Harvey Milk may have been a gay rights icon and one of the first openly gay elected officials in this country, but often left out of his biography by those who choose to celebrate him was the fact that he liked to have sex with underage boys.
One such example of this is Milk's "relationship" with a 16-year-old runaway, Jack Galen McKinley. As told by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts in his 1982 biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, “Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure…At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.”
Shilts was also a close friend of Milk's and wrote of many of his encounters with teenagers as though there was nothing wrong with them. “Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems,” Shilts wrote.