The Whole Milk

by John Fund

“Milk,” in which Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician elected to office in a major city, has become a liberal rallying point. Even more so in the wake of California’s passage of Proposition 8, a statewide ban on gay marriage. Too bad the film doesn’t tell the complete story of Milk, whose early support for Barry Goldwater and later championing of gay small businessmen show how much common ground the libertarian right and the civil-rights left can have. Milk was a much more complicated figure than many people realize.

The film has become a focal point for liberal anger. Some of its fans have urged a nationwide boycott against Cinemark movie theaters after Cinemark CEO Alan Stock donated $10,000 to the “Yes on 8″ campaign. “He should not profit from now showing ‘Milk’ in his theaters,” says the boycott website. Penn himself used his Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Actor to lecture Prop 8 supporters that they can “anticipate their great shame and the shame in the eyes of their grandchildren if they continue.”

“Milk” is a fascinating celebration of a man who was both a symbol of gay empowerment and a martyr to gay rights. The film premiered on the 30th anniversary of his death in 1978. Harvey Milk only served as a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors for 11 months before he, along with Mayor George Moscone, was gunned down at age 48 by Dan White, a former Supervisor who nursed political grudges against both men. White was convicted only of manslaughter after putting up a preposterous defense that too much junk food had impaired his judgment — a foretaste of even stranger legal arguments in later years as more and more people have sought to avoid responsibility for their actions.

Milk is celebrated in the film for his aggressive leadership on gay rights, especially for helping defeat the Briggs Initiative in 1978, which would have banned gays from teaching in public schools — a measure also opposed by Ronald Reagan and many conservatives. But the story of Harvey Milk as a politician was much more than just a symbol of gay liberation. While part of his strategy was to use the tools of old-time ethnic politics to build up a political machine whose organizing principle was sexual orientation, there was also at the heart of all of his campaigns the notion that government had to be responsive to the rights of individuals.

Although he espoused left-wing politics in his later years, until he was almost 40, Milk was a staunch political conservative. Biographer Randy Shilts notes that he was “a hard-boiled conservative in the laissez-faire capitalist mold.” Armistead Maupin, the noted gay writer, writes that “Ridiculous as it seems to me now, Harvey and I had both been naval officers and Goldwater Republicans.” While working on Wall Street, Shilts noted that Milk and his first lover, Joe Campbell, would spend much of the fall of 1964 rising early and enthusiastically handing out flyers for Goldwater at subway stops. “Campbell even began to doggedly mimic Milk’s stubborn arguments for Goldwater, much to the dismay of their theater friends,” writes Shilts in his book “The Mayor of Castro Street.”

A combination of things moved Milk’s politics: the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia were the most influential things that lurched him to the left.  Even so, in his later years Milk would still sometimes quote Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech at the GOP convention: “Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.”

In 1970, Milk settled in San Francisco and opened an independent camera store in the then-emerging gay neighborhood around Castro Street. His interest in local politics began when, not long after opening his business, he was visited by a state bureaucrat who demanded a pre-payment of sales taxes on products he hadn’t yet sold. Milk, struggling to meet his payroll, was infuriated and called the move “taxation without common sense.”

Next, a local public school teacher asked if he could borrow a film projector because none of those at his school worked. Then a local business association tried to discourage city bureaucrats from issuing business licenses to gays. Milk promptly organized the still-popular Castro Street Fair to demonstrate the clout of the gay business community.

He ran for office several times, appealing for gay votes but also as an angry populist demanding government accountability. “Milk has something for everybody,” was his slogan.

The story of Harvey Milk told in Sean Penn’s film is an exciting one, and well told despite some unfortunate political correctness. The film “Milk” is a powerful statement in favor of tolerance and the power of one individual to bring about change. Like Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” the film takes a controversial historical figure about whom many people have only a sketchy idea and makes him both human and accessible. I only wish that the filmmakers had had the courage to tell “the rest of the story” about his political odyssey.


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Posted Mar 3rd 2009 at 5:12 am in Entertainment, Featured Story, Politics | 63 Comments