy?
And that their race would turn into a proxy battle between the political legacies of Harvey Milk and Roy Cohn — in one last, great LGBT+ battle royale for the ages?
Well, no one could have predicted that.
That’s a wild freaking tale, and the secret gay history at the heart of the 2020 Presidential race.
This story originally ran in Gay Star News.
