Life Begins At 40

Rating: 10/10 (14 December 2008)

I remember back in 1978 when I heard about the assassinations in San Francisco. The screaming headlines read Mayor Moscone Murdered on the tabloid News and Post in New York. You read the article and it said that a San Francisco City Supervisor named Harvey Milk was also killed by another supervisor Dan White.
What I didn't know was how much Harvey Milk reflected my own life. A former Goldwater Republican and closeted gay man, he moved to San Francisco and affected a revolution. That was me and three years later I came out and started doing my own thing for the same righteous cause, Milk gave his life for.
Milk was not the first openly gay person elected to public office. Elaine Noble and Allan Spears were serving in state legislatures when Milk finally was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was not a single elected official in a large body of legislators. He became the focus of stopping a rollback of our rights that the newly empowered religious right was seeking to do and God help us, still seeks to do.
San Francisco no longer is THE gay city as it was in Harvey Milk's last eight years of his life. So many places now have GLBT rights laws, so many have created their own gay culture and network. Still all of us owe so much to Harvey Milk and his circle who would not back down.
A few days ago I saw Sean Penn in Bad Boys and to see him 25 years later as Harvey Milk, it's hard to believe the breadth of work that he's done as a player. There's a nomination in this for Best Actor and maybe a second one to go with the one Penn won for Dead Man Walking. You are so taken with his performance that you forget and think you're watching a hidden newsreel of the life of Harvey Milk.
Josh Brolin might very well bring home an Oscar for the uptight Dan White, the assassin. What's extraordinary about Brolin's performance is that White is such an ordinary man, trapped with a set of values that taught him to despise anything different than him. There's some suggestion that White was a latent case and that might have been the ultimate reason for his terrible acts. I've seen that happen often enough in my life.
In my working days before retirement in 2002 I was the only openly gay person at the New York State Crime Victims Board working there and still am, sad to say. Harvey Milk was brought to political activism by someone he knew being targeted for hate crime homicide which was never solved. In the more enlightened times of the Eighties and Nineties these things still go too often unpunished. Like Harvey these incidents were my reason for involvement.
Watching Milk and inner circle many of whom went on to do great things in the Gay Rights movement, I envied them. I certainly put my years in, still do. But I would have given anything to have been involved from the beginning. They have tragic memories, but also wonderful stories to tell about a cause bigger than themselves.
And for that reason this review of this wonderful film is dedicated to a gay rights pioneer whom I knew and who recently passed away. Eleanor Cooper did her activism as an emigrant from Tennessee. She dedicated her life to making the world better for her GLBT brothers and sisters for more than 30 years in New York City. She was a prime leader in the passage of New York City's gay rights law. She was unflagging optimist and never lost faith that with education and reason people would get it about us. Her optimism was infectious, buoyed many a spirit in bad times, political and personal.
Harvey Milk said that he had not really done anything he was truly proud of at the age of 40 just before moving from New York to San Francisco. If he did nothing else he gave hope and encouragement to untold numbers of young gay people that you're not worthless, that you had a mission on this earth to make the best life you can for yourself and for your brothers and sisters. The best scene in the film is Milk talking to a young kid from Minnesota who was contemplating suicide and who might very well have done it as too many have.
The young man's name was Paul. And this review and this film is and should also be dedicated to all the Pauls and Paulas out there who are not going to accept a second class life from ignorant people. Not any place on this globe.