John Dew originally suggested the idea for a stage work based on the life of Harvey Milk to
David Gockley, then the general director of
Houston Grand Opera. Gockley then approached Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie, who had been looking for a new opera subject, after their previous collaborations on the dance opera
Kabbalah and the two-act opera ''
Where's Dick?''. The latter had its world premiere at Houston Grand Opera in 1989. According to Gockley, Dew's original conception to stage the work as a
musical was: ...very, very weird, with strange dreamlike drag ballets and the like. He had a distorted idea of the subject.
Christopher Alden was the director, with set designs by Paul Steinberg, choreography by Ross A. Perry, and fight direction by Michael Kirkland. New York City Opera then presented the opera with the same cast in April 1995. Both the composer and librettist considered the New York premiere "a debacle". The conductor,
Christopher Keene, was ill with
AIDS during much of the rehearsal period. According to Korie: Christopher was very committed to this, but my hair went gray. The chorus never learned the music. The stage manager was never around. John Dew produced the German premiere of the opera at the
Opernhaus Dortmund in February 1996. The Dortmund production used a German translation and a completely different staging devised by Dew. Wallace and Korie revised the opera for the San Francisco Opera performances, in collaboration with
Donald Runnicles, music director of the company, and Peter Grunberg, a vocal coach with the company. Wallace tightened the score, and simplified the orchestration and the rhythmic notation, with a reduction in the opera's running time from nearly three hours to just over two. The changes to the libretto included reduction of the role of
Dan White and of the final act, and the addition of two new arias for Harvey Milk. San Francisco Opera premiered the revised version, then considered the definitive edition, The première San Francisco production of 1996 was recorded in November and later released on
Teldec Records. For a scheduled 2020 revival of the opera in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of Harvey Milk's birth, Opera Parallèle collaborated with Wallace and Korie on a new two-act version of the opera, scaled to allow smaller companies to present the opera. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the postponement of this scheduled production. The revised 2-act version received its premiere at
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on 11 June 2022. ==Roles==