SF Politician Working to Rename SFO Airport to Honor Harvey Milk

[crossfire]

If six of the 11 San Francisco Board of Supervisors sign off on a ballot initiative to rename the city's current airport to the Harvey Milk San Francisco International Airport, they could be making history."We have not found any legislation nor was there ever an actual naming of an openly gay official for an airport," said Stuart Milk, Harvey Milk

Comments

[lizzy_someone]

Speaking as a local(ish) who's been following this debate in the news, I was all for it at first until I realized that:

a) it would actually be really expensive, and it's not exactly like we are living in a time of abundant budget surpluses. You want to do something for gay rights? Awesome -- spend the money on helping homeless queer kids, or anti-bullying efforts, or something a little more concrete. Symbolism is hugely important to me, but if you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars if not more, maybe we can do a little better than re-naming an airport.

b) the white cis men get all the recognition for everything. Harvey Milk has been very publicized and honored in many ways, which is wonderful, but he wasn't the only important San Francisco gay rights activist ever to exist, and he wasn't the first one, either. Del Martin, who died a few years ago, was a San Francisco native who co-founded the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S. in 1955 (yeah, Stonewall? Totally awesome, but not the beginning of the gay rights movement), helped decriminalize homosexuality in the 60s and 70s, and was half of the first-ever same-sex couple in U.S. history to be legally married. Unlike Harvey Milk, she doesn't have an Oscar-winning biopic or a statewide day of recognition or a fancy public statue or probably even one-tenth of his name recognition. Harvey Milk was an amazing person, but his legacy does tend to unfairly overshadow some really important women. (For example: he was not actually the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the U.S.! That landmark achievement belongs to Kathy Kozachenko, a woman who nobody has ever heard of.)

THAT SAID, reallllllly not impressed with the whiners who write in to the newspaper all "HDU I WILL ONLY FLY FROM OAKLAND FROM NOW ON!!"

[crossfire]

Late to my own post--I was netless for the weekend.

I just wanted to say I totally agree with you. I'm a big fan of Harvey personally, but he does get a lot of the spotlight, often times to the exclusion of others and that's really unfortunate. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of the work Harvey did (good though it was) had its foundations on the work of other people---including Del Martin.

As for the expensive thing, I see the point but I'm not sure I agree it's wasted money. But I place a really high value on visibility, so that's probably why. I get that visibility is probably not the point of this effort (the cynical side of me thinks is straight people looking for cookies) but as a side effect it's a pretty darn good one.

[lizzy_someone]

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it would be wasted money, I really do value visibility a lot. I just meant a lot of cities and other institutions are struggling even with basic costs right now, and this seems like a cost that should be either saved for a time of greater financial resources or spent on something even more important, not that visibility isn't important.

Actually IIRC the city supervisor advocating the name change is gay, so at least this isn't the brainchild of cookie-fishing straight people.