"milk," it does a body good

Gus Van Sant's Milk is an urgent, visceral masterpiece, the kind of film that transcends boundaries to become something altogether greater than the sum of its many dangling parts.

It also pulls off a damn nifty trick of being the right movie landing at precisely the right time, which some folks are saying is really the wrong time. The parallels between Harvey Milk's fight against California's Prop 6 in 1978 and the current indigestion over the passage of Prop 8 has already started to generate what if? stories, asking if an earlier release date for the film might have swayed the vote toward equality. I think this is a dangerous speculative path to pursue.
What's clear after seeing Milk is this: the gay rights "movement" has lost its way. It's lost sight of the scraggly, scrappy energy of early activists like Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones, grassroots organizers who used their outsider status as a trump card of sorts and worked to rally all the "us-es" into one political body. We've lost the sense of "us-es" because we, gay America, foolishly thought we'd become part of the "thems." We believed that "Will & Grace" and Ellen and Lance Bass had made gay people mainstream — passé even — and maybe there's some truth to that. But in California, the other minorities didn't agree. The Mormons and the church-going black people and the Catholic Latinos and the change-fearing old people all voted overwhelmingly to overturn marriage equality, which is a bitter pill to gum.

But back to the film.
What I loved about Milk was its blend of heart and head. There's been a lot of chatter comparing it to another Focus Features release, Brokeback Mountain, but I don't think that's a great parallel to draw. Brokeback was, above all, a love story and a meditation on thwarted desire. Milk has its share of bedroom action, but the vibe in those scenes is far more playful, almost innocent by comparison. Instead, the movie makes its case for equality by revealing Harvey Milk and his circle of friends as real, quirky, and flawed people, warts and all.
Perhaps if such a tactic had been used to battle Prop 8, one that featured commercials showing actual gay couples in real relationships, then the vote would've gone in a different direction.