Times Fades Away: Milk on Sunday

Yesterday my sister arrived to spend a week in the city with her new boyfriend and his daughter, who was turning 18. We went out to dinner on the Upper West Side and discussed the movie Milk, which Stephen and I had recently seen for the first time. Although I found the movie to be entertaining and 'well-done' to the extent that the actors seemed to inhabit their roles, I couldn't decided if the movie was pulling my heartstrings as a work of art, or if it was a reaction to a dismal sense that in many ways, things have not really changed very much in the thirty-or-so years since Milk's assassination. In some ways, I argued, things have gotten worse: as an example, I pointed to the clip of Jimmy Carter in the movie in which he encouraged the voters of California to vote against Proposition 6, which would have made it illegal for 'proven homosexuals' to teach in the public schools, whereas Obama has been maddeningly silent about recent propositions that are only slightly less offensive. But Maggie, the 18-year old, insisted that things were changing, and that in a few years they were going to be better. Perhaps, I agreed, perhaps.