Milk That Movie!

You probably think the film MILK starring Sean Penn and directed by Gus Van Sant is super relevant because it addresses the recent passing of proposition 8 in California. In the movie there’s all this hullaballoo over Prop 3, so it’s really easy to insert 8 in place of 3, especially because all you have to do is add a couple of semi-circles to the 3.

MILK is all about how wrong gay people are nowadays. It’s about how if you’re whining for acceptance into the married status-quo you’re totally off track. If you think about the way in which the guy from the Advocate refuses to endorse Harvey Milk because Milk is too “gay” and the Advocate (although it’s a homo publication) is more concerned with fitting in, and keeping feathers unruffled—if you think about this moment in the movie, you’ll see that basically the whole marriage equality campaign today, which is promoted by gays with money (i.e., like the Advocate guy in the movie) is a classist, conformist concern.

Queer teens still get bullied and even killed. Queer people still get fired for being queer (ask any transgendered person how easy it is to get a job if you’re not 100% “passable”). Queer youth get kicked out of their homes. Queer seniors get shunned from nursing homes. Crimes against queers go unprosecuted. Those are the injustices we should have marches about.

Who cares about marriage?! Except maybe people with assets. Okay, okay, queer couples with citizenship/deportation issues have a huge stake in the issue—perhaps the most legitimate stake—but really how do we expect heteros to be all like yeah, get married, woo hoo when they can’t even accept that their own child might be gay and when they think that talking to teens about using condoms or dental dams if they have sex with someone of the same gender is some kind of recruitment tactic?

It just seems that the marriage equality movement has left behind a whole lotta queers who aren’t middle-class or upper-class or white or urbanites or adults (yet). If I were a single, financially strapped, 19-year old Mohican dyke living on a farm in Wisconsin, worried about her future I’d be so damned pissed about the marriage equality bullshit, but I would go see MILK and I’d get some good ideas about how to improve my world.