Harvey Milk Day and The Fight for Gay Marriage

Excerpt from a speech made by Harvey Milk in 1978

Today was Harvey Milk Day. And how fitting that the decision on Prop 8 will be announced in the upcoming week. I am so hoping that the court rejects Prop 8, and that California is added to the list of states legalizing gay marriage.
It pains me to think that tomorrow I could go and get married while some of the most beautiful people I know don't have that right. It is in fact ILLEGAL for them to do so. I can't wrap my mind around it.
I was listening to a book review on NPR the other day, and the book's author was talking about the main subjects of his biography- a couple in an interracial marriage in a time when this was more than frowned upon. As the author continued to talk, he touched on a time not so long ago when it was a FELONY to be married to someone of another race or ethnicity. I suppose I knew this on some level, but I still was in shock for a moment. How judgmental this country has been and continues to be at times still levels me.
When I hear people ranting in hate about this issue, when I hear people involving the church and quoting the bible for support, I am sickened. We need only take a look in our country's past to all the things that we read in history books with disgust--wondering how in the world this happened or that happened. I honestly believe that generations from now, people will look back on this struggle as asinine.
This isn't about religion or politics. It isn't about morals or sin. It is about every person's right to be treated fairly and equally. And speaking of history, do these words ring a bell?: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

May 21, 2009

Tomorrow is Harvey Milk Day

Guest blog post from Senator Mark Leno, chair, California LGBT Legislative Caucus

Today is the 30th Anniversary of the White Night Riots, when the LGBT community and its allies rose up in anger after a lenient manslaughter sentence was handed down to Dan White, the man accused of murdering Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. This miscarriage of justice is still with us today as we grapple with homophobia, Proposition 8 and inequality in California.

Just yesterday I heard the discouraging story of a sixth grader in San Diego County whose A+ presentation about Harvey Milk’s life was censored by her school and labeled as inappropriate “sex education.” Her mother protested, and said "Harvey Milk was an elected official in this state and an important person in history. To say my daughter's presentation is 'sex education' because Harvey Milk happened to be gay is completely wrong."

The school’s action sends the wrong message to students — that being gay is shameful and that the contributions of LGBT Americans should be erased from our history books. Incidents like these are precisely why we need to honor figures like Harvey Milk and affirm our schools as safe places for ALL students to learn and grow.

Join me today in honoring Harvey Milk today, on what would have been his 79th birthday. Harvey was the first openly gay elected official in California and he gave his life for what he believed in. With courage and sacrifice he gave hope to an entire generation of gay and lesbian people whose basic humanity and freedom had been denied and dishonored.

Harvey’s leadership and inspiration brought LGBT people out of the closet and into civic life, but many people may forget that he also fought for important issues we still value today, including access to education, public transportation, affordable housing and protecting the environment.

I first introduced legislation to create Harvey Milk Day in California last year in the Assembly. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, arguing that Harvey should only be honored at the local level in San Francisco. Since then, Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award winning film, Milk, has introduced Harvey’s story to a new generation of Americans. His legacy and message of hope has now spread across the globe.

We need that message of hope now more than ever, which is why I reintroduced the Harvey Milk Day bill again this year. I urge you to tell the governor what Harvey Milk means to you, and sign EQCA’s petition. With your voice, we’ll get his signature this time around.

If you’re in the Sacramento area, help me and my fellow members of the LGBT Caucus celebrate what would be Harvey Milk’s 79th birthday on the North Lawn of the Capitol from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. If you cannot be there, please wish everyone you see a happy Harvey Milk Day and if they ask who he was, please share his courageous story of hope.

Sincerely,Senator Mark LenoSenator Mark Leno represents the 3rd Senate District, which includes Marin and portions of San Francisco and Sonoma Counties.

article courtesy of http://ca-ripple-effect.blogspot.com/2009/05/happy-harvey-milk-day.html

Read more...

Thanksgiving San Francisco, 1978

(photo: The late Harvey Milk)

As most of you know, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for four years, 1998-2002. I only left due to the massive layoffs after 9/11 and the dotcom bust. I have missed the area every day since--(see my previous post here). One of the things I love about San Francisco, especially compared to the south, is the lack of racial tension there (at least compared to here), and the overall attitude of letting everyone be themselves. There is such a freedom there, no matter what the stupid results of the Prop 8 vote were. (still pissed about that one).

