Barrier-shattering. If you only had one word to sum up Harvey Milk’s mission in life, it would be barrier-shattering. Now the Harvey Milk Foundation celebrates other barrier-shattering people who came after.
This year’s Harvey Milk Honors was the first Grand Prix Edition of the ceremony. Formula 1 was in town for the Miami Grand Prix and one of their honorees was Jessica Hawkins, a driver ambassador for Team Aston Martin.
“We want to make sure that we make our presence felt,” Racing Pride CEO Matthew-Harriet Randall said on the red carpet. “We celebrate people within the community within racing.”
The party went down in a packed ballroom at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood. International, national, and local power gays mixed and mingled during an extended cocktail hour. The Gay Men’s Chorus of South Florida performed selections from their ABBA repertoire while aerialists spun overhead.
Then it was time to grab a couch, sit back, and bathe in the warm light of community spirit.
“It’s a great night, we have such an amazing lineup,” Stuart Milk, Harvey’s nephew, said. “We have four incredible people that we’re honoring.
In addition to Hawkins, honorees were Lance Bass of N Sync fame, Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney, and local icon and community leader FayWhat?!
“In a world that still tries to dim us, this matters more than ever,” FayWhat?! said during her acceptance speech. “Let me tell you, it’s not easy being a Latina girl these days. There’s something about being told ‘no you can’t’ your whole life that makes you fight like hell to prove that you can. You wanna control my body? You wanna control my rights, who I marry, who I love? Absolutely not! I will scream louder the more you wanna step on us.”
FayWhat?! is the first community member to receive the medal.
Bass, who still looks like he could have stepped out of a boy band music video, thanked the community for being there for him before he even knew he needed them.
“Growing up in Mississippi, I didn’t always see a path for someone like me,” he said. “Visibility mattered even when I didn’t realize it yet.”
During his speech, Tierney clearly traced Heated Rivalry’s lineage back to Milk. “It is not lost on me that the radial elements of Harvey Milk allowed for not just queer lives to be seen, but for queer art to be made. I do not think I would have been in a position to make a show like this without his titanic presence culturally and politically.”
Harvey Milk in 1978. Credit: Ted Sahl, Kat Fitzgerald, Patrick Phonsakwa, Lawrence McCrorey, Darryl Pelletier, Wikimedia Commons.
