Considering Milk’s Meaning

Harvey Milk at City Hall. (Image by Daniel Nicoletta.)

As I finished off this weekend, I took the night to watch Milk.  It’s not the first, second or fifth time I’ve watched it, but I saw it last night in a different way.  I thought, not so much about Harvey Milk himself, but about some of the cameos.  And I thought about where LGBT equality efforts are today.

I thought about Tom Ammiano’s cameo.  Ammiano, was a teacher who fought and could have been fired as a result of the Briggs Initiative, the anti-gay ballot measure that Milk helped defeat and was a topic of the film.  Ammiano had a particularly sweet cameo, getting to shout out at the actor playing state Senator John Briggs, who spearheaded the initiative that would have prohibited “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting” homosexuality in California’s schools.

Ammiano became a City Supervisor in San Francisco in 1994 after previously having served on the school board there, and now serves in the California Assembly, which currently is considering recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.  Ammiano is an Assembly co-author of the Senate bill.

I thought about Dustin Lance Black’s cameo.  Black, the 35-year-old Academy Award-winning author of the screenplay, walks by Milk in a scene that takes place the night before Milk’s election as a city supervisor.  Tonight, though, for the first time I noticed that Black was walking arm in arm with a black man as he passed Milk’s camera shop.  It’s a slight touch, but in light of all the commentary that has followed Proposition 8’s passage relating to minority support for or opposition to marriage equality, I thought it was at least worthy of note that he chose for his one scene in the movie to present an interracial couple walking down the street in the Castro in 1977.

Today, Dustin Lance Black is on the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, as is the film’s executive producer, Bruce Cohen.  AFER is the recently formed group behind the Perry v. Schwarzenegger federal Proposition 8 challenge.

Finally, I thought about Cleve Jones’s cameo.  Jones appeared a couple of times in the movie, on which he served as a consultant, most notably as one of three people on stage with Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk when he gives Milk’s famed “Hope” speech.  Jones — along with Anne Kronenberg and Scott Smith — is portrayed as the spiritual inspiration of Harvey . . . and his remaining spirit after his assassination.  In one of the special features on the Milk DVD, talking about the success of Milk’s election and the defeat of the Briggs Initiative, Jones said, that then, “Bam, our leader is dead.”  But, Jones quickly noted that, as early as the candlelight vigil that took place the night of Milk’s assassination, “knowing that it wasn’t finished, it was just beginning.”

Jones went on to start the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the unmistakable power of which I’ve written about many times previously.  Most recently, Jones announced that there would be a “March on Washington” this October.  No national organization has taken on organizing the venture, which, from my own experience with the 2000 Millennium March on Washington, takes a lot.  The organizing for 2000 began in the spring of 1998.

But, Cleve Jones loves marches and rallies, as did Milk, and he has a history of being involved with events in D.C. during the weekend of October 11, which is National Coming Out Day.  There remain questions about whether the march will happen this year, whether there should be many events organized throughout the country or whether the whole idea should be scrapped.  Regardless, Jones clearly has learned Milk’s lesson that one person can make a difference.

In that DVD feature, Jones, in a way eulogized Milk and made an unambiguous statement about Jones’s own ongoing motivating principle:  “He was an ordinary man.  He was not a saint; he was not a genius.  His personal life was often in disarray.  He died penniless.  And yet, by his example, and by his actions, he most certainly changed the world.”

I think Milk, regardless of the successes of any of these people’s current efforts, would be so honored that his motivations still are a very real part of the debate that is ongoing about some of the most heated LGBT issues of the day — even within the LGBT community.

The world — and the LGBT community — is far different today than it was in 1978.  Those three cameos, though, and the life those gay men lead today, goes to show that the meaning of Harvey Milk’s life — and the spirit of his being — carries on, strongly, to this very day.

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