Friday Movie: Milk

By Mister Curie

This week's movie is the biographical movie "Milk", rated #4 on AfterElton.com and #2 among MoHos. From IMDb:

Upon moving to San Francisco from New York City in 1972, forty year old Harvey Milk gains focus in his life as a gay activist in the city's Castro district. Gay rights activism turns to political activism as Milk decides he can be a more effective voice for the gay community as a politician, elected or not. Through several elections and losses both for a city seat and a state assembly seat, Milk becomes the first openly gay man in the United States to be elected to political office when he wins a San Francisco supervisor seat in 1977. His many political battlefronts include one with the national anti-gay Save the Children crusade, led and fronted by singer Anita Bryant. Closer to home, Milk has a continuing struggle with his fellow supervisor, Dan White, a staunch social conservative.

I learned a lot from this movie, and I got a glimpse of how little I know and how much more there is to learn. (1) I realized that I know practically nothing about the gay rights movement, (2) I learned that the same arguments and battlelines used in Prop 8 were used 30 years previously in the Prop 6 campaign (it was uncannily all familiar sounding), (3) I was reminded that it isn't just Mormonism that had pitted itself against homosexuality, and (4) I learned the value of coming out of the closet to let people know that there is someone close to them, someone they love, who is gay and that gays aren't the evil, degenerate people they believe us to be. Yesterday I posted that I still have some latent homophobia, there's something about the cultural conditioning and the lies that I've been fed all my life that is difficult for me to overcome. This movie made me ashamed of those feelings. If I am struggling with overcoming this bigotry, when I myself am homosexual, how much more difficult must it be for others who are not touched by homosexuality to overcome the bigotry? They need to know that homosexuals are decent and wonderful people.

This quote by Harvey Milk struck me:

I cannot prevent anyone from getting angry, or mad, or frustrated. I can only hope that they'll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that two, three, four, five hundred will step forward, so the gay doctors will come out, the gay lawyers, the gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects ... I hope that every professional gay will say 'enough', come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help.

Unfortunately I had to wait for Netflix to ship the DVD to watch this one, no "Watch it Now" option. But this was absolutely a must see film!

What did you think of it? What did it teach you?