Interview | Stuart Milk speaks about Levi’s Pride Collection with the Harvey Milk foundation

Levi’s have launched their first global Pride collection in partnership with the Harvey Milk Foundation. Levi’s have been a long standing ally to the LGBTQ community and they are commemorating the election and legacy of Harvey Milk through a ranger of gender neutral products. Emblazoned with Milk’s ‘Hope will never be silent’ quote’ there are plenty of embroidered patches, rainbow tabs and Harvey Milk bottle graphics.  A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Harvey Milk Foundation. You can shop the collection online at levi.com or in stores.

We spoke to Stuart Milk, global LGBT rights activist, co-founder of the Harvey Milk Foundation and  Harvey Milk’s  nephew  about the collection and the importance of global visibility given by Levi’s, including their collection and their participation in London Pride tomorrow:

Which Prides have you been at so far?

Actually, one of your colleagues interviewed me back in February at the National Student Pride event which took place in February, so I did that. And then for this month Sacramento Pride was the first one, followed by Key West Pride. Then Orlando happened, so we made that vigil.  Then Baltic Pride which we’ve been supporting; this alternates between the three countries every year, so this year was Lithuania’s turn, which has been a struggle. This one was a successful one- Riga last year was a partial success and Lithuania three years ago was pretty brutal. I was egged and there was some violence and there were more protesters than marchers. It was not as bad as Hungary, but reminiscent of that.

Do you feel like you have made some headway in places like Lithuania?

Yeah, with Baltic Pride I think we have.  The LGBT organisations on the ground there have done incredible work, and there’s not that many. In Lithuania there are two, and in Latvia and Estonia there’s one, so there’s usually just a handful of people who are willing to be out publicly. For instance, in Baltic Pride, for the Pride itself people had some rainbow stuff on, but they immediately take it off and put it away after the Pride. Even just the average cafe will treat you differently if they see you with visible LGBT stuff on. And of course the government three years ago, both the national government and the city tried to shut it down, and now that they’re part of the EU they feel that they should support demonstrations, which is progress. They didn’t support LGBT rights and they didn’t support Pride, but they said part of being a democracy is that they should be allowed.  Luckily we have more places where we see progress, but we see places where things go back, for example  Istanbul has gone backwards. I faced off the Turkish National police with Mechtild Rawert.  She’s a board member of the Milk foundation she’s a member of the German Parliament. The headlines were ‘barricades came down’ when they allowed the Pride march but now they’re back  to the same thing and shutting it down and stopping it. Just the other day they stopped it.

How important is it to be linked with a global  fashion brand like Levi’s?

It makes a huge difference. I’ll give you an example, since we’ve been talking about Eastern Europe. In Hungary there’s  almost no companies, no corporate support. There’s multiple reasons for this. The first Pride in 2010 in Prague had a number of companies supporting it and now, in Eastern Europe, it’s one of the most successful Prides and a number of companies have continued supporting it. So having a brand like Levi’s supporting not just in places where it’s easy, but supporting the LGBT community and Pride in the difficult places makes a huge difference because people know the brand, it’s part of the mainstream, or they know people who wear the brand or who work for the brand and so that makes a huge difference in a place where people of the LBGT community are not visible and we still have much of the world where LGBT people are visible.

How did this collaboration come about? Did Levi’s come to you?

Levi’s came to us. We’ve had other companies come to us, and we’ve looked into either their history  of their support of LGBT people and employees or their history of external LGBT support as well as their human rights record in terms of where they source their product and whether they’re acceptable to the board or not. Levi’s were the first apparel company that came to us that was not only completely acceptable, but it was a great match. Being a San Francisco based company, having history of a clothing line that has a history of being used by the LGBT community, going back to my uncle’s days, when he was wearing Levi’s more than he was wearing suits!

Do you get a lot of brands that you need to careful of them pink washing?

Yeah. I’ll give you as an example, a global beverage company that approached us and wanted to do something with us, this year, with the  Harvey Milk Foundation, but our response was , and it was the same response that we made when we had our initial meeting with Levi’s was ‘where is this campaign going to be?’ and of course, it was the US or it was global. We said it has to be available everywhere  and the beverage company said it would just be the US, we’re not going to do anything outside the US, or we might consider doing it in a couple of countries where they have  marriage equality. At the foundation said  ‘no, that’s antithetical to our message.’ With Levi’s they were ‘absolutely, we’ll make it global.’

There’s a lot of your Uncle Harvey in the collection, how much did you work with them on the design?

