Post offices around the nation welcomed the new stamps featuring gay rights activist Harvey Milk on Thursday.
Politicians gathered at the White house on Thursday, which would have been Milk's 84th birthday, to celebrate the stamp and honor the man who was California's first openly gay elected official in 1977, NBC Bay Area reported.
Milk was assassinated in 1978, after serving less than a year on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. He was 48.
"I am literally here because of the progress he helped make," U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin said to a crowd of colleagues and government officials at the White House, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Baldwin, from Wisconsin, is the first open lesbian to be elected to the Senate.
Milk passed the city's first strict gay rights ordinance after only 11 months in office. He believed gay people must become elected officials in order to obtain equal rights.
For young, gay Americans who did not live in big cities, Milk said "the only thing they have to look forward to is hope," according to SFC. Electing gay people "means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone."
The stamp features a black and white photo of Milk with a wide smile. Long lines stretched outside the city's post office in the Castro neighborhood on Thursday morning.
"Stamps are selling briskly," USPS spokesman James Wigdel told NBC Bay Area.
San Diego city Human Rights Commissioner Nicole Murray, who was a friend of Milk's, campaigned to get Milk's face on the stamp.
"The stamp is the culmination of a community labor of love, involving people as diverse as World War II veterans to millennial drag queens," Ramirez told SFC. "It started with letters from people in the San Diego area, which led to an avalanche of correspondence from across the nation urging our government to create a Harvey Milk stamp."
Milk was shot and killed at San Francisco City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White on Nov. 27, 1978. Mayor George Moscone was also assassinated.
President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Medal of Freedom in 2009.
