I remember this day from 30 years ago today as if it were yesterday. Indeed the footage of an ashen and shocked Dianne Feinstein making the announcement that Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Milk had been shot and killed is one that I can replay in mind over and over again on call. It forms part of my deepest consciousness. The echo of that day continues to reverberate across my life. I have never been a gay activist. I have never worn my sexuality on my sleeve. Living in a largely heterosexual world, one puts up with the mania of testosterone-laden men. Never mind locker rooms in high school, business trips were often made absurd by the inane behaviour of men in pursuit of women. Not sharing in the joys of such a hunt wasn’t always easy. Over time, being gay sort of forces you to give up one’s heterosexual friends. Granted their lives evolve as the burden of child-rearing consumes their lives but few of my heterosexual friends from college remain a vibrant part of my life. My gay ones however remain my family. As for my own family, very few of them have any comprehension of what my life is like or has been like. It is difficult for me to forget all the anti-gay slurs uttered not at me because frankly as a child I had no conception of my sexuality. But slurs were uttered at other gay men, jokes were made and as I came to realize my awakening attraction to other men, I was frightened into a silence that lasted nearly two decades. That was the damage done to my life due to the callousness of words and the hurtfulness off-colour remarks directed at others. My cousins would on a Saturday night drive around Cali, Colombia and go taunt los maricas. When I realized that I was gay, can you imagine my reaction? I was forced into celibacy out of fear. It isn’t the lack of sex that I bemoan, I have more than made up for that over the past fifteen years, it is the cost to my own human development, relationships that I failed to pursue so that I could conform to a Catholic worldview, one based on hate and the morality of a species that lived in desert caves 3,000 years ago. I hate the Church as I hate all organized religions. It is an evil institution that wrecks lives and yet pretends to save them. The odd part in my life is that I had ceased to believe in a God by the age of 16 once I read Darwin, that delusion was over. But Catholicism has a way holding its hooks in you long past you abandon the faith. Destroying those hooks took me over a decade.

Milk

Academy Award nominee Gus Van Sant directs Academy Award winner Sean Penn as gay-rights icon Harvey Milk. Mr. Milk (1930-1978) was an activist and politician, and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America; in 1977, he was voted to the city supervisors’ board of San Francisco. The following year, both he and the city’s mayor George Moscone were shot to death by another city supervisor, Dan White. Mr. Milk was previously the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary feature “The Times of Harvey Milk,” but “Milk” is the first non-documentary feature to explore the man’s life and career.

Last night I went to the Castro Theater with freshman college roommate, John Clay Leonard, his sister and her partner, to see Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk about the life of Harvey Milk. The movie is entertaining enough and worth seeing but earlier this week I saw for the umpteenth time The Time of Harvey Milk which is playing this week at the Roxie over on 16th and Valencia here in the City. If I could only see one, I’d see the documentary and skip the Hollywood feature film. I don’t think the Van Sant film captures the larger than life essence of Harvey Milk and why to so many of us who never met him and are so appreciative of what he accomplished. The struggle does continue.

Harvey Milk’s Give Them Hope Speech

Thirty-eight gay men have been killed in the United States this year solely because they were gay. Thirty-eight lives abruptly and prematurely ended. When will that madness stop?

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‘Coming Together to Overcome Adversity’

In a Thanksgiving address, President-elect Barack Obama recognizes the importance of family, gives thanks to our troops and talks about the strength needed to get through economic hardship.

Who are you and what have you done with Charles Lemos?
On Tuesday night, I had dinner with a group of friends most of whom were ardent Obama supporters in recent months as opposed to my own skeptical view. It was a bit bizarre to witness the evolving views, including my own. A few of my friends were expressing disappointment in the yet to assume office President-elect. No one, except for me, was at all thrilled that Robert M. Gates was staying on as Defense Secretary. I countered with the argument that no his staying on does make sense. For starters, it offers continuity at a delicate time made all the more evident by yesterday’s attacks in Mumbai. Iraq is certainly not out of the woods and it bears reminding that Gates is a Bush 41 team member and part of the foreign policy establishment. One reason, I told them, that I preferred Hillary Clinton for President was it didn’t matter what your stance on the war in Iraq in 2003 was, what matters is the situation on the ground now and being a realist about what is possible and what is not. What is not possible, because it is unacceptable to the DC and NY foreign policy establishment, is leaving Iraq at all costs and in a vacuum. The crux of my argument for keeping Gates is that Gates is the perfect salesman to make the pitch for getting out of Iraq under the right circumstances but in addition Gates also has the advantage of being competent, a rare trait in the Bush 43 Administration. Gates has the ability to get the conditions on the ground in Iraq right so that a departure becomes feasible. Gates’ intelligence background, an academic (a student of history) and his reputation as a consensus builder were also points in favor. I made a passionate appeal to my friends not to view Obama as abandoning his pledges but rather to remain attentive to the art of the possible.

On a number of fronts and issues, Obama does seem to be listening to disparate voices. It’s important thus that we make ourselves heard and to offer arguments of persuasion. To abandon Obama before even he has governed a day is wholly nonsensical. I remain cautiously optimistic.

To which my friends sat stunned offering up the line who are you and what have you done with Charles Lemos?

Politics isn’t static. We evolve or die.

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