Today is Harvey Milk Day!

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Harvey Milk Day into law last October. He had vetoed a simlar bill in 2008 and there was fear that he might do so again.

But since that veto, the movie Milk was released and won Academy Awards for star Sean Penn and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Also, president Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He fought hard against discrimination – including Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that would have made firing gay teachers—and any public school employees who supported gay rights—mandatory. It lost by a million votes.

As a supervisor, Milk was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city but just 11 months into his term, he and Mayor George Moscone were murdered at City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White.

Milk was just 48 years old and had been a gay rights activist for less than a decade. There was so much still ahead.

Here is the superb documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk:

News footage from 1977: