The Week of Milk

by Michael A. Jones

Published November 21, 2008 @ 08:03PM PT

Thanksgiving weekend is always a massive time for Hollywood, with the holiday blockbusters and Oscar favorites starting to spread their way to cinemas across the country. This year is no different, with the much-hyped "Milk" opening up in theaters on Wednesday. I think it's safe to say that "Milk" is probably the most-anticipated LGBT flick to hit the movie theaters since Ang Lee's 2005 movie, "Brokeback Mountain."

"Milk," however, has a sort of historical significance to it that "Brokeback" couldn't touch. This month - in fact, next week - marks the 30th anniversary of Milk's assassination. One can only imagine how engaged Milk would have been during Election 2008, with Proposition 8 on the ballot in California. Many elements of the Proposition 8 battle, in fact, relate to the battle that Harvey Milk and gay rights supporters in California fought in 1978 to defeat Proposition 6, the Briggs Amendment, which would have banned LGBT persons from teaching in public schools. Rob Epstein, the Academy-Award winning filmmaker who directed The Times of Harvey Milk, has an excellent piece about this today over at HuffPost.

The opening of "Milk" is also being used by gay rights supporters as a way of protesting the passage of California's Proposition 8.

Last week, a campaign called No Milk for Cinemark started, which is organizing LGBT rights supporters to pledge not to see "Milk" in a theater run by the corporation Cinemark. Financial records show that Cinemark's CEO, Alan Stock, gave nearly $10,000 to defeat gay marriage in California, although his corporation now stands to reap millions off of screenings of "Milk." That's a pretty slimy move, even for a Hollywood CEO.

And Join the Impact founder Amy Balliett told the New York Times that her group hopes to help make "Milk" one of the top three grossing films over Thanksgiving weekend.

For our part over the next week, we'll be highlighting a quote a day from Harvey Milk on this site. I'm reading "The Mayor of Castro Street" right now, the excellent Milk biography by Randy Shilts, and one thing pops out from that book - love him or hate him, Harvey fought like hell to organize people (both LGBT persons and straight people) to support gay rights.

We'll start by including this YouTube clip below, which sets to animation the words from Harvey Milk's famous "Hope" speech. After 30 years, these words from Milk still ring true -- not just in California, but throughout the country.