The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Other local leaders also began attending the services. Harvey Milk was most prominent among them. Milk had lost an earlier attempt for a place on the board of supervisors, but a priority of the Moscone administration was to institute district rather than at-large elections, so the makeup of the board would more equitably reflect all city constituencies. That would apparently be the case in the next election, and Milk was positioning himself for another run. Jones was sufficiently enthusiastic about Milk’s chances to assign Tim Carter and a few others as Milk’s special contacts at the Temple, so that any request by him—the printing of campaign flyers, door-to-door volunteers—could be acted on. Carter, like almost everyone else in the Temple who got to know Milk, grew to like him immensely: “Before him, all I knew about gays were that some of them were bears and others were queens. But Harvey became a friend of mine, and I went to his house and spent time with him and his partner and realized that a gay couple was just that, a couple. See, that was something good about the Temple—if you were part of it, you always had the opportunity to grow as a person, to be around and learn to accept, to appreciate, all different kinds of people.”