must-see milk

We know our world, to no small degree, through films. I live on Castro Street, just a few blocks from the San Francisco district of the same name. When I get on Muni, I glance at the plaque telling me I am in Harvey Milk Plaza. The name always struck me as familiar, but I couldn't attach a face to the name. Milk was killed the year I was born so it's not surprising that he took the shape of a vague sense-memory, rather than a piece of a fuller narrative.

That changed when Sean Penn and Gus Van Sant revealed Milk to me and a few hundred other people packed into the resplendent Castro Theatre. We know the faces of history - not through the generous renderings of painters, but through actors in generous make-up. Though I love a good old-fashioned book, I am a proponent of history via biopic if Van Sant is setting the standard.

Milk, according to the movie, came to San Francisco after his fortieth birthday, the beginning of his transition from slick businessman to bearded renegade to activist politician. In the process, the "Mayor of Castro Street" crystallized an amorphous political energy into a voice and force for gay rights. In 1977, he became the first openly gay politician elected to public office in California. Less than a year after taking his seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk was assassinated by Dan White of "Twinkie defense" infamy.

Film, as a medium, can hardly help being ethnographic. The businessman from across the street wipes his hand after shaking Milk's. This moment, in a sense, conveys more about the experience of discrimination than news clips about the effort to prevent gays from teaching in public schools (a campaign with eerie echoes in this last election). But Van Sant takes us a step beyond the rich and poignant details of Milk's life and times. His use of montage, flashback and visual textures brings into relief the many ways in which memory and history are elusive.

Time is not a series of moments stitched together by an evenhanded seamstress; time becomes meaningful through our actions and reflections. The same is true of place. Lately, San Francisco feels more like a part of me - its pasts and patterns woven into my story of self. Milk is no longer a plaque for my glazed, hurried glances; he is a neighbor, reminding me of the intertwined possibilities of art and politics.