After working with the City Council in Salt Lake City to rename a street after San Francisco's own Harvey Milk, Equality Utah is going to be moving its offices to a building on the street named for the LGBTQ trailblazer.
Equality Utah Executive Director Troy Williams, a gay man, told the Bay Area Reporter that the developer of a new multi-use building at 402-430 East Harvey Milk Boulevard donated the top floor to the state's leading organization for advocating on behalf of LGBTQ equal rights. It will be finished by June 2025, when Salt Lake City has its Pride festivities.
Williams said the street was renamed so Milk could join other advocates for civil rights who are the namesakes of streets in the capital of the Beehive State.
"Salt Lake City is a very progressive town," he said. "The majority of our City Council are out LGBT individuals — five of the seven."
The five who identify as LGBTQ are Victoria Petro, Alejandro Puy, Chris Wharton, Eva Lopez Chavez, and Darin Mano. The B.A.R. reached out to all five but has not heard back.
Indeed in the 2020 presidential election, President Joe Biden won Salt Lake County with 53% of the vote despite getting blown out by then-President Donald Trump in the only state with a plurality of citizens who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Milk was the first openly gay man elected to office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. But Milk's time in office was short, as he and then-mayor George Moscone were assassinated on November 27, 1978 by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White, who served only five years of a seven-year prison sentence. White died by suicide in 1985 after his release.
In the years since Milk's death, he has become a global LGBTQ rights figure. His gay nephew, Stuart Milk, helms the Harvey Milk Foundation, which promotes Milk's story, style, and collaborative relationship building.
Schools in San Francisco and New York City are named after Milk, as is a U.S. Navy ship that made its maiden voyage to San Francisco earlier this year.
Since 2010 the state of California has marked May 22, Milk's birthday, as Harvey Milk Day, with an annual gubernatorial proclamation issued to denote the day of special significance. The day is now observed in many other cities. Williams stated that Equality Utah takes a staff holiday for Harvey Milk Day, but doesn't yet have an official event to commemorate it.
Developer Kathia Dang stated that the Salt Lake City building on the so-called Milk Block is in the spirit of the slain supervisor.
"When Harvey Milk stood out on the stoop in the Castro district in San Francisco, there was a line in one of his speeches where he said, 'I believe in building community one neighborhood at a time,'" she stated. "We believe in building community — in our case, one block at a time."
The Milk Block in the city's Liberty Wells neighborhood will also include locations of businesses like Wasatch Cooperative Market, Xiao Bao Bao, and Mozz Artisan Pizza, according to Williams.
Williams said that the 20-block street has become something of an anchor for a nascent LGBTQ neighborhood in Salt Lake City — which in a decade will be at the center of the world's attention, as it was selected to host the 2034 Olympic Winter Games for a second time. (The city also hosted the 2002 Winter Games.)
"There's a gay-owned nightclub called Milk and there's a mural of him that's beautiful and people take their pictures in front of it," he said.
Equality Utah will also be spearheading Harvey Milk Blvd. LGBTQ Neighborhood Visibility project to tell the stories of queer Utahans.
"Our intention was always to create a beacon of hope for LGBTQ youth," Williams said.
He said that Utah is "very unusual" for having a lot of LGBTQ equal rights protections, considering it is generally such a conservative state.
Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers homosexuality sinful, it has softened its campaign against LGBTQ equal rights in recent years. For example, in 2015 the church worked with Utah lawmakers and LGBTQ advocates at striking a compromise on a non-discrimination bill that covers sexual orientation in Utah. Williams said that in 2018 an LGBTQ-inclusive hate crimes law was passed, and last year a ban on conversion therapy of minors was adopted. (Conversion therapy attempts to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity and has been widely condemned by medical associations and others.)
"I think people have a lot of preconceptions about what Utah is like," he said. "I don't feel like young people should move out of Utah to enjoy their equal rights and freedoms."
LGBTQ Agenda is an online column that appears weekly. Got a tip on queer news? Contact John Ferrannini at [email protected]
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