"Milk"

This afternoon I met Jason in Chelsea and we saw "Milk." The price was high: $25 for the two of us, no student discount and no matinees. I don't feel gypped at all, though my wallet is considerably lighter.

"Milk" was excellent. Sean Penn did a wonderful acting job and I hope he gets an Oscar for it. As the film progressed, I realized that even though I'd known of Harvey Milk and his assassination, I really never knew the details of his life and what he accomplished.

After the Stonewall Riots, there were certainly the stirrings of a gay rights movement afoot, but Harvey Milk seems to have put it on the map. He brought the gay population of San Francisco together to fight against the discrimination, harassment, violence and even murder that dogged them, just because they were gay. He lost his bid for City Supervisor three times but came back again until he won. Because of his leadership, gays gained a voice and gained many rights they never had before.

Though I don't remember his activities and speeches per se, I do remember his arch-opponent, Anita Bryant, and her revolting, bigoted efforts to relegate gays to second-class citizenship as people who were not acceptable to right-wing Christians and to God. I do remember seeing buttons lambasting her with the slogan, "A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine," a parody of her orange juice ads years earlier (a day without orange juice is a day without sunshine).

The film delved into Milk's private life. Yes, it's a cliche that when a person becomes deeply involved in a cause larger than himself, his intimates often suffer. So Milk's lover, Scott, picked up on impulse in a New York City subway station in 1970, left him because he could no longer stand to be part of the political campaigning that took up so much of Milk's time and energy. And Milk's next lover, the passionate but emotionally frail Jack, committed suicide because Milk came home late from the Supervisor job one time too many.

I'm not sure at what moment I realized who Milk's murderer was going to be, but towards the last quarter of the film it became clear that another Supervisor was going to kill him, and the Mayor as well. Milk is portrayed as sensing in advance that he was not going to live to see 50, and that his death would be violent. He'd received death threats and he knew his stance as an openly gay politician was extremely dangerous. So we see him, at intervals throughout the film, speaking his story into a tape recorder, to be aired only in the event of his assassination.

Sadly, his fears came true, and he was murdered along with the Mayor. The candlelight march through the streets of San Francisco in their memory was a very moving scene. Jason whispered to me that he had tears in his eyes. So did I, and that doesn't happen very often.

Thirty years ago, just a year after Harvey Milk's murder at age 48, a teenage boy was beaten and raped in a New York City homeless shelter, because he was gay. Instead of acting to protect him, the shelter authorities blamed the victim and threw him out. Two gay men, one a psychiatrist, were appalled at this story and started a voluntary program to help LGBT youth who were not adequately protected by the system. From their efforts grew the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the home of the Harvey Milk High School.

A particularly poignant scene, for me, was the one where a gay teenager calls Harvey Milk and begs him to help. He says his parents are going to send him away to be "treated" for his "sickness" of homosexuality. The boy says he is going to kill himself. Milk tells him to get on a bus and get out of there, just leave home and head to a big city where he can find understanding and others like himself. The camera pulls back and we see that the boy is in a wheelchair. His situation seems hopeless, and Milk is forced to hang up the phone because a riot is going on in the street.

Later in the film, we learn that the boy got a friend to put him on a bus to LA, and he calls Harvey Milk in the middle of a referendum on Proposition 6 (the notorious attempt to strip LGBT's of their rights to housing and jobs), to tell him that he is doing fine, and that Los Angeles has voted the proposition down.

It's kids like that boy who show up at the doors of The Hetrick-Martin Institute. Seeing "Milk" has made me doubly proud to volunteer there, and indirectly serve the students at a high school named for Harvey Milk. My highest recommendations for this movie!