we all hang together
Last night The Boy (who objects to being called "P." and thus will have to suffer with this moniker until he can provide me with a better one) and I went to see Milk, which has finally arrived at one of our local art-house theaters. It's pretty good-- very well cast and decently well written, though not quite as ground-breakingly fantabulous as the reviews allege. At any rate it's timely; it's pretty horrifying to watch the Christian right launch a campaign with identical rhetoric to today's "Yes on 8" blitz-- the only difference is that in 1978 they were trying to fire all homosexual teachers, and today they are trying to prevent homosexual people from getting married. What made me the saddest, of course, is that we still have to assert that gay rights are human rights and they still deny that this is true.
One thing that struck me about the movie was the pervasive atmosphere of danger. Because random bigots, or the police themselves, could and did roll up to Castro Street at any time of the day and especially night to start bashing heads in, even the film's most celebratory moments had an undercurrent of creeping dread. Because I didn't know the Harvey Milk story very well going into the movie, I never knew exactly when he was going to get the bullet-- so nearly every time he went out with his bullhorn or stepped up to a microphone I felt myself steeling for the worst.
What surprised me the most, though, was that it wasn't just the threat of gay-bashing or of assassination that contributed to the atmosphere of dread-- the pick-up culture is also portrayed as being potentially dangerous. At the beginning of the movie when Harvey picks up Scott, everything is lovely-- they have a flirty, funny face-to-face conversation in a well-lit subway staircase, then go back to Harvey's apartment where they laugh and smoosh cake in each other's faces. When Harvey says "you know, you really shouldn't go home with strange men you meet in the subway," it comes off as a self-deprecating joke. But when Harvey meets Jack, much later in the film, the encounter is downright scary-- he's alone in his campaign headquarters at night when a disheveled, possibly strung-out guy leers at him from outside the window. Their wordless exchange of facial expressions through the glass is what convinces Harvey to open the door-- presumably, somebody intending to beat him up wouldn't be capable of raising his eyebrows in such a coy way. Or would he?
I certainly don't have any experience with the gay pick-up culture, and I've only read a little bit of academic analysis of it and that was years ago. But I presume the general idea is that through external markers you can recognize that you share an alternative, marginalized cultural space with some stranger and thus you can trust one another more than you could trust members of the general public. It's pretty interesting: in straight mainstream culture, we generally don't trust strangers and we rarely try to initiate friendly contact with them-- if we do talk to strangers, it's polite and superficial and we certainly don't intend to ever see them again. But both of Harvey's important, long-term relationships begin as what look like random pick-ups. It's interesting to try to imagine myself in that mindset-- where any stranger is potentially a lover. Part of the impulse is certainly marginalization-- when you're part of a hated and feared minority, you need all the friends you can get and so you have to be ready to love everybody in your community. But what if you didn't have to be gay to think that way? I'm not talking about sex, though that's certainly part of it: what if you were really, truly ready to love everybody you saw? Not just despite the fact that they might be dangerous, but because they might be dangerous and you simply refused to give in to fear.
In the film, Harvey receives multiple death threats throughout his career and shrugs them off, saying that it doesn't matter; the work is too important to let fear keep him from doing it. He downplays the heroism, but in fact Gus Van Sant wants us to see that this Milk's legacy: to counter fear with love, everywhere and always.
One thing that struck me about the movie was the pervasive atmosphere of danger. Because random bigots, or the police themselves, could and did roll up to Castro Street at any time of the day and especially night to start bashing heads in, even the film's most celebratory moments had an undercurrent of creeping dread. Because I didn't know the Harvey Milk story very well going into the movie, I never knew exactly when he was going to get the bullet-- so nearly every time he went out with his bullhorn or stepped up to a microphone I felt myself steeling for the worst.
What surprised me the most, though, was that it wasn't just the threat of gay-bashing or of assassination that contributed to the atmosphere of dread-- the pick-up culture is also portrayed as being potentially dangerous. At the beginning of the movie when Harvey picks up Scott, everything is lovely-- they have a flirty, funny face-to-face conversation in a well-lit subway staircase, then go back to Harvey's apartment where they laugh and smoosh cake in each other's faces. When Harvey says "you know, you really shouldn't go home with strange men you meet in the subway," it comes off as a self-deprecating joke. But when Harvey meets Jack, much later in the film, the encounter is downright scary-- he's alone in his campaign headquarters at night when a disheveled, possibly strung-out guy leers at him from outside the window. Their wordless exchange of facial expressions through the glass is what convinces Harvey to open the door-- presumably, somebody intending to beat him up wouldn't be capable of raising his eyebrows in such a coy way. Or would he?
I certainly don't have any experience with the gay pick-up culture, and I've only read a little bit of academic analysis of it and that was years ago. But I presume the general idea is that through external markers you can recognize that you share an alternative, marginalized cultural space with some stranger and thus you can trust one another more than you could trust members of the general public. It's pretty interesting: in straight mainstream culture, we generally don't trust strangers and we rarely try to initiate friendly contact with them-- if we do talk to strangers, it's polite and superficial and we certainly don't intend to ever see them again. But both of Harvey's important, long-term relationships begin as what look like random pick-ups. It's interesting to try to imagine myself in that mindset-- where any stranger is potentially a lover. Part of the impulse is certainly marginalization-- when you're part of a hated and feared minority, you need all the friends you can get and so you have to be ready to love everybody in your community. But what if you didn't have to be gay to think that way? I'm not talking about sex, though that's certainly part of it: what if you were really, truly ready to love everybody you saw? Not just despite the fact that they might be dangerous, but because they might be dangerous and you simply refused to give in to fear.
In the film, Harvey receives multiple death threats throughout his career and shrugs them off, saying that it doesn't matter; the work is too important to let fear keep him from doing it. He downplays the heroism, but in fact Gus Van Sant wants us to see that this Milk's legacy: to counter fear with love, everywhere and always.