J- just looked over, hearing me listen to a video and said, “Are you writing a political post?”  He was a little shocked because I am not really a conventionally political person.

I recently watched Milk and The Times of Harvey Milk.  I was a bit humbled that I didn’t really know the whole Milk story when I saw it. I knew they Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone had been killed and that Milk was the first out gay man to be elected to public office in California.  I think that I knew at some point that Supervisor Dan White had shot them.  But, I don’t think I could have said this before I saw the movie, I had forgotten this part of the story at some point.

I was almost 7 years old when the murder took place, but I don’t remember it.  We had recently relocated to Sacramento from Santa Cruz when it happened and I wonder how my parents reacted.  Did I know about it and just not remember or did I not see the news that night?

My first memory of the story was sometime around 3rd grade (around 1980) when we went on a field trip to the Crocker Art Museum.  I think it was a sculpture that had a twinkie that was referencing the “Twinkie Defense“.  I can almost picture it. Bright colors and chaotic lines and a piece of a Twinkie sticking right out of it.  My mom explained the Twinkie Defense to me, but like many things at that age, I was just beginning to make sense of things and be able to understand the difference between imagination and reality.  Dan White and the Twinkie defense was filed in my brain next to the Greek mythological gods that I had learned about. It seemed partly true, clearly important, but it also had an aura of remoteness, something that was before my time.  I learned about the defense, but I didn’t know who was killed or who did the killing.  I was 30 years from understanding how this could be relevant to my own life.

The Milk documentary was filmed in 1985.  Memorable scenes were an interview with a union man that said he was homophobic before he began working with Milk.  He agreed with everything that Milk said, and this is what made him change his feelings about gay people.  But, he straightforwardly assured the audience, most people still feel how he used to, shamefully.  Also, I believe it was Milk’s colleague Jeannine Yeomans, who describes the fear of people at that time.  They saw that things were changing and did not understand what that would mean for San Francisco and their lives in it. They were used to power being one way and power was changing.

Interestingly, when I finished watching The Times of Harvey Milk, I saw this article that the day before, Speaker Nancy Pelosi compared the extremist and violent rhetoric being used today in the debates on health care to late 1978 in San Francisco, the time when Milk and Moscone were shot.  The comparison is striking for the obvious reason that the US now has its first black elected official.  I was struck by this statement because I related to the times portrayed in the movie.  I was really moved by the scenes in the documentary that showed the candlelight vigil, with thousands out mourning the deaths of Milk and Moscone and the scenes of angry riots following the weak sentencing of Dan White.  Although I am not usually very interested in politics, it was impossible to not feel inspired and have some hope the night that Obama was elected.  I walked out to my back porch and in all directions, I heard whooping, music, horns and celebration.

Rachel Maddow discusses Pelosi’s speech on her show.  She shows the clip of Pelosi then follows with Dianne Feinstein’s 1978 announcement of the murders.  The emotional turbulence of both are remarkable.  A bit later, she plays a clip of Republican John Boehner reacting to Pelosi’s comment, in which he describes the exact fear that Yeomans had described in 1985, cinching the similarities of three decades earlier.

I wonder how much of the Bay Area’s queer culture that I love has to do with politics and specifically, the politics of Harvey Milk.  My bias is to think very little.  It is hard to believe that if politics does make a difference, that 30 years later, Proposition 8 still failed in California. Demographics, geography and economics are what have provided the conditions for queer community to flourish here.  On the other hand, iconography, political figures and historical markers are all building blocks for shifts from a subculture to a culture.

So the fact that our tapestry of our dominant culture continues to be rewoven with queer, black and “other” as thread with a new political context does change things. It ultimately forces the change of  the relationship of the “isms” – sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. – to the dominant culture.  The question that I suppose I am consciously leaving unanswered surrounds the compromise that these historically discriminated against groups inevitably concede to in order to play the game at all.  And of course, whether this is really “the game” that any of us should want to be playing.  And sadly, the celebratory hoots of victory from Obama supporters have become few and far between since long before the health care debate began.