Milk

Laurent and I went to see the late showing of Milk tonight at the E Street Theater. It's a poignant film and well worth seeing, especially to see Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk.

After the show, Laurent said he liked the movie, but he thought it must have resonated a lot more with me. Meh. He makes me feel geriatric. I was in college when Milk was elected and assassinated; Laurent wasn't even born yet.

Being in the heartland of the country, we heard (barely) bits and pieces of Milk's activism, though his name was not familiar to me at the time. There really wasn't much gay activism in Oklahoma and Kansas in the mid-1970s, and what he was doing was just branded more of that "California" kind of hippie/radical extremism. We certainly knew about his nemesis Anita Bryant—she's a former Miss Oklahoma and runner-up Miss America—and her viewpoints that were considered very normal in middle America. When Milk was assassinated in 1978, I heard about his death because that was my Georgetown semester, and it was news in D.C.

Recently the phrase "men who have sex with men" has been created by the HIV/public health community; it's a phrase we really needed in the 1970s, because there were a lot of us MWHSWMs who did not embrace the queer, gay, homosexual, or even bisexual labels. We didn't think of ourselves as being closeted, either, because we didn't think of ourselves as being gay, secretly or otherwise. Back then, I was busy being a typical fraternity man and overachiever who'd go on the occasional date (with a girl) arranged by fraternity brothers and with a little private "hobby" on the side. If there was a gay movement in Oklahoma or Kansas, I missed it.

So, the movie has made me a bit melancholy.

I'm also a little saddened because thirty years later, we're still fighting the same conservative Christian voters with the same ignorance and tired arguments who are choosing to vote on gay civil rights. Back then, it was employment security; today, it's marriage rights. There are times when democracy is a very disappointing and unsatisfactory form of government. I can't wait for science to conclusively prove the biological etiology of homosexuality and the futility of attempts to "cure" it. Then, perhaps, people will be more open minded to seeing gayness the same as race or gender.

Obviously, we still have our issues and our need to progress, but at least Milk gives us a brief, sanitized, and scrubbed look at gay life of the 1970s and tells us the story of one of the great heroes of the gay rights movement.