The gentle art of book reviewing...

is something that I've been doing recently over at KQED. It's an interesting exercise, to define what works or doesn't work about a book rather than tossing it aside the minute it's done and moving on to the next one. Most recently, I've written about pregnant men, and Sarah Vowell. Not at the same time, though.

Saint Harvey

I've seen Milk twice now. Each time it felt like a slightly different movie. The first time I saw it was at a press screening. The theater was packed. The audience hissed whenever Anita Bryant came onto the screen. The film felt like a lively, libidinal story about political wonkery and community organizing.

Several actors have been floated out over the years as possible Milks (Robin Williams, Steve Carrell), but Sean Penn did strike me as the best choice to play the role. It was a transformation enhanced, perhaps, by Milk's own taste for political vaudeville. Milk loved being on television, and consequently left a lot of footage behind compared to your average human. A serious actor could easily immerse themselves in how Harvey Milk walked, talked, and grandstanded, and that's what Penn clearly did.

The second time I saw Milk it was with a documentary filmmaker friend. She'd just seen Rob Epstein's documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, which was playing over at the Roxie. To her, Milk followed the documentary's format almost suspiciously - it opened with the same footage of Dianne Feinstein announcing the deaths of Milk and George Moscone, for example. "And was it just me?" she said, "or was a lot of the movie ultimately just shots of young men pumping their fists in the air and cheering?"

She had a point. And then I realized that, except for Anne Kronenberg, Milk's campaign manager, the women who existed alongside and participated in Milk's career were entirely gone. Milk shows Sean Penn carrying out the debates on the Briggs iniative alone, when, in fact, at every single debate he had a partner named Sally Gearhart. There were a lot of reasons to have her there. Gearhart worked as a debate coach. She had an extensive religious background that allowed her to counter biblical arguements in the way that Harvey could not. But she was also there because she was a woman. Harvey wanted to project an image of Ma and Pa America - of a gay culture that went beyond...well...shots of young men pumping their fists in the air and cheering.

Unlike most men of that era, Harvey went to a lot of effort to involve women, both lesbian and non, in political organizing. Milk insisted that he not only have a woman debate partner, but that the committee behind the fight against the initiative have a board that was 50/50 women and men. In the film, Cleve Jones, played by Emile Hirsch, is presented as Harvey's political heir apparent. But when I interviewed several people who worked closely with Milk on his campaign a few made a point of mentioning that it was Anne Kronenberg that Milk had been grooming as a political successor.

None of these people seemed upset. They were delighted that such a well-done movie had been made, and especially that their friend (who many people had already forgotten) would be remembered again. And history is, by its nature, reductive.

Each story of Milk's life has its flaws, and strengths. As your physician, I'd advise you to check out all of them: The Mayor of Castro Street, by Randy Shilts, The Times of Harvey Milk, and Milk to get a sense of how history is written and re-written. And then, if you ever meet someone who ever met Harvey (and if you live in San Francisco, there are a lot of them out there) ask them your own questions. We aren't finished with history, any more than history is finished with us.