the good kind of dairy

This afternoon the movie Milk caused strange rumblings of emotion in the pit of my cold, dead heart. It's pretty fucking tragic that I knew almost nothing about Harvey Milk before watching this movie. Is nobody teaching history anymore? Why isn't this important?

I was trying to find the silver (okay, rainbow) lining of Prop 8 a few weeks ago, and I told my friend Elaine that it signaled, as all tragedies of civil rights do, a resurgence of a powerful tool of the cause called: giving a fuck. If you look back at the history of the gay rights movement in America, strides forward have been taken almost exclusively in response to tragedy. Stonewall? check. Harvey Milk? check. Matthew Shephard? check.

If there's any comfort to be taken away from the shitstorm that was Prop 8, it's that it startled a lot of complacent people enough to get pissed. I consider it a temporary setback - an awful and disappointing one to be sure, but temporary. There have always been gay people. There will always be gay people. Even if it takes another hundred years for the bigots to die out (and they will) there will be gay people in a hundred years too.

I had the privilege of seeing Angela Davis speak a few years ago, and what I remember most distinctly about the speech was her emphatic insistence that we remember the shitty, embarrassing parts of our history. Her example was Abu Ghraib. Mine is Matthew Shephard. Gus Van Sant's is Harvey Milk.

LOOK IT UP.


p.s. on the issue of Gay Activism (who?? what?) Durban Bud says this:

Besides protesting outside organizations that seek to demean us, the gays and their allies need to do something provocative to bring attention to the individual meanies who continually disrespect us behind our backs. An animal rights activist recently threw flour on poor Lindsay Lohan for wearing fur. In the past, similar activists have branded fur-wearing bitches with red paint. This strategy works. Whenever we now see a sophisticated woman in tears walking down the street with red paint splattered all over her fancy attire, we think to ourselves, "Wow -- that woman must hate animals, or maybe she must have gotten into a fight with her pimp. Regardless, I think I will avoid her in the future. She's scum."

Maybe instead of red paint or flour we could sprinkle our mean-spirited adversaries with glitter. Glitter might appear to be harmless and an easily removable annoyance, but, as someone who used to go clubbing regularly, I can attest that little specks of glitter -- covertly transmitted from brief non-consensual contact with a grinding tina twink -- will remain on your person for days until a senior VP points it out during an all-staff meeting in the company conference room by saying, "Can you turn your head a little bit? I think I saw a little sparkle shining on you or something." As he leans in for a closer inspection he shouts, "OMG -- are you wearing glitter?!?"

I LOVE THIS IDEA.