Nature Founding For Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Dowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connelly.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Brian Ballot.

If you're new to the podcast, the three of us and Ed Ayers are all historians, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Let's start today in a camera shop. It's 1973 in San Francisco. In an elementary school teacher walks into a store called Castro Camera. They have a simple request.

She wanted to rent a projector so she could show her kids some slides.

That's LGBTQ historian, William Faterman. She says the teacher spoke to a man behind a counter at Castro Camera.

That person happened to be a guy named Harvey Milk. And well, Milk wasn't too thrilled with the teacher's order.

And Harvey said, you mean to tell me that your school doesn't have a projector? And the teacher said, well, they do have a projector, but there are just a couple of projectors.

And so many teachers want to use those projectors that you have to put your name on a list to reserve them a month in advance.

Today Harvey Milk is remembered as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States.

His legacy is a gay rights activist and politician helped open the door for future generations of LGBTQ people.

For example, next year, there'll be at least 10 LGBTQ members of Congress. That record number is, in part, due to Harvey Milk's work in San Francisco 40 years ago.

But before he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and became a national icon, Harvey Milk ran Castro Camera with his partner, Scott Smith.

And Faterman says this moment when the school teacher came in asking for a projector, this was one of the things that first motivated Milk to get into politics.

And Harvey thought that that was just disgraceful that the city could not afford enough projectors for elementary school kids, but they could afford to hire policemen to harass gay men on the streets of San Francisco or in trap gay men in the bars of San Francisco.

And I think those things made him decide that it was time for him to run for political office, that he could do things differently, that he could make sure that San Francisco's budget went to the right things instead of hiring police to harass the gay community.

He would fight for getting rid of corruption in governments so that things such as watergate on a local scale couldn't happen.

So watergate pushed Milk to dive into politics too then.

Oh yeah, this is San Francisco in the early 1970s. So watergate was still on everybody's mind, especially Harvey Milk's.

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