Harvey Milk’s legacy: The gay rights icon was remarkable for a very specific reason.

When Harvey Milk was elected 47 years ago this November, he became one of the first openly gay people in public office. With a seat on the San Francisco board of supervisors—essentially the city council—Milk was viewed as a promising political force. His career was cut short just over a year after his election, when he was murdered alongside the then-mayor of San Francisco by a homophobic political rival out to settle a personal score. Today, he is one of the most recognizable gay icons of the 20th century. But his story has been sanitized and sanded down to blurb size over the years, such that mainstream mentions of his life rarely capture much of who he actually was.

I didn't know a lot about Milk beyond the broad strokes of his brief political career before I started reporting Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs , the latest season of Slate's narrative history podcast. It wasn't clear to me whether he'd become a gay rights icon primarily because of his martyring or because he was truly a singular leader. After spending seven months immersed in the story of the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 ballot proposition that would have banned gay teachers from California public schools—which Milk made his name organizing against—I have a much deeper understanding of the man whose name now graces a U.S. Navy ship and an airport terminal at SFO. I learned, from first-hand accounts, that scores of young queer San Franciscans really did see him as a once-in-a-generation leader who gave them new hope for a brighter gay future, and that he was a natural politician in the purest sense, with a talent for building coalitions, solving problems, and making people feel heard. But I also realized that part of what made Harvey Milk special is that, by most conventional and tangible measures, he wasn't special at all.

Milk's young adulthood was a microcosm of gay life in mid-century America. He left the military with a "less than honorable" discharge after a superior discovered he was gay. One night in 1956, when Milk was 25, he was arrested in Miami along with seven other gay men in what a local police sergeant called a " routine crackdown on perverts ." He got a job teaching, but quit after a year, likely due to a fear that he'd be outed. Gay sex was illegal in all 50 states at that time, and teaching licenses were not doled out to criminals.

Milk tried out a slew of different jobs in his 20s and 30s. He worked retail, became an insurance actuary, got into finance, and was even an assistant producer of a Broadway play, which flopped. At the time, Milk was a Republican, and he became an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater. Though Milk had dated a prominent activist, Craig Rodwell , he was skeptical of and indifferent to the early stirrings of a movement for gay rights.

But his politics began to shift in the late 1960s, with the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He moved to San Francisco for a spell in 1969, and realized how freeing it was to exist in a place where he could live life openly as a gay man. He settled there for good in 1972, part of a massive migration to the gay mecca of the Western world. Between 1972 and 1977, about 100,000 LGBTQ+ people moved to San Francisco. These new residents made up one-seventh of the city's entire population.

Many of the gay newcomers, including Milk and his then-partner, Scott Smith, settled in the Castro District. Soon, Milk began making waves as a neighborhood advocate for the growing gay community there. He decided to run for the board of supervisors for the first time in 1973, having been radicalized by Watergate and two infuriating small-potatoes incidents related to the city government. He was already well-known enough to carry the Castro and other left-leaning neighborhoods, but he didn't have a broad enough base to win the citywide race.

Milk lost two more campaigns in the years that followed. But he kept up his work as a community activist. He organized residents to boycott area businesses that mistreated gays and allied with the Teamsters to get products from the Coors Brewing Company—which was union-busting and engaging in racist and homophobic hiring practices—out of all the gay bars. He stood up for gay victims of hate crimes who were mistreated by the police. As the proprietor of his Castro Street camera store, Milk started the Castro Street Fair to boost the local economy and prove to straight business-owners that the gay influx was good for their bottom line. Within three years, the fair was attracting 100,000 people to the neighborhood.

Through these efforts to give gay people a greater sense of ownership over the city they called home, Milk became the person city officials would contact to get a sense of what was going on in gay San Francisco. He also became a major player in the transformation of the Castro. Over the course of the decade, it turned into one of the country's most vibrant gayborhoods, a place where gay people could find safety, community, and influence in numbers. That influence grew stronger with a successful push in 1976—spearheaded by Milk and others—to change the electoral system such that each member of the board of supervisors now represented a smaller district within the city, rather than all seats being at-large.

Now, the Castro and its surrounding neighborhoods could elect one of their own to the board—someone who didn't need to have the deep pockets and mainstream appeal to win a citywide race. In 1977, they elected Milk.

Though Milk was a trusted community leader, his election was far from inevitable. He won his seat on the board without ever getting the blessing of a major party or San Francisco's gay political establishment. They rejected Milk from his very first campaign for being too raggedy and radical, and for not paying his proverbial dues before seeking office. He never got the endorsement of the city's gay Democratic club—so he ended up starting his own.

