The Fight for Human Rights

I remember the afternoon in November 1978 when the news spread through San Francisco that Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had been shot by former supervisor Dan White who had come back to City Hall to beg for his job back. I marched that night in the candlelight with thousands of other San Franciscans in quiet reverence. How could someone hate that much? Was it latent homosexuality in Dan White? Was he unstable?

Eventually White was acquitted of the more drastic charges and convicted of manslaughter, served some time, and then committed suicide.

Watching "Milk" last night brought back so many memories that I cried during most of the movie, which runs for 2 hours and 5 minutes. The gay rights movement in San Francisco was mostly a male phenomenon. I am not a man, and I am not gay. But everyone knew Harvey, because he was outrageous, outspoken, and unpredictable, a perfect icon for the times. And the perfect person to implore and convince gay men to come out of the closet after his own claustrophobic first forty years.

Sean Penn's performance is magnificent, nuanced, captivating, and certainly he captures the wild rashness that was Harvey's trademark. The film drags a bit as we are taken through all of the lost elections--runs for the board of supervisors before there were neighborhood districts so supervisors ran city-wide and therefore had no real constituencies--and another for the state assembly. But the time moves quickly because Penn knows how to act. He acts so well that at times I forgot I was watching Sean Penn.

What got me was the irony that in November 1978, the California ballot bore the Briggs Initiative, infamous Prop 6, which would prevent homosexuals or anyone supporting gay rights from teaching in the California public schools. It was defeated, despite Anita Bryant and the wacko Christian homophobes. Yet forty years later, we are immersed in the battle over Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage after the California Supreme Court held that to preclude gay marriage was a violation of the state's equal protection clause.

The battle for human rights is never ending.

Gus Van Sant has made an important film that takes a charismatic figure, Harvey Milk, and uses that figure to raise the issue of gay rights forty years later. What still doesn't make sense is why gay rights and gay marriage especially might undermine the foundations of heterosexual families. That argument is prominent in the film "Milk" and is still alive and well, as we saw recently in the Jon Stewart interview with Mike Huckabee.