They came up with the creative, and they threw it to us. I don’t remember how much back and forth we had, but there were some pieces that they came up with that they came up on their own, that we would have suggested, like the trucker jacket that says ‘hope will never be silent’ which is a quote from my uncle. That was particularly moving and appropriate right now, after what happened in Orlando.

Levi’s have a float at London Pride this year. How important is the timing of this, in terms of the recent attacks.  

It was a wake up call to some people.  I can tell you that long term LGBT activists such as myself were not surprised. We were shocked, but not surprised. We were stunned and hurt, but not surprised and i think that it talks about the cultural barriers that we have around the world , even in places like the US where we still have to work on getting information and a visibility.  It was an attack on multi levels  on the LGBT community, not just an attack on the LGBT club, but an LGBT club that had a latina , latino or Latinx night. Possibly we’re coming up with the fact that it could be someone who was dealing with their own sexuality which we have dealt with for the history of our movement and usually that goes back to their own cultural background and the turmoil that comes into that. It has given us the opportunity at the Harvey Milk Foundation to talk about the fact that the month before that, if you go to the  Milk Foundation website in May, we put out  a post about a shooting, a mass murder that took place in Mexico at Le Madame’s gay bar that killed 15 and it didn’t hit anyone’s register.

It’s almost started to be posted now on social media as if it’s just happened but obviously the actual posts are backdated…

Yes, May 21st. So the fact of the matter is that, timing wise,  it shows what a company like Levi’s can do. It gets conversations going, it gets global support. It also helps young people who are dealing with their own sexuality. For example when this first rolled out we got a couple of emails from Russia. So organically this story was being picked up by Gay Russia on all these different blog sites and they were showing the ‘advertisement’ there. They were so excited by it that they were showing it against the propaganda law. But we got one email that was particularly moving from a young 14 year old gay Russian boy who said that he had planned out his own suicide and he felt like with the  Russian law, he knew that he could live a life in the closet but he didn’t want to choose that, so he saw this campaign and said, well if someone like Levi’s can support me, then i’m not going to kill myself. We got a couple of emails, not necessarily suicide but that it gave them hope. It was very moving  and powerful and it speaks to what a global brand like Levi’s can do.

It adds to this eloquent response that has been provided against violence. The negative is what happened in the U.S  and Mexico , but there is an additional story. I was talking to some leaders of the African American rights movement, and they agreed with me that we haven’t seen a minority community have this exquisite international, global response to violence and i think that Pride collection fits in with this international, global response, which is that we’re going to support Orlando, but we’re also not going to retreat, we’re not going to go back we’re going to celebrate. We’re not even going to ask for tolerance, we’re going to ask for celebration which is a higher bar than tolerance. It’s kind of what marriage equality has done for us.

The collection is gender neutral. Gender neutral clothing lines have been attacked before…

We’ve seen that too. We have had people saying that it’s not gender neutral or it’s too gender neutral.

It’s a very tricky balance to get right.

Even today a couple of people came in and tried the jacket on and it looked fabulous on the women, it looked fabulous on the men. I don’t know where you would pick on it.

With social media, do you think that the LGBT community can turn on itself a bit with things like this?

Yeah, i mean in one of my uncle’s last tv interview, he was asked  who was the greatest enemy that the LGBT community? HE said it is the LGBT community that pick on the progress instead of going out and creating what they want to see. It’s part of our community and every minority community has that. If you don’t like the gender neutral clothing, you can go for something else, no one’s forcing you to buy it, but it’s great that the choice.

On the Foundation, what have you got coming up?

At our gala we brought in a very big UN champion for LGBT rights, she’s from India. She’s a  Bollywood star, a lot of people still don’t recognise that 1/6th of the world’s population went backwards a year and a half ago when India recriminalized LGB, not the T, so just the LGB, but that’s one sixth of the world’s population that’s just gone backwards and now they’re criminal and illegal.  So  one of our focuses is to redouble our efforts on the sub continent of Asia. Some of the funds from this Levi’s campaign will go to support a very successful play that was done in the US. It was for mostly high school, college and primary schools, called ‘Dear Harvey’, but it’s very US  centric, so we’re adapting that, and commissioning that out with the same playwright to make a global story that has a cultural competency for  the  likes of people from South America, from people from a Latin, Islamic home etc . So it’s interchangeable stories, with the Harvey story at the centre but  we can change these stories to people who have inspired, or sacrificed their life for all of us form different  cultures around the world, and it will be taken out globally.

What do you think your uncle would feel about this constant tussle of rights?

He would remind us that human rights and equality requires vigilance and that with a minority group that never ends. We don’t get to a day where we can all put down our banners and say that it’s over, and he would be absolutely heartbroken about Orlando.

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