I was thinking today about places I would rather be, Paris tops the list, and San Francisco is up there, too. The years I was there were some of the happiest of my life for me, both in my career and my personal life. So today, I was searching for something to post about San Francisco in relation to the holidays, and I think this article is very fitting. For those of you that don't know the history behind this, this piece gives a good overview, but you should know more. And a new movie is out entitled Milk, right now in limited release, starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk. I have seen the trailers for it, and Sean Penn has done an unbelievable transformation as Milk. It is not yet showing here, or I would have been one of the first in line, I can't wait to see it. So enjoy the following piece, and a little history on black Friday.

Thanksgiving San Francisco 1978

by Lincoln Mitchell

Thanksgiving of 1978 came and went like most of the other Thanksgivings of my childhood in the 1970s. My mother, brother and I had spent the holiday with a group of my mother's friends either at our house or somewhere in the Bay Area. Other than my mother's pies, the holiday had not been particularly memorable, but it was about the only thing that had occurred that month in the city where I grew up that might have been described as normal.
In November of 1978, I was a child, albeit a progressive child of 1970s San Francisco, so on Thanksgiving that year my mind was on baseball, my friends, school, my upcoming birthday and other preoccupations of childhood. I was not focused on the recent mass suicide by members of the People's Temple, who had relocated to Guyana from San Francisco, that had been a blow to my city and had dominated Thanksgiving table conversations throughout San Francisco that year. San Franciscans of all ages had no way of knowing that those events would not even be the most traumatic thing to happen to our city that month or that the Jonestown Massacre was only the beginning of a tough decade for our town, one where the we were severely impacted by the AIDS epidemic, spending cuts in health and other social services during the Reagan years, increased costs of living and, just when the city was beginning to turn things around, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.
It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, thirty years ago today, however, that San Francisco again changed forever. That afternoon when I returned from lunch to my sixth grade science class, the nun who was our teacher was visibly distraught about something. She began class that day by somberly announcing that Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had been assassinated. Some of us were as upset and shaken by the news as our teacher was. However, more than a few of my classmates greeted this news with cheers of celebration and even exuberant shouts of "they killed that f*g."
While he was alive, Harvey Milk had not been a major presence in my life. I was too young to be involved in city politics and was not deeply aware of all of the political struggles going on around me. Nonethelesss, I was horrified and more than a little frightened by this reaction from the other boys in my class. At home I had learned that Harvey Milk was one of the good guys-and one of us. Now Milk, who like my family was Jewish and from New York, had been killed; and my classmates were cheering at his death.
San Francisco was a different town thirty years ago. It still had not become the city that Harvey Milk helped build, but never saw. San Francisco in 1978 was a city in transition; and Dan White, the man who had assassinated the Mayor and Harvey Milk was fighting against that transition and that progress. Dan White represented the reactionary and hateful elements that feared Harvey Milk who, in turn, feared nobody. Thirty years later, it is hard to imagine that San Francisco of the late 1970s was a city that was in some real ways was still divided. While the City Hall demonstrations against Dan White remain important images from that period, it is occasionally forgotten that strong reservoirs of support remained in several parts of San Francisco for the policeman turned city supervisor turned cold-blooded killer.
The controversy or spin, a word we didn't use back then, surrounding the assassinations of Moscone and Milk and the subsequent trial of Dan White, who had been angry that Mayor Moscone had decided not to reappoint him to the Board of Supervisors, began almost right away. Over the next few months at school it was common to hear students, particularly in my older brother's class, saying that Dan White had led an exemplary life and should not be punished too much for making just one mistake. At home the one time when my brother or I made the mistake of repeating this line of reasoning, to use that term very loosely, out on my mother, we didn't get very far.
The famous and strange trial that followed the assassination, the now famous Twinkie defense, the slap on the wrist given to Dan White and his subsequent suicide after being released from prison are well known. While the justice system failed the memories of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, the City of San Francisco, and gay and lesbian people everywhere, ultimately Harvey Milk's San Francisco defeated Dan White's San Francisco. Within only a few years of Harvey Milk's death, gay and lesbian elected officials were no longer unusual in San Francisco as the political power that Milk had sought to create in the gay and lesbian community became institutionalized. The city has become responsive to gays and lesbians and has been at the cutting edge of most civil and human rights issues.
Harvey Milk's impact, of course, goes far beyond his adopted hometown. In his famous "Hope Speech", Milk spoke about the "young gay person who all the sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out they will be tossed out of the house, their classmates will taunt the child...and that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide..." Because of the work of Milk and other like him that child now had "two new options: the option is to go to California (read San Francisco), or stay in San Antonio and fight." Milk's greatest legacy is that all across America people chose to do both. While the forces of hate are still out there, and still winning some battles, such as the discriminatory Proposition 8 in California, because of the work of Harvey Milk and millions of other lesser known heroes, those same forces of hate will lose their war. Harvey Milk's America will defeat Dan White's America.
As we sit down to our Thanksgiving dinners tonight, progressives have a lot to be thankful for this year, but lets take a minute to remember that great San Franciscan and great American Harvey Milk and the work we all still have to do.

article courtesy of The Huffington Post

Read more...

