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MILK PREMIERES IN SAN FRANCISCO
Executive producer William Horberg attended the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s Milk last night in San Francisco and writes about it on his blog.
An excerpt:
It was almost 37 years ago that Harvey Milk, the subject of the film, moved to the Castro District from New York City and set up his camera shop there with his boyfriend Scott Smith, at what was to become ground zero in a cultural movement and struggle for respect and equal rights for gay people that, despite the major victories Harvey and his supporters achieved before his untimely assassination, as he became the first openly gay elected official, and won an improbable victory over the ignominious Proposition 6 and its sponsors Anita Bryant and John Briggs, still reverberates today. (Who could miss the eerie resemblance between two faces of evil separated by a generation: the well-coiffed All-American act of intolerance agent Bryant and a certain designer-clad hockey mom of today?)
So here we were, one week before an election that not only marks a decisive moment in our nation’s history, but also finds us fighting against another major assault by the forces of bigotry and intolerance in a California state referendum, which is Proposition 6, repackaged now thirty years later as Proposition 8.
As Martin Luther King famously said in a speech titled Where Do We Go From Here: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But clearly it only bends because of the efforts of good people who keep fighting the fight.
