The Times of Harvey Milk

Last night Tery and I watched The Times of Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk is obviously an important figure in my gay heritage, but I really knew nothing about him. So much so that I've always thought he was Mayor of New York City at one time *hanging head in ignorant shame* He was an aggressive gay rights activist and supervisor in San Francisco city hall. Among his achievements was helping to defeat a bill that would have made it legal and practically obligatory for California schools to fire gay teachers. After only 11 months in office, Milk and the mayor of SF were assassinated by Dan White, a fellow supervisor who voluntarily resigned, then decided he wanted his job back, but when the mayor refused he shot him right in his office. Then because he had the rest of the day free he walked all the way to the opposite end of city hall and murdered Milk in his office, just because they had always disagreed on political issues. To everyone's disbelief, White's charges were reduced to manslaughter and he served only 5 years in prison, because as one interviewee put it (an older straight man who had been impressed by Milk) "some people still believe if you kill a homosexual, you are doing the world a favor."

Tery couldn't believe that I didn't remember this part of history. In my defense, I was 9 years old at the time.

The whole thing was well done, but especially the footage of the candlelight parade.

Though this pic doesn't nearly do justice to the sight of 50,000 people walking silently down Castro Street, candles blanketing the street as far as the eye could see. Rightly so, the name of Harvey Milk will go down in history. His murderer, Dan White, is sentenced to obscurity (at least insofar as I'd never heard of him before seeing this). But this ties in with my very pessimistic JFK and MLK theory, that any time a person comes along to bring the world a step closer to enlightenment, violence will always put a stop to it.