Friday, December 12, 2008

I Saw Milk And Cried Like A Faggot.


I did.
Tears busted outta me like that dam in "X2:X MEN UNITED", and, like Jean Grey, once that water hit me I was transformed into a Phoenix.
-Not Dark, though.
No.
I didn't go on a killing spree that resulted in the lives of Professor X, a solar system, or a coulda-been-awesome-franchise, no--
But I changed.
And who the hell changes watching a movie anymore?
(I saw "Speed Racer" and some emo-vampire-texting-cylon changed her backpack because she was "too hot" in the theater,)
but other then that,
who changes anymore?
Sean Penn changes. It's his superpower. Gone are the days of using his might for mere Oscars; this man is out to shake up a download-only generation of young gay men and woman.
He steps inside Harvey Milk, whose one term as city supervisor (a "community organizer", if you will, take THAT Sarah Palin--) was cut short by Dan White, a fellow supervisor who assassinated Milk and the mayor of San Francisco.
Sorry. Did I spoil the movie?
Milk's story has been with me since I was a kid.
I don't consider being "up on history" spoiling a movie that, maybe, is a bit too late. (More on that later.)
In October of 1998, after Matthew Shepard was killed by two drunk hate-mongers in Laramie, Wyoming, my teacher sat the whole class down and gave us a lesson on not just gay rights--but HUMAN rights.
I was in eighth grade, getting a history lesson that I could have used YEARS earlier.
Harvey Milk's story put a piece into my robotics; gay people weren't this formless cult like the Moonies or the Twilighters, no, we've been around since the beginning of time--
Harvey Milk made up the middle.
I was convinced that the end was not written in stone; that one gay kid's death did not signify the end of a movement, or the beginning; it was just that, a piece of a "movement."
....Say what you will about the movie.
Yes, it's a bit long, yes, there IS a gay in a wheelchair, YES, the score hypes, but people, please: WE don't get films like this, with actors like this, treated with the time, passion, and RESPECT this movie got.
I don't mean WE as in the gays, or the blacks, or the gemeni's (holla), I mean WE as the under 40's who voted Obama,
said NO on 8,
and have the power to form the shapeless mass that Bush left us into something bigger then the bitterness.
I'm excited to talk about this movie.
YES, it would have pushed people's minds if it was released in a pre-post-prop-8 election, but you know what, that day is done.
We live in a world where people's rights can be pulled off willy-nilly.
And, seeing Harvey Milk state that to a group of people in recreated 1977 is horrifying.
Realizing its going on right outside your theater is embarrassing.
What this film gets right is the clarity of reflection:
What are WE doing, everyday, anyday, to change tomorrow?
Thank you, Harvey Milk.
You let a black queer twenty something pot smoking play promoting abomination of an ObamaNation cry like a faggot during the movie about your life.
Consider me recruited.

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