Milk on 8

The post-mortems on Proposition 8 in the gay press are pretty consistent: Harvey Milk was right.

The film ‘Milk’ has a telling scene in which Harvey confronts the comfortable, connected gay establishment over its lame strategy on the anti-gay 1978 Briggs Amendment. Milk scoffs at their defensive campaign materials that dance around the gay issue and don’t even dare to mention the word.

Fast forward to 2008 and Prop 8 on marriage equality, and the whole scenario repeats itself almost exactly except without Harvey or his modern equivalent. Apparently the No-on-8 campaign was late, unfocused, flaccid and, worst of all, de-gayed as if the voters were somehow going to lose sight of that little detail.

The setback recalls the fight in Congress earlier this year over ENDA, the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, over which the main gay lobbyist outfit in Washington cut a secret deal with the Democrats and double-crossed the transgender crowd, all for a meaningless House vote on a measure that W was obviously going to veto anyway.

In both cases political leadership seems to have devolved onto the kinds of conservative, horse-trading elites for whom Milk’s style of steady grassroots organizing and innovative approaches to unusual constituencies was, and always will be, alien. Instead, they’re at home with deals and all the cozy bullshit that goes on in the safe, boring gay bureaucracies that yearn to be K Street clones.

‘Milk’ reminds us of a lost world before the ossification of gay politics when an unusual figure with a political nose and a radical vision could be a major player. It would be great if the street mobilizations of the last few weeks somehow got channeled into an injection of new blood into that tired scene. Times are ripe.