Remember the Milk and Recruit More Gays

It’s Oscar time, and I’ve started my annual Run of the Movies, trying to fit it viewings of as many Academy Award-nominated films as I can before the big show.  Last night, I went to see Milk, and got a healthy dose of vitamin D (for “depressed”). Milk is a docu-drama about the political life of Harvey Milk, a San Francisco City Supervisor who was assassinated in 1978, a year after becoming the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States.

Sean Penn (R) as Harvey Milk, with Josh Brolin as Ron White, the fellow San Francisco City Supervisor who ultimately assassinated Milk. Both actors are nominated for Academy Awards.

As the credits began to roll at the end of the movie, I stayed put to absorb the powerful movie and wait for the tears to dry from my eyes.  Behind me, I heard someone say, “I feel sick,” as they filed out of the theater.  “Me too,” I thought.  I don’t know how the film plays for a straight audience, but for me, it was hard to swallow.  Milk is nominated for Best Original Screenplay for a reason.  It is starkly realistic and blunt in its portrayal of the gay rights movement.  What made my stomach turn was the sad fact that, 30 years later, we are still fighting the same battles, both inside and outside the gay rights movement.

There were self-righteous politicians using the lives of gays and lesbians to further their own political power.  There were self-important “gay establishment” leaders who attempted to slow down and water down the fight for gay equality for the sake of their own power and need to “fit in.”  One powerful gay “leader” portrayed in the film, the then-owner of The Advocate who had himself been fired from a high-paying financial job in New York City, who attempted to convince Milk to use the term “human rights” instead of “gay rights” in a flyer.  He thought the movement was better served by putting itself behind the scenes.

Today, we have the same play with new characters.  Gay leaders who compromise on ENDA by agreeing to leave out our transgender brothers and sisters.  Gay leaders who lead us into losing battles again and again in the interest of compromise and cooperation.  There is a role for such communication, I think, but not at the expense of sacrificing the principle.

Harvey Milk was one of the first, if not the first, to declare that the only way to advance the cause of gay rights was to come out, even at risk of loss of family, friends and employment.  Only by letting straight America know that they know us, that we are all “us,” do we become human in their eyes, and deserving of compassion and basic decency and respect.  The man was a pioneer, our Martin Luther King.  Yet when early promotion for the movie started last fall, a young gay friend of mine asked me, “Who was Harvey Milk?”

And so here we are, four years after the gay marriage ban in Georgia, in the wake of Proposition 8 in California, with weak hate crime laws and no protection against employment discrimination.  I wish Mr. Milk were still among us.  Because I wish there were a leader like him to recruit a new generation of LGBT community activists, and to encourage more of us to be visible and get involved.  See the movie.  Join the movement.  Please don’t make me watch a re-run of the same old tired lost cause in another 30 years.