On this day in queerstory: Human Rights Campaign Action Center builds on Milk’s legacy

It’s a date that pulses through queer history like a heartbeat — October 21, the day love, loss, and rebellion collided in the streets of San Francisco.

On this day in 1985, former city supervisor Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, took his own life in a garage in San Francisco’s Excelsior District. It marked a grim, complicated full stop in one of the most painful chapters in queer political history — one that still echoes through California’s courts, streets, and memory.

To understand why October 21 still feels raw, you have to rewind to November 1978, when Dan White shot Milk and Moscone in their offices at City Hall. White, once Milk’s colleague and occasional friend, had resigned from his post — then, driven by resentment and rage, returned armed and ready to reclaim what he believed was his.

White’s trial in 1979 became infamous for what the press later dubbed the “Twinkie Defense” — his lawyers arguing that junk food and stress had impaired his judgment. He was convicted not of murder, but voluntary manslaughter, serving just over five years. The verdict sparked the White Night Riots, when the Castro exploded in fury and heartbreak, police cars burned, and drag queens hurled debris at riot shields.

So when news broke on October 21, 1985 that White had been found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, there was no single community reaction. Relief. Sadness. Closure. A few even called it justice.

In the months that followed, the queer movement in San Francisco didn’t just grieve — it organized. Activists like Cleve Jones, Anne Kronenberg, and Milk’s partner Scott Smith — also born on October 21, 1948 — turned pain into purpose.

Smith, a quiet but ferocious figure, helped transform Castro Camera, their shared shop, into a community command center. After Milk’s death, Smith worked tirelessly to preserve Milk’s papers and photographs, becoming the de facto historian of a movement that too often saw its stories erased.

It’s one of those almost cinematic coincidences of history — Milk’s killer dying on the same date as Milk’s lover’s birthday. A grim symmetry, or maybe a reminder that queer history refuses to fit neatly into tragedy or triumph.

Today, the Castro is more boutique-bright than barricade-scarred, but every October 21, locals still bring flowers to Milk’s old camera store, now the Human Rights Campaign Action Center. There’s usually a small, informal gathering — veterans of the 1970s movement, younger activists, a few curious tourists. Someone always brings cake for Scott Smith’s birthday. Someone else always mentions how much work there is still to do.

In interviews over the years, Cleve Jones has said that what Milk and Smith built wasn’t just a campaign — it was a blueprint. “They taught us that the personal was political, that being visible was the revolution,” he told reporters in one anniversary interview. “Every time we walk hand-in-hand down Market Street, we’re walking in their parade.”

October 21 isn’t officially marked on calendars, but maybe it should be. It’s a date that binds so many threads of queer life — love and rage, justice and injustice, loss and the will to keep dancing anyway.

Scott Smith died of AIDS in 1995, at just 46. He never saw same-sex marriage legalized, never saw Harvey Milk’s name etched into schools and plazas. But he did see the community survive. And in a way, October 21 is his legacy — not the violence or vengeance, but the fact that we remember at all.

Nearly fifty years on, the lessons remain sharp. Visibility matters. Anger can be fuel. And history, no matter how heavy, can still be rewritten in neon.

In a city that once bled for its queer citizens, October 21 is less about ghosts now — and more about gratitude. The Castro still glows, and Harvey Milk’s camera still points outward, catching every new generation in its frame.

By national museum of american history – https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmuseumofamericanhistory/18352367402/, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link