The Lesson of Harvey Milk

(I had meant to post this last friday but couldn't finish it off before heading to Montreal for a weekend military course. Thankfully this article doesn't really rely on timeliness to be relevant.)

So I finally got the chance, earlier this week, to go see the movie Milk.

For those of you who haven’t been following, the movie Milk is a biographical film which portrays last 8 years of Harvey Milk’s life. Milk (below) was a gay activist and the first openly gay elected political official (elected San Francisco supervisor in 1977).

Don’t worry, if you haven’t seen it yet, this entry won’t give anything away.

Anyways, I found myself thinking a lot about his story after the movie, and I started doing some more research into his life.

Before I state what stood out for me, as the major lesson that we can and should all learn from him, I’ll quickly review my other thoughts on the movie itself and this story in general:

-I thought Sean Penn did a fantastic job and was thoroughly deserving of the best actor Academy award.

-I was also really impressed with Emile Hirsch's performance. The last movie I saw him in was Into The Wild and I completely did not recognize him this time around. He has alot of range as an actor.

-I absolutely cannot believe that so many people (myself included) have never been taught about this guy! He was a pivotal player in the improvement of civil rights in modern American history. If for nothing else, this movie has been very important and very special for sharing this story with more people.

Harvey Milk's Important lesson: Faith in Humanity

Perhaps the most pivotal moment of the movie, and the one which determined Milk's legacy, occurred just after he was elected a San Francisco representative. The Briggs Initiative, (also known as Proposition 6) was announced by sponsor John Briggs, a conservative Orange Country legislator, and Anita Bryant, a well known singer and religious activist. This initiative sought to ban gays and lesbians, and anyone who supported gay rights from working in California's public schools.

Immediately following the highly publicized announcement of Prop 6, Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones and the rest of his political campaign team gathered in Milk's San Francisco city hall office, to decide how to react. This is obviously a critical moment, because if Proposition 6 passes, it would have serious implications for the progression of civil rights and anti-discrimination laws in the US.

Here's where I find their strategy interesting and the emergence of Milk's most important lesson.

A number of politically influential supporters of Milk advocated that they challenge the initiative and try to rally support against it by arguing that it is an affront to human rights. They believed that as the public still seemed to be very uncomfortable with the "issue" of homosexuality, and considering the power of the church and church organizations to mobilize pro-Prop 6 support, the only way to rally support against it would be to attack it for being a serious violation of individual freedoms and human rights, after all, everybody supports human rights right?

Milk, however, said that "hiding behind human rights" was cowardly. He argued, in contrary, they should openly proclaim how this is discriminatory to gays, and reinforce the statement that gays must have the same rights. He also called on all gays out there to "come out! come out! wherever you are!".

When I was watching the movie, I found myself disagreeing with Milk's strategy.

I agreed that it would be better to take the human rights defense. In my opinion, given the power of the religious organizations to mobilise support for Prop 6, and given how critical this legislation was, you have to think that it doesn't matter what defense you take, you must do everything you can to win. You must do anything you can to ensure that the laws protect your equal rights (hence that Prop 6 fails). Who cares about what people think, thats a long term issue to fight another day. In the short term, you must protect your rights. Overall, as long as the laws are there, over time, people's ideas and opinions about it will change.

So in other words, use the existing legal structure to, overtime, move social opinion forward.

That demonstrates that I have a higher amount of trust and faith in the system, than in humanity and the ability of humans to break out of narrow minded thinking.

Milk, in contrast, had faith in humanity. He argued that if all the gays out there came out, everyone would realize that they knew someone or had friends who were gay. And this realization would normalize it and make them realize that they would be taking the rights away from their friends, colleagues and neighbours. This would simultaneously change social thinking and also reject Prop 6.

This was incredibly perceptive and forward thinking, althought it was also risky. Ultimately, it demonstrated his belief in the power of goodness within humans to overcome narrow mindedness.

I won't say the end result for those who haven't seen the movie (although you can probably guess). But to me this remains one of the most brilliant decisions he made and one of the most important lessons we can learn from him.