Milk

The tidiness of Harvey Milk's martyrdom gave the Gus van Sant movie a shape and a narrative. And within that tight frame, he let this life breathe a little with its contradictions and complexities. I remembered that Milk understood two things: that organizing a gay community from the ground up was essential if homosexuals were ever to be free of threat, persecution and violence; and that such a ghetto would never be enough - because the most vulnerable gays and lesbians and transgenders are destined to be born every day in the great heartland between the coasts.

This is the paradox of gay existence that is often the source of so much misunderstanding. The outside world sometimes puts us in a box of cultural otherness - "San Francisco values" - while we are also, simultaneously, as integrated into normality as any heterosexual. Because we are your kids. We grew up in your homes. We can never be totally other when we are also totally mainstream.

And so this movie was really about two gay men and the journey between them. The two gay men are Harvey Milk and Dan White. The two gay men are Barney Frank and Ted Haggard. The two gay men are Tony Kushner and Larry Craig. The two gay men are Frank Kameny and Roy Cohn. And as the years have passed by and HIV churned the gay world as powerfully as plagues and wars often do, these polarities were complemented by any number of variations in between.

What I've tried to express in my life is that there is a part of both these traditions within me and within most gay people.

I can no more stop loving my church than I can stop laughing with drag queens. I can no more abandon my political conservatism than I can my cultural liberalism. I can no more disown my own Catholic family than I can my dead gay friends. And the struggle of these years has been the insistence that all of this is true and none of it should be denied. Because we are human before we are gay; and humans are complicated, fascinating, vulnerable creatures. We are all virtually normal. The goal of the movement Milk helped propel is not to allow everyone the freedom to be gay so much as it is to allow everyone the freedom to be themselves.

This is not easy for anyone, let alone for homosexuals. For many across the centuries, it has been too much. Dan White, for one, could not reconcile the tensions. He either had to be totally normal or completely other. And the over-powering self-hatred this tension created drove him to murderous rage at the freedom and integration he couldn't find for himself. And parts of the gay community couldn't reconcile these tensions either (though without stooping to White's violence) and resorted to pure rage and escapist pathologies as a way to cope. Our job now is to see the humanness of both stories and to build and integrate through them to something better and stronger and calmer. It is to leave neither White nor Milk behind.

Milk was a radical; but he was also a businessman. He had one true love; and yet couldn't integrate it into a successful long-term relationship in his short life-time. He was a man of the streets and yet he also had to become a symbol of establishment power. The scene when he both stokes a rally-cum-riot and then calms it down captured the tension perfectly. He was a man of politics, but he was also only a politician in order to have the chance to be a human.

The movie's brilliance is not that it begins and ends with his death as a reflection on the first and last things; it is that it begins and ends with Milk's love for another human being as well. This reach for intimacy - always vulnerable, always intimate, never safe - endures past movements and rallies and elections. These manifestations of the political are the means to that merely human end.

Which is why, in so many ways, the gay movement, at its very best, is something holy.