HWMBO and I went to the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival last night to see “Milk”. There are advantages to seeing it with a largely lesbian and gay audience. There aren’t any skeptics, naysayers, or downers in the audience.
There was a fleeting glimpse at the beginning of the apartment house I lived in on Castro Street when I was in San Francisco (1993). Milk’s camera shop had been next door. Most of the scenes shot in the Castro were not recognisable, as they concentrated on the people or crowds and less on the surroundings.
I don’t know what younger people would think about it, but for me, waves of nostalgia came over me as I watched it. I was in New York City and not yet out when the events depicted in the movie were happening. Yet, the activism of the 1980’s, of which I was a very small part, was inspired by Milk’s assassination. And by “inspired” I mean the ancient meaning of a spirit “breathing life into” the movement.
Milk predated HIV by a few years, but the activism that surrounded ACT-UP draws breath directly from Milk’s cry “I’m Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you.”
Nowadays many gay men and lesbians are comfortable in their own skins and comfortable with their circumstances. But the injustices that Milk marched about often still exist. Lesbians and gay men are denied the right to marry (which Milk probably only dreamed about in his wildest dreams), they are often denied equal rights in insurance and jobs, with little or no recourse to the civil authorities. Young lesbians and gay teenagers are denied the right to be who they are, both by their peers and by society.
What are we doing about it?
When I was in San Francisco the “Widow Milk” was still alive and active (Scott whats-his-hame, the lover that Milk meets in New York at the beginning of the movie). He did a lot of good in the community.
I don’t believe that Milk would be very happy with complacency in the community. Until marriage is a right for everyone, he’d be marching in the streets with a group he’d rabble-roused himself.
The other thing that really struck me was the difference in society and its attitude toward lesbians and gay men back in the 1970’s and today. How many people felt the need to stay in their closets because it was just too darned dangerous to emerge. Lesbians and gay men are rarely called “homosexuals” today. In the movie, that was the only word that was used (besides the derogatory ones like “faggot”.)
HWMBO seems interested in the story, and I’m trying to find my copy of “The Mayor of Castro Street”. I know I haven’t tossed it (I never toss books) but do you think I can find it? Of course, I can find “And The Band Played On” which is greatly inferior. By the time he wrote “Band” Shilts was horribly twisted about bathhouses because he was convinced that he himself had contracted HIV disease from his very frequent visits there. And no matter how much people tried to convince him that keeping the sex in places where safer sex education could go on and condoms distributed, he insisted that the only solution was to close the bathhouses. The effect of that was to push the sex off into homes, public places, and toilets, where condoms might be unobtainable and safer sex education somewhere else. Bitter, twisted, queen.
I have an icon and a t-shirt of Harvey Milk. I shouild wear the T-shirt this summer.
🙂