Harvey Milk and the Current State of the Gay Community

I watched Sean Penn’s film, Milk, on Friday night.  It’s stuck with me since then.  I’ve been thinking about Harvey Milk’s message — come out, let yourself be known to your friends, neighbors and employers — and above all, know hope.  I’ve been contrasting that message with the current gay “establishment” — Human Rights Campaign, among others — and its wishy-washy methods of gaining gay people rights in America.  It’s a worthy cause, if there ever was one.

But the gay establishment is letting Obama get away with not getting DOMA and DADT repealed.  They accepted his words — “Just wait until the end of my administration.  You’ll be happy then.”  That’s crap.  That is letting Obama pat us on the head and send us on our way, telling us to be good little gays and lesbians.  Weak.  Unacceptable.  Then there’s the No on 8 campaign.

The gay establishment’s conduct of the “No on 8″ campaign was everything that Harvey Milk despised.  The campaign had no guts, no backbone.  It didn’t mention the word “gay” in the campaign at all.  It didn’t show gay people as we are and it didn’t make the point that everyone is the same.  That flew in the face of logic (and a lot of research) — people who know gay people are more likely to vote with them.

Harvey Milk giving his "Hope Speech" at the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day.

The No on 8 campaign forgot what Harvey Milk said when the campaign against the Briggs Initiative (Proposition 6 in 1978) was gearing up.  In the film, Milk rejects and burns a proposed piece of campaign literature because it didn’t mention the word “gay.”  The campaign against the initiative had the slogan “Come out!  Come out!  Wherever you are!”  Gay people came out, too, to their families and employers and churches, and gay people went door to door to defeat Proposition 6.  And gay people won, too; the initiative was defeated 58% to 41%.  They did it then, in 1978, and people were not nearly as enlightened about gay people and gay rights as they supposedly are today.

That’s what still irks me about the No on 8 campaign, nine months later.  That piece of hate legislation, that constitutional amendment, could have been defeated.  It should have been defeated, too, considering what the polls were showing before the campaign started.  But people were complacent and figured that it was in the bag.  The campaign’s managers were also afraid, for some reason, to show gays or to even talk about them.  The gay community had forgotten its own history, and it only took 30 years for that to happen.  In truth, I think it happened long before that.

So where are the Harvey Milks in the gay community today?  Where are the brave men and women with backbone who won’t stand for Obama pushing us aside?  Where are the brave men and women who want gay people to introduce ourselves to our friends and neighbors?  Where are the brave men and women who tell it the way it is and let the chips fall as they may?   What would the state of gay rights be, if Milk hadn’t been assassinated?

The gay community has won a few important victories.  But the overall war is still going on.  DADT is still the law of the land, discriminating against gay service members and keeping us less safe.  DOMA is also still law, writing discrimination against gay relationships into law.  Those are battles left to fight.

But in the meantime, we have to remember Milk’s words from his “Hope Speech“:

On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country … We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets … We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am 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. Come out to your parents, your relatives.

We have to talk about it in order to win.  What was true in 1978 is still true today.  We have to tell people who we are.  Only then can we win our rights and win acceptance.  There will always be the Anita Bryants of the world, but they won’t matter at all when we take away their power by telling people who we are.