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.

On Forgetting

I nothing much to do and thought I'd go see a movie. Ran a search on what was playing near me, and clicked on the title of a film playing at the Roxie, which led me through to a review in The New York Times.

It was a documentary about an experimental music composer from, of all places, Oskaloosa, Iowa. I was born in Oskaloosa. It's not a big town, Osky. What are the odds that anyone from Oskaloosa would have a documentary made about them?And then I realized the composer was a childhood friend of my father's.

I only knew him from a few anecdotes: a friend who listened to James Brown, and owned the first Velvet Underground album as a preteen. That was an obscure, obscure album when it came out. How did a kid in rural Iowa even get it, let alone know to get it?

The legend about the Velvet Underground is that hardly anyone listened to their early concerts, but that every person who did went on to start a band. Arthur Russell may not have made it to any of the concerts, but he went one better - he became, not a band, but an experimental composer. An experiemental disco composer.

So how could I not go see the film? Oskaloosa needs to salute Oskaloosa, especially when Oskaloosa is within six blocks of saluting distance. It was a beautiful night in San Francisco, and I rode my bike from yoga to a sushi restaurant in the Castro to the Roxie and got there just a few minutes after the movie had started.

It was lovely. Obviously put together by someone who was a true believer in the theory that Russell was an ahead-of-his-time genius. But also possessing a real recognition that genius is an awkward thing to have, and a thing that is often remarkably hard to distinguish from solipsism.

The audience sighed a little over Russell's parents, who come across not only dry and acerbic in that particular Great Plains way, but as genuinely thoughtful people. New York during the AIDS crisis was a harsh place to be, and much of the current fight for marriage rights dates back to that time. Partners of men dying of AIDS frequently lost the right to make medical decisions (as well as apartments, shared possessions, and so forth) to the blood relatives of their lovers. Instead, Russell's parents handed over those rights to Russell's partner, Tom Lee, while Russell was ill and then dying - doing the right thing even when, they didn't have to socially or legally.

The film was less true than I like my documentaries to be (an enduring friendship between Lee and Russell's parents appears to have been exaggerated, possibly even manufactured.) But it's great as what it is: a beautiful fairytale about how you can be a sweet but kind of a socially maladept self-obsessed jerk artist from rural Iowa, have a severe paranoia regarding "finishing" any work of art, and still find a great creative community and love with a nice boy from New Jersey. And be remembered after your death by people who will describe you as better than the Beatles. Even though - let's not kid ourselves.


But Arthur Russell's music, which scores the entire movie, does have a particular beauty to it. Russell self-described it as "Buddhist Bubblegum" - you can see how the ecstatic tradtion of Indian devotional music met and cross-fertilized with all sorts of other experimental music genres. Including the aforementioned disco. I don't know if I'd describe it as feeling contemporary, which the musician Jans Leckman does late in the film, but it does possess the timelessness of the deeply eccentric.