As those familiar with the story know, Milk was gunned down in 1978 by embittered ex-San Francisco Supervisor Dan White, who also assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone the same day. But Milk achieved two very significant victories in his brief political career: the passage of a civil rights bill for gays in San Francisco, and the defeat of California's Proposition 6, sponsored by conservative state legislator John Briggs, an ally of gay-hater extraordinaire Anita Bryant. The proposition would have prohibited gays and their supporters from working in the California public school system.
If this is starting to sound like déjà vu all over again, you got that right in more ways than one. The campaign against California's Prop 6 in the late '70s could've taken one of two roads, as was depicted in the film, with Milk meeting with high-powered politicos who urged him to soft-pedal the gay rights aspect of the "No on 6" message. Instead, Milk led the way in confronting the issue, and Briggs, head on.
www.livingincinema.com, Napolitano by Michael Ratcliff
Harvey Milk (left), profile in courage, and Governor Janet Napolitano, profile in cowardice.
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Indeed, in a famous speech given during a gay pride march that year, Milk encouraged his fellow gays to come out of the closet.
"We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions," he told the assembled, adding, "I'm tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out."
Milk believed that if the straight population knew that gays were their sons, daughters, and neighbors, then it would be more difficult to deny them their rights. He debated Briggs over the issue of gay teachers in schools, tussling with the conservative lawmaker over icky subjects such as pedophilia and child molestation. Victory was hardly assured. Yet, the honesty of Milk's tactics paid off, and the Briggs Initiative went down to defeat.
But why didn't the well-funded "No on 8" campaign win this year? Why did bigotry triumph in such a left-leaning state?
Columnist Sherry Wolf, in a piece that appeared on the liberal opinion Web site AlterNet.org, pointed out severe flaws with strategy and message. She especially faults the "No on 8" people for not using their money to develop a grassroots organizing campaign.
"[The 'No on 8' effort] didn't put out a call for activists to hit the phones, knock on doors, and hold rallies to publicly denounce the bigotry of the measure," notes Wolf. "Though, in a few cases, activists took the initiative to do so on their own."
In Wolf's view, "No on 8" shirked its most powerful argument — that Prop 8 was motivated by prejudice and fear. She observes, "The heads of the 'No on 8' campaign avoided even using words like 'gay' or 'bigoted.'" And they waited 'til the last minute, says Wolf, to run an ad voiced over by Samuel L. Jackson, comparing Prop 8 to "past civil rights abuses, like Japanese internment and anti-miscegenation laws."
"No on 8" ran away from the real purpose of the prop: denying gays the same marriage rights as straights. But the "Yes on 8" campaign, funded heavily by the religious right and the Mormon Church, ran toward that issue. Unapologetically, they preached the one-man, one-woman gospel. As with the "Yes on 102" effort here in Arizona, "Yes on 8" claimed for itself the "pro-marriage" stance, defining its opposition as "anti-marriage" by default.
Watching Milk is instructive because the gay supervisor's winning tactic 30 years ago was far more forthright. Sure, it was a different time. But eerily, many of the motivations of those involved then and now have remained the same.
ANNIE ON OFFENSE
In the wake of the passage of Prop 102 in Arizona, Phoenix activist Annie Loyd has helped organize several successful demonstrations in reaction to the anti-gay prop.
First, there was a march on November 15 that drew thousands in downtown Phoenix. Then a 1,000-person demo in Glendale, which was initially organized to counter a planned protest by Kansas gay-hater Fred Phelps' virulently homophobic Westboro Baptist Church but turned into a sort of pro-gay marriage, gay rights love-in when WBC didn't show. And, finally, a candlelight vigil across from the Mormon Arizona Temple in Mesa, on the night the temple's popular Christmas light display opened.
"Today is a new day," Loyd told The Bird recently. "It's about the people, not the politicians."
Loyd, who heads a group called Be a H.E.R.O. (H.E.R.O. stands for "Human and Equal Rights Organizer") and is herself openly gay, kvetched that the "No on 102" message was uninspiring. Prior to November 4, she recalled driving past sign after sign urging voters to vote "yes" on 102 and "for" marriage.
"I have a good friend who said that's like driving down to the South in Selma, Alabama, 40 years ago, looking at signs that said 'White only,'" remarked Loyd. "Where's the outrage?"
The "No on 102" campaign, led in large part by state Representative Kyrsten Sinema's group Arizona Together, had two main arguments, neither of which addressed the issue from a civil rights perspective. The first was that voters had already rejected a similar amendment in 2006 (a victory, in part, due to Sinema's efforts, then), and so this vote was a waste of time. The second was that same-sex marriage was already forbidden by Arizona law, and that law had been upheld by the courts.