Milk earned his seat not through connections, political experience, or material advantage—his camera shop barely, if ever, turned a profit—but through relentless hard work and thousands of conversations with his neighbors about how their lives could be better. He was driven by a deep-seated anger with a system that trod over city residents who most needed support, and he wasn't dissuaded by the moneyed gays who mocked and dismissed him.

He was also imperfect. He had a quick temper and a loud yell. His big personality chafed at some people, who accused him of being an ego-driven self-promoter. (That may be true—people who knew him told me that he thought himself the only person who could stop John Briggs. But this is the case for most candidates for political office, though only some of them get flak for it.) The buttoned-up gays thought he was too extreme, and gay lefties thought him insufficiently militant.

Milk knew that he didn't appeal to everyone. But he tried to make his detractors feel like he represented them, too. In the campaign against the Briggs Initiative, he was an indispensable bridge between the various factions of the gay rights movement that launched their own disparate efforts to fight back. And he didn't abandon his local constituents during that statewide campaign: One activist told me about a time when she informed Milk that a Castro café run by her lesbian-feminist collective was having problems with a permit they needed to hold evening performances. Milk found a permit they could afford and personally delivered it that day.

Milk came to politics in his early 40s, later in life than many others in the movement. I believe that's one of the reasons why he was so effective. He paired the idealism and raw passion of a new activist with the poise and practicality of a seasoned professional. He took decades to find his place and his purpose; when he arrived there, he had earned the wisdom to serve as a mentor and was full of fresh outrage at the injustices he saw.

But though Milk was a remarkably gifted communicator, he was able to gain the confidence of his community precisely because he wasn't a born politician. He was a barely-scraping-by small businessman who'd survived a lifetime of homophobic discrimination and violence, just like everyone else. He patronized the neighborhood haunts and flyered the telephone poles, just like everyone else. When gay-bashers roamed the Castro in the wee hours, targeting men leaving the bars, Milk was on the sidewalks caring for the victims, just like everyone else. And like so many other gay men and lesbians of his generation, he lost his partner, Jack Lira, to suicide, only a few months before his own death.

In my Slow Burn reporting, I met with several people who were close to Harvey Milk and listened to their reflections on what he'd meant to them. But the perspective on Milk that struck me the hardest came from a contemporaneous assessment delivered six months after his death. It was in an audio recording I found from a demonstration at San Francisco City Hall in May 1979, on the day Milk's killer was convicted. It's a blistering, off-the-cuff speech given by Amber Hollibaugh, a working-class, high-femme lesbian who committed some of the most striking acts of bravery of the anti-Briggs campaign (and died just a few weeks before I began my reporting). Before a crowd of thousands of furious, grieving gay people, Hollibaugh clambered up the steps of City Hall and began yelling into a megaphone. "It's time we stood up for each other!" she screamed. "That's what Harvey meant to us. He wasn't some big leader—he was one of us."

It seems to me that that side of Milk—the radical, raggedy, inexperienced, struggling, dead-broke, controversial, yet enormously effective organizer who inspired people to demand better for themselves and their peers—has been lost over the years. In 2008, pegged to the release of the Oscar-winning biopic Milk, NPR's Neda Ulaby asked a smattering of young San Franciscans what they thought about Harvey Milk . Many didn't know much about him at all. One then-24-year-old at an LGBTQ community center told Ulaby that Milk's memory was no longer relevant or necessary. "I feel like we've got lots of white male gay heroes around here doing lots of different things," they said. "I mean, we have tons of gay elected officials."

To my mind, Milk isn't best remembered as a hero. He was just a person who tried his best to make things better where he was. His most impressive feats, including his advocacy for the Castro and his efforts to defeat the Briggs Initiative, came outside of his official duties. He didn't need the imprimatur of the voting public to make a difference; he won his election because he'd already made one.

Some historical icons are worth remembering because they were extraordinary people who did extraordinary things. Milk should be remembered for his ordinariness. His story is a rallying cry, showing that it's never too late to find a new passion and pursue it with gusto. It's a reminder that doing good work doesn't have to mean tackling intractable national problems—that small-time, local advocacy can make meaningful changes in people's lives. And it shows today's queer activists that whatever they have to give to the fight is more than enough. Sometimes, a person who seemingly doesn't have much to contribute to a movement can be exactly what the movement needs.