MILK the Movie

This movie is showing in ONE theater, count it, ONE in the Charlotte area. Probably all of NC. Grrrr. But, I was able to go see it. I had to drive across town, but oh well. I hope it opens on more screens here, more people need to see it. This was an amazing movie, a truly honest picture of one American's life. My review is below. Go.see.it.

Synopsis from the MILK movie website:

Gay Rights Activist. Friend. Lover. Unifier. Politician. Fighter. Icon. Inspiration. Hero. His life changed history, and his courage changed lives. In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in America. His victory was not just a victory for gay rights; he forged coalitions across the political spectrum. From senior citizens to union workers, Harvey Milk changed the very nature of what it means to be a fighter for human rights and became, before his untimely death in 1978, a hero for all Americans. Academy Award winner Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk under the direction of Academy Award nominee Gus Van Sant in the new movie filmed on location in San Francisco from an original screenplay by Dustin Lance Black and produced by Academy Award winners Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. The film charts the last eight years of Harvey Milk’s life. While living in New York City, he turns 40. Looking for more purpose, Milk and his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) relocate to San Francisco, where they found a small business, Castro Camera, in the heart of a working-class neighborhood that was soon to become a haven for gay people from around the country. With his beloved Castro neighborhood and beautiful city empowering him, Milk surprises Scott and himself by becoming an outspoken agent for change. He seeks equal rights and opportunities for all, and his great love for the city and its people brings him backing from young and old, straight and gay, alike – at a time when prejudice and violence against gays was openly accepted as the norm. With vitalizing support from Scott and new friends and volunteers, Milk plunges headfirst into the choppy waters of politics. He also mentors young street activists like Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch). Bolstering his public profile with humor, Milk’s actions speak even louder than his gift-of-gab words. Soon, he is known all across the city and even beyond, but his persistent determination to be a part of city government drives him and Scott apart. While making his fourth run for public office, Milk takes a new lover, Jack Lira (Diego Luna). The latest campaign is a success, as Milk is elected supervisor for the newly zoned District 5. Milk serves San Francisco well while lobbying for a citywide ordinance protecting people from being fired because of their orientation – and rallying support against a proposed statewide referendum to fire gay schoolteachers and their supporters; he realizes that this fight against Proposition 6 represents a pivotal precipice for the gay rights movement. At the same time, the political agendas of Milk and those of another newly elected supervisor, Dan White (Josh Brolin), increasingly diverge and their personal destinies tragically converge. Milk’s platform was and is one of hope – a hero’s legacy that resonates in the here and now.

My review:

This may be the most important movie you see this year, or next. I can't begin to say enough about the performance of Sean Penn, the fearlessness with which he leaps into this role, giving us a true picture of Harvey Milk. Sitting in the theater tonight, I was saddened to think that we haven't come as far as I would like to think where gay rights are concerned as the recent passing of Prop 8 and other incidents across the nation tell us. There are so many incidents, political and otherwise in the movie that are incredibly timely. The movie doesn't just portray him as a hero, but as a flawed, normal man, trying to make a difference, who does succeed, but suffers tragically for it. His flaws, to me, only made him more endearing, more human. One of the most powerful moments for me in the movie was when Milk was trying to rally more voters, and voiced the idea that all gay Americans had to come out, so that everyone would realize they know "one of us". Because once you know someone, care about them, and then find out they are gay, it would be harder to hate them, to vote against them, to not let them have their rights. I think that is very powerful and works for any minority or population struggling to be heard or given rights, because it is so true.

I think I was born liberal, much to my parents disappointment, but knowing gay men and women early in my life shaped even more my beliefs that we are all created equal, we are all human beings. We all have hearts and minds and hopes and dreams. And none of us of any other belief system has the right to take that away from anyone.
Harvey Milk was so brave in his fight to win a public office to change, to make a difference. I was awed at this persistence and ability to believe when there were so many adversaries winning around him. People wept in the theater watching this movie tonight, it was hard not to. It was an amazing man's life story, cut much too short.

Read more...